Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 59)

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Sunday, June 05, 2005
War News for Sunday, June 5, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi troops killed and one injured in checkpoint attack north of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Egyptian contractor shot dead in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi civilians killed in gun battle between insurgents and Iraqi security forces in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police commander escapes assassination attempt in Bahraz.

Bring `em on: Iraqi soldier killed and three injured in suicide attack on convoy near Mosul.

An Iraqi army unit has been disbanded after it refused to attend a U.S. training course in Baghdad.

Border Security: Kurdish rebels have killed four Turkish soldiers in a clash in southeastern Turkey, officials said Sunday. The clash occurred near the city of Tunceli, the Anatolia news agency reported, citing the governor`s office. It was not clear when the fighting took place. Troops reinforced by planes and an attack helicopter were pursuing the guerrillas, it said.

Al Jazeera responds: TV channel Al Jazeera rejected yesterday as unfounded US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s accusations that it was encouraging militant groups by airing beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq.

"Al Jazeera... has never at any time transmitted pictures of killings or beheadings and... any talk about this is absolutely unfounded," the television said in a statement.

Sophisticated Insurgency: But an Islamic mufti, or spiritual leader, living near Fallujah offered a different take: He said the bunkers were proof that the insurgency is unbowed. "This shows the failure of the Marines. It was close to their base and they could not see it," said the mufti, who formerly sat on the council that directed insurgents in Fallujah. He spoke by phone Saturday evening. "The Americans think they know everything. But when they came to Iraq, they thought the people would receive them with flowers. Instead of flowers, they found these bunkers."

Haitham al-Dulaimi, who works at a garage in Ramadi, had a similar reaction. "Are you sure they found it near Fallujah?" he asked, laughing. "It shows you how much the Iraqi resistance has insulted the Americans."

It was not clear who built the bunkers. The entrance to the underground system was discovered by a patrol of Marines and Iraqi army soldiers who were searching a house in the desert when they found a passageway beneath an electric freezer.

Soldier faces murder charges: A second British soldier could face charges over the death of an Iraqi civilian as senior army commanders brace themselves for damaging new revelations about army behaviour in Iraq. A formal military hearing on Friday will consider evidence against Lance Corporal Barry Singleton, 23, following an investigation into claims that he fired his gun 12 times at a driver who tried to speed through a checkpoint.

Opinion and Commentary

Believing your own bullshit:

The disconnect between Rose Garden optimism and Baghdad pessimism, according to government officials and independent analysts, stems not only from Bush`s focus on tentative signs of long-term progress but also from the shrinking range of policy options available to him if he is wrong. Having set out on a course of trying to stand up a new constitutional, elected government with the security firepower to defend itself, Bush finds himself locked into a strategy that, even if it proves successful, foreshadows many more deadly months to come first, analysts said.

Military commanders in Iraq privately told a visiting congressional delegation last week that the United States is at least two years away from adequately training a viable Iraqi military but that it is no longer reasonable to consider augmenting U.S. troops already strained by the two-year operation, said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.). "The idea that the insurgents are on the run and we are about to turn the corner, I did not hear that from anybody," Biden said in an interview.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who joined Biden for part of the trip, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others are misleading Americans about the number of functional Iraqi troops and warned the president to pay more attention to shutting off Syrian and Iranian assistance to the insurgency. "We don`t want to raise the expectations of the American people prematurely," he said.


Good Intentions Gone Bad:

Living and working in Iraq, it`s hard not to succumb to despair. At last count America has pumped at least $7 billion into reconstruction projects, with little to show for it but the hostility of ordinary Iraqis, who still have an 18 percent unemployment rate. Most of the cash goes to U.S. contractors who spend much of it on personal security. Basic services like electricity, water and sewers still aren`t up to prewar levels. Electricity is especially vital in a country where summer temperatures commonly reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet only 15 percent of Iraqis have reliable electrical service. In the capital, where it counts most, it`s only 4 percent.

The most powerful army in human history can`t even protect a two-mile stretch of road. The Airport Highway connects both the international airport and Baghdad`s main American military base, Camp Victory, to the city center. At night U.S. troops secure the road for the use of dignitaries; they close it to traffic and shoot at any unauthorized vehicles. More troops and more helicopters could help make the whole country safer. Instead the Pentagon has been drawing down the number of helicopters. And America never deployed nearly enough soldiers. They couldn`t stop the orgy of looting that followed Saddam`s fall. Now their primary mission is self-defense at any cost—which only deepens Iraqis` resentment.

The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don`t work because no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected. Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone`s checkpoints. They`ve repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers—to Americans and Iraqis alike. Not that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have much to smile about. They`re overworked, much ignored on the home front and widely despised in Iraq, with little to look forward to but the distant end of their tours—and in most cases, another tour soon to follow. Many are reservists who, when they get home, often face the wreckage of careers and family. You should note this report was written by a journalist who supported the war.


Come on: Share your Oil Wealth!:

The fabled wealth of the oil-rich Gulf states is to be targeted in an attempt to salvage a major debt relief deal for Africa ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles.

Although Chancellor Gordon Brown is now confident of a breakthrough deal with the White House on debt relief, which could be worth up to $1 billion a year, he is still seeking to plug a £20bn hole on aid.

Brown will challenge the Arab world to stump up more money - increasing the moral pressure at the same time on President Bush to give more generously. Despite their riches, boosted by oil, the Gulf states have had little tradition of donating overseas aid.


Ties that Bind:

Two weeks after this statement was released, and just prior to the US presidential election, Beijing`s position against US unilateralism was again made explicit by China`s former foreign minister Qian Qichen - arguably China`s most distinguished diplomat.

In an opinion piece published in the state-controlled China Daily, Qian ripped Washington`s unilateralism: "The United States has tightened its control of the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia." He noted that this control "testifies that Washington`s anti-terror campaign has already gone beyond the scope of self defense". Qian went further, stating that: "The US case in Iraq has caused the Muslim world and Arab countries to believe that the superpower already regards them as targets [for] its ambitious democratic reform program."

To China and Russia, Washington`s "democratic reform program" is a thinly disguised method for the US to militarily dispose of unfriendly regimes in order to ensure the country`s primacy as the world`s sole superpower. The China-Iran-Russia alliance can be considered as Beijing`s and Moscow`s counterpunch to Washington`s global ambitions. From this perspective, Iran is integral to thwarting the Bush administration`s foreign policy goals. This is precisely why Beijing and Moscow have strengthened their economic and diplomatic ties with Tehran. It is also why Beijing and Moscow are providing Tehran with increasingly sophisticated weapons.


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``Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy.``
``... But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared ... And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.``
Oder Spiegel-Online:
Die Menschenrechtsorganisation Amnesty International (ai) warf den USA vor, ein weltweites Netz von Gefängnissen und geheimen Lagern zu betreiben. Es gebe in der ganzen Welt ein wahres "Archipel von Gefängnissen", in denen Menschen "buchstäblich verschwinden und ohne Kontakt zu einem Anwalt, einem Gericht oder ihrer Familie festgehalten werden", sagte der für die USA verantwortliche Direktor von ai, William Schulz, heute dem US-Fernsehsender Fox News.
[urlUS-Senator fordert Schließung von Guantanamo]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,359194,00.html[/url]

June 5, 2005
`Don`t Know For Sure` About Guantanamo: Amnesty USA
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-rights-guantanamo-a…

Filed at 1:14 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn`t ``know for sure`` that the military is running a ``gulag.``

Executive Director William Schulz said Amnesty, often cited worldwide for documenting human rights abuses, also did not know whether Secretary Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved severe torture methods such as beatings and starvation.

Schulz recently dubbed Rumsfeld an ``apparent high-level architect of torture`` in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.

``It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea,`` Schulz told ``Fox News Sunday.``

A dispute has raged since Amnesty last month compared the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the vast, brutal Soviet gulag system of forced labor camps in which millions of prisoners died.

A leading Democratic U.S. senator on Sunday repeated his call for a full investigation and said the detention center should be closed.

``The end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don`t, let go,`` Sen. Joseph Biden of Delware told ABC`s ``This Week.``

There have been a number of accusations of American mistreatment of the detainees and of the Koran, the Islamic holy book, at the base.

The U.S. military on Friday released details about five cases top officials said were among only 10 reported over the course of more than 28,000 prisoner interrogations.

Schulz said, ``We don`t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate.``

He also said he had ``absolutely no idea`` whether the International Red Cross had been given access to all prisoners and said the group feared others were being held at secret facilities or locations.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and, most recently, Rumsfeld have repudiated the Amnesty report.

The United States holds about 520 men at Guantanamo, where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war. Many have been held without charge for more than three years.

Schulz noted that it was Amnesty`s headquarters in London that issued the annual report on global human rights, which said Guantanamo Bay ``has become the gulag of our times.``

Asked about the comparison, Schulz said, ``Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy.``

``... But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared ... And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.``

``And whether the Americans like it or not, it does reflect how the more than 2 million Amnesty members in a hundred countries around the world and indeed the vast majority of those countries feel about the United States` detention policy,`` he said.

Biden added: ``More Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no (Guantanamo).``

* Copyright 2005 Reuters Ltd.

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[URLSteife Brise von links]http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/medien/?cnt=685292[/URL]

Unter der rechten Regierung von George W. Bush erstarken in den Vereinigten Staaten die oppositionellen Medien

VON SEBASTIAN MOLL


Wenn es in der Politik ganz klar in eine Richtung geht, bläst meist auch ein medialer Gegenwind - auch in den USA (dpa)

"Wenn es schlecht für das Land ist, ist es gut für die Nation" - so lautet ein beliebter Kalauer unter amerikanischen Medienleuten. Mit der Nation ist in diesem Fall das Magazin desselben Namens gemeint: Die Nation ist das mit 140 Jahren älteste unabhängige Polit-Magazin der USA und immer, wenn das Land politisch aufgewühlt und polarisiert ist, laufen die Leser der Nation zu. Das war in der Reagan-Ära so und das ist unter George W. Bush wieder so: Seit Bushs erstem Wahlsieg 2000 hat die Nation ihre Abonnenten-Zahl auf beachtliche 184 000 verdoppelt. Alleine in der Woche nach der Wiederwahl Bushs 2004 bestellten 24 000 neue Leser die Nation.

Doch Victor Navasky, Herausgeber der Nation, mag diesen Witz nicht besonders gerne. Navasky sieht sich und sein Heft ungern in erster Linie als Bush-Profiteure. Sicher - der Trend lässt sich nicht leugnen, denn nicht nur die Nation hat durch George Bush enormen Zuwachs erfahren. Ein ebenso linkes Magazin wie Navaskys New Yorker Wochenzeitschrift, der Progresive, hat seine Leserschaft seit 2000 um 72 Prozent gesteigert, der American Prospect konnte seine Auflage seit Bushs Wiederwahl 2004 um 27 Prozent erhöhen. Doch Navasky macht gerne darauf aufmerksam, dass die Nation nicht erst seit Bush wächst: "Als ich hier 1978 angefangen habe, hatte die Nation 20 000 Leser. Jetzt haben wir fast zehn Mal so viel."

Drei mal die Meinung gewechselt

Die wachsende Bedeutung von Blättern wie der Nation führt Navasky nur sekundär auf die Bush-Regierung und den Irak-Krieg zurück.
"Ich glaube eher, dass die Konglomerisierung der Medien uns viele Leute zuspielt", sagt Navasky. Nicht mehr als sechs Medien-Konzerne kontrollieren in den USA die Hälfte aller Nachrichtenunternehmen, die Meinungs- und Themenvielfalt bleibt auf der Strecke. Die Regierung Bush hat mit ihrer Deruglierungspolitik kräftig zu dieser Konzentration und Vereinheitlichung beigetragen. Und sie lässt nur wenig unversucht, die konsolidierten Mainstream-Medien in ihrem Sinne zu manipulieren - der Vertrieb vorfabrizierter Nachrichten durch Regierungsstellen und ein Stab von der Regierung gesponserter "Reporter" sind dafür die krassesten Beispiele.

Dem setzen Blätter wie die Nation eine beinahe störrische Unabhängigkeit entgegen. "Wir sind ein Magazin der Meinungen und Ideen", sagt Navasky und kann beinahe in jeder Ausgabe auf Themen verweisen, die in den etablierten Medien nicht stattfinden: Sei es, dass in einem Forum amerikanischer Intellektueller die reflexhafte linke Empörung über die Einmischung der Regierung in den Fall Terry Schiavo kritisch hinterfragt wird; sei es ein investigatives Stück darüber, wie die Bush-Regierung still und klammheimlich die amerikanischen Großstädte austrocknet oder sei es eine Studie der Diskriminierung von Gewerkschaftsangehörigen in amerikanischen Betrieben. "Einer unserer Kolumnisten hat während der Invasion von Afghanistan drei Artikel geschrieben, in denen er drei Mal seine Meinung geändert hat", sagt Navasky stolz. "Er hat laut nachgedacht, und das wissen die Leute zu würdigen." Der Kolumnist legte seine moralischen und politischen Konflikte offen, anstatt unter dem Banner vorgeschobener Neutralität bloß die Statements der politischen Parteien wiederzukäuen. Damit konnten sich die Nation-Leser identifizieren.

Zu schätzen wissen diese auch, dass die Nation sich nicht nach dem Markt richtet. Auch die rapide wachsende Leserschaft hat das Blatt nicht dazu bewogen, seinen Inhalt zu überdenken. "Wir schreiben über die Dinge, von denen wir denken, dass sie wichtig sind. Wir machen keine Umfragen und schreiben dann das, wovon wir glauben, dass es viele Hefte verkauft." Interessanterweise treibt jedoch gerade das der Nation und verwandten Medien die Leser in die Arme. Der traditionelle Leser, laut Navasky typischerweise ein von den Sechziger Jahren geprägter Akademiker in seinen 50ern, wird um eine ganz neue Generation ergänzt. "Viele junge Leute sind im Wahlkampf 2004 politisch erwacht und lesen uns, um sich politisch zu bilden und um zu erfahren, dass sie nicht alleine sind."

Um diese Leserschaft streiten sich die traditionellen linken Medien wie die Nation allerdings mit den Blogs. Ein Wettstreit, in dem die Magazine laut Navasky deutliche Vorteile haben: "Wir sind wie die Blogs ein Korrektiv zum Mainstream. Im Gegensatz zu den Blogs sind unsere Artikel jedoch sauber recherchiert, und der redaktionelle Prozess garantiert deren Richtigkeit und Wahrhaftigkeit."

So haben sich im medienkonsolidierten Amerika von George W. Bush linke Magazine wie die Nation, die vormals etwas beinahe Konspiratives an sich hatten, einen festen Platz im öffentlichen Diskurs erobert. Was einst als amerikafeindliche Propaganda abgetan wurde und nur von einer radikalen Minderheit in den Großstädten verschämt gelesen wurde, deckt jetzt einen offenkundig dringend gewordenen Bedarf an anderen Stimmen, anderen Perspektiven. "Wir setzen den Standard für öffentlichen Diskurs und sorgen dafür, dass bestimmte Dinge nicht unter den Tisch gekehrt werden", sagt Victor Navasky. Die USA und seine Regierung kommen an der Nation nicht mehr vorbei.

Erscheinungsdatum 06.06.2005

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June 6, 2005
The Mobility Myth
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/opinion/06herbert.html?

The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who`s winning.

A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they`re getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions.

On the same day, in the business section, the paper reported that the chief executives at California`s largest 100 companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. The paper contrasted that with the 2.9 percent raise that the average California worker saw last year.

The gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is fast becoming an unbridgeable chasm. David Cay Johnston, in the latest installment of the New York Times series "Class Matters," wrote, "It`s no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everybody else behind is not widely known."

Consider, for example, two separate eras in the lifetime of the baby-boom generation. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002, Mr. Johnston wrote, each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000.

It`s like chasing a speedboat with a rowboat.

Put the myth of the American Dream aside. The bottom line is that it`s becoming increasingly difficult for working Americans to move up in class. The rich are freezing nearly everybody else in place, and sprinting off with the nation`s bounty.

Economic mobility in the United States - the extent to which individuals and families move from one social class to another - is no higher than in Britain or France, and lower than in some Scandinavian countries. Maybe we should be studying the Scandinavian dream.

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the gap between the rich and the rest of us is not growing fast enough. An analysis by The Times showed the following:

"Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."

The social dislocations resulting from this war that nobody mentions have been under way for some time. But the Bush economic policies have accelerated the consequences and intensified the pain.

A big problem, of course, is that American workers have been hurting badly for years. Revolutionary improvements in technology, increasingly globalized trade, the competition of low-wage workers overseas and increased immigration here at home, the decline of manufacturing, the weakening of the labor movement, outsourcing and numerous other factors have left American workers with very little leverage to use against employers.

Many in the middle class are mortgaged to the hilt, maxed out on credit cards and fearful to the point of trembling that all they`ve worked for might vanish in a downsized minute.

The privileged classes, with the Bush administration`s iron cloak of protection, avoid their fair share of taxes, are reluctant to pay an honest dollar for an honest day`s work (the federal minimum wage is still a scandalous $5.15 an hour), refuse to fight in their nation`s wars, and laugh all the way to their yachts.

The American dream was about expanding opportunities and widely shared prosperity. Now we have older people and college grads replacing people near the bottom in jobs that offer low pay, no pensions, no health insurance and no vacations.

A fellow named Mark McClellan, who was bounced out of a management position when Kaiser Aluminum closed down in Spokane, Wash., told The Times in the "Class Matters" series: "I may look middle class. But I`m not. My boat is sinking fast."

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Monday, June 06, 2005

Quran Splashed with Urine at Guantanamo

The Pentagon released this news late Friday in order to defeat the US news cycle, which closes down for the American weekend. I deliberately kept it for Monday morning.

The Pentagon now admits that it found evidence in its files of the Quran being "mishandled" at Guantanamo. (Muslims would say "defiled.") All this after poor Newsweek was pilloried by the Bush administration. Moreover, I cannot for the life of me understand why the Pentagon thinks all the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo were carefully recorded for posterity.

Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware has now called for Guantanamo to be closed down. Absolutely right.

The main reason is not that it is a continued scandal and creates a very poor image among Muslims worldwide of the United States. This allegation is true, and the US press has done a poor job of covering the continued fall-out of the Quran desecration story among Muslims world-wide. But it isn`t the main reason the prison should be closed.

The main reason is that the Bush Administration established the prison at Guantanamo in hopes of gutting the Bill of Rights. They wanted the prisoners there to be beyond the law, outside the framework of judiciality. They would have no lawyers. They would be tried only if the administration wanted to try them. They would be held indefinitely. They would be outside the framework of US law and also of the Geneval Conventions-- though Rumsfeld keeps slipping and calling them prisoners of war.

Terrorists are dirty criminals who should be tried, and if found guilty, put away for life. Terrorists are criminals. They are not non-human, and any attempt to create a category of human beings to whom the protections of the law do not apply is an attempt to undermine the Republic. It is a return of the Bill of Attainder, a feature of absolute monarchy that the Founding Fathers stood against. It is something to which even Rehnquist is opposed.

Once it was established that these Muslims could be treated in this way, Bush would be a sort of absolute monarch over all such detainees (remember that some of them might be innocent for all we know) And then gradually others could be added to the category of the "rights-less." The Patriot Act II envisages stripping Americans of their citizenship for supporting terrorist organizations. Without citizenship, they would not be afforded the protections of the Constitution. And gradually, in this way, the American nationalist Right would be able to circumscribe that pesky Bill of Rights, which so interferes with Executive (i.e. Royal) Privilege. The legal minds on the American Right have clearly been annoyed with the Bill of Rights for some time and the speed with which they foisted the so-called PATRIOT Act (makes it kinda hard to oppose, calling it that, huh?) on an unwary Congress, which had no time to read it, suggests that they had a lot of these ideas on the shelf ready to go.

Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.

posted by Juan @ [url6/6/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/quran-splashed-with-urine-at.html[/url]


Sunni Arab Issue Continues to Bedevil Iraq

Ed Wong of the New York Times reports:


` Attacks continued across central and northern Iraq on Sunday. One man was killed in Buhruz, northeast of Baghdad, when gunmen drove up to a car carrying a police officer and opened fire, an Interior Ministry official said. The officer, Maj. Muhammad Azzawi, and another man in the car were wounded, and the driver was killed. Early on Sunday, gunmen sprayed the car of a policewoman in Baghdad, killing her, a police colonel told The Associated Press. On Saturday, a suicide car bomb exploded outside Mosul in the north, killing two policemen and wounding four. When more police officers went to help their colleagues, a roadside bomb went off, wounding four additional officers. `



Al-Zaman quotes Arab nationalist politician Nasir Chadirchi as saying that the parliamentary committee established to draft Iraq`s permanent constitution "does not represent the various groups that make up the Iraqi people. It is, in reality, a committee of the victors in the [Jan. 30] elections." He insisted that no community should be marginalized.

The parliamentary constitution-making committee is made up of members of parliament in accordance with the proportion their list gained in the election. There are only 2 Sunni Arab members, though Sunni Arab "advisors" are being appointed. An adviser is obviously not equal to a member of the committee. Chadirchi is involved in an attempt to form a large Sunni Arab political coalition to contest the next elections, scheduled for December.

The office of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari admitted Sunday that over-zealous Iraqi soldiers engaged in "Operation Lightning" in southwestern Baghdad and its suburbs may have sometimes ethnically profiled Sunni Arab youths, detaining them for their identity rather than because they were known to have done something wrong.

AP reports,

` "There is an improvement in security and in the performance of the security forces, but members of the army and police do cause mistakes, which do happen," said Laith Kuba, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. There were also some claims that "soldiers took advantage and helped themselves to cash and other items. One doesn`t rule it out. I think the army needs more disciplinary measures in these cases," Kuba said.`



The claims of discrimination were made in Friday prayers sermons by Iraqi Sunni clerics.

Al-Zaman reports that an Iraqi government special forces team has been carrying out an operation in Basra called "Fidelity" that targets illegal river harbors that have been used to smuggle petroleum products out of Iraq. Smuggling has been a huge problem for southern Iraq. Iraq subsidizes the domestic cost of gasoline, so it is quite lucrative to buy it up and sell it at market prices abroad. The Iraqi government is losing tens of millions of dollars from such smuggling enterprises.

Meanwhile, Basra police found a huge cache of TNT at a farm near Safwan. They also arrested two foreign Arabs with a great deal of munitions in their possession.

The Kasnazani Sufi Order and other mystical Iraqi fraternities were shaken by the attack on a Sufi center at Mazaari near Balad last Friday. The Kasnazani is a sub-order of the Qadiriyyah, founded by Shaikh Abdu`l-Qadir al-Jilani in the medieval period. There is a strong antipathy between Sufi mystics and the hard line Wahhabi sect and other revivalist groups influenced by Wahhabism.

The Ansar al-Islam group based in Kurdistan, with which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a ssociated, was known for attacking the shrines and tombs of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which is popular among Kurds.

A photo gallery of Kasnazani Sufis performing rituals in Sulaimaniyah has been posted by Behrooz Mehri.

Shaikh Muhammad al-Kasnazani of Kirkuk has been known as pro-American, which may help make sense of the Mazaari bombing if that group is loyal to him.

On the other hand, a sub-group of the Kasnazani Order was involved with Izzat al-Duri, one of Saddam`s high officials who is suspected of being a leader of the guerrilla movement. And the infamous Khattab of Chechniya, an Arab jihadi, was said to have been initiated into the Kasnazani order of the Qadiris. So some Sufis from this order have been militant, but the group that was hit likely was seen as pro-American.

posted by Juan @ [url6/6/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/sunni-arab-issue-continues-to-bedevil.html[/url]

Hizbullah Wins Big in South Lebanon

Hizbullah and Amal, along with some representatives of Saad al-Hariri`s "Future" movement swept the elections in South Lebanon. Lebanon also uses a "list" system, which I have decided is extremely anti-democratic. Hizbullah [Hezbollah] and Amal represent about 40% of the Lebanese population, i.e. the Shiites, but they only get 23 seats in the South, plus a few more in the Bekaa valley and elsewhere. There are 128 seats in parliament. They should probably have 50 or so of them. In the last parliament, Hizbullah had only 12 seats of its own, though it is the largest and most important Shiite party.

Note that the outcome of the Lebanese election so far does not look very much like the "Arab Spring" promised us by the Wall Street Journal. Hizbullah is a strong ally of Syria, though it did not insist on Syrian troops remaining in Lebanon. In fact, with the Syrians gone, and given the weakness of the Lebanese Army, Hizbullah is primed to become the most important military force in the country. Although some of the Lebanese Forces (rightwing Maronites) politicians have called for Hizbullah to be immediately disarmed, no one else agrees with them-- not Saad al-Hariri, not Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, not pro-Syrian Christians.

Note that all the major political groupings continue to be willing to establish list alliances in some districts with Hizbullah. Saad al-Hariri did. Walid Jumblatt did. Even returned Maronite general Michel Aoun did! (He has wanted Syrian out of Lebanon since the late 1980s, when he tried to accomplish it by force).

The election really is within Lebanon`s major ethnic groups. The original issue was Syria. The Sunni Arabs led by the Karami family and its allies were pro-Syrian. They are being supplanted now by the al-Hariris, who turned anti-Syrian.

Within the Christians, President Emile Lahoud and his supporters, who are pro-Syrian, are facing a challenge from the revived Lebanese Forces, rightwing groups that had been active in the civil war but tended to collapse in the 1990s. But some of the Christian politicians are hitching themselves directly to Saad al-Hariri`s Future Tendency, as with Amin Gemayyel. Al-Hariri hopes Future (al-Mustaqbal) will become a broad-based, cross-sectarian political party.

There is no dispute within the Druze community, since their leader Walid Jumblatt joined in the anti-Syrian coalition.

There is also no dispute in the Shiite community, which initially staged pro-Syrian counter-demonstrations, but acquiesced in the departure of Syrian troops.

Ironically, once the Syrians withdrew, they took off the table the main issue that had united the Lebanese opposition. The opposition promptly split. Al-Hariri`s willingness to run with Hizbullah is a key sign of that. Aoun`s relative unpopularity is another.

The big remaining issue for the opposition is forcing President Lahoud to resign. I suspect they will succeed in that. But once they succeed, they really will lack any basis for a continued alliance, and factionalism will reemerge.

It is as though Yushchenko had had to serve in parliament with a big bloc of the supporters of Leonid Kuchma, or even had to make electoral alliances with them.

Lebanese politics is very old and its parliamentary maneuverings have been going on for decades. George W. Bush didn`t teach the Lebanese any new tricks.

The main question raised by this Arab Spring is whether Washington will be able to continue to view Hizbullah as nothing more than a terrorist organization. Whatever else it is, it clearly is an important Lebanese political party. And evidence for its having carried off an international terrorist strike in the past 7 years seems slim.

posted by Juan @ [url6/6/2005 06:10:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/hizbullah-wins-big-in-south-lebanon.html[/url]

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We are powerless unless we stand shoulder to shoulder

European nations cannot influence world affairs on their own
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1499923,00.ht…
Jean-Marie Colombani
Monday June 6, 2005

Guardian
In 1989 we all hoped that the end of the cold war would lead to the emergence of the free world that Europe and America, standing together, had been fighting for. Looking at the world in 2005 there is little ground for such optimism.

We did not imagine then the extent of the threats that we are facing today, particularly the eruption of terrorism on a mass scale, first on 9/11 in the US, then on March 11 in Europe, and the risks linked to weapons of mass destruction remain worrying.

The cause of freedom hasn`t advanced much. Terrorists are trying to impose a new form of totalitarianism in the Islamic world. One of tomorrow`s superpowers, China, is - and will probably remain - a dictatorship. And Putin`s Russia is moving towards a new form of authoritarianism.

If Europe and America want to build a world of freedom and democracy, they need a strong partnership. However, for the past few years they have kept moving apart.

As the 2004 election has confirmed, what we are witnessing today in America is more likely to be a long-term trend than a temporary phase that will end when Bush leaves. A new transatlantic partnership will only be possible and effective if both sides play their role.

First, if the US wants to champion freedom and democracy, it must live up to its ideals. The multilateral institutions that were built after the second world war are not perfect. But we cannot achieve a world of peace and freedom without respecting international law. The Bush administration`s assumption that the US has a right not to comply with it, its repeated efforts to weaken multilateralism and undermine the UN, and its replacement of containment by the concept of preventive wars, are dangerous and counterproductive.

As we all know now, the Iraq war was based on false premises. Besides WMD, Bush misled the American people into believing there was a link between Iraq and 9/11. Now, as a result of the war, Iraq has become a haven for terrorists.

In Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, America is disregarding the rule of law and human rights, violating the very principles it claims to be fighting for. Such practices, as well as the war itself, have unleashed an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism throughout the globe.

At the start of Bush`s second term, Rice and Rumsfeld visited old Europe to try to persuade its leaders that the US is ready to listen to them and the rest of the world. There are reasons to doubt it, such as the appointments of Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank and John Bolton at the UN.

So obviously, despite British efforts, we cannot afford to count on America to change its views, at least in the short term. This means that Europe must acquire the means to make sure that its own voice is heard, and that we need a transatlantic partnership on more equal terms.

There is much more agreement between France, Britain and other European countries than is usually acknowledged. On multilateralism and the importance of international law, on the Kyoto protocol and development, on the Middle East and an approach to terror that combines suppression with action on the causes of terror, European countries have common agendas.

But it is an illusion to think that individual countries such as France and the UK, for all their past greatness, can influence world affairs on their own. By siding with the US on Iraq, has Blair been able to sway Bush or mitigate US unilateralism? By standing alone and trying to mobilise other countries against the US in the security council, has Chirac been able to make France`s views prevail?

The only way for Europeans to have their say is to be united. France and Britain hold the key to a future common defence and foreign policy. Some positive steps have been taken towards this in the constitutional treaty. But it looks as if the French and the British are tempted to stick to their illusions of self-reliance and national sovereignty.

In today`s globalised world, sovereignty is an empty idea if it means adapting passively to world changes that we have not been able to shape. By pooling sovereignty in a more democratic EU, European countries can regain some of the political influence that we have lost.

There is a French concept that is often misunderstood here, that of a "multipolar world". This is not a project directed against US power. It is merely stating a fact: tomorrow`s world will be dominated by several great powers, including America, China and perhaps India and Russia. The question is not: will France and Great Britain be at the table of those great powers? They won`t. The question is: will Europe be sitting at this table?

If it wants to have its say in world affairs, Europe needs to exist by itself. And it is obvious that the configuration of this multipolar world will require Europe to work closely with America, but in genuine partnership rather than subordination.

We might disagree with Bush`s methods and his ideas of a crusade of good versus evil, but the promotion of freedom in the world is not owned by Bush. It is the common task of all the democratic world.

Last year we welcomed 10 new countries in the EU, most of which were under communist rule less than two decades ago. The prospect of joining the EU has been key to securing a peaceful and democratic future in those countries. It has played a role in what happened in Ukraine a few months ago, and it is also our only chance to finally achieve lasting peace on our own continent, by solving the tensions in the Balkans. The repeated failures we`ve had on that front illustrate our excessive dependency on America when action is needed.

In the wider world, building freedom and democracy should be Europe and America`s common ambition. The idea that freedom can be imposed by war is dubious. We need to think about instruments of global governance to foster development and democracy, and work tirelessly to make sure state power is submitted to human rights and international law.

This does not mean we should accept the view that Americans will do the dirty work of military action while Europeans content themselves with "nicer", softer activities. This is hypocritical: we keep our hands clean and retain the freedom to criticise the US while relying on it for our own security. In order to have any influence, and if Europeans take seriously the values they believe in, they need their own capabilities too, and they should intervene when necessary to maintain peace and security, and to protect human rights.

In today`s context, Europeans standing together is an indispensable condition for achieving this. Are governments doing enough to convince citizens that this is the way forward? And are they ready to make the necessary efforts to build a more united Europe? Apparently not.

Even if they succeed in doing this, we must hope that Europeans will not be completely alone. That is why it is vital that Europe keeps working with America, and American progressives, so as to build the partnership that will enable this vision to prevail in tomorrow`s world.

· Jean-Marie Colombani is the editor of Le Monde. This is an edited extract of a talk he gave at the Chatham House event What Chance a Free World? on May 26

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Jun 7, 2005

A watershed in Syria
By Ronald Bruce St John
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF07Ak01.html

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

As the Ba`ath Party congress began on Monday, Syrian President Bashar Assad continued to be torn by competing forces. In the wake of the hasty removal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, hardliners now are pushing for a reassertion of party control. Reformers see the moment as ripe to accelerate socioeconomic and political change. The end result may well set the stage for Syrian politics for years to come.

Socioeconomic reform
The endorsement of additional free-market reforms for Syria`s state-run economy is one likely outcome of the party congress. Implementation would be a relatively easy and popular move, as Syrians are tired of being poor.

Syrian first lady Asma Assad recently signaled that related socioeconomic reforms were under consideration. Addressing a May conference in Damascus organized by Women in Business International, a non-profit organization that encourages networking among businesswomen, she called for greater institutional transparency and argued that any increase in foreign investment would necessitate more accountable institutions and more open procedures. She also called for the creation of a modern educational curriculum to broaden opportunities and to reduce the gender gap.

Her remarks, a potential harbinger for the party congress, carry additional weight in that she has practical knowledge of the business world. Born and raised in London, Asma was an economist for Deutsche Bank and dealt with mergers and acquisitions at JP Morgan before her marriage to Bashar.

Political reform
Necessary political reforms will likely prove more difficult to address. Assad is reportedly considering a change in the Syrian constitution that would remove a reference to the Ba`ath Party as "the leader of society". Old-school Ba`athists argue this would undermine the authority of the party, while reformers hope the president will go further and actually resign from the party. Assad may seek some change in the document`s phraseology, but he is unlikely to go too far in undermining the authority of the party.

In addition, the Ba`athists may also announce new rules concerning the formation of opposition political parties as long as they have a "national platform", code words for being non-sectarian. Assad and much of the ruling elite belong to a small Shi`ite Muslim sect known as the Alawis. Religious parties are a reminder of bloody battles that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Bashar Assad`s father, Hafiz Assad, faced mounting Muslim activist opposition. Eventually, Hafiz brutally crushed the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood in a February 1982 uprising of Sunni Muslims in Hama. While Alawi-Sunni tensions are slowly easing (both Bashar and his brother Maher married Sunni women), recent events in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq highlight the potential threat sectarian politics pose for the stability of the regime.

Another highly symbolic issue for the Ba`ath Party Congress is the emergency law that has kept Syria in a permanent state of martial law for more than four decades. First decreed in December 1962, the Ba`athist regime reissued the state of emergency when it seized power in March 1963, and the law has been broadened since that time. The state of emergency gives extraordinary powers to the government, which may restrict freedom of movement and assembly; censor letters, publications, and broadcasts; seize property; and close media offices. Assad could decide to abolish the law entirely or restrict it to real breaches in national security.

Political opposition
The May 24 crackdown on the Jamal Atasi Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Syria, the only tolerated independent political forum left in the country, added confusion to the prospects for real political change. This was the only political group to survive the 2001 crackdown on political dissent that ended the so-called "Damascus spring".

Suppression of the Atasi Forum, albeit principally a secular grouping, reflected regime concern with the growing influence of revived Islamist currents. Recently, participants in the forum were read a letter from the exiled head of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood has been a capital offense in Syria since the bloodbath at Hama in 1982.

On the surface, the arrests appeared to be a way for Assad and other top officials to strengthen their position vis-a-vis hardline critics within the regime in the run-up to Monday`s party congress. When Syrian authorities released the forum members six days after detaining them, the latter confirmed the government had intended to send a message that cooperation with the banned Muslim Brotherhood was still forbidden and punishable. The decision to curtail the activities of the Atasi Forum solely due to its contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, a relatively moderate movement today, raises fresh doubts as to whether the congress will consider a political reform package of any consequence. Absent moderate outlets for political dissent, the Syrian stage increasingly is set for violent conflict between radical Islamists and the Assad regime.

Frustration in Damascus
Despite Washington`s repeated demands for economic and political reform in Syria, the proclamation of new reforms in Damascus, if that`s what occurs after the party congress, is unlikely to produce a major shift in US policy. As the senate confirmation hearings for John Bolton as UN ambassador aptly demonstrated, the George W Bush administration has inflated the Syrian danger for some time. This was done in part because Damascus undoubtedly could do more to support the US in its "war on terrorism". But the White House has also found Syria to be a convenient scapegoat for the failure of administration policies in Iraq. As the violence in Iraq escalated this spring, the Bush administration repeatedly complained that Syria was the main conduit fueling the flow of men and money to the Iraqi insurgency. In this sense, current US policy toward Syria reflects more a frustration with the insurgency than either diplomatic reality or domestic conditions within Syria.

Either way, real or imagined grievances against Syria mean US pressure will not ease soon. On the contrary, the Bush administration appears to have abandoned any attempt at engagement. Instead, it is pursuing regime change on the cheap through a deliberate policy of destabilization intended to uproot Assad through external pressure. In so doing, Washington seems oblivious to the tentative economic and political openings managed by the Assad regime in the past year or so. The White House has also ignored the wishes of Syrian activists, most of whom want Washington to back off.

Increasingly frustrated with US failure to reward positive Syrian steps, such as recent actions against the insurgents in Iraq and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, Damascus halted military and intelligence cooperation with Washington in May. The Syrian stance prompted renewed discussions at the highest levels of the US government as to the diplomatic, economic and military options available to deal with the "Syrian problem".

Absent US support, Syria has focused on a pending agreement with the European Union, its main trading partner. The agreement, which gives Syria greater access to European markets, is contingent on its full compliance with UN Resolution 1559, which calls for the removal of all Syrian forces, intelligence and military, from Lebanon. While Syrian trade with the US approximates only US$400 million, the EU agreement is worth more than $1 billion in aid and trade.

Time for action
June 2005 is shaping up to be a make or break month for Assad. The outcome of the Ba`ath Party congress will reveal much about the nature and motives both of Syria and the US. Whatever happens, Assad and the Ba`ath Party clearly need to take dramatic steps. Timid policy change will only highlight the insecure and indecisive nature of the regime. This will embolden domestic and international opposition, while confirming the hardliners` belief in the need for tougher action at home. Alternatively, if Assad unfurls a substantive agenda for socioeconomic and political change, he will rally support within the EU, call the Bush administration`s bluff and undercut domestic opposition in and out of the Ba`ath Party.

Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, has published widely on foreign policy issues. Author of Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife (Penn Press, 2002), his latest book, Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, will be published by Routledge in October 2005.

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

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Mal wieder was von Spengler aus der Asia Times.
Mehr [urlThe Complete Spengler]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/spengler.html[/url]

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Jun 7, 2005

Muslim anguish, Western condescension
By Spengler

Why do Muslims riot over alleged desecration of the Koran? For the same reason that Christians used to riot over alleged desecration of the Host, the wafer that when consecrated becomes the body of Jesus Christ, according to Catholic belief. For Muslims, the Koran is not a holy book, like the Christian Gospels or the Jewish Torah, but the incarnate presence of Allah on Earth, dictated to the Prophet Mohammed word-for-word by the Archangel Gabriel. It is not prophecy, but the presence of divinity, as a number of commentators have observed, including this one (The crescent and the conclave, April 19, 2005).

Under the rubric Muslim anguish and Western hypocrisy (Nov 23, 2004), I observed that Christianity once killed apostates as a matter of routine, an action defended in retrospect by Catholic theologians such as Michael Novak as appropriate to the times. Western commentators condemn the guards of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for desecrating the Koran, while regarding Pakistani or Afghan Koran rioters as primitives. Condescending Westerners should look more closely at their own history. [1]

Host-desecration riots by Christians in 1298 led to an estimated 100,000 deaths in Germany and Austria, starting with the execution by fire of the entire Jewish community of Rottingen. Enraged Christians killed 3,000 Jews in Prague after a priest carrying a consecrated Host wafer was sprayed by sand. Other killings took place in Rome in 1021, Strasbourg in 1308, Posen in 1399, Silesia in 1451, and so forth. Medieval Jews, to be sure, were less likely to have tortured a consecrated Host than Marine guards were to have flushed a Koran down the toilet, and historians agree that the charge was a fabrication. [2] Christian sensitivities, nonetheless, were just as bloodthirsty as in today`s Pakistan.

Worshipping divine incarnation in a book, to be sure, has quite different implications than worshipping the incarnate presence of God in bread and wine. Textual criticism becomes heresy as a matter of course. And without the sort of textual criticism that busied the Christian reformers at the turn of the 16th century, it is odd to speak of an Islamic reformation. A book in whose very words God reveals his presence must remain stuck in time like a fly in amber.

Muslim violence over desecration of the Koran is not uncommon, as a matter of fact. According to the Nigerian Christian journalist Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo:

In December of 1994, a Nigerian Christian trader, Gideon Akaluka, was accused of tearing pages out of the Koran in the northern city of Kano. Muslim youths launched an attack on him. He was rescued by the police and locked up in Bompai prison. On December 26, 1996, Muslim groups stormed the prison, pulled Akaluka out and beheaded him. They hoisted his head on a pike and paraded through the streets of Kano.

On December 12, 2001, a Nigerian Christian truck driver, Saint Moritz, was reversing his truck near a fruit market in Kano. His truck accidentally ran into an area occupied by a Koranic study group. As students fled, one dropped his Koran. The truck trampled on a copy of the Koran. Muslim groups pursued the man. He ran to a police station. Mobs stormed the police station, overpowered the few cops on post and dragged the man to the street. They beat the man unconscious. He later died in a hospital.

No one, of course, is accused of desecrating a consecrated Host any longer, so Catholics have no one against whom to riot. Few Catholics, for that matter, still believe that the wafer really turns into the flesh of Jesus Christ (according to a 1992 Gallup Poll, only 30% of American Catholics polled clearly expressed this belief), and therefore are unlikely to riot even if someone really were to desecrate a Host. Unlike the skeptical Catholics, Muslims actually believe in the divine character of the Koran, and thus have something to riot about.

It now seems clear that some of the Guantanamo guards did abuse copies of the Koran, even if they did not, as Newsweek reported, flush one down a toilet. It would be surprising if US interrogators never resorted to Koran abuse as a technique for breaking down the will of prisoners. Like sensory deprivation, psychotropic drugs and physical stress, desecrating the Koran may be an effective interrogation technique. That does not make the practice any less deplorable, but the fact that it is likely to be quite effective in destroying the morale of Muslim prisoners increases the probability that it will be applied on occasion.

Two things explain the effectiveness of Koran desecration as a means of breaking Muslim morale. The first is that the Koran hosts Allah`s incarnate presence, so to speak. The second is the peculiar importance of success to Islam. Unlike Christianity or Judaism, worldly success is the ultimate testimony of Islam; the muezzin calls, "Come to prayer. Come to success!", and its emblem is the crescent, a symbol of secular growth, as opposed to the cross, a symbol of renunciation of worldly things. As I wrote in Horror and humiliation in Fallujah (April 27, 2004),

The West cannot endure without faith that a loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His throne ... The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to "come to prayer" is the same thing as to "come to success". Humiliation - the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it - is beyond its capacity to endure.

Abusing the Koran is the equivalent of abusing Allah himself, and tells the Muslim prisoner that his god is powerless to avenge insults. Again, I do not condone such things, but merely observe that an effective weapon is more likely to be put to use. As I wrote in "Horror and humiliation in Fallujah:

Radical Islam has risen against the West in response to its humiliation - intentional or not - at Western hands. The West can break the revolt by inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the Muslim world.

The ultimate in American condescension is the "Muslim World Outreach" strategy exposed by US News and World Report on April 25. [3] As David E Kaplan reported:

Although US officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle, many have concluded that America can no longer sit on the sidelines as radicals and moderates fight over the future of a politicized religion with over a billion followers. The result has been an extraordinary - and growing - effort to influence what officials describe as an Islamic reformation.

Attempting to engineer an Islamic reformation may be the silliest initiative in foreign policy in the history of the world. The theological department of the Central Intelligence Agency will not persuade Muslims to loosen their grasp on the living presence of Allah on this Earth. In its tragic encounter with Islam, the West cannot help but inflict humiliation.

The Koran desecration affair, with its parallels to medieval Christian violence, reinforces the conclusion I drew in my November 22 essay:

Jews and Christians had centuries to accomplish the transition from public and political religion to private and communal religion, whereas circumstances press moderate Muslims to do this on the spot. The two older religions did so under duress, chaotically, and with limited success. Whether Islam can make such a transition at all remains doubtful.

Notes
[1] See for example Kenneth Woodward, "Newsweek and the Koran" in The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2005, p A14.

[2] According to Wikipedia, "Host desecration is an anti-Semitic myth similar to the blood libel myth. It started in late 13th-century England and France (a century after Christians started making blood libel accusations against Jews), where it was claimed that Jews would steal consecrated Host wafers and torture them. According to the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, a consecrated Host wafer becomes the flesh of Jesus, so it was believed that Jews would steal and torture these wafers to reenact the crucifixion of Christ."

[3] "Hearts, Minds and Dollars" by David E Kaplan, US News and World Report, April 25, 2005.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

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[urlBush Refers to Butcher Karimov as a “Friend”,]http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=1004
Senior US Officials Cozy up toDictator Who Boils People Alive,
Uzbekistan Crackdown Puts [urlBush Democracy Doctrine to Test,]http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,158344,00.html
When People[urlPower Is a Problem]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/03/17/AR2005040701201.html[/url][/url][/url]
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Gerard Baker:

"If success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, Washington, D.C., is now running the largest and most desperate orphanage in modern intellectual history."

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May 25, 2005
Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East
By BERNARD LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20050501faessay_v84…

From the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from a lecture given on April 29, 2004, as part of the Robert J. Pelosky, Jr., Distinguished Speaker Series at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

For Muslims as for others, history is important, but they approach it with a special concern and awareness. The career of the Prophet Muhammad, the creation and expansion of the Islamic community and state, and the formulation and elaboration of the holy law of Islam are events in history, known from historical memory or record and narrated and debated by historians since early times. In the Islamic Middle East, one may still find passionate arguments, even bitter feuds, about events that occurred centuries or sometimes millennia ago -- about what happened, its significance, and its current relevance. This historical awareness has acquired new dimensions in the modern period, as Muslims -- particularly those in the Middle East -- have suffered new experiences that have transformed their vision of themselves and the world and reshaped the language in which they discuss it.

In 1798, the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. The force invaded, conquered, and ruled Egypt without difficulty for several years. General Bonaparte proudly announced that he had come "in the name of the French Republic, founded on the principles of liberty and equality." This was, of course, published in French and also in Arabic translation. Bonaparte brought his Arabic translators with him, a precaution that some later visitors to the region seem to have overlooked.

The reference to equality was no problem: Egyptians, like other Muslims, understood it very well. Equality among believers was a basic principle of Islam from its foundation in the seventh century, in marked contrast to both the caste system of India to the east and the privileged aristocracies of the Christian world to the west. Islam really did insist on equality and achieved a high measure of success in enforcing it. Obviously, the facts of life created inequalities -- primarily social and economic, sometimes also ethnic and racial -- but these were in defiance of Islamic principles and never reached the levels of the Western world. Three exceptions to the Islamic rule of equality were enshrined in the holy law: the inferiority of slaves, women, and unbelievers. But these exceptions were not so remarkable; for a long time in the United States, in practice if not in principle, only white male Protestants were "born free and equal." The record would seem to indicate that as late as the nineteenth or even the early twentieth century, a poor man of humble origins had a better chance of rising to the top in the Muslim Middle East than anywhere in Christendom, including post-revolutionary France and the United States.

Equality, then, was a well-understood principle, but what about the other word Bonaparte mentioned -- "liberty," or freedom? This term caused some puzzlement among the Egyptians. In Arabic usage at that time and for some time after, the word "freedom" -- hurriyya -- was in no sense a political term. It was a legal term. One was free if one was not a slave. To be liberated, or freed, meant to be manumitted, and in the Islamic world, unlike in the Western world, "slavery" and "freedom" were not until recently used as metaphors for bad and good government.

The puzzlement continued until a very remarkable Egyptian scholar found the answer. Sheikh Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi was a professor at the still unmodernized al-Azhar University of the early nineteenth century. The ruler of Egypt had decided it was time to try and catch up with the West, and in 1826 he sent a first mission of 44 Egyptian students to Paris. Sheikh Tahtawi accompanied them and stayed in Paris until 1831. He was what might be called a chaplain, there to look after the students` spiritual welfare and to see that they did not go astray -- no mean task in Paris at that time.

During his stay, he seems to have learned more than any of his wards, and he wrote a truly fascinating book giving his impressions of post-revolutionary France. The book was published in Cairo in Arabic in 1834 and in a Turkish translation in 1839. It remained for decades the only description of a modern European country available to the Middle Eastern Muslim reader. Sheikh Tahtawi devotes a chapter to French government, and in it he mentions how the French kept talking about freedom. He obviously at first shared the general perplexity about what the status of not being a slave had to do with politics. And then he understood and explained. When the French talk about freedom, he says, what they mean is what we Muslims call justice. And that was exactly right. Just as the French, and more generally Westerners, thought of good government and bad government as freedom and slavery, so Muslims conceived of them as justice and injustice. These contrasting perceptions help shed light on the political debate that began in the Muslim world with the 1798 French expedition and that has been going on ever since, in a remarkable variety of forms.

JUSTICE FOR ALL

As Sheikh Tahtawi rightly said, the traditional Islamic ideal of good government is expressed in the term "justice." This is represented by several different words in Arabic and other Islamic languages. The most usual, adl, means "justice according to the law" (with "law" defined as God`s law, the sharia, as revealed to the Prophet and to the Muslim community). But what is the converse of justice? What is a regime that does not meet the standards of justice? If a ruler is to qualify as just, as defined in the traditional Islamic system of rules and ideas, he must meet two requirements: he must have acquired power rightfully, and he must exercise it rightfully. In other words, he must be neither a usurper nor a tyrant. It is of course possible to be either one without the other, although the normal experience was to be both at the same time.

The Islamic notion of justice is well documented and goes back to the time of the Prophet. The life of the Prophet Muhammad, as related in his biography and reflected in revelation and tradition, falls into two main phases. In the first phase he is still living in his native town of Mecca and opposing its regime. He is preaching a new religion, a new doctrine that challenges the pagan oligarchy that rules Mecca. The verses in the Koran, and also relevant passages in the prophetic traditions and biography, dating from the Meccan period, carry a message of opposition -- of rebellion, one might even say of revolution, against the existing order.

Then comes the famous migration, the hijra from Mecca to Medina, where Muhammad becomes a wielder, not a victim, of authority. Muhammad, during his lifetime, becomes a head of state and does what heads of state do. He promulgates and enforces laws, he raises taxes, he makes war, he makes peace; in a word, he governs. The political tradition, the political maxims, and the political guidance of this period do not focus on how to resist or oppose the government, as in the Meccan period, but on how to conduct government. So from the very beginning of Muslim scripture, jurisprudence, and political culture, there have been two distinct traditions: one, dating from the Meccan period, might be called activist; the other, dating from the Medina period, quietist.

The Koran, for example, makes it clear that there is a duty of obedience: "Obey God, obey the Prophet, obey those who hold authority over you." And this is elaborated in a number of sayings attributed to Muhammad. But there are also sayings that put strict limits on the duty of obedience. Two dicta attributed to the Prophet and universally accepted as authentic are indicative. One says, "there is no obedience in sin"; in other words, if the ruler orders something contrary to the divine law, not only is there no duty of obedience, but there is a duty of disobedience. This is more than the right of revolution that appears in Western political thought. It is a duty of revolution, or at least of disobedience and opposition to authority. The other pronouncement, "do not obey a creature against his creator," again clearly limits the authority of the ruler, whatever form of ruler that may be.

These two traditions, the one quietist and the other activist, continue right through the recorded history of Islamic states and Islamic political thought and practice. Muslims have been interested from the very beginning in the problems of politics and government: the acquisition and exercise of power, succession, legitimacy, and -- especially relevant here -- the limits of authority.

All this is well recorded in a rich and varied literature on politics. There is the theological literature; the legal literature, which could be called the constitutional law of Islam; the practical literature -- handbooks written by civil servants for civil servants on how to conduct the day-to-day business of government; and, of course, there is the philosophical literature, which draws heavily on the ancient Greeks, whose work was elaborated in translations and adaptations, creating distinctly Islamic versions of Plato`s Republic and Aristotle`s Politics.

In the course of time, the quietist, or authoritarian, trend grew stronger, and it became more difficult to maintain those limitations on the autocracy of the ruler that had been prescribed by holy scripture and holy law. And so the literature places increasing stress on the need for order. A word used very frequently in the discussions is fitna, an Arabic term that can be translated as "sedition," "disorder," "disturbance," and even "anarchy" in certain contexts. The point is made again and again, with obvious anguish and urgency: tyranny is better than anarchy. Some writers even go so far as to say that an hour -- or even a moment -- of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny. That is one point of view -- but not the only one. In some times and places within the Muslim world, it has been dominant; in other times and places, it has been emphatically rejected.

THEORY VERSUS HISTORY

The Islamic tradition insists very strongly on two points concerning the conduct of government by the ruler. One is the need for consultation. This is explicitly recommended in the Koran. It is also mentioned very frequently in the traditions of the Prophet. The converse is despotism; in Arabic istibdad, "despotism" is a technical term with very negative connotations. It is regarded as something evil and sinful, and to accuse a ruler of istibdad is practically a call to depose him.

With whom should the ruler consult? In practice, with certain established interests in society. In the earliest times, consulting with the tribal chiefs was important, and it remains so in some places -- for example, in Saudi Arabia and in parts of Iraq (but less so in urbanized countries such as Egypt or Syria). Rulers also consulted with the countryside`s rural gentry, a very powerful group, and with various groups in the city: the bazaar merchants, the scribes (the nonreligious literate classes, mainly civil servants), the religious hierarchy, and the military establishment, including long-established regimental groups such as the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. The importance of these groups was, first of all, that they did have real power. They could and sometimes did make trouble for the ruler, even deposing him. Also, the groups` leaders -- tribal chiefs, country notables, religious leaders, heads of guilds, or commanders of the armed forces -- were not nominated by the ruler, but came from within the groups.

Consultation is a central part of the traditional Islamic order, but it is not the only element that can check the ruler`s authority. The traditional system of Islamic government is both consensual and contractual. The manuals of holy law generally assert that the new caliph -- the head of the Islamic community and state -- is to be "chosen." The Arabic term used is sometimes translated as "elected," but it does not connote a general or even sectional election. Rather, it refers to a small group of suitable, competent people choosing the ruler`s successor. In principle, hereditary succession is rejected by the juristic tradition. Yet in practice, succession was always hereditary, except when broken by insurrection or civil war; it was -- and in most places still is -- common for a ruler, royal or otherwise, to designate his successor.

But the element of consent is still important. In theory, at times even in practice, the ruler`s power -- both gaining it and maintaining it -- depends on the consent of the ruled. The basis of the ruler`s authority is described in the classical texts by the Arabic word bay`a, a term usually translated as "homage," as in the subjects paying homage to their new ruler. But a more accurate translation of bay`a -- which comes from a verb meaning "to buy and to sell" -- would be "deal," in other words, a contract between the ruler and the ruled in which both have obligations.

Some critics may point out that regardless of theory, in reality a pattern of arbitrary, tyrannical, despotic government marks the entire Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Some go further, saying, "That is how Muslims are, that is how Muslims have always been, and there is nothing the West can do about it." That is a misreading of history. One has to look back a little way to see how Middle Eastern government arrived at its current state.

The change took place in two phases. Phase one began with Bonaparte`s incursion and continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Middle Eastern rulers, painfully aware of the need to catch up with the modern world, tried to modernize their societies, beginning with their governments. These transformations were mostly carried out not by imperialist rulers, who tended to be cautiously conservative, but by local rulers -- the sultans of Turkey, the pashas and khedives of Egypt, the shahs of Persia -- with the best of intentions but with disastrous results.

Modernizing meant introducing Western systems of communication, warfare, and rule, inevitably including the tools of domination and repression. The authority of the state vastly increased with the adoption of instruments of control, surveillance, and enforcement far beyond the capabilities of earlier leaders, so that by the end of the twentieth century any tin-pot ruler of a petty state or even of a quasi state had vastly greater powers than were ever enjoyed by the mighty caliphs and sultans of the past.

But perhaps an even worse result of modernization was the abrogation of the intermediate powers in society -- the landed gentry, the city merchants, the tribal chiefs, and others -- which in the traditional order had effectively limited the authority of the state. These intermediate powers were gradually weakened and mostly eliminated, so that on the one hand the state was getting stronger and more pervasive, and on the other hand the limitations and controls were being whittled away.

This process is described and characterized by one of the best nineteenth-century writers on the Middle East, the British naval officer Adolphus Slade, who was attached as an adviser to the Turkish fleet and spent much of his professional life there. He vividly portrays this process of change. He discusses what he calls the old nobility, primarily the landed gentry and the city bourgeoisie, and the new nobility, those who are part of the state and derive their authority from the ruler, not from their own people. "The old nobility lived on their estates," he concludes. "The state is the estate of the new nobility." This is a profound truth and, in the light of subsequent and current developments, a remarkably prescient formulation.

The second stage of political upheaval in the Middle East can be dated with precision. In 1940, the government of France surrendered to Nazi Germany. A new collaborationist government was formed and established in a watering place called Vichy, and General Charles de Gaulle moved to London and set up a Free French committee. The French empire was beyond the reach of the Germans at that point, and the governors of the French colonies and dependencies were free to decide: they could stay with Vichy or rally to de Gaulle. Vichy was the choice of most of them, and in particular the rulers of the French-mandated territory of Syria-Lebanon, in the heart of the Arab East. This meant that Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, who moved in and made it the main base of their propaganda and activity in the Arab world.

It was at that time that the ideological foundations of what later became the Baath Party were laid, with the adaptation of Nazi ideas and methods to the Middle Eastern situation. The nascent party`s ideology emphasized pan-Arabism, nationalism, and a form of socialism. The party was not officially founded until April 1947, but memoirs of the time and other sources show that the Nazi interlude is where it began. From Syria, the Germans and the proto-Baathists also set up a pro-Nazi regime in Iraq, led by the famous, and notorious, Rashid Ali al-Gailani.

The Rashid Ali regime in Iraq was overthrown by the British after a brief military campaign in May-June 1941. Rashid Ali went to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war as Hitler`s guest with his friend the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. British and Free French forces then moved into Syria, transferring it to Gaullist control. In the years that followed the end of World War II, the British and the French departed, and after a brief interval the Soviets moved in.

The leaders of the Baath Party easily switched from the Nazi model to the communist model, needing only minor adjustments. This was a party not in the Western sense of an organization built to win elections and votes. It was a party in the Nazi and Communist sense, part of the government apparatus particularly concerned with indoctrination, surveillance, and repression. The Baath Party in Syria and the separate Baath Party in Iraq continued to function along these lines.

Since 1940 and again after the arrival of the Soviets, the Middle East has basically imported European models of rule: fascist, Nazi, and communist. But to speak of dictatorship as being the immemorial way of doing things in that part of the world is simply untrue. It shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt for the Arab present, and unconcern for the Arab future. The type of regime that was maintained by Saddam Hussein -- and that continues to be maintained by some other rulers in the Muslim world -- is modern, indeed recent, and very alien to the foundations of Islamic civilization. There are older rules and traditions on which the peoples of the Middle East can build.

CHUTES AND LADDERS

There are, of course, several obvious hindrances to the development of democratic institutions in the Middle East. The first and most obvious is the pattern of autocratic and despotic rule currently embedded there. Such rule is alien, with no roots in either the classical Arab or the Islamic past, but it is by now a couple of centuries old and is well entrenched, constituting a serious obstacle.

Another, more traditional hurdle is the absence in classical Islamic political thought and practice of the notion of citizenship, in the sense of being a free and participating member of a civic entity. This notion, with roots going back to the Greek polites, a member of the polis, has been central in Western civilization from antiquity to the present day. It, and the idea of the people participating not just in the choice of a ruler but in the conduct of government, is not part of traditional Islam. In the great days of the caliphate, there were mighty, flourishing cities, but they had no formal status as such, nor anything that one might recognize as civic government. Towns consisted of agglomerations of neighborhoods, which in themselves constituted an important focus of identity and loyalty. Often, these neighborhoods were based on ethnic, tribal, religious, sectarian, or even occupational allegiances. To this day, there is no word in Arabic corresponding to "citizen." The word normally used on passports and other documents is muwatin, the literal meaning of which is "compatriot." With a lack of citizenship went a lack of civic representation. Although different social groups did choose their own leaders during the classical period, the concept of choosing individuals to represent the citizenry in a corporate body or assembly was alien to Muslims` experience and practice.

Yet, other positive elements of Islamic history and thought could help in the development of democracy. Notably, the idea of consensual, contractual, and limited government is again becoming an issue today. The traditional rejection of despotism, of istibdad, has gained a new force and a new urgency: Europe may have disseminated the ideology of dictatorship, but it also spread a corresponding ideology of popular revolt against dictatorship.

The rejection of despotism, familiar in both traditional and, increasingly, modern writings, is already having a powerful impact. Muslims are again raising -- and in some cases practicing -- the related idea of consultation. For the pious, these developments are based on holy law and tradition, with an impressive series of precedents in the Islamic past. One sees this revival particularly in Afghanistan, whose people underwent rather less modernization and are therefore finding it easier to resurrect the better traditions of the past, notably consultation by the government with various entrenched interests and loyalty groups. This is the purpose of the Loya Jirga, the "grand council" that consists of a wide range of different groups -- ethnic, tribal, religious, regional, professional, and others. There are signs of a tentative movement toward inclusiveness in the Middle East as well.

There are also other positive influences at work, sometimes in surprising forms. Perhaps the single most important development is the adoption of modern communications. The printing press and the newspaper, the telegraph, the radio, and the television have all transformed the Middle East. Initially, communications technology was an instrument of tyranny, giving the state an effective new weapon for propaganda and control.

But this trend could not last indefinitely. More recently, particularly with the rise of the Internet, television satellites, and cell phones, communications technology has begun to have the opposite effect. It is becoming increasingly clear that one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the information revolution. The old Soviet system depended in large measure on control of the production, distribution, and exchange of information and ideas; as modern communications developed, this became no longer possible. The information revolution posed the same dilemma for the Soviet Union as the Industrial Revolution did for the Ottoman and other Islamic empires: either accept it and cease to exist in the same manner or reject it and fall increasingly behind the rest of the world. The Soviets tried and failed to resolve this dilemma, and the Russians are still struggling with the consequences.

A parallel process is already beginning in the Islamic countries of the Middle East. Even some of the intensely and unscrupulously propagandist television programs that now infest the airwaves contribute to this process, indirectly and unintentionally, by offering a diversity of lies that arouse suspicion and questioning. Television also brings to the peoples of the Middle East a previously unknown spectacle -- that of lively and vigorous public disagreement and debate. In some places, young people even watch Israeli television. In addition to seeing well-known Israeli public figures "banging the table and screaming at each other" (as one Arab viewer described it with wonderment), they sometimes see even Israeli Arabs arguing in the Knesset, denouncing Israeli ministers and policies -- on Israeli television. The spectacle of a lively, vibrant, rowdy democracy at work, notably the unfamiliar sight of unconstrained, uninhibited, but orderly argument between conflicting ideas and interests, is having an impact.

Modern communications have also had another effect, in making Middle Eastern Muslims more painfully aware of how badly things have gone wrong. In the past, they were not really conscious of the differences between their world and the rest. They did not realize how far they were falling behind not only the advanced West, but also the advancing East -- first Japan, then China, India, South Korea, and Southeast Asia -- and practically everywhere else in terms of standard of living, achievement, and, more generally, human and cultural development. Even more painful than these differences are the disparities between groups of people in the Middle East itself.

Right now, the question of democracy is more pertinent to Iraq than perhaps to any other Middle Eastern country. In addition to the general factors, Iraq may benefit from two characteristics specific to its circumstances. One relates to infrastructure and education. Of all the countries profiting from oil revenues in the past decades, pre-Saddam Iraq probably made the best use of its revenues. Its leaders developed the country`s roads, bridges, and utilities, and particularly a network of schools and universities of a higher standard than in most other places in the region. These, like everything else in Iraq, were devastated by Saddam`s rule. But even in the worst of conditions, an educated middle class will somehow contrive to educate its children, and the results of this can be seen in the Iraqi people today.

The other advantage is the position of women, which is far better than in most places in the Islamic world. They do not enjoy greater rights -- "rights" being a word without meaning in that context -- but rather access and opportunity. Under Saddam`s predecessors, women had access to education, including higher education, and therefore to careers, with few parallels in the Muslim world. In the West, women`s relative freedom has been a major reason for the advance of the greater society; women would certainly be an important, indeed essential, part of a democratic future in the Middle East.

FUNDAMENTAL DANGERS

The main threat to the development of democracy in Iraq and ultimately in other Arab and Muslim countries lies not in any inherent social quality or characteristic, but in the very determined efforts that are being made to ensure democracy`s failure. The opponents of democracy in the Muslim world come from very different sources, with sharply contrasting ideologies. An alliance of expediency exists between different groups with divergent interests.

One such group combines the two interests most immediately affected by the inroads of democracy -- the tyranny of Saddam in Iraq and other endangered tyrannies in the region -- and, pursuing these parallel concerns, is attempting to restore the former and preserve the latter. In this the group also enjoys some at least tacit support from outside forces -- governmental, commercial, ideological, and other -- in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, with a practical or emotional interest in its success.

Most dangerous are the so-called Islamic fundamentalists, those for whom democracy is part of the greater evil emanating from the West, whether in the old-fashioned form of imperial domination or in the more modern form of cultural penetration. Satan, in the Koran, is "the insidious tempter who whispers in men`s hearts." The modernizers, with their appeal to women and more generally to the young, are seen to strike at the very heart of the Islamic order -- the state, the schoolroom, the market, and even the family. The fundamentalists view the Westerners and their dupes and disciples, the Westernizers, as not only impeding the predestined advance of Islam to final triumph in the world, but even endangering it in its homelands. Unlike reformers, fundamentalists perceive the problem of the Muslim world to be not insufficient modernization, but an excess of modernization -- and even modernization itself. For them, democracy is an alien and infidel intrusion, part of the larger and more pernicious influence of the Great Satan and his cohorts.

The fundamentalist response to Western rule and still more to Western social and cultural influence has been gathering force for a long time. It has found expression in an increasingly influential literature and in a series of activist movements, the most notable of which is the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Political Islam first became a major international factor with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The word "revolution" has been much misused in the Middle East and has served to designate and justify almost any violent transfer of power at the top. But what happened in Iran was a genuine revolution, a major change with a very significant ideological challenge, a shift in the basis of society that had an immense impact on the whole Islamic world, intellectually, morally, and politically. The process that began in Iran in 1979 was a revolution in the same sense as the French and the Russian revolutions were. Like its predecessors, the Iranian Revolution has gone through various stages of inner and outer conflict and change and now seems to be entering the Napoleonic or, perhaps more accurately, the Stalinist phase.

The theocratic regime in Iran swept to power on a wave of popular support nourished by resentment against the old regime, its policies, and its associations. Since then, the regime has become increasingly unpopular as the ruling mullahs have shown themselves to be just as corrupt and oppressive as the ruling cliques in other countries in the region. There are many indications in Iran of a rising tide of discontent. Some seek radical change in the form of a return to the past; others, by far the larger number, place their hopes in the coming of true democracy. The rulers of Iran are thus very apprehensive of democratic change in Iraq, the more so as a majority of Iraqis are Shiites, like the Iranians. By its mere existence, a Shiite democracy on Iran`s western frontier would pose a challenge, indeed a mortal threat, to the regime of the mullahs, so they are doing what they can to prevent or deflect it.

Of far greater importance at the present are the Sunni fundamentalists. An important element in the Sunni holy war is the rise and spread -- and in some areas dominance -- of Wahhabism. Wahhabism is a school of Islam that arose in Nejd, in central Arabia, in the eighteenth century. It caused some trouble to the rulers of the Muslim world at the time but was eventually repressed and contained. It reappeared in the twentieth century and acquired new importance when the House of Saud, the local tribal chiefs committed to Wahhabism, conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and created the Saudi monarchy. This brought together two factors of the highest importance. One, the Wahhabi Saudis now ruled the holy cities and therefore controlled the annual Muslim pilgrimage, which gave them immense prestige and influence in the Islamic world. Two, the discovery and exploitation of oil placed immense wealth at their disposal. What would otherwise have been an extremist fringe in a marginal country thus had a worldwide impact. Now the forces that were nourished, nurtured, and unleashed threaten even the House of Saud itself.

The first great triumph of the Sunni fundamentalists was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they saw -- not unreasonably -- as their victory. For them the Soviet Union was defeated not in the Cold War waged by the West, but in the Islamic jihad waged by the guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. As Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have put it, they destroyed one of the two last great infidel superpowers -- the more difficult and the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would, so they believed, be much easier. American actions and discourse have at times weakened and at times strengthened this belief.

In a genuinely free election, fundamentalists would have several substantial advantages over moderates and reformers. One is that they speak a language familiar to Muslims. Democratic parties promote an ideology and use a terminology mostly strange to the "Muslim street." The fundamentalist parties, on the other hand, employ familiar words and evoke familiar values both to criticize the existing secularist, authoritarian order and to offer an alternative. To broadcast this message, the fundamentalists utilize an enormously effective network that meets and communicates in the mosque and speaks from the pulpit. None of the secular parties has access to anything comparable. Religious revolutionaries, and even terrorists, also gain support because of their frequently genuine efforts to alleviate the suffering of the common people. This concern often stands in marked contrast with the callous and greedy unconcern of the current wielders of power and influence in the Middle East. The example of the Iranian Revolution would seem to indicate that once in power these religious militants are no better, and are sometimes even worse, than those they overthrow and replace. But until then, both the current perceptions and the future hopes of the people can work in their favor.

Finally, perhaps most important of all, democratic parties are ideologically bound to allow fundamentalists freedom of action. The fundamentalists suffer from no such disability; on the contrary, it is their mission when in power to suppress sedition and unbelief.

Despite these difficulties, there are signs of hope, notably the Iraqi general election in January. Millions of Iraqis went to polling stations, stood in line, and cast their votes, knowing that they were risking their lives at every moment of the process. It was a truly momentous achievement, and its impact can already be seen in neighboring Arab and other countries. Arab democracy has won a battle, not a war, and still faces many dangers, both from ruthless and resolute enemies and from hesitant and unreliable friends. But it was a major battle, and the Iraqi election may prove a turning point in Middle Eastern history no less important than the arrival of General Bonaparte and the French Revolution in Egypt more than two centuries ago.

FEAR ITSELF

The creation of a democratic political and social order in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East will not be easy. But it is possible, and there are increasing signs that it has already begun. At the present time there are two fears concerning the possibility of establishing a democracy in Iraq. One is the fear that it will not work, a fear expressed by many in the United States and one that is almost a dogma in Europe; the other fear, much more urgent in ruling circles in the Middle East, is that it will work. Clearly, a genuinely free society in Iraq would constitute a mortal threat to many of the governments of the region, including both Washington`s enemies and some of those seen as Washington`s allies.

The end of World War II opened the way for democracy in the former Axis powers. The end of the Cold War brought a measure of freedom and a movement toward democracy in much of the former Soviet domains. With steadfastness and patience, it may now be possible at last to bring both justice and freedom to the long-tormented peoples of the Middle East.

Copyright 2002--2005 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

* Copyright 2005

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Monday, June 06, 2005
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This Day in History, June 6, 1944

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# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:26 AM
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Thank you Yankeedoodle

At some stage today the number of visits to Today in Iraq will pass the 1 million mark. A milestone and a millstone. It all started [urlhere.]http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_dailywarnews_archive.html[/url]

Thanks to all the contributors.

FF

War News for Monday, June 6, 2005

Bring `em on: Five Iraqi civilians killed in mortar strike in Tal Afar.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi civilian killed and two injured in mortar strike on police station in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Six Iraqi police and two civilians injured in a car bomb attack in Al Daira.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed in IED attack in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: The Shiite-led Iraqi government acknowledged Sunday that its forces may have targeted innocent Sunni Muslims in a drive to crush the insurgency in southwestern Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers injured Friday in roadside bomb attack in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi policemen and one civilian wounded in car bomb attack in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi police commandos wounded when thwarting a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Four Iraqis wounded in suicide bomb attack in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Insurgent killed by US sniper team in Baghdad.

Spinning the Recruitment Numbers: The Army and Marine Corps, as they struggle with recruiting shortfalls, will no longer announce their monthly recruiting numbers at the beginning of each month. Instead, the Defense Department will approve the release of recruiting statistics for all four services.

More shitless spin: It seems the British involvement in the illegal invasion was for the starving in Africa because Saint Bob Geldof says that Blair must tell George Bush to repay British support over the war on terror by backing moves to end African poverty.

It`s not just Gitmo: The chief of Amnesty International USA alleged Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is part of a worldwide network of U.S. jails, some of them secret, where prisoners are mistreated and even killed.

Al Sadr moving mainstream: Once dismissed as an upstart, the portly al-Sadr has been transformed into a respectable political figure, commanding the loyalty of key lawmakers and several Cabinet ministers. "We are growing stronger, and our appeal is becoming wider," Ibrahim al-Jaberi, a senior official at al-Sadr`s office in Sadr City said Saturday. Sadr City is a sprawling Baghdad neighborhood that`s home to some 2.5 million Shiites and the largest bastion of support for al-Sadr. It was named for Muqtada`s father, the late Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed in 1999.

Opinion and Commentary

Media Cowards:

"I think that the media is afraid to follow up on the very grave implications of this story because they have grown accustomed to being bullied by the Bush administration, and because the story implicates the media for giving the Bush administration a free ride in deliberately misleading the American people into an unnecessary and increasingly disastrous war," Lee said. "Sadly, the type of courageous, independent journalism that uncovered the Watergate scandal is nowhere to be found today."


No Shit Sherlock!:

A surge in suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere around the world is a response to territorial occupation and has no direct link with Islamic fundamentalism, according to the author of a new book who has created a database of such bombings over the past 25 years.

Robert Pape, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, collected demographic information on 462 suicide attackers who completed their missions and said he found that the common wisdom was wrong. He said most suicide terrorists were well-integrated and productive members of their communities from working- or middle-class backgrounds.

In "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Pape cited suicide terrorism campaigns from Lebanon to Israel, Chechnya and Sri Lanka, where he said major democracies had been the principal targets. A broad misunderstanding of the issue, he said, is taking the U.S.-led war on terrorism in the wrong direction and could in fact be fueling an increase in suicide terrorism.


# posted by Friendly Fire : 12:03 AM
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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Kirkuk Police Defy their Dismissal by Interior Ministry
More Car Bombs Wreak Havoc

The Associated Press reports, ` Four car bombings within seven minutes killed six people, including at least three Iraqi soldiers, in northern Iraq, an army commander said. The first attack struck Hawija, about 65 kilometres south of Kirkuk, before three others exploded at army checkpoints in Bagara, Dibis and at the entrance to Hawija. `

Al-Zaman:Five Iraqis, including 2 children, were killed when mortar shells fell on their quarter of Mosul.

Four Iraqi soldiers were wounded by a suicide bombing attack at the entrance to their base in the east of Tikrit. Three special forces troops of the ministry of the interior were woundedby a car bomb xplosion in front of the police station in al-`Amil, southwest Baghdad.

In the Jihad quarter of west Baghdad, a suicide bomber set off his payload at a checkpoint, wounding 3 Iraqi soldiers. This checkpoint had been set up as part of Operation Lightning, but there had not been time to strengthen its security.

The police station in the Shaikh Fathi quarter in Mosul took mortar fire.

In Baiji, US troops detained 30 persons in front of a mosque, who are suspected of being involved in the guerrila movement.

CNN says, `"There is a major military operation under way here in the city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq," said Senior Baghdad Correspondent Jane Arraf, who is embedded with U.S. troops. ` Telafar has been plagued by violence between the Turkmen Shiite majority and the radical Sunni Muslim guerrillas.

The Interior Ministry issued a command that 2500 Kurdish policemen be laid off in Kirkuk. They had been appointed by the Kurdistan regional government. The Police Chief of Kirkuk, Sarhadd Qadir, replied that the high officers of the police force in Kirkuk will not obey the decision of the ministry.

The 2500 officers and policemen dismissed, explained the police chief, were Kurds who had once lived and worked as police in Kirkuk, but had been expelled from the city by Saddam Hussein. They have recently returned and their old jobs were restored to them by the Kurdish leadership. Qadir said, "They will not obey this order . . . It was necessary for there to be coordination between the Iraqi government and the ministry of the interior in this regard with the regional government of Kurdistan."

(Kirkuk is a mixed city of Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs in Tamim Province, but the Kurds want to incorporate it into their proposed greater Kurdistan province. The Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, conquered the city with US air cover, during the 2003 war, playing a role there somewhat similar to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. They therefore have formed the police force. The Interior Ministry is presumably attempting to make the police more ethnically mixed by firing a couple thousand Kurdish policemen).

Ammar al-Hakim (son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list in parliament) said, "We do not accept the inclusion of Kirkuk in this governorate or that. For Kirkuk is a microcosm of Iraq, and belongs to all Iraqis." (He seems to be arguing for giving Kirkuk a special status.)

The governing council of Karbala province joined in the call to form a federal region for Middle Iraq that would unite the current provinces of Karbala, Najaf, Babil and Kut, to be called . . . "Middle Iraq." The move is opposed, al-Zaman says, by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and by the young radical, Muqtada al-Sadr. The governor of Karbala, Aqil al-Khaz`ali said, "We have arrived at the decision to form a committee of academics, politicians, human rights workers and economists to study the subject" of forming a new super-province for the middle of the country.

Shaikh Muhammad Husain al-`Amidi, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Karbala, said, "I am not for or against federalism." But he called for the plan to be built on "practical foundations." Al-`Amidi condemned plans of provincial autonomy pursued by some [probably a reference to the Kurds.]

John Yaukey of the Gannett News Service surveys the staying power of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement in Iraq. They are said to have a long-term strategy, since they realize that they cannot win in the short term.

Qassim Abdul Zahra of AP managed to get an interview with Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He leads a portion of the Sadrist Movement founded by his father, which is enormously popular in the Shiite south and in the vast slums of East Baghdad, now called Sadr City.

Some telling quotes from Muqtada:


"In reality, the electoral process was designed to legitimize the occupation, rather than ridding the country of the occupation . . ."

"As long as the occupier is here, I will not interfere in the political process," he said. "I would like to condemn and denounce the last Iraqi government`s decision to legalize the occupation. Legalizing the occupation is rejected from any angle."

` Anyone who sees himself capable of bringing about political reform should go ahead and try, he added, "but my belief is that the occupiers won`t allow him." `

"I call on authorities to spend Iraqi money on Iraqis and serve the interests of Iraq`s people … not on America`s interests in Iraq . . ."

"I will not interfere, whether it`s Islamic or non-Islamic, but I personally prefer it to be Islamic. It is up to the Iraqi people to decide about their constitution . . ."

posted by Juan @ [url6/7/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/kirkuk-police-defy-their-dismissal-by.html[/url]

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http://www.ourfuture.org/projects/national_conference/2005/i…

Published on Monday, June 6, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
`Writing the History of the Revolution is Now Up to You`
by Bill Moyers
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0606-21.htm

This is the prepared text of the speech Bill Moyers gave at Take Back America: The Conference for America`s Future, sponsored by the Institute for America`s Future, in Washington on Friday, June 3, 2005

It`s good to be with you again. Your passion for democracy is inspiring and your enthusiasm contagious. I can`t imagine a more exuberant gathering today except possibly at the K Street branch of the Masters of the Universe where they are celebrating their coup at the Securities and Exchange Commission

I wish that I could have attended all your sessions, listened to all the speakers, and heard all the points of view that have been raised here. But thanks to C-Span I was able to catch enough of your proceedings to realize you covered so many subjects and touched on so many ideas that you`ve left me little to say. That`s okay, because as Bob Borosage reminded us back in January, what matters most isn`t what is said in Washington but what you do on the ground across the country to build an independent infrastructure, generate ideas, drive local campaigns, persuade the skeptic, organize your neighbors, and carry on the movement at the grass roots for social and economic justice.

Before you go home, however, Bob has asked me to talk about what`s at stake in what you are doing. Given all that has already been said, I will take my cue from the late humorist Robert Benchley who arrived for his final exam in international law at Harvard to find that the test consisted of this one instruction: "Discuss the arbitration of the international fisheries problem in respect to hatcheries protocol and dragnet and procedure as it affects (a) the point of view of the United States and (b) the point of view of Great Britain." Benchley was desperate but he was also honest, and he wrote: "I know nothing about the point of view of Great Britain in the arbitration of the international fisheries problem, and nothing about the point of view of the United States. I shall therefore discuss the question from the point of view of the fish."

That`s what I have done in much of my work in journalism. Thirty-five years ago almost to the day I set out on a three-month trip of over 10, 000 miles to write a book called "Listening to America." I completed the book but I`ve never finished the trip; never was able to come off the road; never could stop listening. My worldview has been a work in progress, molded largely by the stories I`ve heard from the people I`ve met. I want to tell you this morning about some of those people. They tell us what`s at stake. I begin with two families in Milwaukee. The breadwinners in both households lost their jobs in that great wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the next decade my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. I grew up with people like them. They`re the kind my mother called "the salt of the earth" (takes one to know one!) They love their children, care about their neighborhoods, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week. But like millions of Americans, these two families in Milwaukee were playing by the rules and still losing. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America had reached Grand Canyon proportions.

I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that first documentary. It aired on PBS in January 1992 with the title "Minimum Wages: The New Economy." You`ll see the father of one family as he looks for work after losing his machinist`s job at the big manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton. You`ll meet his wife in their kitchen as they make a desperate call to the bank that is threatening to foreclose on their home after failing to meet their mortgage payments. During our filming the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One was hospitalized for two months, leaving the family $30,000 in debt. You`ll hear the second family talk about what it`s like when both parents lose their jobs, depriving them of health insurance and putting their children`s education up for grabs. Take a look.

[VIDEO]

Seeing those people again I thought of the interviews that the Campaign for America`s Future conducted around the country on the eve of your conference. A woman in Columbus, Ohio, told one interviewer something that I`ve heard in different ways in my own reporting over the past few years. She said: "Everyday life pulls families apart." It takes a moment for the implications of that to hit home. Think about it: Our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the race -- a place where "everyday life pulls families apart."

What turns these personal traumas into a political travesty is that the people we`re talking about are deeply patriotic. They love America. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, they are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade, when our final film in the series aired, they were paying little attention to politics; they simply didn`t think their concerns would ever be addressed by our governing elites. They are not cynical - their religious faith leaves them little capacity for cynicism -- but they know the system is rigged against them. As it is.

You know the story: For years now a relatively small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income as large economic and financial institutions obtained unprecedented levels of power over daily life. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold (See Joshua Holland, Alternet, posted 4/25/05.).

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if everyone were benefiting proportionally. But that`s not the case. Statistics tell the story. Yes, I know -- statistics can cause the eyes to glaze over, but as one of my mentors once reminded me, "It is the mark of a truly educated man [or woman] to be deeply moved by statistics."

Let`s see if these statistics move you.

While we`ve witnessed several periods of immense growth in recent decades, the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers - that`s a heap of people - fell by 7 percent between 1973 and 2000 (ibid.)

During 2004 and the first couple of months this year, wages failed to keep pace with inflation for the first time since the 1990 recession. They were up somewhat in April, but it still means that "working Americans effectively took an across-the-board pay cut at a time when the economy grew by a healthy four percent and corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay raises down." (ibid)

Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the highest among the highly developed countries in each of the seven measures of inequality tracked by the index. While we enjoy the second highest GDP in the world (excluding tiny Luxembourg), we rank dead last among the 20 most developed countries in fighting poverty and we`re off the chart in terms of the number of Americans living on half the median income or less (ibid)

And the outlook is for more of the same. On the eve of George W. Bush`s second inauguration The Economist - not exactly a Marxist rag - produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American can get to the top. With income inequality not seen since the first Gilded Age (and this is The Economist editors speaking, not me) - with "an education system increasingly stratified with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities" - with corporate employees finding it "harder…to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement" - "with the yawning gap between incomes at the top and bottom" - the editors of The Economist - all friends of business and advocates of capitalism and free markets -- concluded that "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society."

Let me run that by you again: "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society."

Or worse. The Wall Street Journal is no Marxist sheet, either, although its editorial page can be just as rigid and dogmatic as old Stalinists. The Journal`s reporters, however, are among the best in the country. They`re devoted to getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth and describing what they find with the varnish off. Two weeks ago a front-page leader in the Journal concluded that "As the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth - or that a rich child will fall into middle class - remain stuck….Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity." (Wall Street Journal, page one, May 13, 2005.)

That knocks the American Dream flat on its back. But it should put fire in our bellies. Because what`s at stake is what it means to be an American.

A few weeks ago my colleague Charlie Rose put a question to the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein. He asked: Could there ever be a successful progressive version of Fox News Channel? Klein didn`t think so. He said Fox appeals to "mostly angry white men" while liberals -- "you know, they don`t get too worked up about anything."

Well, here`s something to get worked up about:

Under a headline stretching six columns across the page, the New York Times reported last year that tuition in the city`s elite private schools, kindergarten as well as high school, would hit $26,000 for the coming school year. On the same page, under a two-column headline, the Times reported on a school in nearby Mount Vernon, just across the city line, with a student body that is 97% black. It is the poorest school in the town: Nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of ten lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February a sixth-grader who wanted to write a report on the poet Langston Hughes could not find a single book about Hughes in the library - not one. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other path breakers like them in the modern era. Except for a couple of Newbery Award books bought by the librarian with her own money, the books are largely from the 1950s and 1960s, when all the students were white. A child`s primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. There`s a 1967 book about telephones with the instruction: "When you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from 1991, with two volumes missing. And there is no card catalogue in this library. Something worth getting mad about.

How about this:

Caroline Payne`s face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don`t fit. Her appearance has caused her to be continuously turned down for jobs. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler`s recent book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. She was born poor; although she once owned her own home and earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but lacking the resources to deal with such unexpected and overlapping problems as a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots, and move on. "In the house of the poor…" Shipler writes, "the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into one another." If you believe the Declaration of Independence means what it says - that all of us are endowed by the Creator with a love of life, a longing for liberty, and a passion for happiness - and everyone includes Caroline Payne - this is something to get worked up about.

Or this - courtesy of the columnist, Mark Shields. It seems workers in the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands were being forced to labor under sweatshop conditions producing garments for Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Gap and Liz Claiborne. The garments were then shipped tariff-free and quota-free to the American market where they were entitled to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label. When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska heard that these people were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing while working 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, with none of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, he became enraged. He got the Senate to pass a bill - unanimously - that would extend the protection of our laws to the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas. But then the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff moved into action with an SOS to his good friend, Tom DeLay. The records show they met at least two dozen times. DeLay traveled to the Marianas with his family and staff - on a "scholarship" provided by Abramoff`s clients -- where they played golf and went snorkeling not far the sweatshops (some scholarship!) Was Tom DeLay offended by what he saw? To the contrary. He told the Washington Post that the sweatshops were "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. ABC-TV News recorded him praising Abramoff`s clients by saying: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system." And Tom Delay - the rightwing radicals` revisionist incarnation of Saint Francis of Assisi -- killed the Senate bill. (Mark Shields, CNN.com. 5/28/05.)

If that doesn`t get your dander up, maybe this will: The minimum wage hasn`t been raised since l997. After the Republicans recently defeated an effort to increase it, Rick Wilson wrote for CommonDreams.org about a single mother of two children working somewhere in his home state of West Virginia at $5.15 an hour, 40 hours a week, or $5,378 below the federal poverty level of $16,090 for a family that size. Put another way, "her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty level." Meanwhile, the base salary of the Members of Congress who voted down the wage increase is $162,100. That single mom would have to work about 31, 476 hours to earn what those members of Congress get in a year. And remember -- the minimum wage she earns is actually worth less than it was 40 years ago (Rick Wilson, CommonDreams.org. 5/25/05.)

It wasn`t supposed to be this way. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a decent equilibrium in how democracy works so that it didn`t just work for the powerful and privileged (If you don`t believe me, I`ll send you my copy of The Federalist Papers). The economist Jeffrey Madrick put it well: Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relative poor - were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all (white) comers, rather than held for elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters` rights. The old hope for equal access to opportunity became a reality for millions. Including yours truly.

Ruby and Henry Moyers were knocked down and almost out when the system imploded into the Great Depression. They worked hard all their lives but never had much money - my father`s last paycheck before he retired was $96 and change, after taxes. We couldn`t afford books at home but the public library gave me a card when I was eight years old. I went to good public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. And in my freshman year I hitchhiked to college on public highways stopping to rest in public parks. Like millions of us, I was an heir to what used to be called the commonwealth - the notion of America as a shared project. It`s part of our DNA, remember: "We, the People…in order to create a more perfect union"

You`re never more mindful of this than at the Lincoln Memorial. Like you, I`ve been there many times over the years. Back in 1954, when I was a summer employee in the Senate, I took the same hike every Sunday. Starting at the Capitol I headed for the Washington Monument, briskly climbed its 898 steps, came down almost as briskly (I was only 20, remember), veered over to the Jefferson Memorial and then doubled back to the mall and down past the reflecting pool to where Lincoln gazes perpetually over this city - a city that because of him is the capital of the United States of America and not just the Northern States of America.

Standing there last night, I sensed that temple of democracy where Lincoln broods to be as deeply steeped in melancholy as it was during the McCarthy reign of terror, the grief of Vietnam, or the crimes of Watergate. You stand there silently contemplating the words that gave voice to Lincoln`s fierce determination to save the Union - his resolve that "government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth" - and then you turn and look out, as he does, on a city where those words are daily mocked. This is no longer Lincoln`s city. And those people from all walks of life making their way up the steps to pay their respects to this martyr for the Union - it`s not their city, either. This is an occupied city, a company town, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the powerful and privileged who have hired an influence racket to run it. The records are so poorly kept it`s impossible to know how many lobbyists there really are in this town, but the Center for Public Integrity found that their ranks include 240 former members of Congress and heads of federal agencies and over 2000 senior officials who passed through the revolving door of government at warp speed. Lobbyists now spend $3 billion a year buying influence and access for their clients and, according to the New York Times, over the last six years spent more than twice the amount spent by candidates for federal office. Once again this is a divided city. Not between North and South as in Lincoln`s time, but between those who pay to play - those who can buy the government they want -- and those who can`t even afford even a seat in the bleachers.

So it is that huge financial institutions like MBNA - the credit card giant that is the biggest contributor to the President`s two campaigns for the White House - prevail in getting Congress and George W. Bush to curtail personal bankruptcies, making it harder for those families in Milwaukee to get a fresh start and a second chance.

So it is that Wal-mart, with the third largest corporate political action committee in the country, and pharmaceutical giants with more lobbyists in town than there are Members of Congress, join with gun manufacturers and asbestos makers and the White House to restrict the right of aggrieved citizens to take corporations to court for malfeasance.

So it is that as ExxonMobil accumulates more than $1 billion a month from escalating oil prices -- more than $1 billion a month even after allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and capital spending - the oil and gas industry wrings huge tax breaks from a public already squeezed hard by high prices at the gas pumps.

And so it is that on the Sunday before President Bush`s second inaugural, Nick Confessore, writing in the New York Times Magazine, describes how the president`s first round of tax cuts has brought the United States tax code closer to a system under which income from savings and investments would not be taxed at all and revenues for public services would be raised exclusively from taxes on working men and women. One of the most fervent right-wing class warriors in Washington is quoted as predicting: "No capital gains tax, no dividends tax. No estate tax, no tax on interest." It will be one of President Bush`s enduring legacies to have replaced estate taxes on the wealthy with a sweat tax on their grave diggers.

Let me read you something:

When political interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it`s ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don`t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America`s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You`re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You`re barred from writing off your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

Once again I`m not quoting Marx or Lenin or even The Nation, the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones.

I`m quoting from…..Time. From the heart of the Time-Warner empire comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."

You read this, and then you read the report by the American Political Science Association which finds that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed." You also read - in that same report - that a quarter of all whites in this country have no financial assets. Then you read on and learn that the median white household has 62% more income and twelve times as much wealth as the median black household and that 61% of African-Americans in this country and half of all Latinos have no financial assets at all.

Then you open Jared Diamond`s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail to find the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar`s description of an America where rich elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society where the elite insulate themselves from the consequences of their action, Diamond warns, contains a built-in blueprint for failure.

You read all this and realize you have been seeing it with your own eyes as a reporter in the field. You`re seeing the mugging of the American Dream right before your eyes.

Go with me for a moment to a small town in Pennsylvania. Two years ago, for my weekly PBS series Now with Bill Moyers, one of our teams spent time there listening to regular people talk about what`s happening in their lives. I want to share with you an excerpt so that you can eavesdrop on the hidden conversation of America that the ruling powers in Washington wants to stay hidden, as I`ll explain in a moment. First look at this:

[VIDEO]

Let me tell you something about these people ("the point of view of the fish," remember?)

They don`t ask to get rich.

They want a job that pays a living wage.

They want social security to be there in their old age, for their own sake and so their kids won`t be burdened with their care.

They want a simple, comprehensive health care system.

They want their livelihoods and the fate of their communities to be taken into account as the elites in government and corporations measure profits, economic growth and the GDP.

And they would like to see the political system cleaned up, so the playing field is more level and their voices not wholly drowned out by the deep-pocket predators from the Business Roundtable.

These are not radical views. These are not even "liberal" views. They are just plain American values. Any reporter who spends any time in the field can see that. You just have to get out of the Washington and New York studios, throw away the talking points sent you by the Republican National Committee, stop yakking and start listening, leave the winners to their champagne and buy the losers a beer, and you`ll discover that the actual experience of regular people is the missing link in a nation wired for everything but the truth.

And let me tell you: These plain American values - the truth from an America that is barely holding on - scare the hell out of the powers that be.

Case in point: When that broadcast aired in November of `03, Kenneth Tomlinson was watching. As most of you know by now, Mr. Tomlinson is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ally of Karl Rove, and the rightwing monopoly`s point man to keep tabs on public broadcasting. You`ve heard no doubt that he and I have been, shall we say, somewhat at odds of late. I didn`t know exactly what started the trouble until just a few days ago, when the Washington Post carried a story reporting that when Mr. Tomlinson watched that documentary from Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, it was too much for him. Reaching into the well-worn book of mindless rightwing clichés, he called it "liberal advocacy journalism" and decided right then and there "to bring some `balance` to the public TV and radio airwaves."

So what did he do? Well, apparently the saintly Tom DeLay was too busy snorkeling with lobbyists to take on his own show informing the folks in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, that they are the "Petri dish of capitalism." But Mr. Tomlinson found kindred spirits at the rightwing editorial board of the Wall Street Journal where the "animal spirits of business" are routinely celebrated with nary a negative note about the casualties of their voracious appetites. Now you can get on public television every week, in The Wall Street Editorial Report, an alternative view of reality to life as it is lived in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania and communities like it all across this country.

Here`s the point: The last thing ideologues want is reporting about the facts on the ground. Facts on the ground subvert the party line. That`s why if you live where rightwing talk radio and media monopolies dominate the public discourse, you are told a hundred different ways every day why unregulated markets work better than democracy. It`s a lie, but it works, because you are never told the other side of the story. But here, on PBS one Friday evening, was the other side of the story. Here were ordinary people who are in pain for reasons not of their own making. And it was more than a rightwing apparatchik could take. Because too much of the truth might set those people free. Might take them to the voting booths - or even to the streets - to declare: We`re mad as hell and we`re not going to take it anymore!"

This is a good place to pause and call on that old journalistic warhorse, Hal Crowther, who was at Time and Newsweek and the Buffalo News before going his own way with an independent column. Just this week he writes that:

"The first thing every reporter was taught, back when reporters were taught things, is that the best way to find the truth is to follow the money….If the media still hunted with live ammunition, Enron, Halliburton and the energy industry`s pornographic profits since 9/11 would be enough to force this oil-soaked, sheik-beholden government to resign. In disgrace-remember disgrace?" And he goes on: "Worse still than handouts to the wealthy is the reprehensible new legislation that blocks working Americans from climbing the hill where the money flows - laws like boulders rolled downhill to crush the scrambling underclass, the millions of Americans unable to pay their bills. Think about what it means to limit personal bankruptcies, inhibit class action suits against toxic employers, protect chemical polluters (usually oil companies) from liability lawsuits and cap settlements in personal injury cases. It means trying to eliminate what little protection ordinary citizens retain against corporate leviathans that cheat, exploit, injure and poison them, trap them in hopeless jobs, renege on their healthcare and default on their pensions. It means striping leverage from the people who have no leverage to spare."

Hal Crowther is one of those journalists who goes hunting with live ammunition. But if Kenneth Tomlinson and Karl Rove have their way, public broadcasting journalists will be firing blanks.

What`s important in this story is not only that journalism still matters - that reporting from the ground up can strike a nerve in the heart of the imperium. What`s important is that you see what as citizens you are up against. These guys play for keep. They mean to control the story. And if they can they will silence or discredit anyone who dissents from the official view of reality.

A profound transformation is occurring in America and those responsible for it don`t want you to connect the dots. We are experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From public land to water and other natural resources, from media with their broadcast and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America`s public resources is being shifted to the control of elites and the benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. Back in the early 1970s President Nixon`s Attorney General, John Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so far to the right that you won`t recognize it." A wealthy right-winger of the time, William Simon, President Nixon`s Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that "funds generated by business…must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

We`ve seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from hardships beyond their control, make it hard for ordinary citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of corporations, and diminish the ability of government to check and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the winner takes all. Streams of money flowed into think tanks to shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine to achieve it. What has happened to working Americans is not the result of Adam Smith`s benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

It`s an old story in America. We shouldn`t be surprised by it any more. Hold up a mirror to this moment and you will see reflected back to you the first Gilded Age in the last part of the 19th century. Then, as now, the great captains of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."

They were deadly serious. Go for the evidence to such magisterial studies of American history as Growth of the American Republic (Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg), and you`ll read how they did it: They gained control of newspapers and magazines. They subsidized candidates. They bought legislation and even judicial decisions. To justify their greed and power they drew on history, law, economics, and religion to concoct a philosophy that would come to be known as Social Darwinism - "backed up by the quasi-religious principle that the acquisition of wealth was a mark of divine favor." One of their favorite apologists, Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale, said: "If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization.

I`m not making this up. It`s right there in the record. The historians tell us that a boundless continent lay open and ready for their exploitation and "all the bounties of nature were allowed to fall into the hands of strong men and powerful corporations." Clever lawyers came up with new devices for the legal aggrandizement of private fortunes (shades of today`s Federalist Society!) No labor laws or workingmen`s compensation nets interfered with their profits (shades of DeLay`s "Petri dish of capitalism! ") No public opinion penetrated the walls of their conceit (shades of "The Great Republican Noise Machine.")

They`re back, my friends. They`re back in full force and their goal is to take America back - to their private Garden of Eden in that first Gilded Age when "the strong take what they wanted and the weak suffer what they must." Look no further than today`s news: William Donaldson, who made a decent stab at enforcing post-Enron reform on Wall Street, is out as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; according to USA Today, the President`s big donors - the captains of finance - cashed in their IOUs and came away from the White House with his head on a platter. In his place: A rightwing congressman who takes a dim view of shareholder suits and favors eliminating the estate tax, the dividend tax, the - well, there`s no tax on wealth he doesn`t want to eliminate. Once again the chicken coop is sold to the fox.

Back in the first Gilded Age it was the progressives who took them on, throwing themselves at the juggernaut to try and keep it from rolling over the last vestiges of democracy. They lost the first rounds and only because they kept fighting for many long years did in time America begin to balance the power of concentrated wealth with the claims and needs of ordinary people. Nowadays it`s you who stand between that regenerated juggernaut and those families in Milwaukee, those folks in Tamaqua, and the millions like them around the country. You must be like the Irishman coming upon a street brawl who yells in a loud voice: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?" Not waiting, he wades in.

Wade in! Go home and tell the truth to your neighbors and fight the corruption of the system. But it`s not enough just to say how bad the others are. You owe your opponents the compliment of a good argument. Come up with fresh ideas to make capitalism work for all. Ask entrepreneurs to join you - they know how to make things happen. Show us a new vision of globalization with a conscience. Stand up for working people and people in the middle and people who can`t stand on their own. Be not cowed, intimidated, or frightened - you may be on the losing side of the moment, as the early progressives were, but you`re on the winning side of history. And have some fun when you fight - Americans are more likely to join the party that enjoys a party . Come to think of it, go out and argue that working people should have more time off from the endless hours of tedious work that devours the soul and the long commutes that devastate families and communities.

Above all, know what you belief and why. So I have some homework for you. Here`s your summer reading: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, by Harvey Kaye, soon at your bookstores (along, I might add, with a revised and updated paperback version of Moyers on America.) Thomas Paine was the foremost journalist of the American Revolution who called forth the better angels of our nature, imbued us with our democratic impulse, and articulated our American Identity with its exceptional purpose and promise. It was Paine who argued that America would afford "an asylum for mankind," provide a model to the world, and support the global advance of republican democracy. In these pages is tonic for flagging spirits facing great odds - because it was Thomas Paine who insisted that "it is too soon to write the history of the Revolution." And writing the history of the Revolution is now up to you. That`s what truly is at stake.

Good luck!

(The transcript of this speech as delivered can be found at http://www.ourfuture.org/document.cfm?documentID=1974)

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Der AP Ipsos Poll:http://www.ap-ipsosresults.com/

In God we Trust: America`s rising religious zealotry
Andrew Buncombe in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

07 June 2005

Some snapshots of religious zeal in the US: there are churches in Texas where 20,000 worshippers pray every Sunday; Alabama`s most senior judge was dismissed for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from his court; the re-election of George Bush ­ returned with the support of thousands of evangelicals lured to the polls by local laws banning homosexual marriage.

Such images leave little doubt about the importance of religion in a country where more than 40 per cent of the population say they regularly attend church. But a survey has underlined the huge gulf between the US and other industrialised countries on the influence of religion in everyday life.

Despite the separation of church and state being enshrined in the US constitution, more than 40 per cent of US citizens said religious leaders should use their influence to try to sway policy-makers. In France, by contrast, 85 per cent of people said they opposed such "activism" by the clergy.

"These numbers are not surprising," Daniel Conkle, who teaches law and religion at Indiana University, told The Independent. "The US, in separating church and state, has not followed with the notion that it includes a separation of religion and politics.

"In other words, it`s believed the institutions of church and state should be separate but there has never been a consensus that religious values should somehow be separated from public life or kept private."

The survey, carried out for the Associated Press by Ipsos, found that, in terms of the importance of religion to its citizens, only Mexico came close to the US. But unlike in the US, Mexicans were strongly opposed to the clergy being involved in politics ­ an opposition to church influence rooted in their history.

The survey ­ which questioned people in the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Korea and Spain ­ found that only 2 per cent of people in the US said they did not believe in God. In France and South Korea the number of people who said they were atheists stood at 19 per cent.

The survey has again highlighted the gap between the US and Western Europe, where Pope Benedict XVI has complained that growing secularism has left churches empty. It has also reopened the debate among academics as to the reasons for the difference.

Some specialists, such as Roger Finke, a sociologist at Penn State University, point to the long history of religious freedom in the US and say it has created a greater supply of options for citizens than in other countries. That proliferation, they argue, has inspired wider observance.

"In the United States, you have an abundance of religions trying to motivate Americans to greater involvement. It makes a tremendous difference here," said Mr Finke.

Others argue that rejecting religion is a natural result of modernisation and the US is an exception to the trend. And then there are those who argue Europe is an anomaly and that people in modernised countries inevitably return to religion ­ they yearn for tradition.

Gregg Easterbrook, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, said: "By a lot of measures, the US is the most religious of the industrialised nations."

In terms of church attendance the US is not exceptional. A survey carried out by the University of Michigan found that, while more than 40 per cent of people in the US said they went to church, in Nigeria the number was 89 per cent and in the Philippines it was about 68 per cent. In South Africa and Poland, the figure stood at 55 per cent.

But the US appears to be exceptional among industrialised nations because of the numbers who believe religion should influence policy-makers.

One survey respondent, David Black, from Osborne, Pennsylvania, said: "Our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they`re wimps." Experts said many countries, unlike the US, have experienced religious conflicts that have made people suspicious of giving clergy any say in policy.

"In Germany, they have a Christian Democratic Party, and talk about Christian values but they don`t talk about them in the same way that we do," said Brent Nelsen, from Furman University in South Carolina.



©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Note to Readers: In honor of our one millionth site visit here is a classic YD rant from two years ago. With the exception of one single sentence it could just as well have been written today.

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Yankee`s Rant of the Day – July 29, 2003

We have lost this war. It doesn’t matter that the administration redefines success, or finds new factors to blame for their own failures. We have lost.

We lost diplomatically before the first shot was fired. Where America once had friends and allies, we are now alone and isolated. We no longer lead the Free World; the Free World treats us as a pariah and we lead a motley assembly of hopeful opportunists and mercenaries. The opportunists will be disappointed and the mercenaries will disappoint us.

We lost militarily. We overpowered a conventional army that wouldn’t fight but we created an insurgent army that will fight us where none existed before. We gave the world’s sympathy to people who want to kill us and destroy our nation.

People once said Americans lost their innocence in Vietnam. In Iraq we have lost our honor. We justified an aggressive war on conquest based on falsehoods as flimsy as the Nazis justified the conquest of Poland on a fictional incident at Sender Gleiwitz. While the American media believed those lies, the rest of the world did not. It might be worth remembering that in 1939, only the Germans believed Goebbels.

We have disgraced our profession of arms. We have a shoot-on-sight policy for our enemies. We kill bystanders, pay blood money and call it “cultural awareness.” We kidnap families as hostages, call them “detainees,” and believe that information extracted under such circumstances is “intelligence.” We have lowered the standards for actionable intelligence to the point where we feel justified to use lethal force in two simultaneous raids, hundreds of miles apart, to kill the same man.

We have lost but we don’t know it yet.


War News for Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Bring ‘em on: Two US Marines killed in separate roadside bombings near Fallujah. At least 18 people killed and 39 wounded in a coordinated string of four bomb attacks in and around Hawija. The body of a Sunni cleric who had been shot to death found under a bridge in Basra. He had been kidnapped last Sunday by armed men in police uniforms. Twenty-eight people injured in car bombing in Baghdad, no fatalities noted.

Bring ‘em on: Six Iraqi soldiers and two civilians wounded in car bombing in Babil province. Four guards and six prisoners suffered ‘minor injuries’ in a disturbance late Sunday at the Abu Ghraib prison complex.

Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqi civilians, including two children, killed in mortar attack in Mosul. Translator working with US forces killed by gunmen in Kirkuk. Two Iraqi soldiers killed and four injured in bombing near al-Mahaweel area south of Baghdad. Four Iraqi army soldiers injured in booby-trapped car explosion in Tikrit.


Another major operation: U.S. and Iraqi troops on Tuesday launched another major military operation against insurgents in Iraq, a show of force in the northwestern city of Tal Afar -- not far from the huge, porous Syria border that has been navigated with impunity by anti-American foreign fighters.

"There is a major military operation under way here in the city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq," said Senior Baghdad Correspondent Jane Arraf, who is embedded with U.S. troops.

"Dozens of tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Apache helicopters have moved in to a neighborhood in the town which is thought to be a stronghold of insurgents."

So far, 16 suspected insurgents have been detained, Arraf said.

The U.S. military has poured in 4,000 troops into the Tal Afar area in recent weeks.

In a report on CNN, Arraf described the start of the offensive as "the worst kind of urban warfare" and said the city resembled a "ghost town" because of populace fears of violence.


Closing the door a day late: Iraqi security forces at a new base in the working-class neighborhood of Amil spent Monday belatedly constructing a barrier of bricks and concrete blocks hours after a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives straight into the building where the men were housed, witnesses said.

Once inside the former factory, the driver detonated his cargo, killing himself and ending a three-day lull in such attacks in the capital.

The full extent of the casualties from the Monday morning attack was unclear. Al-Arabiya television reported that five people were killed, but the Associated Press quoted a police official saying three policemen and three bystanders were wounded. Police at the scene declined to comment.

The Iraqi forces "only moved there three days ago, so they did not have any concrete barriers or obstacles or any kind of security or reinforcements for the building yet," said Ali Jabur, who works next door to the new base. "That is why this suicide bomber was able to drive directly from the main street to the building. They shot at him - I heard that they tried to stop him - but he did not stop and continued right inside."


Bunker: American marines have discovered an elaborate series of underground bunkers used recently by insurgents in central Iraq, with heavy weapons, a kitchen and fresh food, furnished living quarters, showers and even a working air-conditioner, the military said Saturday.

The bunkers were built into an old rock quarry north of the town of Karma, an insurgent stronghold in Anbar Province that lies near the city of Falluja. The bunker system is 558 feet by 902 feet, nearly equal to a quarter of the Empire State Building`s office space, making it the largest underground insurgent hide-out to be discovered in at least the past year, if not during the entire war, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a spokesman for the Second Marine Division.

No one was in the bunkers at the time of the raid, Captain Pool said. But the fresh food in the kitchen indicated that insurgents had been there recently. The underground lair had been in use for some time, he said, and was built from one subsection of the quarry.

In one part of the hide-out, troops discovered machine guns, mortars, rockets, artillery rounds, black uniforms, ski masks, compasses, log books, a video camera, night-vision goggles and fully charged satellite phones, Captain Pool said.


Good to see the new government has this whole justice concept down: Saddam Hussein could face up to 500 charges at a tribunal, but he will be tried on only 12 well documented counts because prosecuting him on all would be a "waste of time," the prime minister`s spokesman said Sunday.

Laith Kuba also said Saddam was likely to be tried within the next two months on a range of charges, including alleged crimes committed in Iraqi Kurdistan.

"There should be no objection that a trial should take place within that time," Kuba said during a press conference. "It is the government`s view that the trial of Saddam should take place as soon as possible."

No date has been set for the trial of Saddam, who has been held in a U.S.-run detention facility in Baghdad since being captured in December 2003.

"The number of charges on which he will be tried are 12 and the judges are confidant that he will be convicted of these charges," Kuba said.


At least they got a speedy trial: The blacksmith, the builder and the laborer were sentenced to death just before noon.

The murder victim`s son cried out, "God is great! God is great!" Bowed and unshaven, the murderers were cuffed and quietly led away. Someone said they must be guilty. An innocent man would yell in protest until his voice disappeared.

The trial had lasted two hours. It was the third time since the end of Saddam Hussein`s regime that the death penalty had been handed down.

Iraq is at war and justice is tenuous. The defendants at last week`s trial never met the lawyer who argued their case. They weren`t allowed to introduce medical or other evidence. There was no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, because there were none. The little testimony given was mainly the denials of the accused.


That freedom of the press stuff might need a little work as well: Iraqi journalists say they are being censored by the US-led Coalition forces and the Iraqi government because of the topics covered by them in newspapers and on television.

The Iraqi Association of Journalists (IAJ) said they have been accused of collaborating with insurgents after trying to report on both sides of the ongoing conflict.

Based on the IAJ information, eight journalists have been detained since March 2005 by US forces, accused of being a security risk to the Iraqi people and the military.

Two of the journalists detained by US forces had written articles on the lives of insurgents, after having spent days shadowing them.

"We were living without press freedom during Saddam Hussein`s regime and today there is not much difference. Journalists are being held by US forces for doing their job when they write about opposing views," Kamal Aidan, a senior official from the IAJ, told IRIN in Baghdad.

In addition, Aidan pointed out that 85 journalists and media staff have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. Of this number, some 62 were Iraqis. The total also included 14 deaths at the hands of US troops, which encouraged the IAJ, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to demand independent reports on the circumstances.


A bit painful: Iraqis, who are already dealing with food shortages, daily power blackouts and a deadly insurgency, on Sunday received another dose of bad news: Their newly elected leaders may slash budgets and government jobs.

As many as half of Iraq`s 6.5 million-strong workforce is employed by the state, thanks in part to ousted President Saddam Hussein, who increased the public payroll to mask unemployment and shore up a faltering economy.

Kubba did not say how many jobs could be eliminated, but he warned that budget cuts "will be a bit painful."

For months, U.S. and Iraqi officials have said that poor, desperate Iraqi men have been carrying out many of the insurgent attacks in exchange for cash handed out by Hussein loyalists and foreign Islamic extremists. Many Iraqis blame the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, for laying the groundwork for the insurgency by summarily dismissing the old Iraqi army`s tens of thousands of soldiers, a move that may have swelled the ranks of militant groups.

Humam Shamaa, an economist with the Iraqi Institute for Future Studies, a think tank, said that each Iraqi without a paycheck is a potential recruit for well-funded militant groups.


Another clash shaping up: Last week Basra saw its first conference on the threat of privatisation, bringing together oil workers, academics and international civil-society groups. The event debated an issue about which Iraqis are passionate: the ownership and control of Iraq`s oil reserves.

The occupation forces and their allies in the Iraqi government see things differently. Plans are now afoot for sweeping changes to Iraq`s oil sector, to give western oil majors access to its reserves for the first time since 1972.

But they will face a challenge. While the workforce has shown itself to be quite capable of running the industry, it has been equally effective at shutting down that industry when threatened by the authorities.


Powderkeg: As Iraqi officials prepare to draft the country`s new constitution, fierce debate is expected over the status of Kirkuk, the center of northern Iraq`s oil industry. Formerly known for its ethnic harmony, Saddam Hussein`s policy of forced population shifts, called Arabization, has torn the fabric of the province. Now the Kurds want it back.

The group, Human Rights Watch, estimates that more than a quarter-million Kurds and non-Arabs were forcefully expelled from their homes in Kirkuk.

Since 2003, tens-of-thousands of Arab settlers have left the region, but tens-of-thousands of others have chosen to stay in towns and villages they now think of as home.

Meanwhile, local officials estimate more than 100,000 Kurds have returned. Many of them are living in miserable conditions, in camps for the internally displaced, and in villages with little running water or power.

Rights groups report that there have been attacks on leaders from all three predominant ethnic groups. They also report tit-for-tat killings across ethnic lines in communities across the province. Kirkuk has also suffered from insurgent attacks on oil and gas pipelines, plus car-bombings and other terrorist activity.


Your tax dollars at work: Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States has spent $990 million on U.S. "embassy" operations there, but none of that has been put toward building a permanent home for the U.S. diplomatic presence, according to a report for Congress.

That project will cost taxpayers another $1.3 billion, only $20 million of which has been put toward the project so far, according to an April report from the Congressional Research Service.

By comparison, the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing cost $434 million, according to Congress.

The embassy in Iraq will be three times that expensive because it includes not just offices and living spaces but also a power plant. Iraqi electricity remains unreliable, far below demand and vulnerable to sabotage.


Muqtada: Scores of supplicants filed slowly past Muqtada al-Sadr, kissing his hands in a show of loyalty to this fiery young anti-American cleric who has created one of the most dynamic religious and political movements in Iraq.

But despite the support he enjoys, al-Sadr told the Associated Press in a rare interview he would steer clear of Iraqi politics as long as U.S. troops remain in the country, and warned the current government legitimizes the occupation instead of preparing for its end.

"As long as the occupier is here, I will not interfere in the political process," he said, adjusting himself on a brown cushion lying on the floor of a long hallway. "I would like to condemn and denounce the last Iraqi government`s decision to legalize the occupation. Legalizing the occupation is rejected from any angle."


Progress In Iraq

Deepening misery: The Bush administration continues to insist that progress is being made in Iraq, but the last two years have brought deepening misery for Iraqis. That is the inescapable conclusion of a report released in May by the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation.

The "Living Conditions in Iraq" study is based on a 2004 survey of more than 21,000 households. It shows the Iraqi people are suffering widespread death and war-related injury, high rates of infant and child mortality, chronic malnutrition and illness among children, low rates of life expectancy, and significant setbacks for women.

Iraq`s alarmingly high child mortality rate translates into thousands of `excess` deaths every year. These are the quiet, unseen victims of the continuing tragedy in Iraq.

The new report also sheds light on the number of Iraqi deaths directly attributable to the US-led invasion and occupation. As of mid-2004 the war had caused 24,000 Iraqi deaths, the study estimated. This is the number for all deaths, civilian and military, in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

The death toll in Iraq has continued to climb, of course, especially in recent weeks, so these numbers are larger now than when the survey was conducted last year.


A complex mix: More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a complex mix of tragedy and hope. To give a sense of the ebb and flow, this chart shows data for three key months: May 2003 (the first full month after the fall of Baghdad), June 2004 (the last month before the Coalition Authority gave way to the interim Iraqi government) and May 2005.

The chart referred to is a java pop up. It’s worth going to the story and taking a look at the chart, maybe as much for what it tells us about our news media as what it tells us about Iraq.

This writers really seem to be reaching for reasons for optimism. Ok, so there are now 160,000 internet subscribers and the researchers claim that 75 percent of Iraqis support the government (a claim I find suspect), but the chart shows that both oil and electricity production have fallen since last June, that the death rates for US troops, Iraqi security personnel, and Iraqi civilians were all almost double in May 2005 what they were in June 2004, and that the average number of daily insurgent attacks has increased sevenfold since May 2003. This may represent a complex mix, but it strikes me that there’s a hell of a lot of tragedy in it and precious little hope.


An Iraqi point of view: It is hard for a piece of news to grab a lot of attention in Iraq today as many Iraqis say conditions can never be as worse as they are now.

Car bomb attacks in which at least 700 innocent Iraqis have lost their lives in only two months are part of their news menu, which is not very surprising.

For this reason, there was no popular reaction, whether negative or positive, to news reports that Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari shook hands and exchanged greetings with former Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer.

No one took to the street in protest and the National Assembly (the parliament) ignored what many saw as “an important political event.”

But for many Iraqis the impact of the unexpected encounter is less than that of a traffic incident on the congested streets of Baghdad.

In the past two years Iraqis have grown to ignore or better disdain their politicians and their actions because the paradise they and the U.S. had promised to build on arriving here has turned into real hell.


The Dreams of Sparrows: In a makeshift cemetery in Iraq, one group of men diligently chips away at rock-hard dirt, carving out trenches. Another carries shrouded bodies and lays them down for burial.

Jagged pieces of slate, with lettering in chalk, serve as gravestones. "A big man with a blue robe and a set of keys," reads one -- some of the dead haven`t been identified.

You won`t see this moving, vivid and revealing footage -- shot after the U.S. attack on Fallujah last November -- on your evening news. The scenes come from The Dreams of Sparrows, one of several recent documentaries about the war in Iraq.

Shot by a team of Iraqi filmmakers, Dreams is part of an independent, digitally enabled new wave of war reportage. Along with bloggers and independent journalists, Iraq-based filmmakers are transmitting stories they believe have been neglected by mainstream media outlets.

"Americans are missing a lot," said Aaron Raskin, the U.S.-based producer of Dreams who spent a month filming in Iraq.


Bush Morality

Belated recognition: The Bush administration appears to have opened a whole new front in its war on terror: a forceful, full-scale defense of the morality of its detention-camp policies.

First came harsh criticism of Newsweek magazine for its since-retracted charge of Koran abuse at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. More recently top officials have pushed back - hard - against Amnesty International`s use of "gulag" to describe Guantánamo`s conditions.

The intensity and coordination of administration remarks on this issue may reflect a belated recognition of the stakes involved. Rightly or not, to much of the world the abuse of prisoners in US custody may now be emblematic of American foreign policy as a whole.


More Ancient History

Manipulating America into war: John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

"Many believed the U.S. delegation didn`t want meddling from outside in the Iraq business," said the retired Swiss diplomat, Heinrich Reimann. "That could be the case."


Are We Finally Getting An Opposition Party?

Free pass: Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, says big media, especially cable news channels, are giving the Bush Administration a free pass by focusing on celebrity news and other “trivial matter” rather than examining White House policies.

Conyers based his assertion on a new survey of cable news treatment of important or high-profile stories by the Congressional Research Service, which gathers data at lawmakers’ request to help them write bills or prepare for hearings. Conyers used the CRS sampling to charge that cable news outlets gave big play to some inconsequential stories while largely ignoring a lot of news casting Bush Administration policies in a negative light.

For instance, according to the study, April 28 revelations of a British government memo indicating intelligence services had concluded prior to the start of the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction were ignored by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports and Anderson Cooper 360, MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olberman and Fox’s Big Story. Days later, those same shows were leading or devoting a lot of time to the runaway bride saga.


Get some spine: Senator Hillary Clinton castigated President Bush and Washington Republicans today as mad with power and bent on marginalizing Democrats during a speech to 1,000 supporters at her first major re-election fund-raiser, which netted about $250,000.

"There has never been an administration, I don`t believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the audience at a "Women for Hillary" gathering in Midtown Manhattan this morning.

"I know it`s frustrating for many of you; it`s frustrating for me: Why can`t the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It`s very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they`re doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don`t care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

Abetting the Republicans, she said in some of her sharpest language, is a Washington press corps that has become a pale imitation of the Watergate-era reporters who are being celebrated this month amid the identification of the anonymous Washington Post source, Deep Throat.

"The press is missing in action, with all due respect," she said. "Where are the investigative reporters today? Why aren`t they asking the hard questions? It`s shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today. They don`t stand their ground. If they`re criticized by the White House, they just fall apart.

"I mean, c`mon, toughen up, guys, it`s only our Constitution and country at stake," she said. "Let`s get some spine."


Commentary

Opinion: Most Iraqis do not consent to the open-ended military occupation they have been living under for more than two years. On Jan. 30, a clear majority voted for political parties promising to demand a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Washington may have succeeded in persuading Iraq`s political class to abandon that demand, but the fact remains that U.S. troops are on Iraqi soil in open defiance of the express wishes of the population.

Lacking consent, the current U.S.-Iraqi regime relies heavily on fear, including the most terrifying tactics of them all: disappearances, indefinite detention without charge and torture. And despite official reassurances, it`s only getting worse. A year ago, President Bush pledged to erase the stain of Abu Ghraib by razing the prison to the ground. There has been a change of plans. Abu Ghraib and two other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq are being expanded, and a new 2,000-person detention facility is being built, with a price tag of $50 million. In the last seven months alone, the prison population has doubled to a staggering 11,350.

The U.S. military may indeed be cracking down on prisoner abuse, but torture in Iraq is not in decline — it has simply been outsourced. In January, Human Rights Watch found that torture within Iraqi-run (and U.S.-supervised) jails and detention facilities was "systematic," including the use of electroshock.

An internal report from the 1st Cavalry Division, obtained by the Washington Post, states that "electrical shock and choking" are "consistently used to achieve confessions" by Iraqi police and soldiers. So open is the use of torture that it has given rise to a hit television show: Every night on the TV station Al Iraqiya — run by a U.S. contractor — prisoners with swollen faces and black eyes "confess" to their crimes.

Rumsfeld claims that the wave of recent suicide bombings in Iraq is "a sign of desperation." In fact, it is the proliferation of torture under Rumsfeld`s watch that is the true sign of panic.


Editorial: There are no guarantees that militarily withdrawing from Iraq would contribute to stability or would not result in chaos. On the other hand, we do know that under our occupation the violence will continue.We also know that our occupation is one of the chief reasons for hatred of the United States, not only in the Arab world but elsewhere.

Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of. After two years in Iraq and the loss of more than 1,600 American soldiers, it is simply not enough to embrace the status quo.

We are not suggesting a ``cut-and-run" strategy. The United States must continue to finance security, training, and reconstruction.

But the combination of stubbornness and saving face is not an adequate rationale for continuing this war. This is not a liberal or conservative issue. It is time for lawmakers in Washington -- and for concerned citizens across the nation -- to demand that this sad chapter in our history come to an end and not be repeated in some other hapless country.

The path of endless war will bankrupt our treasury, devour our soldiers, and degrade the moral and spiritual values of the nation. It is past time to change course.


Casualty Reports

Local story: Former Oklahoman West Point professor killed in Iraq.

DoD news release: Caldwell, ID, soldier killed in IED blast in Kirkuk. She was 19 years old.

Local story: Racine, WI, soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Fort Smith, AK, soldier killed in Iraq memorialized.
# posted by matt : 7:35 AM
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ROBERT SCHEER
Blaming the Messenger Fools No One
Robert Scheer
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer7…

June 7, 2005

On Sunday, the Iraqi government announced that Saddam Hussein would be charged with crimes going back to the 1982 killings of almost 160 men in the Shiite village of Dujail.

The evidence will come in no small measure from reports by Amnesty International and other human rights groups published before and during the United States` semi-secret alliance with Hussein in the 1980s.

This unsavory partnership with Hussein was partly created by Donald Rumsfeld when he was a special presidential envoy to the Middle East in 1983 and `84.

But that sorry bit of history did not stop Rumsfeld and the president last week from bludgeoning Amnesty International for daring to criticize the Bush administration`s torture-stained offshore prison system — in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. It`s "reprehensible," Rumsfeld said of the human rights organization`s report. It "cannot be excused."

Of course, in the world outside the Beltway, what is really reprehensible is the detention of hundreds of people for years without granting them prisoner-of-war status or charging them with a crime.

What is reprehensible is letting dogs attack naked prisoners, shipping others out to be tortured by totalitarian regimes and covering up the deaths of prisoners during interrogations.

But for the aggrieved leaders of the world`s only superpower, pointed criticism from a citizen-run nonprofit apparently is more shocking than the abuse of prisoners they deem guilty until proved otherwise.

"It`s an absurd allegation," President Bush said of the Amnesty International report, referring to the organization`s sources as "people who hate America."

Vice President Dick Cheney said he was offended and that he doesn`t take Amnesty International seriously.

Both men argued, essentially, that the United States` historic contributions to human rights mean Amnesty International had no right to turn its steady gaze on us.

Yet the White House certainly took Amnesty International seriously when the administration was campaigning for support for the invasion of Iraq.

"Amnesty International`s description of what they know has gone on, it`s not a happy picture," Rumsfeld said then, urging "a careful reading of Amnesty International."

And, pointed out Amnesty International`s U.S. director, Bill Schultz, "they have never found us absurd when we criticized Cuba, North Korea or China."

What Amnesty International attempted to do in its current report is what it always does: hold all nations to a plumb line of integrity on human rights.

Its survey of 140 nations also called to task Russia, China and a host of other nations, as well as the United Nations.

Ignoring this careful balance and Amnesty International`s impeccable credentials, the administration and its defenders chose to focus on one phrase in the report, the reference to the U.S. maintaining the "gulag of our time" at Guantanamo Bay.

Although it is clear that Gitmo is not comparable to the Soviet gulag, with its millions of prisoners held for decades, Amnesty International`s point should be respected. We are talking about a secretive prison where some detainees have been held for more than three years without getting a single day in court.

"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity," Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan wrote in her forward to the report.

Amnesty International does pay tribute to the U.S. Supreme Court for its recent ruling that the "war on terrorism" prisoners are entitled to their day in court, but notes ruefully that not a single detainee in Guantanamo Bay`s detention facility has been offered such protection.

And the group has published some clear and moderate suggestions as to how the United States can bring its detention system into line with decent human rights practices:

• End all secret and incommunicado detentions.

• Grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

• Ensure recourse to the law for all detainees.

• Establish a full independent commission of inquiry into all allegations of torture, ill treatment, arbitrary detentions and "disappearances."

• Bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations.

As modest as these suggestions are, they are apparently anathema to the Bush administration, which instead of admitting its mistakes, prefers shooting the messenger.

How dare the White House and Pentagon, which have for three years rationalized torture and fought off the courts` attempts to grant the detainees some basic right of appeal, blame Amnesty International, rather than themselves, for besmirching the U.S. human rights record.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Dahr Jamail`s Iraq Dispatches

June 07, 2005
Who Cares?
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000253.…

Suicide bombers unleashed another day of hell across Iraq today, killing at least 18 and wounding over 67.

Four of them struck Iraqi Security forces, along with US military convoys around Baghdad. Despite the huge US-backed Iraqi security operation throughout the capital city, attacks there continue unabated.

The small city of Rawa near Al-Qa’im was bombed again by the US military Sunday night. The military admitted to the bombing, but claimed that there were no civilian casualties. Today on Al-Jazeera the satellite channel flashed footage of flattened civilian homes, as well as people in the city claiming that seven civilians were killed in the bombings.

In Hawija (near Kirkuk), three suicide car bombers struck Iraqi security checkpoints today, killing several Iraqis. Meanwhile in Tal-Afar (near Mosul), fierce clashes erupted between the Iraqi resistance and American soldiers. These are ongoing as I type this.

It continues to be clear that the plans of the Bush Administration in Iraq either do not include the protection of Iraqis, they don’t care, or both.

I received an email from someone today along these lines which I found interesting:

“I operated out of Camp Anaconda, near Balad. What almost everyone, both in uniform and those as contractors, agreed on (was) the objective of the Bush Administration’s long term (plan) is focused primarily on oil. Hearts and minds are secondary, far behind the issue of petroleum products, as the US continues to compete for resources around the world. I hope more media conversation is forthcoming on this issue.”

Also along these lines, an Iraqi friend of mine who is a doctor in Baghdad told me that when he was in Ramadi yesterday, US soldiers attacked the Anbar Medical School while students were taking their exams. As he said, “They (US soldiers) smashed the front gates of the school in a barbaric way using Humvees…and terrorized the female students while arresting two students while they were working on their exams. They then lay siege to the homes of the dean of the university, along with homes of lecturers, even though their families were inside.”

My friend also reported that after he recently visited Haditha (remember “Operation Open Market”) he found that a large number of civilians had been detained.

“They even detained a friend of mine and his father because they found papers in their home about an upcoming demonstration,” he told me.

Recently, the US-backed Iraqi “government” announced it had detained nearly 900 “suspected militants.” A “suspected militant” in Iraq looks more and more like anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time when Iraqi or US forces conduct an operation.

Of course the looting of homes during raids continues along with the detentions of innocent Iraqis. So much so that as a result of the huge “security” operation in Baghdad, Laith Kuba, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari found it necessary to make the following statement:

“Some people complained there are cases where soldiers took advantage and helped themselves to cash and other items. One doesn’t rule it out. The complaints I heard from people were the aggressiveness of some of these forces as they do things. Some people have half-hinted that they have copied some of the mannerisms of other foreign troops. I think that is a valid criticism in some cases.”

Posted by Dahr_Jamail at June 7, 2005 04:41 PM

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

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Latest Fatality: Jun 06, 2005
May.05: 88 (endgültige Zahl)
June05: 10



Iraker: Civilian: 90 Police/Mil: 32 Total: 122

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Jun 8, 2005

Car bombings: Iraq`s time bomb
By Michael Schwartz
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF08Ak01.html
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To many critics of the war, the situation in Iraq has gotten a lot more confusing since the election of January 30. The election itself was confusing: though originally forced on the occupation by Shi`ite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it was nevertheless conducted in the enthusiastic embrace of the US government and media. And while the winning ticket was elected after a campaign centered around promises of a timetable for US withdrawal, its leadership abandoned this demand while the occupation celebrated the huge turnout in Shi`ite and Kurdish areas as an endorsement of the occupation.

But the seemingly endless wrangling over Sunni representation in the new government provided a clarity of sorts on the meaning of the election - that the government is simply not a critical factor in the dynamics of Iraqi society. By April, the whole issue of the election and the new government had faded into the background as an onslaught of car bombings exchanged headlines with two new military offensives by the American military near the Syrian border and a much ballyhooed Iraqi military offensive in Baghdad.

These recent developments have demonstrated that the occupation and the resistance continue to be the two primary forces in the country, but they also underscore how difficult it is to discern the underlying logic of the confrontation between them.

The car bombings are the centerpiece of these new events, and they represent, I believe, a new and qualitatively different offensive strategy by the resistance. One symptom of this departure can be found in sheer numbers: according to US military officials there were 25 car bombings last year in Baghdad; since March 1, there have been 126. But what really distinguishes this campaign from earlier ones - even those that utilized car bombs - is their indiscriminate targeting. Far larger numbers of civilians are killed or wounded in these attacks than in other resistance attacks, many of which are carefully targeted to avoid civilian casualties.

Don`t be fooled by the press coverage - the car bombs are not detonated at random, nor are they primarily directed at Shi`ite mosques. In fact, only a handful have been targeted primarily at civilians - the vast majority are aimed at recruits or active duty members of the Iraqi police and army; the civilian injuries are - to use the ghoulish American military jargon - "collateral damage".

But it is important to begin by understanding the small proportion that actually target civilians, notably mosques and other places where Shi`ites congregate. These appear to be exclusively the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his cohorts in "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia". (Though they regularly claim credit for these attacks, we can never be certain of his authorship, given the unreliability of his claims.) Zarqawi`s faction has consistently characterized the Shi`ites as apostates. In a recent statement, they denounced virtually the whole Shi`ite community, saying that occupation leaders were "being aided by their allies from Shi`ites", and then adding, "The Shi`ite sect has always spearheaded any war against Islam and Muslims throughout history." Applying classic terrorist logic, Zarqawi is attempting to use attacks on civilians to intimidate the Shi`ite community from supporting the new government and the US-led occupation that stands behind it.

"Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" accounts for a tiny proportion of the military actions undertaken by the Iraqi resistance. My best estimate is that Zarqawi and his allies account for perhaps five actions each week, including perhaps one car bombing. This represents a small proportion of even the car bombings, which have been running at at least 10 per week since the election; and it is a tiny proportion of the 400 or so violent actions each week - virtually all of which are directed at military targets, with about 70% directed at US armed forces.

These attacks are nevertheless a significant element in the Iraqi cauldron. The massive mayhem they cause reflects the fact that the targets are vulnerable civilians, and the immense publicity given them by the American media (encouraged by occupation authorities) ensure their actual and figurative importance. Beyond this, their role in creating and sustaining friction and conflict between the Sunni and Shi`ite communities, again augmented by the media spotlight on this growing problem (a spotlight that is also encouraged by occupation authorities) ensures that these attacks have become the most visible elements in the car-bombing offensive.

But the visibility of "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" has also created a growing effort for the remainder of the resistance to dissociate itself from Zarqawi and his allies. Since last fall, the latter have been regularly denounced by the Association of Muslim Scholars, the key clerical leadership of the Sunni resistance. They have been repeatedly labeled as criminals (rather than resistance fighters) by the Sadrists - the key anti-occupation group among the Shi`ites. Even the new Iraqi government has acknowledged the growing estrangement. Laith Kubba, an adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, told New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise that many elements of the resistance were no longer "welcoming" Zarqawi and other foreign fighters. He commented, "There was a moment when they said, `OK, we`re going to use you in our fight against the government and Americans. But now they`re saying, `You`re a burden.`"

It is this growing isolation of Zarqawi that makes the car-bombing offensive all the more significant. It is being carried out by elements of the resistance who do not traditionally target civilians. And while they are not targeting them in this campaign, neither are they attempting to avoid civilian casualties. This odd equation is nicely expressed in this Washington Post description of a May 23 attack: "At lunchtime, a car bomb exploded outside a cafe frequented by workers in a predominantly Shi`ite neighborhood of north Baghdad, killing at least five people, hospital officials said. The bomb was detonated by remote control, police said. While the intended targets appeared to have been police who also gather at the cafe, witnesses said the victims were civilians."

Most of these attacks are a little less indiscriminate, since reports in early May indicated that 250 of the 400 people killed to that point were recruits or active duty police and national guard.

This technical distinction between targeting civilians and targeting armed forces is worth emphasizing because it allows us to see the underlying logic of the attacks. The targeting of police is a direct response to the American policy of "Iraqification" of the war - an attempt by the US military to train an Iraqi force that can relieve the overstressed American armed forces. The intention is to deprive the Iraqification campaign of the manpower it needs, and thereby weaken the occupation.

It remains to be seen whether this sort of intimidation campaign can work. The US media have been quoting American military leaders as reporting that the bombings were not scaring Iraqis away from one of the only jobs that promises enough pay to support a family; but we can`t rely on such reports. (We do know, however, that Iraqification thus far is a miserable failure. For example, the recent Operation Matador - the search and destroy operation by American troops over by the Syrian border - involved no Iraqi troops at all, because none could be trusted to withstand actual fire fights. And the police in key Sunni cities, such as Ramadi and Mosul, have not been able or willing to police the towns, leaving large sections of cities and whole towns in the hands of the resistance, who become the de facto police there.)

While the car-bombing campaign cannot be called "indiscriminate" carnage, it is carnage nonetheless, and it represents a dramatic departure from earlier resistance strategies on two very important dimensions. The most obvious departure is the lack of concern for civilian casualties. Classic guerrilla war, regularly practiced by the Iraqi resistance, tries to ensure that guerrilla attacks avoid civilian casualties. In Iraq this has been regularly practiced by warning local residents of impending attacks and having them clear the neighborhood before they occur. This, for example, was done in the famous incident in Fallujah where the four security men were ambushed (and then later butchered by a mob), the triggering incident for the first siege of Fallujah. But it is also the bread and butter of myriad small guerrilla incidents, such as the one described by Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner:

Farhan Ali, 52, a shepherd from the village, said insurgents told him to clear out of an area on a busy dirt road from Abu Ghraib to Smailat because they had planted a bomb in a cardboard carton that was set to blow up next to the foot patrol. "All the people in the area knew about it," he said. "The insurgents asked us to stay out of the road ... All of us were just watching," Ali said. "There were a bunch of kids standing away from the road expecting and watching to see an explosion."

While there have been innumerable instances where such caution is not applied and many battles in which civilians were caught in the crossfire, the recent car bombings represent the first instance in which a guerrilla campaign has generated this level of civilian casualties. Of course, Iraqi police and national guards (both recruits and active duty personnel) are required to congregate in crowded city locations, so the guerrillas have a good excuse for attacking where they do. But in other circumstances, they would warn people nevertheless, even at the risk of losing the element of surprise or aborting the attack altogether. So this represents a drift far away from the ethics that have so far dominated the resistance (though at least some elements of the resistance, including Zarqawi and his crowd, have never honored them).

This change in strategy has enormous potential to change the way in which the resistance is viewed inside Iraq. Ordinary citizens, even those who detest the occupation, will generally be alienated from such strategies, and therefore, from the resistance. Many people react like two eyewitnesses to the restaurant attack described above. One, acknowledging the purpose of the attack, commented: "I swear to God, I will not enter any restaurant if I see any policemen sitting there," and then complained, "There is no safe place in Baghdad, not even your bedroom." The other declared bluntly that the insurgents were cowards: "They cannot face these men [the police] man-to-man, so they show us how brave they are by killing these poor men who run all day to feed their families."

But there is another aspect to these attacks that is even more symptomatic of a shift in the resistance strategy: the targeting of police and police recruits. While these attacks have occurred in the past, they have now become the key weapon in the resistance struggle against Iraqi armed forces, replacing one that was almost its direct opposite.

Before the current campaign, most of the resistance attempted to co-opt, rather than defeat, the Iraqi police and national guard. The patterns were simple: when police and the national guard were stationed in cities, the resistance would cooperate with them in enforcing criminal law, delivering criminals to them and avoiding armed conflict, except when they participated in campaigns against the resistance itself. When the US called on local Iraqi forces to fight the resistance, the resistance would issue an appeal for the Iraqi armed forces to defect or abandon their posts and melt into the population. In virtually every important confrontation police stations were abandoned to the resistance, Iraqi units deserted and went home rather than fight other Iraqis, and some even joined the resistance and fought the Americans. The most highly visible of such cases occurred in the two battles in Fallujah last year and the confrontations in Sadr City, where the US could not mobilize any Iraqi units except those from the Kurdish areas.

This strategy was more successful than preventing the recruitment of police and national guards, since it created a "Trojan Horse" supplied and trained by the US that was frequently an ally and almost never the enemy. In Mosul, for example, US reliance on the local police allowed the resistance to take over the city (during the battle of Fallujah, when the US forces were otherwise occupied) with almost no fighting. A force of 3,000 policemen simply melted into the population (except those that joined the rebels) and left their weapons and supplies behind.

This new car-bomb strategy will therefore hurt the resistance whether it succeeds or fails. Any reduction in the size of the army will be more than offset by the antagonism to the resistance among the surviving forces, definitively undermining the "Trojan Horse" strategy.

So why have at least some elements of the rebellion abandoned the co-optation strategy? The most important answer lies in changes in US policy for deploying Iraqi military forces. Until last fall, the US recruited local residents for the local police force and assigned army units with matching ethno-religious backgrounds to local patrols. That is, they recruited Fallujans to police and patrol in Fallujah, Ramadans in Ramadi and Sadr City residents in Sadr City. When this was not possible, Sunnis were assigned to Sunni areas; Shi`ites were assigned to Shi`ite areas.

This policy, of course, was a key element in enabling the "Trojan Horse" strategy, since the soldiers` ties in the local communities gave families and tribal leaders personal, moral and clerical leverage over the local armed forces. Last fall, faced with the stark evidence of the power of these ties, the US military reacted by assigning outsiders to police the most troubled areas. That is, they began to use Sunni and Kurdish forces in Shi`ite areas; Shi`ite and Kurdish forces in Sunni areas. So, for example, while the Sunni military forces refused to fight in both battles of Fallujah, in the second battle a Kurdish force joined the Americans and fought alongside them.

This strategy could work - the US might be able to recruit police forces and national guard units that would not be co-optable by the resistance, simply exploiting the ethno-religious divisions in the country. They are trying this in Ramadi and other centers of Sunni resistance. In Fallujah, the Shi`ite occupying troops have been accused of frequent and systematic brutality. This brutality is a sign that the Shi`ite armed forces may not be co-optable by the Sunni resistance, and it has been a major source of the growing antagonism between the Shi`ite and Sunni communities. (The use of this ethnic "fix" to their enforcement problems, as well as failure of the Americans to respond to the charges of brutality in Fallujah and elsewhere provides further evidence of American complicity in - and perhaps authorship of - the growing ethno-religious conflict in Iraq.)

Certainly, the current car-bomb campaign suggests that at least some elements in the Sunni resistance think that the American strategy will work. One key sign of this can be seen in the abortive negotiations around the battle of Fallujah. It was not well publicized, but the US did negotiate with representatives of the Fallujah leadership before attacking, and one of the sticking points in the negotiations was the demand by the rebels that the police force in Fallujah be recruited from Fallujah. The US would not agree to this demand. Another, more immediate, indication lies in the fact that virtually all of the car bombs are directed against primarily Shi`ite armed forces. In fact, the bombings tend to be in Shi`ite areas of town (where Shi`ite recruits or police congregate) so that the civilian victims are also Shi`ite. While such targeting is "logical" in some abstract sense, the attacks are inevitably seen as anti-Shi`ite.

Hence it is no surprise that communities in which these attacks take place see them as atrocities - not only because they kill civilians, but also because the recruits are usually local men who are applying for one of the only available jobs in town. The comment that the restaurant bombers "show us how brave they are by killing these poor men who run all day to feed their families" probably represents the predominant attitude among Shi`ites toward both the car bombers and the police they target. The fact that these police jobs are all that the American-led pseudo-reconstruction can offer in the way of employment is a sign of the failure of the occupation. But even if this sharpens the anger of the residents against the US, it does not soften the anger at the car bombers, who are not only killing people, but removing one of the few job possibilities available in communities where unemployment is as high as 60%.

So the car-bomb campaign is designed to substitute for co-opting the police, but it has far-reaching consequences. Beyond the murder and alienation of civilians and its likelihood to strengthen police antagonism to the resistance, it adds to the growing divisions between Shi`ites and Sunnis, feeding the very ethno-religious friction that has become Washington`s principal excuse for its continuing presence. The fact that the US is in some sense the driving force behind this growing division is an important part of the story, but it is only one important part. The other is the strategy of the Sunni resistance. Instead of searching for another way of defeating Iraqification, it has adopted this strategy, which has already contributed to the growing friction between Shi`ites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the Internet at numerous sites, including Asia Times Online, TomDispatch, MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print at Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is [e-mail]

(Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz)

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Published on Tuesday, June 7, 2005 by the Boston Globe
The War Against Islam
by James Carroll
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

Among the factors leading to the French and Dutch rejections of the European constitution last week, none looms more ominously than the nightmare of antagonism between ``the West" and Islam. Many Europeans fear a rising tide of green, both within the continent and from outside it. Where once communists threatened, now Muslims do. A new wall is being built.

Muslims, meanwhile, see a flood of contempt in pressures on immigrant communities in European cities, in restrictions on Islamic expression, and in openly expressed reservations about Turkey`s admission to the EU precisely because of its Islamic character. Given escalations of the war in Iraq together with widely reported instances of Koran-denigration by US interrogators, such trends in Europe make the global war on terror seem expressly a war against Islam. The ``clash of civilizations" seems closer at hand than ever.

To make sense of this dangerous condition, it can help to recall some of the forgotten or misremembered history that prepared for it, from the remote origins of the conflict to its manifestations in the not so distant past. As the story is usually told in Europe and America, the problem began when a jihad-driven army of ``infidel" Saracens, having brutalized Christians in the ``Holy Land," threatened ``Christendom" itself with conquests right into the heart of present-day France. Charles Martel is the hero of primal European romances because he defeated the Muslim army near Tours in 733. But for Martel, Edward Gibbon wrote, ``the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford."

Across subsequent centuries, in the European memory, Islam posed the great threat to the emerging Christian order. But was that so? Lombards, Normans, Vikings, forces from the Slavic east, and violent contests among Christians themselves all wreaked havoc in Europe, even in Martel`s time. As I learned from the historian Tomaz Mastnak, the threat from the Saracens was one among many. It was defined as transcendent only with the later Crusades, when Latin Christian armies set out to rescue that ``Holy Land" and roll back Islamic conquests. The crusading impulse presumed a demonizing of Saracens that was justified neither by the threat they actually posed nor by their treatment of Christians in Palestine. Indeed, chronicles of the earlier period take little or no notice of the religion of Saracens. Religious co-existence, famous in Iberia, was a mark of other lands conquered by Arabs. Europe`s initiating ``holy war" with Islam, that is, was based on flawed intelligence, propaganda, and threat exaggeration.

The poison flower of the Crusades, with their denigrations of distant cultures, was colonialism. The dark result of European imperial adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant destruction of culture, and, second, the powerful reaction among Muslims and Arab populations against colonialism, a reaction that included an internal corrupting of Islamic traditions. The accidental wealth of oil in the Middle East made both external exploitation and internal corruption absolutely ruinous. The political fanaticism that has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified in Osama bin Laden) is rooted more in a defensive fending off of assault from ``the West" than in anything intrinsic to Islam. The American war on terror, striking the worst notes of the old imperial insult, only exacerbates this reactionary fanaticism (generating, for example, legions of suicide bombers).

Having forgotten the deeper history, nervous Europeans seem also to have forgotten how large numbers of Muslims settled in the continent`s cities in the first place. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ``guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. The rank injustice of a system depending on a permanent underclass was bound to issue in political resistance, and now it has, but with a religious edge.

The point is that this conflict has its origins more in ``the West" than in the House of Islam. The image of Muslims as prone to violence by virtue of their religion was mainly constructed across centuries by Europeans seeking to bolster their own purposes, a habit of politicized paranoia that is masterfully continued by freaked-out leaders of post-9/11 America. They, too, like prelates, crusaders, conquistadors, and colonizers, have turned fear of Islam into a source of power. This history teaches that such self-serving projection can indeed result in the creation of an enemy ready and willing to make the nightmare real.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© 2005 Boston Globe

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HIGHLIGHTS from the SIPRI YEARBOOK 2005
http://yearbook2005.sipri.org/highl/highlights
Security and conflicts

• In 2004 it became obvious that maintaining control over Iraqi territory would require capabilities other than high-intensity warfare and more manpower than in the technology-intensive phase of the war.

• Many of the conflicts that continue to produce the greatest number of deaths, casualties and suffering are wars of long duration. Far from soliciting more attention, their long-standing and recurrent nature tend to make them less visible internationally. Although the current international emphasis on the prevention of violent conflict is a positive development, it is worth considering whether the emphasis of policy and research should be directed at addressing the resolution of the world’s longest-standing major armed conflicts.

• Much of the current discussion of peace-building is focused on the macro level. What current operational experiences appear to illustrate, however, is that peace-building fails most often at the micro level, in the content and delivery of specific security, rule-of-law, economic, social and political reforms.

• Nationally led ‘coalitions of the willing’ of the kind that undertook the military actions in Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003) pose special challenges for parliamentary oversight, since the interstate component of decision making is not carried out through an established, transparent multilateral institutional process.

• Military expenditure by states in the Middle East is high and shows a rising trend since 1996. Conventional arms races are unconstrained, but developments related to weapons of mass destruction are the ones that receive international attention.

• Since the 1980s, the introduction of a more open economic model in most states of the Latin American and Caribbean region has been accompanied by the growth of new regional structures, the dying out of interstate conflicts and a reduction in intra-state conflicts.

Military spending and armaments

• In the new security environment, which focuses on insecurity in the South and greater global security interdependence, there is an increasing awareness of the ineffectiveness of military means for addressing threats and challenges to security and a growing recognition of the need for global action.

• World military expenditure exceeded $1 trillion in 2004. The USA accounted for 47 per cent of this spending.

• The combined arms sales of the top 100 arms-producing companies in 2003 were 25 per cent (in current dollars) higher than in 2002.

• China is almost completely dependent on Russia for its arms imports, but its relationship is changing from a recipient of complete weapons to a recipient of components and technology to be used in Chinese weapon platforms. There are indications that China is anxious to gain access to other than Russian technology, partly because that technology is becoming outdated.

Non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament

• In April 2004 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1540, an instruction to UN member states that they must legislate nationally to introduce effective controls on nuclear, biological and chemical weapon proliferation-sensitive items. The resolution was adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, leaving open the potential use of enforcement measures by the Security Council against states failing to comply with this instruction.

• The controversies over the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes led to renewed interest in proposals for limiting civil uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing capabilities on a worldwide basis.

• A number of official inquiries into the handling of intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapon programmes, including how it had been interpreted or presented, published reports in 2004. The inquiries found a common theme that pre-war assessments were inaccurate and unsupported by the available evidence.

• Since Libya’s policy change it has become clear that it received considerable foreign assistance to procure sensitive nuclear materials, technologies and components as well as documentation related to nuclear weapon design. However, the relatively low technical absorption capacity of its scientific–industrial base meant that these ‘short cuts’ did not bring Libya appreciably closer to achieving a nuclear weapon capability.

• The NATO–Russia stalemate over the adapted CFE Treaty has lasted for over five years, but the second wave of NATO enlargement was accomplished despite Russia’s concerns. In Europe, the focus has shifted towards ‘soft’ measures and arrangements, such as confidence- and security-building measures for stricter control of small arms, surplus ammunition and landmines.

• International non-proliferation and disarmament assistance (INDA) is becoming a significant element of the wider anti-proliferation effort. To increase the effectiveness of this assistance, the efforts made by the G8 group of industrialized states were redesigned in 2004. Traditionally undertaken as a bilateral effort between the USA and Russia, the functional and geographic scope of INDA programmes is expected to expand in future to include projects in a wider range of countries, cover new types of sensitive material and undertake projects in new countries.

• In 2004 the EU reviewed the instruments that have been used to create an effective and modern system for controlling transfers of both conventional weapons and dual-use items. As a result of these reviews. revisions will be made to both the arms and dual-use export control systems of the EU.

• Over the years, the law of the sea has been adapted to changed priorities. Today, the general rule of flag-state jurisdiction has yielded to the universal interest of combating the slave trade, piracy and drug trafficking. In future, the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction may also be added to this list.
©2005 by SIPRI

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Heute die neuste Folge der Serie über Klassenstrukturen in USA:
Diese Serie ist wieder mal ein Beweis für Herrn Kissingers These, dass in den USA Realist ein Fremdwort ist.
Erst einmal Grafiken als Macromedia Flash über die Zustände:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS…

Besonders interessant ist Veränderung der Einkommensstruktur innerhalb eines gewissen Zeitrahmens:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS…

Wobei sich herausstellt, dass die Veränderung der Einkommen in den USA gegenüber europäischen Staaten am ungünstiger ist. In Europa ist der Taum vom Aufstieg besser zu verwirklichen, als in den USA.
Wer dort arm ist hat die geringste Möglichkeit innerhalb einer oder mehrerer Generationen aus der Armut herauszukommen:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS…

Dagegen wird eine Umfrage aus den USA gestellt, in der sich ganz klar der Glaube der US-Bevölkerung manifestiert, dass die Möglichkeiten in den USA die besten sind:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS…

Die USA ist die Stadt auf dem Hügel, nur dass diese Stadt eine Fata Morgana ist, die für die Meisten nicht zu erreichen ist.
Anderseits ist diese Utopie auch der Erfolg des US-Modells, denn ohne diesen Glauben an den Erfolg, wäre der Aufbau des Landes nicht möglich gewesen.

Hier der heutige Beitrag:

[urlIn Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/national/class/08fict-FINAL.html[/url]
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: June 8, 2005

On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it`s those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it`s part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane - those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.
Weiter geht es bei der NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/national/class/08fict-FINA…

Übrigens die Annmeldung ist kostenlos!

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Es sieht so aus, als ob Bush sein Kapital das er von den Wählern erhalten hat in 04 vollständig verspielt hat. Das gilt auch für Senat und House.

[urlPost-ABC News Poll Data (PDF)]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll050607.pdf[/url]

washingtonpost.com
Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War
52% Say U.S. Has Not Become Safer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; A01

For the first time since the war in Iraq began, more than half of the American public believes the fight there has not made the United States safer, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

While the focus in Washington has shifted from the Iraq conflict to Social Security and other domestic matters, the survey found that Americans continue to rank Iraq second only to the economy in importance -- and that many are losing patience with the enterprise.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting -- in all three cases matching or exceeding the highest levels of pessimism yet recorded. More than four in 10 believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is becoming analogous to the experience in Vietnam.

Perhaps most ominous for President Bush, 52 percent said war in Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States, while 47 percent said it has. It was the first time a majority of Americans disagreed with the central notion Bush has offered to build support for war: that the fight there will make Americans safer from terrorists at home. In late 2003, 62 percent thought the Iraq war aided U.S. security, and three months ago 52 percent thought so.

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Overall, more than half -- 52 percent -- disapprove of how Bush is handling his job, the highest of his presidency. A somewhat larger majority -- 56 percent -- disapproved of Republicans in Congress, and an identical proportion disapproved of Democrats.

There were signs, however, that Bush and Republicans in Congress were receiving more of the blame for the recent standoffs over such issues as Bush`s judicial nominees and Social Security. Six in 10 respondents said Bush and GOP leaders are not making good progress on the nation`s problems; of those, 67 percent blamed the president and Republicans while 13 percent blamed congressional Democrats. For the first time, a majority, 55 percent, also said Bush has done more to divide the country than to unite it.

The surge in violence in Iraq since the new government took control -- 80 U.S. troops and more than 700 Iraqis died in May alone amid a rash of bombings -- has been accompanied by rising gloom about the overall fight against terrorists. By 50 percent to 49 percent, Americans approved of the way Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism, down from 56 percent approval in April, equaling the lowest rating he has earned on the issue that has consistently been his core strength with the public.

The dissipating support for the Iraq war is of potential military concern, because, as Marine Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis wrote in a note to his troops as he led them back into Iraq in February 2004, "our friendly strategic center of gravity is the will of the American people."

Some authorities on war and public opinion said the figures indicate that pessimism about the war in Iraq has reached a dangerous level. "It appears that Americans are coming to the realization that the war in Iraq is not being won and may well prove unwinnable," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University. "That conclusion bleeds over into a conviction that it may not have been necessary in the first place."

That is the view of poll respondent Margaret Boudreaux, 63, a casino worker living in Oakdale, La. "I don`t think it`s going well -- there`s too much killing," she said, worrying that the Iraq invasion could move more enemies to violence. "I think that some of the people, if they could, would get revenge for what we`ve done."

"You hear a lot about Saddam but nothing about Osama bin Laden. I don`t think he [Bush] does enough to deal with the problems of terrorism. . . . He`s done a lot of talking, but we haven`t seen real changes," said another poll respondent, Kathy Goyette, 54, a San Diego nurse. "People are getting through airport security with things that are unbelievable. . . . I don`t think he learned from 9/11."

While Bush has shelved his routine speeches about terrorism, and Congress has turned to domestic issues, fear of terrorism has receded from the public consciousness. Only 12 percent called it the nation`s top priority, behind the economy, Iraq, health care and Social Security.

The drop in Bush`s approval ratings on fighting terrorism came disproportionately from political independents. In March, 63 percent of independents approved of Bush`s job combating terrorism. By April this had fallen to 54 percent. And in this weekend`s survey, 40 percent gave him good marks.

The poll suggests that views on the Iraq war`s impact also remain highly partisan. Three in four Republicans said the Iraq invasion has boosted domestic security, while three in four Democrats said it has not. Political independents lean negative on the issue: About six in 10 said the war has not made Americans safer.

Overall, Bush`s 48 percent job approval rating was essentially unchanged from the 47 percent rating he received in a late-April poll. And there was growth in the proportion of people who said the economy was doing well: 44 percent, up from 37 percent in April.

But the public took a generally gloomy view of the White House and Congress. A plurality said Bush is doing worse in his second term than in his first, and 58 percent said he is not concentrating on the things that matter most to them -- the worst showing Bush has had in this measure in Post-ABC polls.

Congress fared no better. The proportion of the public disapproving of the legislative body was at its highest since late 1998, during President Bill Clinton`s impeachment. More people said they would look at a candidate other than their sitting representative than at any point in nearly eight years. For the first time since April 2001, Democrats (46 percent) were trusted more than Republicans (41 percent) to cope with the nation`s problems. But at the same time, favorability ratings for the Democratic Party, at 51 percent, tied their all-time low.

A total of 1,002 randomly selected adults were interviewed by telephone June 2 to 5 for this Post-ABC News poll. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll also found disapproval or division when it came to Bush`s performance on several other recent, high-profile issues. One-third of those surveyed approved of the way Bush is handling federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, while 55 percent disapproved. The public was divided on the president`s handling of judicial nominations, with 46 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving. And half said they were opposed to drilling in Alaska`s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal backed by Bush and being debated in Congress.

But the most striking trend identified by the survey was the spreading impatience over Iraq and national security matters. While six in 10 were confident that the United States was not violating the rights of detainees at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Americans were more skeptical that the government is protecting the rights of U.S. citizens at home. Only half said Americans` rights were being adequately protected, down from 69 percent in September 2003.

James Burk, a sociologist at Texas A&M University, said disillusionment about Iraq may have grown to the point that policymakers will have difficulty reversing it. "People all across the country know people in Iraq [so] there`s a direct connection to the war," he said. Burk sees a "disjuncture" between upbeat administration rhetoric and realities the public perceives. "These data suggest we will soon reach the point, if we haven`t yet reached the point, where that kind of language will seem too out of touch."

Polling director Richard Morin contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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[urlUS scientists pile on pressure over climate change]http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1501659,00.html[/url]

Revealed: how oil giant influenced Bush

White House sought advice from Exxon on Kyoto stance
John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday June 8, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,150164…

Guardian
President`s George Bush`s decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world`s most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.

The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the White House for discussions on climate change before next month`s G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of how close the company is to the administration and its role in helping to formulate US policy.

In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company`s "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable.

Other papers suggest that Ms Dobriansky should sound out Exxon executives and other anti-Kyoto business groups on potential alternatives to Kyoto.

Until now Exxon has publicly maintained that it had no involvement in the US government`s rejection of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is not the case.

"Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition]," says one briefing note before Ms Dobriansky`s meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon.

The papers further state that the White House considered Exxon "among the companies most actively and prominently opposed to binding approaches [like Kyoto] to cut greenhouse gas emissions".

But in evidence to the UK House of Lords science and technology committee in 2003, Exxon`s head of public affairs, Nick Thomas, said: "I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto."

Exxon, officially the US`s most valuable company valued at $379bn (£206bn) earlier this year, is seen in the papers to share the White House`s unwavering scepticism of international efforts to address climate change.

The documents, which reflect unanimity between the company and the US administration on the need for more global warming science and the unacceptable costs of Kyoto, state that Exxon believes that joining Kyoto "would be unjustifiably drastic and premature".

This line has been taken consistently by President Bush, and was expected to be continued in yesterday`s talks with Tony Blair who has said that climate change is "the most pressing issue facing mankind".

"President Bush tells Mr Blair he`s concerned about climate change, but these documents reveal the alarming truth, that policy in this White House is being written by the world`s most powerful oil company. This administration`s climate policy is a menace to humanity," said Stephen Tindale, Greenpeace`s executive director in London last night.

"The prime minister needs to tell Mr Bush he`s calling in some favours. Only by securing mandatory cuts in US emissions can Blair live up to his rhetoric," said Mr Tindale.

In other meetings documented in the papers, Ms Dobriansky meets Don Pearlman, an international anti-Kyoto lobbyist who has been a paid adviser to the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments, both of which have followed the US line against Kyoto.

The purpose of the meeting with Mr Pearlman, who also represents the secretive anti-Kyoto Climate Council, which the administration says "works against most US government efforts to address climate change", is said to be to "solicit [his] views as part of our dialogue with friends and allies".

ExxonMobil, which was yesterday contacted by the Guardian in the US but did not return calls, is spending millions of pounds on an advertising campaign aimed at influencing politicians, opinion formers and business leaders in the UK and other pro-Kyoto countries in the weeks before the G8 meeting at Gleneagles.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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[urlBlair will discover how much influence he has in White House]http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1501669,00.html[/url]

Ab Oktober darf Angie mit auf der Couch liegen.

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Wednesday, June 08, 2005

33 Dead in Tuesday Attacks, over 70 Wounded

[urlAt least 33 persons died in guerrilla attacks]http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1386983.htm[/url] or from friendly fire on Tuesday. The Australian Broadcasting Co. reports, ` Nine people were killed in the northern city of Mosul, including four peshmerga militiamen reportedly shot dead by police after they were mistaken for insurgents and three students killed when unknown gunmen burst into their apartment. ` This in addition to the car bombings in the morning at Hawija, and later a mortar attack at Fallujah and drive-by shootings and ambushes north of Baghdad and elsewhere.

Reuters/ al-Sharq al-Awsat: Abdul Salam Abd al-Karim, a Sunni cleric in Basra, was killed on Monday. He had been kidnapped Sunday by men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. Tension has been building between the Shiite and the Sunn Arab communites in Iraq.

[urlBush and Cheney may think everything is going just great]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/07/AR2005060700296.html[/url] in Iraq, but the American public does not.

Proportion who said the rate of US casualties in Iraq is unacceptable: almost 75%
Proportion who said US military is bogged down in Iraq: 66 percent
Proportion who say Iraq war was not worth fighting: almost 60 percent
Proportion who say Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam: more than 40 percent
Proportion who say Iraq war has not made US safer: 52 percent.
Proportion who say that Bush is handling his job poorly: 52 percent

[urlIt is coming out]http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2005/06/07/afx2078991.html[/url] that there was a major riot at Abu Ghraib prison over the weekend.
Reuters reports on the discontents of returnees to Iraq from among former exiles.

[urlThe Christian Science Monitor]http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0608/p06s01-woiq.html[/url] reports on hopes that modernizing banking and moving to credit cards could hurt the guerrilla movement. I like CSM and they`ve done some fine reporting from Iraq. In fact, I urge people to subscribe, to help them keep going. But this article has a key flaw. You need security to implement the changes envisaged by the article, so its thesis involves the protagonist pulling himself up by his bootstraps. In Beirut during the Civil War, the guerrillas just relentlessly robbed the banks.
Stephen J. Hedges explains the theory of Fourth Generation W… and its relevance to Iraq. The idea that language and cultural training is key is absolutely fundamental. It is amazing that the Bush Administration and the Neocons thought they could run Iraq without knowing Arabic!

posted by Juan @ [url6/8/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/33-dead-in-tuesday-attacks-over-70.html[/url]

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Joining Up to Dodge a Dead End
With no hope of a good job or money for college, many heartland teens are enlisting in the military in search of economic security.
By P.J. Huffstutter
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-recruit…

June 8, 2005

GLENWOOD, Iowa — Lucas Tvrdy was about to enter high school when his mother, Patty, sat down with his older sister, Jessie, and had the talk.

It was painfully simple, Patty recalled: We don`t have the money to send you to college. There were no apologies, no tears. Only resignation.
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Like most families in this town 30 minutes southeast of Omaha, the Tvrdys aren`t poor — but there is no room in their budget for tuition. Patty works as an administrative secretary
for a small city health department; her husband, Randy, worked for himself for many years and only recently has enjoyed a steady paycheck for hauling pet food across Nebraska.

"There were many, many years we raised a family of four on $7 an hour," Patty said. "Even now, we make enough to pay the mortgage and our bills. That`s about it."

Jessie, unwilling to take on thousands of dollars in college loans, decided to join the Navy. When she graduated from Glenwood Community High School in 2002, she gave Lucas her senior photograph and this advice: "When it`s time, follow me."

Three years later, Lucas is doing just that. The 5-foot-11 teenager, who weighs 110 pounds when wearing combat boots, hopes to learn how to work on ship engines. Or maybe try out for the SEALs.
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Mills County, Iowa. The few jobs here are often in the healthcare
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"It`s our way of life," said Lucas, 18. "I could be sent to Iraq. I could die in Iraq. But I`d die a man with good life insurance, so my family would be taken care of."

As the conflict in Iraq heads toward a third year, military recruiters across the country are falling short in their efforts to fill the ranks. But those in struggling heartland towns like Glenwood are making their numbers.

Different reasons draw the teenagers into service: pride in following a family tradition, a sense of honor in defending their country, an overwhelming need to find a focus for their future. In the end, the primary draw tends to be economic security.

Even if they don`t agree with the war, financial worries outweigh political opinions. And that has helped recruiters here enormously.

National Guard officials say they are surpassing their recruitment goals in Iowa, although recruits know they are likely to be sent to the Middle East. The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps say they are meeting their goals. The Army has fallen short, but recruitment numbers have steadily risen each month since May 2004, said Army Lt. Col. Marisa A. Tanner, commander for the Des Moines Recruiting Battalion.

Although their job continues to be difficult, recruiters said, they are having unexpected success in other rural regions in the Midwest and in parts of the South. They cite a sluggish economy coupled with long-standing town traditions of serving in the military.

Glenwood High`s Class of 2005 graduated Memorial Day weekend. Nine of its 140 seniors are headed to basic training. Some left almost immediately, while others will be gone by the end of this year.

All but one were minors when they enlisted; their parents had to sign waivers. Two are still 17.

Andy Lentz joined the Marines. Kent Herrman, Ron Rosenburg and Dan Greenwood signed up with the Army. Lucas Tvrdy, Chris Corbett, Wyatt Flint, Loleta Ashburn and Amanda Cerra are Navy-bound.

Lucas expects to leave Glenwood in December. By then, two of his closest friends will be gone.

Kent Herrman, 19, heads out today. Known at school as the tough kid with a quick wit and a quicker temper, he hopes his experience as a wrestler has conditioned his body to withstand the grueling training.

Chris Corbett, 18, will be gone by July 11. Described by teachers as sweetly naive, Chris stood less than 5 feet tall for most of his life until a recent growth spurt stretched his slender frame 6 more inches.

"I`ve had people tell me they think we`re dumb to be doing this — that we`re dumb to go off to war," Kent said. "I think they`re dumb not to want to."

Their dreams seem modest. Lucas wants to attend an automotive technical school and open a custom motorcycle shop. Chris hopes to attend cooking school and become a chef. Kent longs to get a university degree and become a police officer.

These are heady goals in a town where 9% of adults have a bachelor`s degree and the median household income is $39,682 a year, according to the most recent census. In comparison, the median income for Omaha — where many local residents go to find work — is $44,981.



The American Legion post takes up more than a quarter of a block on the town square. Its annual Ham and Bean Feed is a big event. Most storefronts on the square — from the Farm Bureau to the grocery store — have American flags in the windows.

With a population of 5,400, Glenwood is the largest town in rural Mills County, which takes its name from a young officer who died during the Mexican-American War.

Iowa`s pride in its military service dates back to the state`s formation in the 1840s, said William Johnson, a curator with the State Historical Society of Iowa. During the Civil War, more than 63% of the men old enough to fight joined the conflict. In World War II, the town of Red Oak — about 30 miles east of Glenwood — lost more young men per capita than any other community in the United States.

No one from Glenwood has died in the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. But since November, at least four from nearby towns have been killed in the Middle East.

"You think of Iowa as very peaceful, a place of farmers devoted to the land. But we`re also strong in our devotion to family," Johnson said. "Serving our nation is considered one of those responsibilities that come with being a good family man and, these days, a good family woman."

Glenwood High officials said about three-fourths of its graduates attended college or trade school, while the rest entered the workforce or went into the military.

"Kids in the country know they have to work for what they want," said Patty Tvrdy. Lucas is a "fingernails-get-dirty kind of boy," so Patty wasn`t surprised when he enlisted.

Most students want to come back to their hometown, said school Principal Dave Stickrod, but it`s difficult to find a job that pays well.

Glenwood`s meatpacking plant closed years ago, as did the facility that cleaned uniforms for hotels and other service industries. Family farms struggle to thrive along the rolling hills of the Missouri River valley.

"We`re kid-rich and industrial-property poor," Stickrod said.

The few jobs here are often in the healthcare or food service industries. On Tuesday, the Iowa Workforce Development`s website listed 11 full-time permanent jobs in Mills County — all but one in Glenwood. Three pay $10 an hour or more. The rest pay $9 an hour or less. Few of the ads mentioned benefits.

Lucas has spent the last months looking for work, to pay bills and keep busy until he ships out. He`s chatted up potential bosses. Hardee`s was closing for good. McDonalds wasn`t hiring.

He stopped by one of his favorite haunts, hoping for better news at Tom & Tiff`s, a cafe down the street from one of the town`s three stoplights. When Lucas sat down, the waitress didn`t bother to ask what he wanted. Regardless of the day or time, Lucas said, the staff brings his usual: French toast and a steady stream of Mountain Dew.

He cut off a hunk of the sweet, hot bread about the size of his hand, folded it into thirds and stuffed it into his mouth.

"Hey, you guys get a chance to look at my application?" he asked, mumbling his question while frantically chewing. "Is there anything available yet?"

The waitress shook her head no.

Lucas sighed and tore off another chunk of bread.



The air burned hot and humid on Lucas` last full day of class. He passed by a cluster of girls leaning against teal-colored lockers, giggling over prom photographs. Some wore T-shirts with the names of their soon-to-be new homes: Iowa State University, University of Nebraska.

The chatter was excited, the topics light. Do the dorms have bunk beds? Who`s going out for sorority rush?

Lucas straddled a plastic chair in the lunchroom next to Kent and Chris. The teens talked about how to break in combat boots, how much an M-16 weighs and how to write a will.

"I didn`t want to have the talk with my parents, but you have to," Kent said. "I told them to give away my things, and have my little sister take care of my dog."

Earlier in the week, Lucas` sister, Jessie — stationed on the aircraft carrier Nimitz — called to wish him luck at basic training. She has signed up for another year to earn more money for college. The three friends are considering doing the same.

"You can never have too much money saved up for college," Chris said.

Chris and his family moved to Glenwood in 1998, and soon after, he and Lucas became friends through the school music classes. Kent and Lucas have been friends since they started school. They both grew up outside of town, living along gravel roads where mile markers are easier to find than street signs.

For as long as Kent can remember, he`s wanted to join the Army. As a child, he and friends roamed through the grove of hardwood trees in his backyard, hefting twigs like rifles and pretending they were soldiers. At night, he would lie in bed and dream of becoming a hero.

Recruiters first approached Kent when he was watching an air show at nearby Offutt Air Force Base. He filled out a card to ask for more information about enlisting. Kent was in the eighth grade at the time.

"They said they`d hang onto the card," he said.

When terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, Kent said, he planted himself in front of a television for hours, feeling shock and frustration at being too young to fight. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do except watch and wait.

Last year, Kent said he contacted the Army, even though he disagrees with the reasons for the war in Iraq. He was the first in his class to enlist and the first in his family for nine generations to join the active-duty military. The reserves held no appeal.

"You`re going to be shipped off right away anyway, so why not go for it?" Kent said. "If I can help stop the fighting overseas, why shouldn`t I enlist and go do something about it?"



On a recent Saturday night, as the sunset painted the sky in shades of tangerine and turquoise, dozens of cars crammed into a parking lot in front of Newman`s Thriftway store. Girls clustered in groups, pretending to look bored.

They sneaked glances at the boys, who spent hours strutting among the vehicles and rehashing stories about sports victories and getting their trucks stuck in potholes. Some of the recruits were among them, happy for these last moments to chat with friends and flirt.

This is the main pastime for Glenwood`s teens. There`s little else to do in a town with just one movie theater.

The conversation this night revolved around graduation parties and recent breakups. Music thumped so loudly from the speakers of one truck that the rusted door panels rattled. Someone suggested using a fake ID to buy beer and then driving along the back roads. Recent rainstorms left the ground slick, perfect for off-roading in the mud.

Lucas ignored the suggestion. So did his friends. This close to basic training, they couldn`t afford to be caught stepping out of line. That meant no drugs (the military routinely conducts drug tests). No traffic tickets (the military could cut them for certain violations). No new tattoos or body piercings.

The recruits didn`t speak about the military, the fact that they were leaving or the risks they would face.

"We didn`t want the girls to start crying again," Kent said later.



Chris` mother and stepfather — both of whom work at Wal-Mart — didn`t want him to enlist. Last summer, a Navy recruiter called the house and asked to speak to Chris. Tracy Nevill told the man her son was not interested.

"I told him, `You don`t need to talk to him.` I didn`t want him to get involved in the war," Nevill said. The recruiter persisted. He made arrangements to meet with Chris at home, when his mother was out.

By the time she returned, Chris had been won over.

He told his mother that they spoke of duty and patriotism, of training and travel. School expenses would be paid.

He`d earn enough money to fix up his 1988 Thunderbird and pay for car insurance so he could drive it.

He was determined to go. "He wanted to do this, and I figured that he was old enough to make those sorts of decisions," Tracy Nevill said. She signed a waiver that allowed Chris to join.

"We need the money," Chris said. "I`m proud to earn it this way."

Rachelle Schroeder understands. Her son, Nathan Heitmann, joined the National Guard after Sept. 11. He was sent to Afghanistan; he came home Monday.

Every year for the last five years, at least one of the students who worked at Schroeder`s cafe or her landscaping business has enlisted. This year, that student is Chris.

Schroeder, who has known Chris most of his life, spent months teaching him how to nurture lawns and keep fussy plants alive.

"He`s 18 years old. He`s old enough to make his own choices. He`s old enough to be a man," Schroeder said. "But it breaks my heart."

Schroeder said she recently took Chris aside, to make sure he knew what other Glenwood kids had experienced.

Heitmann marched 60 miles a day for three days straight, carrying a 90-pound pack. He had scabies, poison oak and impetigo — all at the same time.

He cleaned the bodies of soldiers who died in a helicopter crash.

"This is what you call reality. Cleaning bodies," Schroeder recalled telling Chris. "Do you realize this?"

Chris remembered replying, "I can handle it."

"Can you?" Schroeder asked.

Chris looked at her. "I have to do this," he said. "I need to do this."


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Es wurde immer schon berichtet, dass sich die Mercenarios im Irak sehr wild aufgeführen.
In Jeeps mit durch die Orte rasend, wild um sich schießend und keinerlei Gesetze beachtend. Jedenfalls sehr verhasst bei den Irakern.

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
U.S. Marines Detained 19 Contractors in Iraq
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-secu…
Most of the men are American security guards. Some say they were abused after being accused of firing at civilians and troops.
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer


June 8, 2005

WASHINGTON — U.S. Marines forcibly detained a team of security guards working for an American engineering firm in Iraq after reportedly witnessing the contractors fire at U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians from an armed convoy, the military said Tuesday.

After three days of detention in jail cells at a U.S. military base in Iraq, 19 employees of North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering, including 16 Americans, were released last week.

All have resigned from the company and are returning home, U.S. and company officials said.

The employees have said that the incident in Fallouja last month was a case of mistaken identity. Several have accused the Marines of verbally and physically abusing them while they were in custody.

A Marine Corps spokesman denied that any abuse had taken place and said an investigation was continuing. No Iraqis or Americans were injured in the incident that prompted the arrests.

"The Americans were segregated from the rest of the detainee population and, like all security detainees, were treated humanely and respectfully," Lt. Col. David Lapan said Tuesday in an e-mail confirming the incident.

This is believed to be the first time that the U.S. military has detained private security personnel in Iraq for allegedly putting American troops and Iraqi civilians at risk. By some estimates, there are as many as 20,000 such workers in Iraq protecting American civilians and U.S. and Iraqi government officials.

The incident has reignited debate about the accountability of security contractors in Iraq, where they operate in a legal gray zone. Contracting experts said it was unclear what authority the U.S. military would have to detain American civilians in Iraq.

"Two years into the [Iraq war], and there`s still a hole when it comes to a legal structure," said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written extensively on private military contractors.

"Where in the chain of command do [contractors] fit? Where is the accountability? If something bad happens, who investigates it, who prosecutes, and who punishes?" he asked.

The incident has also raised new questions about the treatment of captives by U.S. military forces. Several of the detained Zapata employees said that they were stripped and threatened by a snarling military dog while Marines jeered and took photos.

"I never in my career have treated anybody so inhumane," one of the contractors, Rick Blanchard, a former Florida state trooper, wrote in an e-mail message. "They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos, hazed us, called us names."

Zapata officials said they were continuing to investigate the incident, but had found no evidence that their security guards had fired at U.S. military personnel.

Instead, they said, it appeared that the guards had fired warning shots in the air when an unidentified vehicle approached the convoy as it was passing through Fallouja on a routine mission.

Zapata is one of several companies contracted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of explosives in Iraq. The firm`s workers operate from an isolated outpost south of Fallouja.

"Our personnel did not fire on the Marines," said Mary Richards, Zapata`s senior vice president for operations. "Based on everything that we know and everything that we have collected, they followed the rules that are required when working as a contractor in Iraq."

Lapan, the Marine Corps spokesman, gave a different account of the circumstances leading up to the detention.

On May 18, he said, a Marine patrol in Fallouja reported receiving fire from a convoy of late-model trucks and sport utility vehicles. The Marines also saw gunmen in the convoy fire at civilians in the streets of Fallouja, where reconstruction was taking place.

Three hours later, a second set of Marines at an observation post reported receiving fire from vehicles matching the description of the convoy involved in the earlier incident, Lapan said.

The Marines stopped the convoy using spiked strips in the road and took 16 Americans and three Iraqi translators into custody. Of the Americans, 14 were armed security personnel, according to the Corps of Engineers.

Lapan said the vehicles and weapons, which were owned by the Corps of Engineers and loaned to the workers under the contract, were impounded as part of the investigation.

The reason the men were released remained unclear on Tuesday. Lapan did not respond to follow-up questions.

The contractors were "safely transported to their compound near Baghdad, along with representatives of the company that employed them," Lapan said.

Contractors have disputed many parts of the Marine account.

Mark Schopper, a lawyer for two of the contractors, said that his clients, both former Marines, were subjected to "physical and psychological abuse."

He said his clients told him that Marines had "slammed around" several contractors, stripped them to their underwear and placed a loaded weapon near their heads.

"How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?" the Marines shouted at the men, Schopper said, in an apparent reference to the large salaries security contractors can make in Iraq.

He also said that during their detention, the workers` relatives in the United States received phone calls from people with American accents threatening to kill their loved ones if they talked about the incident.

Schopper said he had contacted the FBI and his congressman, Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.), about the incident.

"It was repulsive, appalling treatment," the attorney said.

Jana Crowder, the founder of a support group for the wives of American contractors in Iraq, said she had been in contact with two wives of the detained men.

She said the men were not allowed to call their families or others during their detention.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Latest Fatality: Jun 07, 2005
June05: 15

Iraker: Civilian: 97 Police/Mil: 47 Total: 144

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Friedman mit 92 immer noch aktiv. SF passt an sichnicht zu ihm.

Friedman`s `heresy` hits mainstream
Private Social Security accounts were his idea
- Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 5, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security.

Asked why he dwells in liberalism`s den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn`t skip a beat.

"Not much competition here," he quipped.

"The people I see in the Safeway don`t go around yelling, `I`m a left wing Democrat,` even if they are," he said. "This is a very nice city to live in."

Living atop Nob Hill for the past 28 years with his wife and collaborator, Rose, who fell in love with the city as a young woman, Friedman is considered perhaps the most influential economist since John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes, the British economist whose ideas propelled the New Deal, was to Republicans what Friedman, son of poor Jewish Brooklyn immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is to Democrats: a font of heresy.

It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral.

"We may wish to help poor people," he wrote. "Is there any justification for helping people whether they are poor or not because they happen to be a certain age?"

President Bush`s proposal to incorporate private accounts in the giant retirement program is easily traced to Friedman.

"He`s the originator of it and all the discussion can be traced back to him," said the Cato Institute`s Michael Tanner, a leading advocate of partial privatization.

"I`ve always been opposed to Social Security," Friedman said in a recent interview at his home in San Francisco. "I think it`s a very unethical program. "

Friedman`s work clearly influenced Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, now the chief intellectual force behind privatization, said Thomas Saving, a recent Social Security trustee. Feldstein, often mentioned as a likely candidate to replace Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, cites Friedman in his article on the subject in the American Economic Review.

"He`s the guy who got people asking the question," Saving said, "because at the time it was a question you couldn`t ask."

The late Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, whom Friedman advised, found that out in 1964 when he suggested during his presidential campaign that Social Security be made voluntary.

Goldwater was pilloried, not only by editorial pages but his own party. He lost in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who went on to create Medicare, the big health care program for the elderly, in 1965.

Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a Ponzi game.

Charles Ponzi was the 1920s Boston swindler who collected money from "investors" to whom he paid out large "profits" from the proceeds of later investors. The scheme inevitably collapses when there are not enough new entrants to pay earlier ones.

That Social Security operates on a similar basis is not really in dispute. Paul Samuelson, who won his Nobel Prize in economics six years before Friedman and shared a Newsweek column with him in the 1960s, called Social Security "a Ponzi scheme that works."

"The beauty about social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound," Samuelson wrote in an oft-quoted 1967 column. "Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in ... A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived."

Today, 38 years after Samuelson wrote this, the number of people collecting benefits is about to rise steeply as Baby Boomers retire, reversing the flow of the system`s finances. And it is Friedman`s intellectual framework that now reigns at the White House.

"Everybody goes around talking about the problems created by the declining number of workers per retiree," he said. "How come life insurance companies aren`t in any problem?"

The question is quintessential Friedman: simple, accessible and formidable.

Life insurance companies take premium payments and invest them in factories and buildings and other income-producing assets, Friedman said. These accumulate in a growing fund that can then pay benefits. Social Security, by contrast, operates pay-as-you-go, collecting payroll taxes from workers that immediately go to pay retirees.

The biggest misconception about the program, he argues, is that workers believe it works like insurance, with the government depositing taxes in a trust fund.

"I`ve always thought it disgraceful that the government should be essentially lying about what it was doing," he said.

"How did you ever get the Democrats, who supposedly were in favor of progressive taxation, to pass a tax that is biased against low-income people - - which is on income up to a maximum and no more?" he asked, referring to the $90,000 ceiling on which Social Security taxes are levied. "Only by clothing it in this idea that it`s not really a tax, it`s an insurance payment."

Asked why, if Social Security is so terrible, it is the most popular government program in American history, Friedman replied, "Well, because why does a Ponzi game work? It`s easy to understand why it`s popular. So far, on the average, retirees have gotten more out of the system than they put into it. "

What about the fact that Social Security has reduced poverty among the elderly?

"Well," he replied, "what it has done is transfer a lot of income from the young to the old. It is certainly true it has made the old people of the United States the best treated old people in the world."

But why is that a bad thing? "Oh," he replied. "It`s not a bad thing for them, but what about the young?"

Friedman supported Bush`s first-term candidacy, but he is more accurately libertarian than conservative and not a reliable Bush ally.

Progress in his goal of rolling back the role of government, he said, is "being greatly threatened, unfortunately, by this notion that the U.S. has a mission to promote democracy around the world," a big Bush objective.

"War is a friend of the state," Friedman said. It is always expensive, requiring higher taxes, and, "In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do."

He also said it was no coincidence that budget surpluses appeared during the Clinton administration, when a Democratic president faced a Republican Congress.

"There were no big spending programs during the Clinton administration," he said. "As a result, government spending tended to stay down, the economy grew like mad, taxes went up, spending did not, and lo and behold, the deficit was turned into a surplus."

The problem now, he said, is that Republicans control both ends of Washington.

"There`s no question if we`re holding down spending, a Democratic president and a Republican House and Senate is the proper combination."

He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of his ideas.

When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."

What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at [e-mail].

Page C - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Bush dis-assembles Iraq
Halliburton gets in the tent business?

"Thank you, Meester Bush, for `saving us` from Saddam."

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Asia Times beschäftigt sich häufig mit dem Verhältnis von den USA zu China und den anderen asiatischen Staaten.
Meist Artikel, die man in den westlichen Medien nicht finden kann.
Ob die Einschätzungen richtig sind, mag jeder für sich selbst entscheiden. Denkanstöße sind es auf jeden Fall.

Jun 9, 2005

The US and that `other` axis
By Jephraim P Gundzik
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GF09Ad08.html

Beijing`s increasingly close ties with Moscow and Tehran will thwart Washington`s foreign policy goal of expanding US security footholds in the Middle East, Central Asia and Asia. However, the primacy of economic stability will most likely prevent a proxy-style military confrontation, in Iran or North Korea, between China and the US.

Threat to `axis of evil` unwinds in Baghdad
In January 2002 during his State of the Union address to the US congress, President George W Bush outlined his administration`s primary foreign policy goal as preventing "regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction". Bush went on to specifically name Iraq, Iran and North Korea as state sponsors of terrorism, infamously dubbing this group the "axis of evil". After failing to gather multilateral support in the United Nation, Bush declared war on Iraq.

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, Beijing has worked feverishly to strengthen its ties with Moscow and Teheran in an apparent effort to prevent US military action against the remaining "axis of evil" members, Iran and North Korea. In addition to recent massive energy deals with Teheran, which place Iran in China`s security web, both Beijing and Moscow have accelerated the transfer of missile technology to Teheran, while selling the Islamic republic increasingly sophisticated military equipment.

Armed with a vast array of anti-ship and long-range missiles, Iran can target US troop positions throughout the Middle East and strike US Navy ships. Iran can also use its weapons to blockade the Straits of Hormuz through which one-third of the world`s traded oil is shipped. With the help of Beijing and Moscow, Teheran is becoming an increasingly unappealing military target for the US.

As in the Middle East, the China-Iran-Russia axis is challenging US interests in Central Asia. Washington is working feverishly to gain security footholds in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan to complement existing US military bases in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. China and Russia are working equally hard to assert their influence in Central Asia. A good portion of this work is being done under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO.)

Composed of China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the SCO was created in 1996 and reborn in 2001 when it was bolstered to counter the initial eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The SCO is becoming an increasingly powerful regional mutual security organization. Joint military maneuvers between SCO member states began in 2003. In 2004, the SCO created a rapid reaction anti-terror strike force. According to Igor Rogachev, Russia`s ambassador to China, the new force is designed to combat and respond to terrorist attacks in any SCO member nation.

In 2004, Iran made it clear that it was interested in joining the SCO. Iran`s mammoth energy deals with China imply that Tehran is now integral to China`s national security. A good way to formalize security relations between China and Iran is through the SCO.

The autocratic governments of Central Asia have much more in common with China, Iran and Russia than with the US. At the same time, China and Russia can invest exponentially larger sums of money in Central Asian countries than the US. Almost all of China`s and Russia`s foreign investment is conducted by state-owned enterprises. Investment by these enterprises is primarily driven by geopolitical expediency.

Foreign investment in the US is controlled by profit-driven private enterprises. While the US government can dole out aid to Central Asian countries, the size of this aid pales in comparison to the money that can be lavished on Central Asian countries by China`s and Russia`s state-owned enterprises. In 2004, commercial and security ties between Kazakhstan and China were strengthened when Beijing signed a deal with Astana to build a pipeline from the Caspian Sea to western China.

The pipeline deal with Kazakhstan prompted Beijing to pledge increased military and technical assistance to Kyrgyzstan, through which this pipeline passes. Despite its small size and lack of natural resources, the geostrategic importance of Kyrgyzstan, which hosts military bases for both Russia and the US, is enormous. Recent political instability in Kyrgyzstan especially alarmed Washington.

In early April, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Bishkek to ensure that Kyrgyzstan`s new government would continue to host US military forces. In addition, Rumsfeld tried to persuade interim President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to allow the US to station AWACS surveillance planes in Kyrgyzstan. At the beginning of 2005, the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry denied this request by Washington, saying that such equipment was beyond the original humanitarian and peace-keeping mission of US. forces in Kyrgyzstan. Bakiyev made it clear that Washington would not be allowed to deploy the AWACS or to establish any more bases or expand existing facilities in Kyrgyzstan.

Bakiyev also stressed that US forces would not be in the country permanently. Deepening economic and security ties between Central Asian countries and China and Russia could eventually reduce Washington`s influence in the region to Afghanistan. However, in addition to three operational military bases already in Afghanistan, Washington plans on building another six military bases, further amplifying the US military threat to China, Russia and Iran.

East Asia is another region where the China-Iran-Russia alliance has common interests diametrically opposed to Washington`s. The most obvious country where these interests conflict is North Korea. As with Iran, the Bush administration is determined to force North Korea`s government to acquiesce to US security demands. Again, like Iran, North Korea poses a strategic threat to Washington`s global hegemonic aspirations. The mutual antagonism by Iran and North Korea of the US has naturally brought these two countries together. North Korea has been an integral supplier to Iran`s ballistic missile program over the past 15 years.

The US State Department has sanctioned the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation, North Korea`s main missile exporter, four times since 2000 for engaging in proliferation activities with Iran. In 2004, US intelligence reported that North Korea was helping Iran build long-range missiles. While Iran`s ties to North Korea are strategic, Russia`s and China`s ties to the country are security driven. Both Russia and China share common borders with North Korea.

The Soviet Union had strong ties with North Korea between 1950 and 1990 punctuated by a mutual security agreement. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia`s relations with North Korea weakened sharply. President Boris Yeltsin chose not to renew the mutual security agreement with North Korea in favor of strengthening relations with South Korea.

President Vladimir Putin reestablished the historically close ties between Russia and North Korea. In 2000, Putin traveled to Pyongyang. North Korea`s leader, Kim Jong-il, paid return visits to Russia in 2001 and 2002. In addition to official state visits, Moscow and Pyongyang have exchanged several ministry-level visits in the past two years. Pyongyang also enjoys very close relations with Beijing, with which high-level visits have been exchanged regularly in the past several years.

More importantly, Pyongyang and Beijing are tied together by a mutual security agreement. North Korea is an important security buffer for both China and Russia against US military projection in Asia. With Beijing and Moscow clearly in accord about countering Washington`s global hegemonic aspirations, neither country is likely to sell out their relations with North Korea and this security buffer. More likely, Beijing and Moscow would like to bolster the security buffer in the light of expanding US militarism. It is extremely unlikely that the US will convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and uranium enrichment program because both Beijing and Moscow need North Korea and the security buffer it provides.

Playing in Washington`s backyard
In 2004, Russia and China launched a counter-offensive to the expansion of US militarism in Asia. Beijing and Moscow began to court Latin America`s new leftist governments in an unprecedented slap to the US. Both Russia and China have strengthened relations with Washington`s arch foe in Latin America - Venezuela. In November 2004, Moscow agreed to sell Caracas as many as 30 combat helicopters and 100,000 automatic rifles. In addition, Venezuela is considering the purchase of up to 50 MiG-29 fighter jets from Russia to replace aging F-16s.

The Russia-Venezuela arms deal was widely criticized in Washington. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have voiced strong opposition to the deal. In late 2004, Venezuela`s President Hugo Chavez visited Beijing, where he signed several oil sector investment deals with the China National Petroleum Corporation. Chavez has also stated that he would like to give oil export preference to China rather than the US. China also signed significant energy-related investment deals with Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina in 2004. The willingness of Beijing and Moscow to challenge US security so close to home clearly indicates that a geostrategic battle has begun.

Security threat or strategic competitor?
Beijing`s expanding foreign relations both within and outside the China-Iran-Russia alliance and China`s growing militarism have begun to repaint Washington`s perceptions of US-China relations. These perceptions have been echoed by Washington`s closest allies in Asia - Taipei and Tokyo. In mid-2004, reports by both the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) and the Pentagon depicted China as a major threat to US national security.

The USCC was created by Congress in 2000 "to monitor, investigate and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People`s Republic of China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action". In June 2004, the USCC released its annual report on China.

This report noted that China was deliberately using economic warfare against Washington by creating a "competitive advantage over US manufacturers". The report specifically referred to the undervaluation of the yuan against the dollar and Beijing`s (alleged) disregard for World Trade Organization rules as weapons in China`s economic war with the US. The report described China`s expanding relations with Iran as countering multilateral efforts to stabilize international oil supplies and prices.

The USCC report also noted that Russia was supplying increasingly sophisticated weapons to China and that these weapons were part of Beijing`s strategy for defeating US forces in the event of war with Taiwan. A congressionally mandated report on China by the Pentagon described China`s Russia-assisted military buildup as giving China the ability "to cause significant damage to all of Taiwan`s airfields and quickly degrade Taiwan`s ground based air-defenses and associated command and control". Most alarming, the Pentagon report warned that Chinese military strategists were considering the use of nuclear weapons against US and Taiwanese forces.

The Bush administration`s concern over China`s growing military power is also depicted in Washington`s reaction to the European Union`s proposed lifting of its China arms embargo. Washington`s greatest concern about renewed arms trade between the EU and China was that this trade would permanently tip the balance of power away from Taiwan and toward China. Even worse, European arms could be used to kill US troops in Asia. Of course, the possibility of Beijing using European weapons to kill US troops presupposes that a war between China and the US will erupt.

Taiwan`s President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) share Washington`s concerns about China`s military threat. The Chen government`s concern stems from its drive for Taiwan`s independence from China and Beijing`s forceful reminders that Taiwan is part of China. In the lead up to Taiwan`s legislative elections in late 2004, Chen campaigned on a platform of Taiwanese independence. Though Chen`s DPP suffered significant losses in these elections, Beijing`s response was largely entrained in the form of China`s anti-secession law.

The law was meant to firmly warn Chen against seeking Taiwan`s independence from China in the event that the DPP won a legislative majority. The DPP`s losses to the unification-minded opposition takes much of the bite out of the law. In addition, Chen`s opposition, the Nationalist Party, has permanently stalled legislation seeking about $18 billion to bolster Taiwan`s missile defense system. The opposition has realized that Taiwan has no hope of defending against a military attack from the mainland, prompting renewed ties between Taiwan`s Nationalist Party and Beijing.

Along with Washington and Taipei, Tokyo also demonstrated its growing concern over China`s increasing military might. In December 2004, the Japanese Defense Agency issued a defense policy guideline that defined China as a potential security threat. The report noted, "China, which has significant influence on the region`s security, has been modernizing its nuclear and missile capabilities as well as naval and air forces, and expanding its area of operation at sea."

In a joint US-Japan security statement issued in February, Tokyo went further, agreeing that Japan would "encourage the peaceful resolution of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through dialogue". Both the defense policy guideline and Tokyo`s concern over tension between China and Taiwan are a dramatic departure from Japan`s post-war foreign policy. The change in foreign policy focus from military pacifism to military assertion is being driven by Washington`s own security concerns.

These same concerns drove Tokyo to encourage oil exploration in an area of the East China Sea that is claimed by China. Japan`s military assertion has accelerated China`s defense buildup while contributing to the creation of the China-Iran-Russia alliance. The shift in Tokyo`s foreign policy has led to a sharp deterioration in China`s relations with Japan. Foreign policies in Beijing, Washington and Tokyo are all characterized by two separate components - geopolitical relations and economic relations.

Cold War redux
Beijing`s geopolitical relations with Washington and Tokyo are arguably at their lowest ebb since China established formal relations with the US and Japan in the 1970s. The deterioration in China`s relations with the US and Japan and the resultant improvement in relations with Iran and Russia are being driven by Washington`s outsized global security concerns. These security concerns are becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for Washington.

In sharp contrast to geopolitical relations, economic relations between Beijing, Washington and Tokyo remain quite strong. The mutual interdependence of these economies argues strongly against the preeminence of security issues in overall relations. China is the largest trading partner of Japan and third largest trading partner of the US. In addition to substantial trade links, American and Japanese companies have invested tens of billions of dollars in China over the past 15 years. Nonetheless, Beijing, Washington and Tokyo have all elevated the importance of security to overall economic well-being.

While a conflict between the US and China over Iran or North Korea cannot be ruled out, economic interdependence suggests Beijing and Washington have entered a period of geopolitical detente. Beijing`s increasingly close relations with Moscow and Tehran will contain Washington`s further military projection in the Middle East, Central Asia and Asia and foil the Bush administration`s plans for subduing uncooperative governments in Iran and North Korea. Finally, Washington`s unilateralist foreign policy will increasingly isolate the US to the benefit of China`s foreign economic relations, making Beijing all the stronger.

Jephraim P Gundzik is president of Condor Advisers, Inc. Condor Advisers provides emerging markets investment risk analysis to individuals and institutions globally. Please visit for further information.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

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Den Russenlink gibt es immer noch!
[url9000 Dead GIs In Iraq?]http://www.uruknet.info/?colonna=m&p=12306&l=x&size=1&hd=0[/url]

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The Independent
Business as usual in Assad’s ’revived’ Baathist cabinet
Wednesday, 8th June 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=645…

The man who once handled Syria’s affairs in Lebanon, the ex-foreign minister Abdul Halim Khaddam, 72, was reported to have resigned his vice-presidency last night at the ruling Baath party’s annual congress in Damascus. But his departure will do nothing to obscure the fact that, rather than open Syria to new political freedoms, President Bashar al-Assad is intent on "reviving" the Baath to turn round the economy and stamp out "corruption".

Most Syrians lost track of the number of times that Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, called upon the party to "root out", "liquidate" and eliminate the nepotism and high-level corruption that is the cancer of the Arab world. A few officials would feel the lash of the state’s anger, and one of Hafez’s prime ministers actually committed suicide by shooting himself - twice - in the head. Hafez was always being urged to "reform" the economy, which is exactly what his son said he was going to do yesterday.

Mr Khaddam’s departure, if it is confirmed - the congress spokeswoman, Bouthaina Shaaban, has denied it - will be another symbol that the leadership wishes to "make way for the younger generation", another aspiration of most Arab one-party states; President Mubarak of Egypt likes to use the phrase, although he is the one man who never seems to be ready to step aside for a younger generation.

The real story in Damascus, however, is a simple one: despite all the pressures on Syria, despite all the advice from the country’s liberals and human rights groups, Bashar appears to have retreated back into the arms of the party founded by Michel Aflaq in the 1940s and stubbornly defended by his intelligent and ruthless father. His speech to the 1,200 congress delegates was a cocktail of admission and conservatism. He was, his critics said, adopting the Chinese model of reform: freeing the economy while keeping politics in a straitjacket.

The only way to social improvement, he said, was to "address the negative practices which hamper our progress and constrain our reform project". While agreeing that the current "political atmosphere" - presumably the US’s growing impatience with Syria - had "put tremendous pressure on Arab citizens and forced them to an unprecedented re-examination of their convictions and ideas", he said that the information technology revolution - which he himself supports as head of the Syrian computer society - had produced theories and lifestyles which had "overwhelmed Arabs and threatened their existence and cultural identity".

There was another reference to US policy towards Syria: "International conditions and successive events in our region have had a negative effect on investment and development opportunities where we had hoped for better." And that, it seems, was all he had to say about the US and Israel, the insurgency in Iraq and the Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon.

All very well and true, perhaps. But there was no message to the human rights groups who want an open, democratic, civil society in Syria. There was no hint as to how Bashar intends to confront the growing animosity of a pro-Israeli US administration.

Mr Khaddam, who was interim president after the death of Hafez, was a close personal friend of the murdered former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, whose assassination was blamed on the Syrians but whose funeral Mr Khaddam was the only Syrian official to attend.

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EXPLODIERTER STERN
Schockwelle der Zerstörung
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Supernova N 63A: Falschfarben zeigen Schwefel (rot), Sauerstoff (blau) und Wasserstoff (grün). Dem Hubble-Weltraumteleskop ist ein spektakulärer Schnappschuss gelungen. Ein Stern von der 50-fachen Masse unserer Sonne ist in einer gewaltigen Explosion untergegangen und hat seine Reste in bizarren Formen im All verteilt.
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Posted on Tue, Jun. 07, 2005

Leaders deny Bush manipulated Iraq intelligence
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11837950.htm

By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday forcefully denied that Bush manipulated intelligence to build support for war with Iraq, as a controversial British government memo suggests.

Standing side by side in the White House, the two leaders disputed the pre-war memo, which has raised questions about whether Bush exaggerated the threat from Iraq in his zeal to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Bush and Blair were put on the defensive about the so-called Downing Street memo at a news conference intended to highlight their plans for increased aid to Africa.

Bush`s critics have seized on the memo, written by one of Blair`s top aides in July 2002 and made public last month, as evidence that Bush misled the world on the need for war. The document, which summarizes a visit to Washington by the head of British intelligence and other officials, says "intelligence and facts were being fixed" by the White House to support Bush`s war plans.

Bush has long maintained that he didn`t decide finally to go to war until shortly before combat began in March 2003.

"The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," Blair said, coming to Bush`s defense. "No one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time. ... All the way through that period of time, we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict."

Bush said he considered war "the last option" and insisted that he wasn`t fixated on removing Saddam by force.

"There`s nothing farther from the truth. My conversations with the prime minister were how can we do this peacefully," he said. "We worked hard to figure out how we could do this peacefully."

The top-secret memo, written eight months before Bush ordered the Iraq invasion, was leaked to The Sunday Times of London last month in the closing days of Blair`s successful campaign for a third term as prime minister. Despite his victory, Blair emerged from the election weakened by his party`s losses in parliament, a setback driven in part by anger over the Iraq war.

Critics accuse Bush and Blair of misusing intelligence during the run-up to the war, and the leaders seemed ready for a question about the memo as they faced reporters in the White House. Both cited their willingness to work with the United Nations as evidence that they wanted a peaceful resolution.

Still, there`s little doubt that Bush was prepared to use military force long before he chose that option. The president directed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to begin considering military options for Saddam`s removal as early as 2001.

It`s also clear, with hindsight, that Bush was wrong about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction. On Tuesday, Bush blamed the war on Saddam`s refusal to abide by U.N. demands for weapons inspections.

"He made the decision, and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power," Bush said.

The lingering questions about the rationale for war overshadowed Blair`s announcement that the two leaders are nearing agreement on a plan to forgive 100 percent of Africa`s foreign debt. Blair hopes to make African debt relief a centerpiece of next month`s G-8 summit in Scotland, which will bring together leaders from eight industrialized democracies.

"I think there is a real desire to make sure that we cancel the debt," Blair said, adding that the proposal would include compensation for institutions holding bad African debt. The two leaders also agreed to increase foreign aid to African countries that meet certain conditions.

As expected, Bush announced plans to provide an additional $674 million for African famine relief and other humanitarian assistance this year. The money will be shifted from other aid accounts. Blair has called on wealthy nations to double aid to Africa and will push for it when G-8 leaders gather at the Gleneagles golf resort on July 6.

But Bush drew a line short of Blair`s goal.

"Nobody wants to give money to a country that is corrupt, where leaders take money and put it in their pocket," Bush said. "We`re really not interested in supporting a government that doesn`t have open economies and open markets."

On another topic, Bush didn`t answer directly when asked if he believes that climate change is man-made. Bush, who abandoned the Kyoto treaty on global warming, has suggested in the past that more research is needed to determine the link between pollutants and global warming.

"I`ve always said it`s a serious long-term issue that needs to be dealt with," Bush said. "We lead the world when it comes to dollars spent, millions of dollars spent on research about climate change. We want to know more about it. It`s easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about it."


© 2005 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.realcities.com

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COMMENTARY
Torture`s Part of the Territory
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klein7j…

By Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein reported from Iraq for Harper`s. She is the author of "No Logo" (Picador, 2002) and is writing a book on the ways capitalism exploits disaster.

June 7, 2005

Brace yourself for a flood of gruesome new torture snapshots. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Defense Department to release dozens of additional photographs and videotapes depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo`s famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front`s attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film`s key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.

Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France`s continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn`t the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay…. It`s my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."

His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don`t have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.

Now, as then, there are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.

Most Iraqis do not consent to the open-ended military occupation they have been living under for more than two years. On Jan. 30, a clear majority voted for political parties promising to demand a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Washington may have succeeded in persuading Iraq`s political class to abandon that demand, but the fact remains that U.S. troops are on Iraqi soil in open defiance of the express wishes of the population.

Lacking consent, the current U.S.-Iraqi regime relies heavily on fear, including the most terrifying tactics of them all: disappearances, indefinite detention without charge and torture. And despite official reassurances, it`s only getting worse. A year ago, President Bush pledged to erase the stain of Abu Ghraib by razing the prison to the ground. There has been a change of plans. Abu Ghraib and two other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq are being expanded, and a new 2,000-person detention facility is being built, with a price tag of $50 million. In the last seven months alone, the prison population has doubled to a staggering 11,350.

The U.S. military may indeed be cracking down on prisoner abuse, but torture in Iraq is not in decline — it has simply been outsourced. In January, Human Rights Watch found that torture within Iraqi-run (and U.S.-supervised) jails and detention facilities was "systematic," including the use of electroshock.

An internal report from the 1st Cavalry Division, obtained by the Washington Post, states that "electrical shock and choking" are "consistently used to achieve confessions" by Iraqi police and soldiers. So open is the use of torture that it has given rise to a hit television show: Every night on the TV station Al Iraqiya — run by a U.S. contractor — prisoners with swollen faces and black eyes "confess" to their crimes.

Rumsfeld claims that the wave of recent suicide bombings in Iraq is "a sign of desperation." In fact, it is the proliferation of torture under Rumsfeld`s watch that is the true sign of panic.

In Algeria, the French used torture not because they were sadistic but because they were fighting a battle they could not win against the forces of decolonization and Third World nationalism. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein`s use of torture surged immediately after the Shiite uprising in 1991: The weaker his hold on power, the more he terrorized his people. Unwanted regimes, whether domestic dictatorships or foreign occupations, rely on torture precisely because they are unwanted.

When the next batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib appear, many Americans will be morally outraged, and rightly so. But perhaps some brave official will take a lesson from Col. Mathieu and dare to turn the tables: Should the United States stay in Iraq? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Ein weiterer Schritt zum Bürgerkrieg?
Die von den USA ausgebildeten Truppen desertieren schneller als sie ausgebildet werden können, dagegen erhalten die Milizen, ob kurdisch, shiitisch oder auch bei den Sunniten und Aufständigen immer mehr Zulauf.
Die shiitischen Milizen wurden und werden im Iran ausgebildte.
Das hat sich Dubya auch nicht vorgestellt, dass er dem Iran den südlichen Irak auf dem Sibertablett übergeben würde.


June 8, 2005
Iraqi Leaders Take a Divisive Step by Backing Shiite Militia
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/international/middleeast/0…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 - In a move certain to further inflame sectarian tensions with Sunni Arabs, the country`s top leaders said today that they strongly supported the existence of an Iranian-trained Shiite militia and praised the militia`s role in trying to secure the country.

It was the first time the new Iraqi government has publicly backed an armed group that was created along sectarian lines, and it was an implicit rejection of repeated requests by American officials that the government disband all militias in the country.

The widening sectarian rift was further underscored today when top Sunni Arab leaders demanded that a 55-member constitutional committee dominated by Shiites and Kurds add at least 25 Sunni seats to the committee. The Sunnis said they wanted those seats to have full membership powers.

In recent days, Shiite committee members have proposed adding 12 to 15 non-voting seats to the committee for Sunnis.

Violence from the Sunni-led insurgency continued, as the American military announced on today that four soldiers had died from various attacks in northern Iraq today and Tuesday. A car bomb exploded in a line of drivers outside a gas station in the city of Baquba, killing three people and wounding one, an Interior Ministry official said.

Two bodyguards of a National Assembly member were gunned down in Baghdad, a police officer was killed in the capital and another was assassinated in Mosul, the official said.

The remarks supporting the Shiite militia were made in the morning at an unusual news conference whose speakers included Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister and a Shiite Arab; Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president and a militia leader himself, and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite political party that created the Shiite militia, known as the Badr Organization.

In recent weeks, some Sunni Arab leaders have vociferously blamed the Badr militia for the murders of prominent Sunni clerics and others. Among the Badr`s harshest critics is Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a powerful group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques.

Indeed, from the time the Badr militia entered Iraq from Iran during the American-led invasion, Sunnis have blamed Badr fighters for assassinations across the country, especially the killings of former Baath Party officials.

The joint appearance of Mr. Talabani and the Shiite leaders indicated that Shiite and Kurdish leaders seemed willing to endorse the existence of each group`s militias. The two main Kurdish parties together have the strongest militia in the country, a force that totals 100,000 fighters and is known as the pesh merga, or "those who face death." In negotiations with the Shiites to assemble the current government, Kurdish leaders argued vehemently that the Kurds, as part of their right to broad autonomy, must be allowed to keep the pesh merga intact.

The issue was expected to be raised again during the drafting of the new constitution, but Mr. Talabani`s support of the Badr Organization appears to show that the Kurds and Shiites have reached some sort of understanding that their respective militias should continue to exist.

"You and the pesh merga are wanted and are important to fulfilling this sacred task, to establishing a democratic, federal and independent Iraq," Mr. Talabani said, addressing the Badr.

Mr. Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as SCIRI, said: "Badr represents all Iraqis; it represents the wide spectrum of Iraqis and has a wide base in Iraq."

The Badr Organization, originally called the Badr Brigade, was founded in the 1980`s while SCIRI was in exile in Iran, and it received training from the Iranian military. Mr. Hakim was appointed its leader by his older brother and SCIRI`s founder, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. When the elder Hakim was killed with scores of followers in a suicide car bombing in Najaf in August 2003, his brother took charge of the entire SCIRI organization.

In the summer of 2003, the Badr Brigade changed its name because American officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority were urging the dissolution of all militia. The Badr`s leaders publicly claimed it had transformed into a purely humanitarian organization, but said repeatedly in interviews that the Badr was still armed and was active in cities across Iraq, particularly in the Shiite heartland of the south.

The militia numbers in the tens of thousands, and American officials now privately acknowledge that they have failed to disband any of the country`s major militias.

When asked about the continuing existence of the militias, American military commanders refer reporters to the Iraqi government, saying the issue is now in the hands of leaders like Dr. Jaafari, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Hakim. The commanders say they cannot give orders to a sovereign Iraq, even if the existence of the militias increases the possibility of large-scale civil war.

One of the toughest issues for the new government is how to lessen the deep-seated feelings of disenfranchisement among the former ruling Sunni Arabs. The Sunnis largely boycotted the January elections and are effectively shut out of the political process. Shiite and Kurdish leaders, at the urging of the White House, are trying to bring in more Sunnis, especially into the process of drafting the permanent constitution, whose first draft is due by August 15.

Sunni Arab leaders met in Baghdad today and concluded that they wanted at least 25 seats on the 55-member committee of the National Assembly assigned to draft the constitution. There are now two Sunni Arabs on the Shiite-dominated committee. The committee will likely be resistant to the demands of the Sunnis, since there are only 15 Kurds on the committee. Sunni Arabs and Kurds each make up roughly a fifth of the Iraqi population.

Alaa Meki, an official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a powerful Sunni group, said in an interview that the Sunni leaders were ready to submit 25 names to the committee to be accepted as "full members, not as advisers."

One problem facing the Iraqi government is that unlike the Shiites, the Sunni Arabs do not have a unified leadership. Several rival Sunni movements have been negotiating with American and Iraqi officials over the Sunni role in politics and the constitutional process. The meeting of Sunnis today did not include the National Dialogue Council, a group that is competing with the Iraqi Islamic Party and Muslim Scholars Association.

The International Crisis Group, a prominent conflict-resolution organization, released a study today saying that the National Assembly should invoke the one-time option of a six-month delay on the writing of the constitution partly to make the process more participatory. The assembly should then lay out a detailed and realistic timetable for completing the first draft, the study said.

It also urged the Bush administration to top pushing the Iraqis to meet the original deadline of August 15. American officials have said they intend to keep on track the writing of the constitution and elections for a five-year government, scheduled for December.

Joost R. Hiltermann, the report`s author and a recent visitor to Iraq, said in an e-mail message that the haggling over Sunni positions on the committee "could go on for a while" and is "all the more reason to postpone, but only with a detailed timetable."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 9, 2005
Census Hispanics Glance
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:41 a.m. ET

The U.S. population, in millions, by race and ethnicity in July 2004 and July 2000 and the percentage change, according to the Census Bureau. The total for race groups surpasses the U.S. total because individuals can report belonging to more than one race. The American Indian category includes Alaska natives; the native Hawaiian category includes other Pacific Islanders. People of Hispanic ethnicity can be of any race.

Race, EthnicityJuly 2004 July 2000 Change

White 239.9 232.0 3.4

Black 39.2 37.2 5.4

Asian 14.0 12.1 15.7

American Indian 4.4 4.2 4.7

Native Hawaiian 1.0 0.9 11.1

Non-Hispanic or Latino252.3 246.5 2.4

Hispanic or Latino41.3 35.6 16.0

Total Population293.7 282.2 4.1

* Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

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June 9, 2005
Rumsfeld Says Guantánamo Isn`t Being Considered for Closing
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/international/europe/09rum…

STAVANGER, Norway, June 8 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that the Bush administration was not considering shutting down the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he defended the treatment of its prisoners by their American military guards and interrogators as humane.

During a visit to Norway before a meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels, Mr. Rumsfeld responded to criticisms that the detention center should be closed after reports that the Koran had been mishandled and prisoners mistreated.

"I know of no one in the U.S. Government, in the executive branch, that is considering closing Guantánamo," he said at a news conference.

Information gathered from detainees there has allowed the United States and its allies to disrupt terrorist operations or prevent some attacks, saving the lives of Americans and people from other nations, Mr. Rumsfeld said. He said up to a dozen suspected terrorists released from American detention centers had been recaptured later as they were taking part in either terrorist plots or combat.

Military guards and interrogators, he said, are fully aware of Bush administration orders "that any detainees be treated in a humane way, and they have been."

Among those calling for the Guantánamo camp to be closed is former President Jimmy Carter, who said this week that the United States should shutter the detention center as an illustration that it is committed to protecting human rights.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, President Bush said of the prison: "We`re exploring all alternatives into how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America. What we don`t want to do is let somebody out who comes back and harms us."

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, also said, "We always are looking at all alternatives when it comes to dealing with these detainees."

The American military`s own official inquiry found that guards or interrogators at the detention center had mishandled the Koran five times, in some cases intentionally but in others by accident.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Ja, Ja die Sesselpupser!
Da will doch ein ein Ex-Ösi dem öffentlichen Dienst an die Wäsche. Ein Paradoxon an sich.

washingtonpost.com
Public Workers Under Fire
Schwarzenegger Targets A Last Bastion of Security
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Harold Meyerson
Post
Thursday, June 9, 2005; A21

America has a problem with its public employees. They are not downwardly mobile enough.

Policemen, firefighters, teachers, hospital nurses -- they still belong to the one part of the U.S. economy where the New Deal hasn`t been repealed. Fully 90 percent of them have defined-benefit pensions as of old. In the private sector, just 60 percent of employees have retirement plans, and a scant 24 percent still cling to defined-benefit plans. Fully 86 percent of public employees are covered by on-the-job health insurance; in the private sector, the rate has fallen to 66 percent.

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, public employees make on average $49,275 a year. A sub-princely sum, that, but better than the $34,461 that is the average annual income of private-sector workers.

There are a number of reasons public employees have been able to preserve the kinds of benefits and, in some instances, living standards that were once more common to American workers generally, but chief among these is unions. While 37 percent of public-sector workers are unionized, just 8 percent of private-sector workers are. Through their power at the ballot box, public employees have maintained the ability to bargain with their employers, who are either elected officials or their appointees. For all intents and purposes, their private-sector counterparts have lost the power to bargain collectively.

But are decent living standards in one sector sustainable when they`re dependent on the taxes of an increasingly beleaguered private sector? More and more, conservative political strategists see an opportunity to weaken the Democrats -- traditionally the beneficiaries of public-employee union support -- by pitting private-sector voters against public-sector ones. That certainly was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger`s goal earlier this year when he backed an initiative that would have terminated the defined-benefit pensions for California`s state and municipal employees and shifted them to 401(k)s instead.

Schwarzenegger`s plan had a few glitches -- most notably, ending survivor benefits for widows and orphans of police officers and firefighters killed on the job. Facing an onslaught of criticism, Schwarzenegger backed off the initiative. But the war between Arnold and California`s public employees has spread across many fronts. He`s been embroiled with nurses on the question of nurse-patient ratios, and with teachers over his reneging on a funding commitment to public schools. He`s been losing every one of these fights, with his support in the polls dropping from 60 percent to an anemic 40.

Now, a number of Schwarzenegger`s business backers have funded yet another initiative, this one to curtail the ability of public-sector unions to fund political campaigns (including those for and against initiatives). The governor -- unless he trades off his support for this measure in return for concessions from the Democratic legislature -- is likely to back it.

Though the attacks from the gazillionaire governor on the state`s public servants have only backfired, Arnold`s handlers do not sound daunted. On Sunday the Los Angeles Times, reporting on a series of bi-weekly phone calls that Schwarzenegger and his strategists hold with his leading business backers, quoted veteran Republican operative Don Sipple, in one recent call, telling the assembled Arnoldistas how they`d go after the public employees.

"When you get to the point of . . . `These people are on your payroll, and they are out to roll you every day,` that creates a kind of phenomenon of anger," Sipple said. "But it takes a long time to get there."

If Arnold truly believes he can convince his fellow Californians that the police, firefighters and teachers are out to roll them every day, then the tale of the Incredible Shrinking Governator will continue apace.

But the problems faced by public-sector workers as the private sector grows steadily meaner aren`t going away, whatever the outcome of the immediate battles in California. When public-sector workers were first joining unions in the `60s, they were largely playing catch-up with private-sector employees. But as Wal-Mart has supplanted General Motors as America`s largest private employer (and GM announced a cutback of 25,000 more workers Tuesday), it`s the teachers and their public-sector cohorts who have emerged as the relatively more advantaged -- and politically exposed.

From the period of the three decades after World War II, when the long boom in the American economy was felt in every class and quadrant, we have devolved into a nation of separate economies -- increasingly insecure private-sector workers, a public sector where the guarantees of the New Deal order still pertain and a stratum of mega-rich whose investment income is taxed at lower rates than the incomes of those who work for a living. If we can`t create more security in the private sector (and universal health insurance would be a good start), the modest security of a work life in the public sector will surely be eroded, too.

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Decadent Europe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1502250,00.ht…

The EU crisis can be read as evidence of a declining civilisation. Let`s stop neocons gloating
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday June 9, 2005

Guardian
Contemplating the European Crisis (I think a capital C is called for) I find myself driven even to reading Toynbee. Not Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, whose work I always follow with the greatest pleasure, but her long-dead and largely forgotten ancestor, Arnold Toynbee, the philosophical historian of the rise and fall of civilisations.

For one plausible long-term interpretation of the chaotic reaction in Europe since the French non of May 29 is that these are the symptoms of a civilisation in decline, if not in decadence. How ludicrous that the prime minister of Luxembourg should insist, like some east European communist leader of old, that black is white and everything can therefore continue just as before. The government will dissolve the people, and elect another. How absurd that, confronted with the greatest popular challenge to the European project since its inception, France and Britain can think of nothing better than to face up for a vicious cross-channel squabble over their respective contributions to an EU budget that costs the average British taxpayer less than £3 a week. Like the Bourbons, our leaders have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

If I were Chinese I`d be laughing all the way to the bank. After the European centuries, from about 1500 to 1945, and the American century, from 1945 until some time in the first half of this one, the Asian century dawns on the horizon. As Tom Friedman of the New York Times acidly observes, while Europe is trying to achieve the 35-hour week, India is inventing the 35-hour day. Whatever our "knowledge-based" advantage, no economy can compete successfully on such terms. Things must change, if they are to remain the same.

Toynbee was led to ask why civilisations decline and fall through his experience of what has been called the European civil war from 1914 to 1945. His own grand, schematic answers have been largely discounted by professional historians, but the question remains a good one. As with all terribles simplificateurs, some of his ideas are, at least, suggestive. For example, among the characteristic features of disintegrating civilisations he finds the conjoined twins of archaism and futurism. Some people wallow in the memory of a golden age that never was while others glorify an imagined future. Does that sound familiar? Then there is what he calls the idolisation of an ephemeral institution. For some Europeans today that idolised ephemeral is the nation state, for others the EU. And there is his basic and perhaps rather obvious point that the decline of civilisations proceeds in a serious of routs and rallies. Coming close to self-parody, Toynbee suggests that the normal rhythm seems to be rout-rally-rout-rally-rout-rally-rout: three-and-a-half beats.

In the first half of the 20th century Europe inflicted upon itself the mother of all routs. In the second half of that century it produced a formidable rally. While the EU cannot (and generally does not want to) match the US in military power, it does in combined gross domestic product and social attractiveness. It is the world`s largest single agglomeration of the rich and free. Moreover, it has just got much larger. This is an extraordinary success that, at the time of Toynbee`s death, in the year of the first British referendum on our membership in "Europe", almost nobody foresaw.

The next year, in 1976, Raymond Aron wrote a book called Plaidoyer pour l`Europe Décadente, translated into English as In Defence of Decadent Europe. His great concern was that western Europe was losing its self-confidence, its will to win, what Machiavelli called virtù - "the capacity for collective action and historical vitality". The challenge he feared was not the far east, which, apart from Japan, hardly appeared as a competitor in those days, but the very near east: the Soviet-dominated, communist-ruled half of Europe. (Interestingly, given the negative significance attached to the word "liberal" in the recent French referendum debate, his alternative title was In Defence of Liberal Europe.)

His fears in respect of the communist east turned out to be unjustified, although a pessimist might say that, in a process of "competitive decadence", the east simply collapsed first. As a result, and due to the magnetic attraction and active policies of the European Union, eight post-communist democracies joined the EU on May 1 last year. Never before have so many European states been liberal democracies, joined in one and the same economic, political and security community. Yet the European Crisis has arrived just a year after this triumph, and partly caused by it. For, among many other things, the French and Dutch votes were also noes to the consequences of enlargement and to the prospect of further enlargements.

Thirty years ago Aron worried about a kind of hedonistic self-indulgence characteristic of decadent societies. At the risk of sounding like a cross between Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, the thought does occasionally occur when flicking through British and European TV channels, from Celebrity Love Island, through Big Brother, to the endless onanistic German chatshows. Aron also worried about Europe`s low birth rates, which in the meantime have become still lower. "The civilisation of self-centred enjoyment," he dared to write, "condemns itself to death when it loses interest in the future."

Of course, looked at from another viewpoint, liberal in a different sense, the very low birth rates in countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany are an expression of increased liberty: namely a woman`s right to choose. But it`s common sense that welfare states then need someone else to support so many pensioners. That someone is to hand: a young, vigorous, growing population just across the Mediterranean, eager to come and work here. But Europe is proving very bad at making Muslim immigrants feel at home. The Dutch nee vote was in significant part a vote against Muslim immigration, and the French non was in part against Turkey joining the EU.

It may not have escaped your attention that this analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neoconservatives and anti-Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought. To this I would say two things. First, American neocons would be idiots to gloat. Europe and America are two parts of one larger civilisation. If the old Europe on this side of the Atlantic goes down, it may help the new Europe on the other side of the Atlantic in short-term power relations, but it will be enormously damaging to US interests in the longer term.

Second, it`s up to us to prove them wrong. Nothing I have darkly hinted at here is inevitable. Jeremiads are meant to be self-denying prophecies. The European project has many times moved forward precisely through and out of crisis. My formula, from Romain Rolland via Antonio Gramsci, is "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". At a time when most columns in British and European newspapers are engaged in the familiar, admonitory rhetoric of "we should do this, we must do that", it can help to stand back and, with the pessimism of the intellect, calmly contemplate the abyss. But then, after a period of reflection, we should act. Give yourself a treat: prove a neocon wrong.

www.freeworldweb.net
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Nixon`s empire strikes back
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1502532,00.ht…

Bush`s imperial project has succeeded by learning the chief lesson of Watergate - muzzle the press.
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday June 9, 2005

Guardian
The unveiling of the identity of Deep Throat - Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI - seemed affirm the story of Watergate as the triumph of the lone journalist supported from the shadows by a magically appearing secret source. Shazam! The outlines of the fuller story we now know, thanks not only to Felt`s selfunmasking but to disclosures the Albany Times Union of upstate New York, unreported so far by any major outlet. Felt was not working as "a disgruntled maverick ... but rather as the leader of a clandestine group" of three other high-level agents to control the story by collecting intelligence and leaking it. For more than 30 years the secrecy around Deep Throat diverted attention to who Deep Throat was rather than what Deep Throat was - a covertFBI operation in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was almost certainly an unwitting asset.

When FBI director J Edgar Hoover died on May 2 1972, Felt, who believed he should be his replacement, was passed over. The Watergate break-in took place a month later. As President Nixon sought to coerce the CIA and FBI to participate in his increasingly frantic efforts to obstruct justice, Felt, who had access to raw intelligence files, organised a band of his most trusted lieutenants and began strategic leaking. The Felt op, in fact, was part of a widespread revolt of professionals throughout the federal government against Nixon`s threats to their bureaucratic integrity.

Nixon`s grand plan was to concentrate executive power in an imperial presidency, politicise the bureaucracyand crush its independence, and invoke national security to wage partisan warfare. He intended to "reconstitute the Republican party", staging a "purge" to foster "a new majority", as his aide William Safire wrote in his memoir. Nixon himself declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends the "institutions" of government had to be "reformed, replaced or circumvented. In my second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of these three methods - or whichever combination of them - was necessary."

But now George Bush is building a leviathan beyond Nixon`s imagining. The Bush presidency is the highest stage of Nixonism. The commander-in-chief has declared himself by executive order above international law, the CIA is being purged, the justice department deploying its resources to break down thewall of separation between church and state, the Environmental Protection Agency being ordered to suppress scientific studies and the Pentagon subsuming intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the US with blunt military force as its chief foreign policy.

The three main architects of Bush`s imperial presidency gained their formative experience amid Nixon`s downfall. Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon`s counsellor, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, one after the other, served as chief of staff to Nixon`s successor, Gerald Ford, both opposing congressional efforts for more transparency in the executive.

With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney remarked in 1976: "Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn`t do any good if you lose." During the Iran-contrascandal Cheney, a republican leader in the House of Representatives, argued that the congressional report denouncing "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law" was an encroachment on executive authority.

The other architect, Karl Rove, Bush`s senior political aide, began his career as an agent of Nixon`s dirty trickster Donald Segretti - "ratfuckers" as Segretti called his boys. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Rove operated through a phoney front group to denounce the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media".

Under Bush, the Republican Congress has abdicated its responsibilities of executive oversight and investigation. When Republican senator John Warner, chairman of the armed services committee, held hearings on Bush`s torture policy in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White House set rabid House Republicans to attack him. There have been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists that the Senate votes to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN while refusing to release essential information requested by the Senate foreign relations committee.

One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon`s demise was the necessity of muzzling the press. The Bush WhiteHouse has neutralised the press corps and even turned some reporters into its own assets. The disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq, funnelled into the news pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic case in point. By manipulation and intimidation, encouraging atmosphere of self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced the press from dissenting professionals inside the government.

Mark Felt`s sudden emergence from behind the curtain of history evoked the glory days of the press corps and its modern creation myth. It was a warm bath of nostalgia and cold comfort.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Thursday, June 09, 2005

The Revenge of Baghdad Bob

"The Revenge of Baghdad Bob" is my current piece in Salon.com about the bizarrely unrealistic assessments of the Iraq War by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

First para.:


"The sheer dishonesty of the Bush administration whenever it speaks about the situation in Iraq was on display again during Bush`s Tuesday press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recent weeks Bush has repeatedly expressed wild optimism, utterly unfounded in reality, about the political process in Iraq and about the ability of the new Iraqi government and army to win the guerrilla war. He has if anything been outdone in this rhetoric by Vice President Dick Cheney. This pie-in-the-sky attitude, which increasingly few believe, degrades our civic discourse, and it endangers the national security of the United States."

posted by Juan @ [url6/9/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/revenge-of-baghdad-bob-revenge-of.html[/url]

Talabani and al-Hakim Call for Role for Shiite, Kurdish Paramilitaries
4 US Soldiers Killed

Guerrillas killed 4 US servicemen on Wednesday in separate incidents. Other guerrilla operations around Iraq took the lives of at least 9 Iraqis, including two government officials. Guerrillas kidnapped 20 Iraqi soldiers near the Syrian border.

Al-Zaman: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance that dominates parliament, asked Wednesday that Shiite and Kurdish militias be deployed in Operation Lightning and other operations against the guerrillas that are being implemented by the forces of the Defense and Interior ministries.

The remarks came at the second conference of the Badr Organization, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which Abdul Aziz al-Hakim also heads. Al-Hakim was the leader of the Badr Corps in the 1990s through 2003.

Talabani said at the Badr conference, "Your role is still needed, as is that of your brethren, the Peshmerga."

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said, "The Badr Organization sees as among its responsibilities, and the responsibility of all sincere national Iraqi forces-- especially the Peshmerga-- to benefit from these forces, through official channels, including the law . . . Given our appreciation for the efforts and sacrifices of of our brethren and our sons, the heroes of the Badr Organization, and for all those who sacrificed themselves to defend the Iraqi people-- it is necessary to give them precedence in bearing administrative and governmental responsibilities, especially in the security fields."

Earlier, Talabani had admitted that the US opposed the use of the ethnic militias, for fear it would exacerbate ethnic tensions. But the winners of the Jan. 30 elections were SCIRI and the Kurds, and it is natural that they should now attempt to entrench their paramilitaries. The position of Talabani and al-Hakim on the use of their militias will anger most Sunni Arabs.

The Sunni Arab bloc demanded better representation on the parliamentary committee that is drafting a permanent constitution. They want 25 of their members added to the committee. (Some Sunni representatives have been added on a non-voting basis, which is not generally acceptable to the Sunnis.)

Reuters says that the Sunni Arabs are demanding one third of the seats on the constitution drafting committee as a price for their participation in the process.

Reuters reports an assassination attempt against a member of the constitution drafting committee that left two of his bodyguard dead. He escaped harm.

Zalmay Khalilzad, proposed by the Bush administration as US ambassador to Iraq, hit the nail on the head several times during his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said that the US needs to make it clear it has no designs on Iraq`s natural resources. He said that the Sunni Arab elite had to be reached out to. He said that he would get out of the Green Zone and talk to local elites.

Security is so bad in Iraq that piracy has returned to the Basra area.

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The revenge of Baghdad Bob
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/06/09/baghdad_bob/…

Bush`s ludicrous statements about Iraq are increasingly reminiscent of the propaganda spouted by the former spokesman for the Iraqi regime -- except that they`re not funny.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juan Cole


June 9, 2005 | The sheer dishonesty of the Bush administration whenever it speaks about the situation in Iraq was on display again during Bush`s Tuesday press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recent weeks Bush has repeatedly expressed wild optimism, utterly unfounded in reality, about the political process in Iraq and about the ability of the new Iraqi government and army to win the guerrilla war. He has if anything been outdone in this rhetoric by Vice President Dick Cheney. This pie-in-the-sky attitude, which increasingly few believe, degrades our civic discourse, and it endangers the national security of the United States.

With Blair at his side, Bush trotted out his usual talking points on Iraq, speaking of freedom and remarking, "This is the vision chosen by Iraqis in elections in January." Bush added, "We`ll support Iraqis as they take the lead in providing their own security. Our strategy is clear: We`re training Iraqi forces so they can take the fight to the enemy, so they can defend their country, and then our troops will come home with the honor they have earned." He again trumpeted his alleged policy of spreading democracy in the region as a way of combating the "bitterness and hatred" that "feed the ideology of terror."

The two leaders were finally confronted by the press corps with the leaked Downing Street memo, which reported that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence agency MI6, had returned from Washington in July 2002 convinced that Bush had already decided on war. The notes of his report to Blair and British Cabinet members say, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Bush dealt with the memo by denying Dearlove`s observations. "My conversations with the prime minister was how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently it took place in London, happened before we even went to the United Nations -- or I went to the United Nations."

It has gotten so that on the subject of Iraq, the way you can tell when Bush is lying is that his mouth is moving.

Bush is trying to give the impression that his going to the United Nations showed his administration`s good faith in trying to disarm Saddam by peaceful means. It does nothing of the sort. In fact, the memo contains key evidence that the entire U.N. strategy was a ploy, dreamed up by the British, to justify a war that Bush had decided to wage long ago. It was the British who wanted Bush to go to the United Nations seeking an ultimatum that Saddam allow the weapons inspectors to return, in hopes that the Iraqi dictator would refuse. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is quoted as saying at the July 2002, meeting, "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force." (Emphasis added.) Among the main fears of the British Cabinet members was that a war against Iraq might be considered illegal by the Hague tribunal, leaving them open to war-crimes charges. They felt that going to the United Nations would provide a legal basis for the war if Saddam rejected the inspectors.

So, his going to the United Nations does not prove that Bush did not want a war, and it does not refute the charges in the memo, since the memo accepts that it would be a good thing to go to the U.N. and a better thing if Saddam rejected the ultimatum. In the event, Bush did not give the inspectors time to do their jobs. They examined 100 of 600 suspected weapons sites and found nothing. Bush rushed to war anyway.

The docile White House press corps, which until the press conference had never asked the president about the Downing Street memo, predictably neglected to press Bush and Blair on those issues, allowing them to get away with mere obfuscation and meaningless non-answers. At the end of his response to the question about the memo, Bush simply repeated his mantra, "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power." For his part, Blair managed to assert with a straight face, "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all."

The Bush administration`s empty prevarications about the reasons they went to war are matched by their increasingly surreal pronouncements on the situation in Iraq. In an appearance on CNN`s "Larry King Live" on Monday, May 30, Cheney said, "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they`re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." He went on to insist that America was safer as a result. As has become the Bush administration`s modus operandi on a wide variety of subjects, Cheney simply made the assertion, giving no evidence to back it up. In fact, the guerrilla war in Iraq is far more active, professional and effective now than it has ever been. It routinely assassinates important government officials and has killed nearly 900 Iraqis in the past two months. May was as deadly for U.S. troops as last January had been, and it was the worst month ever for casualties among reservists.

Asked at a May 31 press conference about the wave of bombings that have bedeviled Iraq daily since the new government was formed in April, Bush said, "I think the Iraq government will be up to the task of defeating the insurgents." He said he was pleased with the progress and was heartened by the Iraqi government`s Operation Lightning, which involved sweeps of Sunni Arab neighborhoods. But that operation has been plagued by charges that the new army ethnically profiled young Sunni Arab men, arresting them en masse rather than focusing on actual terrorists. As a result, it has increased Sunni Arab radicalism and anti-Americanism. And during the sweep of some Baghdad neighborhoods, violence exploded in other parts of the country, and bombings have not ceased in the capital itself.

The American public, according to a just-released Washington Post/ABC News poll, has not been taken in by the administration`s Panglossian pronouncements. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq. Nearly 60 percent said that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. More than 40 percent thought the Iraq war had made that country "a new Vietnam." And 52 percent maintained that the Iraq war has not made the United States safer.

It is always dangerous to democratic values for there to be such a large gap between what the president maintains and what the people know to be the case. More urgently, the Bush administration`s delusional state about the progress of its war suggests that it is incompetent to safeguard the nation`s security.

Bush and Cheney declare that the guerrillas are losing and their numbers and activities are falling. This sunny position may temporarily help prevent Bush`s falling poll numbers from sinking into the gutter, but it bears no resemblance to reality. The guerrilla war is threatening the entire American project in Iraq. The northern city of Mosul, with a population of over a million, had been quiet and relatively pro-American until November 2004. After the U.S. military launched its attack on the city of Fallujah, maintaining that it was a guerrilla center, enmity toward the United States spread rapidly across Iraq, and Mosul changed radically. Some 4,000 policemen resigned in fear of their lives, and Mosul became unstable and a site of continual guerrilla attacks.

Bush also misunderstands the significance of the Jan. 30 elections. Contrary to his hollow claims that the elections signaled the triumph of Iraqi unity, they were in fact a victory for sectarianism of a sort that did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. The Sunni Arabs, who largely did not vote, have only 17 members in the 275-seat parliament. They therefore are grossly underrepresented among the voting delegates on the committee charged with writing a new constitution, a situation that has contributed to the ongoing insurgency and threatens Iraq`s future. The Shiites and Kurds both voted enthusiastically. The Shiite religious parties that had been close to Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian hard-liners swept to power in the Legislature.

And a highly dangerous phase lies ahead, as the new Iraqi government must decide how much independence to grant the Kurdish north. The future of the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, with its vast oil reserves, is a particularly volatile subject. If Iraqi Arabs and Kurds -- whose peshmerga are the most potent Iraqi militia -- are not able to reach agreement, the possibility of major clashes, even a civil war, cannot be ruled out.

And there is scant evidence to support Bush`s claim that the war in Iraq is helping spread democracy in the Middle East, and no evidence whatsoever that the war is making America safer. The Egyptian elections are not going to be substantially more democratic. When democratic elections have been held, the results are hardly those that Bush and his neocon brain trust were hoping for. Elections in Lebanon, in which the militant Shiite group Hezbollah won overwhelmingly in the south, revealed the deep religious and ethnic fissures in that country. The postponed Palestinian elections are likely to increase the power of Hamas. The one-sidedly pro-Israel Bush administration has shown no willingness to deal realistically with either of those militant groups, and it has only recently and reluctantly adopted even a passive stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result, the single issue that most fuels anti-Americanism throughout the region remains incendiary.

Meanwhile, reports of Quran desecration and mistreatment of Muslim prisoners, including brutal killings, have brought rage at America to all-time highs throughout the Muslim world, including the strategically crucial nations of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Bush administration is so hated that the very idea of American-style democracy is now tainted in the eyes of many Muslims eyes -- and not just radicals. It is difficult to see how this is making America safer.

As journalist Sarah Whalen pointed out in the Arab News, the increasingly effective guerrilla war has vindicated Baghdad Bob. "Baghdad Bob" (his real name was Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf) was the spokesman for the Iraqi regime who issued an endless stream of ludicrous pronouncements about how the mighty Iraq army was turning Baghdad into a mass grave for Americans, and so on. Today, many of his predictions, such as the one that the Iraqis would hurl "bullets and shoes" at the invading U.S. military, not bouquets of roses, have come true. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Sahhaf has been honored on a higher plane. His rhetorical strategy, of simply denying reality, has now been taken over by his arch-nemesis, George W. Bush.

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Irgendwie sind diese alten Haudegen schon etwas besonderes. Sowas wie Piraten auf einem Segelschiff in der virtuellen Welt.

A Born Gambler Rolls the Dice at 88

Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian has bought and sold airlines, movie studios and Las Vegas casinos. Now he`s placing a bet on GM.

By David Streitfeld

Times Staff Writer

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-kerkorian9jun09,0,3460…

June 9, 2005

Ever since Kirk Kerkorian revealed last month that he was buying a major stake in General Motors Corp., people have been speculating about his motives.

Here`s one safe bet: The wealthiest man in Los Angeles is not acquiring shares in the biggest and sickest automaker out of any special affection for cars.
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Unlike many wealthy folk, Kerkorian does not fill his garages with lovingly shined roadsters. In a city where you are what you drive, he drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Before that, he drove a Taurus.

Long ago, he cared. When Kerkorian first became rich, he bought a lavish Cadillac and outfitted it with spiffy wire wheels. Then he got bored and got rid of the car.

For Kerkorian, this is a familiar pattern.

"I used to have beautiful watches," he says, extending his right wrist beyond the cuff of a crisp white shirt. It`s bare. "I`ve done those things," he adds, dismissing all sorts of luxury goods and high-profile events. The man who owned the legendary Hollywood studio MGM watches the Oscars on TV.

There`s only one thing whose appeal has remained constant: doing deals. For 60 years, Kerkorian has been buying and selling airplanes, airlines, movie studios and Las Vegas casinos and hotels, trading his way to what Forbes magazine estimates is a $9-billion fortune.

This week has been a big one, even for him. On Monday, Kerkorian turned 88, an age at which most moguls would be taking it real slow. Tuesday, he was the ghost in the room as unhappy GM shareholders assembled in Wilmington, Del., for their annual meeting. Wednesday, Kerkorian disclosed that he had acquired an additional 19 million GM shares in a tender offer, boosting his stake to 7%.

In Detroit, the reaction to Kerkorian has been half hope, half dread and complete surprise. Even his onetime partner, former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, says he was "stunned" that Kerkorian "had taken such a position in a difficult time."

Maybe, the optimists think, Kerkorian can spark management into saving GM, somehow pumping up its sales while slashing its healthcare costs. Or perhaps, the pessimists counter, he`ll push for a breakup, splitting the cash-rich financing arm from the ailing car-making part. That might be the end of GM as we know it.

Kerkorian denies any plans to exert an influence. "I`m a very passive investor," he says.

Many remember his 1990 passive investment in Chrysler. It turned into a hostile but unsuccessful takeover attempt in 1995. Yet it`s possible that he has no master plan for GM, and simply believes it`s a good buy.

"He`s a born gambler with a sixth sense for sniffing out value," says Iacocca, who joined in the ill-fated Chrysler bid. "Doing deals is what keeps him alive."

Doing them simply is what keeps him rich. "You get a checklist," Kerkorian says, "and then you just sort of ride herd on it." It`s always just a few items on a single sheet of paper.

His lawyer, Terry Christensen, has watched him invest for 35 years. One of Kerkorian`s strengths is his ability to screen out the extraneous.

"He likes something on a clear table, where he can see what it is," Christensen says.

At the moment, Kerkorian`s desk is actually quite cluttered, but he says this is atypical. He`s been away at the Cannes Film Festival, which he enjoyed from the deck of his 192-foot yacht, the October Rose.
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Kerkorian with his mother, Lily, about 1950. The entrepreneur, who was born in Fresno in 1917,
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This office, on a quiet Beverly Hills street, makes an unlikely command post. It`s discreet to the point of invisibility. The suite isn`t listed in the building directory and the nameplate on the locked door is blank.

Inside, there`s nothing to impress a visitor. Kerkorian`s office has a big desk, a small table and a couch. There are models of his Boeing 737 and, more incongruously, a sailing ship — a gift, he says, like many things in this room. There are few personal touches beyond the photos of Tracy and Linda, the children from his long-dissolved marriage to former Las Vegas dancer Jean Hardy.

His daughters, born in 1959 and `65, provided the name for Kerkorian`s holding company, Tracinda, and his foundation, Lincy, but have no direct involvement with his business.

Also on the shelves are a smattering of books. Several are about Armenia, the former Soviet republic that is Kerkorian`s ancestral land.
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Exactly a century ago, his father left Armenia for the San Joaquin Valley. Kirk, born in Fresno, initially spoke Armenian. Although he quickly learned English, the country has always exerted a strong pull. Many of his closest friends and colleagues have been of Armenian descent. Since the country declared its independence in 1991, he has been its benefactor to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Armenians have tried to express their gratitude. "Everyone wanted to name something for him. An avenue, a plaza, a city — you name it, why not?" says Haik Gugarats, assistant to the Armenian ambassador to the United States. "But it was his wish that we don`t."

Always, his wish is that you don`t. In "Fade Out," Peter Bart`s 1990 account of MGM Studios during Kerkorian`s ownership, Bart calls the billionaire "ever-mysterious," "reclusive" and an "enigma," and that`s just on Page 12.

He`s not reclusive, just quiet. Even in photographs, he says, you can tell which one is him, because he`s got his mouth shut. Unlike folksy Warren Buffett or geeky Bill Gates, Kerkorian casts no reflection in popular culture. Mention his name to people and they tend to confuse him with Jack Kevorkian, the suicide doctor.

This anonymity lets Kerkorian take his girlfriend to movies in Century City and Westwood without attracting attention. "The Upside of Anger," a family drama starring Kevin Costner, was a recent favorite. He tried to see the remake of "The Longest Yard," the prison football film, and it was sold out. This is a problem he could avoid by attending private screenings, but he says he`d rather be out with the public, usually in a middle row.

Unlike many moguls, his ego isn`t stroked by appearing in the press — this interview, which he did reluctantly but graciously, is a very rare exception. He`s not in the business of selling Kirk Kerkorian. He would never conceive of naming a Las Vegas hotel casino after himself, the way his competitor Steve Wynn just did. He goes into his hotels and the staff doesn`t recognize him, which is the way he likes it.

But there`s another explanation for Kerkorian`s reticence: shame. His formal education ended after the eighth grade when he left Jacob Riis, a school for delinquent boys at Sixth and Main streets in Los Angeles, and he thinks his conversation betrays it.

"I wish I could talk like Donald Trump or Steve Wynn," he says. "Hell, I`d love it."

A final reason is simply impatience. Reminiscing is something Kerkorian doesn`t have time for.

That`s not because he`s 88. No matter how old you are, he once told a friend, you`ve got to act as if you have 15 more good years. For Kerkorian, this may be the simple truth. His grandfather died in a Los Angeles convalescent home in 1940, at what he said was 116. Even if the old man was off by five or 10 years, Kerkorian says, that`s not bad.

Kerkorian could pass for a youth of 68. He`s being treated for macular degeneration, the deterioration of the central portion of the retina, so he sits out of the glare of the sun. But otherwise, thanks in part to endless games of tennis, he`s in splendid shape.

"I think it`s in our genes," says his sister, Rose. "I`m 94, and I still kick the dog around."



In 1916, Lily Kerkorian, Kirk`s mother, discovered she was pregnant. Again. Having figured her child-bearing years were over, she was annoyed, then determined. She consulted with the local Armenian wise women, who said she could induce an abortion by taking scalding baths.

It didn`t work, so the elders changed tack. Says Kerkorian, who learned as a teenager that he was unwanted: "They finally convinced her, now that you`re going to have it, it might be your lucky thing. He`ll take you to Hawaii."

Ahron Kerkorian, Kirk`s father, was an entrepreneur. He put together 1,000 acres of farmland near Bakersfield, but a recession hit and he couldn`t come up with $8,000 to stave off the bankers. Ahron moved his family to Los Angeles, where he became a fruit broker but found success elusive. "We had to move every three months because we couldn`t pay our rent," Rose remembers.

Kirk learned two things: First, don`t attach yourself too much to anything you own, because it might be taken away from you. "I`m not married to anything," is the way he expresses it in "Kerkorian: An American Success Story," a 1974 book by the late Los Angeles Times reporter Dial Torgerson.

A second lesson absorbed from his father`s travails: Don`t bet everything you have on one roll of the dice, because if you fail you won`t have anything left to bet next time.

Kirk first wanted to be a boxer like his older brother Nish. At nearly 6 feet, he was taller than opponents in his weight class, giving his arms a longer reach. At his second fight, in Bakersfield, he flattened the other fighter with one quick shot. The press nicknamed him Rifle Right Kerkorian. In 33 bouts, he only lost four times.

His ambition was to fight in Madison Square Garden but he got diverted — luckily, he says now. "My brother got really damaged fighting, and it probably would have happened to me. I`d be a punch-drunk fighter someplace."

What intervened was flying. Kerkorian was working with a friend, installing furnaces in houses in the San Gabriel Valley. During lunch, the friend would stop at Alhambra Airport, where he would take a Piper Cub up for a brief flight.

"I watched him do it three or four times," Kerkorian says. "I said, `You`re wasting 3 bucks on this?` But I took a ride, and got hooked."

He became a student, paying for the lesson but not the extra 50 cents to rent a parachute. He became an instructor, then a military instructor. During World War II, he was a ferry pilot for the Royal Air Force, earning $1,000 a month transporting planes from their Canadian factories to England. The work was incredibly dangerous, because the bombers weren`t designed for the North Atlantic`s bad weather or the long distance.

Some war historians believe that working for the Ferry Command was more hazardous than fighting the Luftwaffe. But it wasn`t quite exciting enough for Kerkorian.

The safest way to take one of the Mosquito bombers to England was to leapfrog from Labrador to Greenland to Iceland to Scotland. To go from Labrador directly to Scotland was barely possible, if the winds cooperated by hurtling you along.

On one 1944 nonstop flight, Kerkorian broke the old record of 8 hours and 56 minutes — but the other plane on the trip had gone even faster, diminishing his achievement. On another nonstop he was flying solo when the winds died in mid-ocean. Kerkorian nursed the plane in. As he was landing, it ran out of gas.

"It was a hot ticket, the most exciting two years of my life," he says, and then adds: "Almost."

He doesn`t have another period in mind — that would require too much thinking about what has gone before — but there`s a lot of competition. One candidate: the postwar years, when he dealt in government surplus planes.

In 1947, Kerkorian bought a C-47 transport in Hawaii for $12,000. He knew he could sell it for nearly twice that on the mainland. The trick was getting it there. The 2,400-mile journey from Honolulu to San Francisco greatly exceeded the plane`s range.

Kerkorian`s solution was to install eight additional fuel tanks. But there wasn`t enough margin of error, and the plane was draining the last of its fuel with nothing visible but ocean. Kerkorian and his three-man crew threw their luggage and everything else that wasn`t nailed down off the plane, trying to lighten it. That wasn`t enough. They were preparing to ditch when the coast, and the airfield, finally came in sight.

A few weeks later, Kerkorian took the plane`s sole life raft to the beach and tried to inflate it. Thanks to a hole, the raft was as seaworthy as a piece of paper. "I should have died and I didn`t," he says.

That was frequently true. In the late `40s, the entrepreneur started running what are now known as charter flights. "I was the mechanic, I`d clean the plane, I`d sell the tickets and then I`d fly it."

As time went on his natural impatience increased, which was a bad quality in a pilot. Once he was flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas when he noticed an oil smear on the engine cover. I`ll check it out later, he decided.

Later was almost too late — in Vegas, he discovered oil had leaked everywhere.

After that, he left the flying to others. He`d still gamble, but with money and not his life.

A deal maker`s long career of bold investments 1947: Kirk Kerkorian buys an air charter called Los Angeles Air Service for $60,000. It owns a DC-3, a Beechcraft and a Cessna. The company is later renamed Trans International Airlines. 1962: Sells the airline to Studebaker Corp. 1964: Buys back the airline. 1968: Sells the carrier to Transamerica for stock that eventually nets him $104 million. 1968: Acquires controlling 30% stake in Los Angeles-based Western Airlines. 1969: Forms International Leisure Corp. and sells 17% to the public for $26.5 million. The company acquires the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas and builds the International, the first successful Las Vegas casino not on the Strip. 1969: Purchases control of Culver City-based Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 1970-71: Sells two Las Vegas hotels to Hilton Hotels. 1973: Reenters casino gambling with construction of MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. 1976: Sells remaining 17% stake in Western Airlines back to the company for $30.6 million. 1978: Accumulates 25.5% stake in Columbia Pictures. After overcoming antitrust objections, attempts a takeover but gives up in 1980 after a bitter battle with management. 1980: Spins off MGM casino operations into separate public company, retaining controlling stakes in both. 1981: Arranges MGM acquisition of United Artists after losing out to Marvin Davis in bid to acquire 20th Century Fox. 1982: Creates MGM/UA Home Entertainment to license MGM films for home video, sells 15% of the stock to the public, then buys it back. 1983: Makes but then withdraws offer to buy all shares of MGM/UA that he doesn`t own. 1984: Makes abortive effort to acquire control of Walt Disney Productions. 1985: Spins off United Artists as a separate public company. Buys the 30% of MGM Grand Hotels he doesn`t own for $126 million and months later sells its Las Vegas and Reno hotels to Bally Manufacturing for $440 million. 1986: Ted Turner buys MGM for $1.5 billion, but a financial squeeze forces him to sell back MGM`s name, logo and production and distribution assets. Turner keeps about 3,000 film titles. 1987: Kerkorian starts luxury airline MGM Grand Air. Agrees to buy the venerable Desert Inn and Sands hotels on the Las Vegas Strip from Summa Corp. 1990: Italian businessman Giancarlo Parretti buys MGM/UA for $1.3 billion. Within a year, lender Credit Lyonnais seizes the studio when Parretti fails to make payments. 1990: Kerkorian buys 9.8% of Chrysler Corp. 1991: Makes a failed bid for Trans World Airlines with TWA unions. 1992: MGM Grand Air shuts down. 1995: Makes a bid for Chrysler but is unsuccessful. 1996: Buys MGM for the third time for $1.3 billion, with Australian broadcaster Seven Network. 1998: Buys out Seven Network, gaining a 90% interest in the company. Acquires PolyGram`s film library. 2000: MGM Grand buys Mirage Resorts for $4.4 billion. 2000: Kerkorian files a $9-billion securities fraud suit against DaimlerChrysler over the German automaker`s merger with Chrysler. 2001: Cuts stake in DaimlerChrysler almost a third. 2002: Seeks a new buyer for the MGM studio. 2004: MGM Mirage announces it will buy Mandalay Resort Group, dramatically increasing Kerkorian`s investment on the Las Vegas Strip. April: A federal court rules for DaimlerChrysler in Kerkorian`s suit. April: Sony Corp. and partners complete a $4.9-billion purchase of MGM from Kerkorian. May: Kerkorian announces that he owns nearly 4% of General Motors and says he intends to double his stake. Wednesday: His company says it increased its GM ownership to 7.2%, missing Kerkorian`s investment target. Source: Times librarian John Jackson

In 1990, Kerkorian summoned his investment advisor, Michael Tennenbaum, to his house. It was a Sunday morning in September, and Kerkorian announced that he wanted to buy some stock: 22 million shares of Chrysler.

Tennenbaum, the vice chairman for investment banking at the Wall Street firm of Bear, Stearns & Co., was surprised — and alarmed. Kerkorian hadn`t invested in the auto industry before, and the No. 3 company didn`t seem like a good buy for anyone. It had billions in debt and billions more in unfunded pension liabilities.

"Gee, they`re in pretty bad shape," Tennenbaum said. He offered to have Bear, Stearns analysts prepare an in-depth report on Chrysler`s prospects.

"I`d rather you wouldn`t," replied Kerkorian.

Tennenbaum felt like he had had a door slammed on him. You don`t treat Wall Street bankers like that. He later complained to the brokerage`s chairman, Alan "Ace" Greenberg, who set him straight.

"Don`t tell Babe Ruth how to hold his bat," Greenberg admonished.

In two years, Chrysler`s value tripled. Tennenbaum, who now runs his own investment firm in Santa Monica, grew more respectful. "Kirk has a special talent," he says. "He can see things."

Kerkorian hasn`t changed his approach with GM. "People are dying to find out what investment banker gave him advice," said his lawyer, Christensen. "The answer is, none."

A special talent. Foresight. A golden gut. The ability to see around corners. A sixth sense. His friends and associates differ on the label, but all agree that Kerkorian has a unique ability to make successful bets on the future.

To hear him tell it, though, it`s often just a happy accident.

"I`ve had more people tell me, did you envision this or that?" Kerkorian says. "It would be bullshit if I said anything. I just lucked into things. I used to think that if I made $50,000 I`d be the happiest guy in the world."

Take his investments in Las Vegas. He started going there in 1946, flying high rollers from L.A. who didn`t want to waste precious gambling time on what was then a 10-hour car trip. He began investing in the city nine years later, putting $50,000 into a hotel. It wasn`t a good moment — the city was in one of its periodic over-built phases — and he lost the money.

Subsequent investments, in both land and hotels, were more profitable. Three times — in 1969, 1973 and 1993 — Kerkorian built the largest hotel in the world in Las Vegas. He would buy something or build something, sell it when the time was right or, occasionally, when he had to, and then regroup and buy something else.

In April of this year, MGM Mirage, a publicly traded company that is 55% owned by Kerkorian, bought Mandalay Resort Group for $7.9 billion. That brings its Vegas properties to 11, including some of the biggest and best-known: the Bellagio, Mirage, Luxor, Excalibur, New York New York, Circus Circus, MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay hotel-casinos.

Despite his long residence in Los Angeles, Las Vegas is Kerkorian`s kind of place. Picture yourself a street kid in the Los Angeles of the early 1920s, he says. What do you do for entertainment when you`re not sneaking into movies? You draw a line in the dirt and pitch pennies — if not for money, for bottle tops.

"I`m a gambler at heart," he says. "That`s my life." Every time he landed a plane during the war, he would find the poker game on the base and play for hours.

Kerkorian used to gamble just like everyone else, by chasing bets and staying at the tables forever. One anecdote has him coming to Vegas with friends, sending their bags up to their rooms and plunging into gambling. They lost all their money, sent the bellman up to fetch their bags and went home, without ever seeing their rooms.

Finally realizing that sort of gambling didn`t pay off, he says, "I shortened the play."

He decides his betting limit and if he loses it, even after only five minutes, he walks away. His casinos would go broke if all gamblers took this approach.

"I never know when to stop," says Las Vegas developer Irwin Molasky. "I`m like most gamblers. Kirk knows when to stop. He has a plan, always."



There`s only one other person who flew planes and owned an airline, a Hollywood studio and Vegas hotels and casinos: Howard Hughes, of course.

Kerkorian, one of the few people still around who met Hughes in person, loved Martin Scorsese`s biopic "The Aviator." He compares himself to Hughes, but only to point out his own insignificance. "This guy broke real speed records. He designed airplanes. He was a great engineer. He did huge things."

But for 20 years, until his death in 1976, Hughes was a genuine recluse, lost in obsessive-compulsive disorders and other phobias. That period is what`s remembered in the popular imagination, not his achievements.

It`s a tragedy, Kerkorian says. "He had some of the worst [airplane] crackups you ever saw. He got really stuck on drugs. It was too bad there was nobody strong enough around him to say, `You`ve got to clean up.` He didn`t have dear friends like I do."

Kerkorian has always been loyal to his friends, and they`ve always been loyal to him. When young Kirk was sent to reform school, his best friend, Norman Hungerford, intentionally misbehaved so he would be sent there too. After 80 years, the two still keep up.

If his friends help keep his life in balance, tennis is what gives Kerkorian energy. He was a late convert to the game, not picking up a racket until he was 50. Now he plays several times a week, often in a doubles competition with buddies affectionately named "the grudge match." They play, eat lunch, play again.

"We used to have such fun teasing each other about it," says Joe Sugerman, one of the players. "It was a terrific escape from all the pressures of the week."

Sugerman is speaking in the past tense because some of the fun has gone. Kerkorian`s regular partner was ICM agent Mort Viner. During a game two years ago, the players were changing sides when Viner fainted. A heart attack killed him. In his memory, at lunch the players keep his chair vacant.

Recently, Kerkorian has been playing in senior tournaments for those 85 and up. The U.S. Tennis Assn. ranked him and his doubles partner, 88-year-old Irving Converse, 11th in their age category.

"Some old guys get pretty upset about losing. Kirk`s not like that," Converse says. "He enjoys the game, win or lose. Of course, the more he wins, the better."

*

Times staff writer John O`Dell contributed to this report.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Thursday, June 09, 2005
War News for Thursday, June 9, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed by roadside bomb near Dour.

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers killed in mortar attack near Tikrit.

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed by roadside bomb near Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Twenty-two Iraqi soldiers kidnapped near Rawa.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi bodyguards for Iraqi National Assemblyman assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqis killed by car bomb in Baquba.

Bring `em on: Nineteen Iraqis killed, 70 wounded by three car bombs near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Oil pipeline ablaze near Beiji.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi government employees assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Heavy fighting reported near Tal Afar.

Bring `em on: Six unidentified bodies discovered near Qaim.

Bring `em on: Pirates raid oil tanker off Basra.

Civil war. "A militant Shiite Muslim group with close ties to Iran has gained enormous power since Iraq`s January elections and now is accused of conducting a terror campaign against Iraq`s Sunni Muslim minority that includes kidnappings, threats and murders. But in spite of concern among Sunni Arabs that the Badr Brigade is behind a series of brutal attacks against Sunni clerics, including cases where victims appear to have been tortured with electric drills, the group was praised by top Iraqi government officials on Wednesday. `Today, there is a sacred mission of sweeping away the remnants of the dictatorship and defeating the terrorism, and your role with your brothers in the (Kurdish militia) is required and necessary to fulfill this sacred mission,` Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, told a meeting of Badr members. At the same gathering, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari praised Badr for its restraint, saying `force without integrity is evil and integrity without force is weakness.`" Thanks to Anonymous for this informative article.

Negotiations? "The U.S. Embassy has held indirect talks with members of violent Iraqi insurgent groups, a U.S. official said Wednesday, edging back from a long-standing position not to negotiate with terrorists or those who have American or Iraqi blood on their hands. `People stop shooting at us, and we — and I think the Iraqi government — are ready to engage,` said the U.S. official, who spoke to a group of Western reporters on condition of anonymity. `People willing to condemn the use of violence, particularly against the Iraqi people, we`re willing to engage.`"

Mercenaries. "U.S. Marines forcibly detained a team of security guards working for an American engineering firm in Iraq after reportedly witnessing the contractors fire at U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians from an armed convoy, the military said Tuesday. After three days of detention in jail cells at a U.S. military base in Iraq, 19 employees of North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering, including 16 Americans, were released last week."

Press gang. "Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car. `They said we were going somewhere but I didn`t know we were going all the way to Seattle,` Axel said. Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him. He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an `apathy discharge` if he didn`t like it. And he wouldn`t have to go to Iraq if he didn`t want to. At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn`t gotten a chance to read. `Just formalities,` he was told. `Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about.`"

Army families. "The divorce rate among active-duty soldiers rose dramatically last year, especially among Army officers. In 2004, a total of 3,325 Army officers saw their marriages end in divorce, 6 percent of all marriages among officers, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center, the Pentagon’s statistics-gathering arm. That’s up 78 percent from 2003 statistics at 1,866 and nearly triple the rate in 2001, which saw 1,145 divorces. Among enlisted soldiers, 7,152 filed for divorce in 2004 (3.5 percent of total marriages), according to the Manpower Center. Those figures are up 28 percent from 2003 (with 5,587) and up 52 percent from 2001 (with 4,513). Divorce rates among the other services have increased only modestly or not at all in the same time period."

Rummy`s department. "The US defence department spent nearly £250m on combat boots, tents, tyres and medical supplies and then sold them at discount prices as "surplus to requirement" before ordering more of the same, according to a government watchdog. The wasted funds could have bought 1700 urgently needed Humvee patrol cars for troops in Iraq and ended a frontline body-armour shortage, said the report, published yesterday."

Poll numbers. "The poll also reflects a broader dissatisfaction with the second Bush administration. Almost every issue on which the White House has focused in recent months - social security reform, salvaging its most extreme judicial nominations, agitating to keep the comatose Terri Schiavo alive against the wishes of her husband - has proved unpopular. If Mr Bush`s ratings on the terrorism question have fallen, it is in part because he has barely mentioned the topic. The Iraq findings were the most striking, because the public has clearly rejected the line put out by President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney that the US is turning the corner and that the insurgency is in its last throes. Almost 900 Iraqis and Americans have been killed in the past six weeks. Iraq`s oil pipeline to Turkey was hit by a new sabotage attack yesterday."

Conservative hypocrite. "Would I encourage my grandsons to go to war? Never. But neither would I encourage them to run off to Canada to avoid military service or to desert if things got rough. There is nothing noble about cowardice, and I wouldn’t want them to have to live with that feeling for the rest of their lives."

Tammy Duckworth Day. "Wednesday was dedicated Tammy Duckworth day in Illinois, an honor the Illinois major takes humbly. `It`s truly humbling because I`m just a soldier. I was just there doing my job,` said Maj. Tammy Duckworth, Illinois National Guard. Duckworth was just doing her job in Iraq. While flying a Blackhawk helicopter, she was hit with enemy fire. `I looked at the other pilot and said, "Hey, I think we`ve been hit." Of course, I swore. And as soon as those words left my mouth, the RPG penetrated through the window beneath my feet and there was a big fireball,` Duckworth said. Not having any idea how severely injured she was, her mission was to land the helicopter."

Commentary

Opinion:

The U.S. House of Representatives killed a bill in late May to formally limit the role of women in combat zones. Under the proposal, the Pentagon would have needed permission from Congress to open new combat positions to women. The original legislation also would have closed thousands of "forward support" positions in Iraq that are now open to women.

The bill`s supporters don`t like the notion of women anywhere near combat. They`d rather the ladies fluff pillows in the military hospitals and ride their tanks sidesaddle, far from the so-called front lines.

Fortunately, military leaders leapt to women`s defense — or rather, to the military`s defense — and helped deep-six the legislation.

"Women soldiers have performed magnificently in all types of Army formations," wrote Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, in a letter to Congress.

The male president of the Association of the U.S. Army also sent a letter to Congress in support of women. So did the male president of the National Guard Association.

Perhaps these men are closeted raging feminists. More likely they`re motivated by a simple truth: Today`s volunteer military can`t survive without women who are willing to put themselves in mortal danger.


Analysis:

Bush and Cheney declare that the guerrillas are losing and their numbers and activities are falling. This sunny position may temporarily help prevent Bush`s falling poll numbers from sinking into the gutter, but it bears no resemblance to reality. The guerrilla war is threatening the entire American project in Iraq. The northern city of Mosul, with a population of over a million, had been quiet and relatively pro-American until November 2004. After the U.S. military launched its attack on the city of Fallujah, maintaining that it was a guerrilla center, enmity toward the United States spread rapidly across Iraq, and Mosul changed radically. Some 4,000 policemen resigned in fear of their lives, and Mosul became unstable and a site of continual guerrilla attacks.

Bush also misunderstands the significance of the Jan. 30 elections. Contrary to his hollow claims that the elections signaled the triumph of Iraqi unity, they were in fact a victory for sectarianism of a sort that did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. The Sunni Arabs, who largely did not vote, have only 17 members in the 275-seat parliament. They therefore are grossly underrepresented among the voting delegates on the committee charged with writing a new constitution, a situation that has contributed to the ongoing insurgency and threatens Iraq`s future. The Shiites and Kurds both voted enthusiastically. The Shiite religious parties that had been close to Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian hard-liners swept to power in the Legislature.

And a highly dangerous phase lies ahead, as the new Iraqi government must decide how much independence to grant the Kurdish north. The future of the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, with its vast oil reserves, is a particularly volatile subject. If Iraqi Arabs and Kurds -- whose peshmerga are the most potent Iraqi militia -- are not able to reach agreement, the possibility of major clashes, even a civil war, cannot be ruled out.

And there is scant evidence to support Bush`s claim that the war in Iraq is helping spread democracy in the Middle East, and no evidence whatsoever that the war is making America safer. The Egyptian elections are not going to be substantially more democratic. When democratic elections have been held, the results are hardly those that Bush and his neocon brain trust were hoping for. Elections in Lebanon, in which the militant Shiite group Hezbollah won overwhelmingly in the south, revealed the deep religious and ethnic fissures in that country. The postponed Palestinian elections are likely to increase the power of Hamas. The one-sidedly pro-Israel Bush administration has shown no willingness to deal realistically with either of those militant groups, and it has only recently and reluctantly adopted even a passive stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result, the single issue that most fuels anti-Americanism throughout the region remains incendiary.


Casualty Reports

Local story: New York Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Alabama Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Marine dies from wounds received in Iraq.

Local story: New York soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier added to Iraq War casualty list two years after his suicide.

Local story: Arizona soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Alabama contractor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Irish contractor wounded in Iraq.
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Latest Fatality: Jun 08, 2005
June05: 18


Iraker:
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Published on Thursday, June 9, 2005 by Foreign Policy in Focus
Bush Administration Attacks on Amnesty International: Old Wine, New Bottles
by Stephen Zunes
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0609-23.htm

In what appears to be a concerted effort to discredit independent human rights advocates, the Bush administration and its allies in the media have been engaging in a series of attacks against Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization and winner of the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize.

Amnesty International has received support from literally millions of individuals around the world because of its steadfast defense of civil and political rights against repressive governments regardless of a given regime’s ideology, economic system, or strategic alliances. Avoiding politics, Amnesty provides regular reports of the human rights situation in every country in the world based upon certain objective criteria, and focuses its advocacy work on letter-writing campaigns to free individual prisoners.

Such consistent and credible reporting and advocacy to advance the cause of human rights does not sit well with the U.S. government, however, long the world’s number one military and financial backer of autocratic regimes and whose armed forces in recent years have engaged in widespread torture, extrajudicial killings, and other violations of international humanitarian law.

Following publication of a report on May 26 criticizing the abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military in detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere, Vice President Dick Cheney blithely dismissed Amnesty International’s well-documented findings, saying “I frankly just don’t take them seriously.” White House spokesman Scott McClellan claimed that the detailed accounting of U.S. human rights violations was “ridiculous and unsupported by the facts,” while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that Amnesty’s report was “absurd.”

President George W. Bush, in a press conference May 31, similarly referred to it as “an absurd report” and implied that the 44-year-old human rights organization was being used by terrorists and those “who hate America.”

Ironically, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush administration officials were regularly citing Amnesty International’s human rights reports as evidence of the perfidy of Saddam Hussein’s regime. For example, in reference to the Iraqi government, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld asserted that “We know that it’s a repressive regime” as a result of reports by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations “about how the regime of Saddam Hussein treats his people.” Rumsfeld added that a “careful reading” of Amnesty International’s reports document “the viciousness of that regime.”

It is one thing to criticize human rights abuses by foreign governments the Bush administration seeks to overthrow, and it is quite another thing to criticize human rights abuses by the United States itself.

A number of prominent American publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, have joined in the attack, calling Amnesty International a “highly politicized pressure group” whose allegations regarding human rights abuses by U.S. forces “amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda.”

This is not the first time the U.S. government has tried to discredit Amensty International, however.

For example, in 1982, Amnesty International reported how the Guatemalan army under dictator Efrain Rios Montt was engaged the slaughter of thousands of Indian villagers in what Amnesty described as a “genocidal policy.” In response, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala City insisted that Amnesty International had been duped by Communists. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan insisted that Rios Montt, who had seized power in a military coup a few months earlier, was “totally dedicated to democracy” and that the general had been given “a bum rap.” U.S. government documents subsequently released reveal that the CIA and other U.S. agencies were actually confirming the reports of widespread massacres by the Guatemala armed forces.

During that same period, Amnesty International reported that in neighboring El Salvador, the junta’s armed forces and special security units were engaged in the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of civilians, the majority of whom were nonviolent activists affiliated with peasant leagues, labor unions, religious organizations, human rights groups, and opposition political parties. However, Reagan administration officials denied such human rights abuses were taking place and Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders attacked Amnesty International for being one-sided and acting as apologists for “terrorists.” Subsequent investigations by the United Nations’ Truth Commission have confirmed the accuracy of Amnesty’s findings.

Also during the 1980s, the validity of Amnesty International’s reports regarding the widespread killings of Nicaraguan civilians by irregular forces based in Honduras and of Honduran civilians by security forces of their own government were repeatedly challenged by then-U.S. ambassador John Negroponte. Yet again, the U.S. government’s cover-ups were ultimately unsuccessful and Amnesty’s reports have since been acknowledged as accurate. Negroponte has since served as President Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, followed by a stint as the “ambassador” to Iraq (while still under U.S. occupation), and currently as the first Director of National Intelligence.

Despite Amnesty International’s frank reporting of human rights abuses in Nicaragua, Cuba, and other leftist governments, media outlets supportive of U.S. Central America policy rushed to the Reagan administration’s defense, with the Wall Street Journal falsely accusing Amnesty of applying “a gentler standard to U.S. adversaries in Central America than to U.S. friends” and using “ad hominem attacks” on “those offering conflicting evidence.”

A key figure in the Reagan administration’s efforts to discredit Amnesty International’s reporting on Central America was Elliot Abrams, who succeeded Enders as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. Despite being convicted of perjury in 1991 for lying to Congress under oath, President Bush during his first term appointed Abrams as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. Abrams currently serves as his deputy national security adviser--ironically in charge of promoting democracy abroad.

Efforts to discredit Amnesty International when it challenged the human rights abuses of U.S. allies continued into the 1990s as well. In 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Bill Clinton dismissed Amnesty International’s reports regarding the Israeli massacre of over 100 Lebanese refugees at a United Nations compound near Lebanese village of Qana, insisting--despite the failure to present any evidence to the contrary--that the killings were accidental.

In 1999, during a visit to Turkey not long after Amnesty International released a report documenting ongoing human rights abuses by the Turkish government, including the use of torture on an administrative basis, President Clinton praised what he described as a “renewed and clear determination of the Turkish government to take a stand against torture and to generally increase protection of human rights.” Despite the report noting structural impediments to any imminent lessening of ongoing abuses, the visiting American president declared “the human rights issue is moving in the right direction in this nation.”

Under the Bush administration, congressional Democrats have supported Republican efforts to discredit Amnesty International when it criticizes American allies. For example, in April of 2002, Amnesty International published a detailed and well-documented report regarding the Israeli military offensive in the occupied West Bank, noting how “the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] acted as though the main aim was to punish all Palestinians. Actions were taken by the IDF which had no clear or obvious military necessity.” The report went on to document unlawful killings, destruction of civilian property, arbitrary detention, torture, assaults on medical personnel and journalists, as well as random shooting at people in the streets and houses. In response, a bipartisan resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives challenged Amnesty’s findings, claiming that “Israel’s military operations are an effort to defend itself ... and are aimed only at dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas.” Though the chief sponsor was right-wing Republican leader Tom DeLay, the resolution was supported by such prominent congressional Democrats as Tom Lantos, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Mark Udall, John Lewis, Lane Evans, Barney Frank, Edward Markey, Major Owens, David Price, Steny Hoyer, Dick Gephardt, Jim McGovern, and Patrick Kennedy, among others. Indeed, there were only 21 dissenting votes against the resolution in the 435-member body.

With the Democrats demonstrating their willingness to team up with Republicans to try to discredit Amnesty International when it criticizes human rights abuses by the armed forces of key U.S. allies, it is not surprising that the Bush administration and its supporters now feel like they can get away with such brazen attacks against the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization when it criticizes U.S. forces.

Yet the influence that Amnesty International has been able to wield over the years in advancing the cause of human rights has never come from the backing of governments or political parties, but from the support of concerned individuals from around the world. It is therefore up to the American people to challenge any and all elected officials who seek to discredit this noble organization in order to cover up human rights abuses by the United States and its allies.

Stephen Zunes, Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

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Published on Thursday, June 9, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
US Policy Under Fire
by Lynne Glasner
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0609-24.htm

Drum roll please: Proof-positive documents that the US/UK lied about the rationale for invading Iraq and intentionally molded the ‘intelligence’ to enable the policy.

Then the bang ended with a whimper. Is lying just an integral part of the US culture and the political landscape, or are we such a cowed nation since 9/11 that whatever the government does is OK? Whatever the reason, we need to refocus the lens on the much bigger lie of omission, an issue that has a greater bearing on how we go forward as a nation.

What no one is talking about openly on either side of the Atlantic is the Bush Doctrine: the 21st century version of imperialism in which the US takes over the unfriendly dictatorships of the Middle East, one by one, and builds military bases across the region so that both the economies and self-defense of these countries become dependent on our largesse--a modern day colonization, if you will. The Bush Doctrine is based on neo-con ideas that have been simmering for over two decades. These ideas are narrowly discussed on some of the neo-con websites, but they have never gotten much traction outside of these circles.

The confluence of neo-con doctrines, 9/11, and Bush’s own religious fundamentalism gave the Bush Doctrine raison d’etre. The Bush Doctrine sets up a dependency that keeps the US in the position of the single superpower, controls the oil, and juggles to maintain Arab support all at once. Quite a coup if you are in accord with the objective: transforming the Middle East.

For Bush, the religious end (Apocalypse soon) justifies the means; for him it’s ordained by God so how could it be wrong? But the Bush Doctrine is actually an old, on-going neo-con position that has come home to roost in the ideology and persona of W. These policies underlie all the overt lies and aggressive stands taken by Bush and his supporters. The first leg of the plan is to frame both the policy and the actions taken on its behalf in terms that the public can sign on to: anti-terror, WMD possession that is or could be a threat, and the ‘peaceful’ installation of ‘democratic governments’ to thwart the threat. The removal of Saddam was only a short-term goal, the first of many steps in the long-term plan to remake the Middle East in the neo-con/US image. The Bush policy has never been about anti-terrorism, wmds or Saddam; it’s about reshaping the Middle East. That’s why as the rhetoric kept changing, the deception got lost in the bigger picture - it was no big deal to those who have bought into the goals. And to ensure both public confusion and support where they can get it, they play the propaganda cards as well as any middle-eastern dictator.

While the public starts to turn its attention to WMD lies and the shifting rationale for going to war, the neo-cons are busy behind the scenes fine-tuning the Doctrine and calling the shots within the Administration to make sea changes in the Middle East – building huge military bases with taxpayer dollars; threatening Iran and Syria with economic sanctions and more, trying desperately to hold on to the thin coalition forged in Iraq. Perhaps it’s by design that the current Iraqi ‘government’ is so tenuous. After all, if it fails, guess who will pick up the pieces and form another imposed interim government. By then, the military installations will be more deeply entrenched and better able to secure the country, what’s left of it. So as Iraq deteriorates, the neo-cons don’t really care – as Schwarzenegger said: “I’ll be back.”

Imperialism, of course, is an ingrained part of British history, but it is an archaic concept in this day and age and certainly no more politically correct there than it is in the US. Blair’s worry is of long-term US dominance and lack of confidence that the EU will be able to act as its counter. In the US neo-con value system, US lying only counts if you’re talking about Clinton’s sex life; in the UK, the lie covers Blair’s fear of being cut from the ‘A’ list of partners in the new, budding empire that our ambitious President is erecting (if “ya can’t beat em, join em” is Blair’s dictum). On both sides of the Atlantic, the public policy is very different from the private one and both Bush and Blair have used an equally hypocritical stance to lead their nations to war: the ends justify any means.

In this ‘benign’ imperialistic view, to the neo-cons the US is the protector of the world, to Bush as the leader of the US, he is the missionary of the 21st century. For both, promoting ‘democracy’ and preventing terrorism are the mantras and lying is OK in that context because it’s promoting the ‘greater good.’ The UK rationale is somewhat different, but the methodology is the same. When the liars are caught, they wrap themselves up in the American flag and act like philosopher-kings prodding a willing and weak public to trust their leaders because they know best.

Historically, presidential doctrines have defined our overall policy about every hundred years: Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Roosevelt Corollary of Monroe Doctrine (1904) and now here comes Bush 100 years later. The Bush Doctrine is not really so different in attitude from Monroe’s grabbing control of this hemisphere or Roosevelt’s aggressive seizure of commerce south of our borders. Both implied ‘or else’ threats. The Bush Doctrine is another corollary except the geography makes a seismic departure. The message is: stay out of the Middle East – we are the only superpower so we keep the oil and control it. Although in both of the earlier doctrines the underlying goal was also economic land-grab and protection of commerce, neither engaged in pre-emptive war and both were publicly announced at national addresses to the union.

Of course, the world has changed since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and his ‘big stick.’ The new Radical Republicans know that not only would American popular support for the Bush Doctrine be thin, but it would feed our enemies and create new opposition. Unfortunately, that reality doesn’t make the neo-cons stop and rethink the policy; it just impacts the strategy they use to put it in place. In order to start implementing such a policy, the Bush Administration has to lie, less they be stopped in their tracks. So they feed on the frenzy of post 9/11 fear and lie about the rationale for their actions. The fact that the Bush policy is shrouded in post-9/11, anti-terrorist language adds credence to it and allows a traumatized public to give their consent to lies in the name of “self-defense.” When the public gets wind of the lies, they forgive their lofty leaders in the name of anti-terrorism. Except that too is a lie. This perception has been carefully crafted to gain wider support for the underlying policy. The only policy rationales put out are about terrorism and fighting the enemies of democracy who threaten our existence. Lofty goals that no one would be against.

The Bush Doctrine is not new, it’s just not in the news. All the blustering about the lies about WMD and preplanning of the war miss the larger policy lie and it’s why the story fizzles. So long as the average American remains threatened by another terrorist attack, Joe American doesn’t care about lies in the name of self-defense. The neo-cons use the language and tactics of anti-terror in the same way as the Cold War hawks used it during the red scare in that embarrassing era of our history. Good-bye Cold War Domino Theory, hello War on Terror Reverse Domino Theory: take down the dictatorships of those who could supply our energy, one at a time, and replace them with our own colonial capitalistic enterprise. In their anti-terror frenzy, the Radicals go after anyone who is ‘soft’ on anti-terror the same way they did anyone who was ‘soft’ on communism.

The public needs to connect the dots: The much bigger and more important lie here is not all the lies about the existence of wmds – that was a red herring – it’s the non-announcement of the Bush Doctrine as official US policy.

Lynne Glasner lives in New York. She can be reached at [e-mail]

© 2005 Lynne Glasner

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When Peace Is The Enemy
Ten Deadly Enemies of Humanity in America
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article9095.htm

By Dr. Charles Mercieca

06/09/05 "ICH" - - Every dictionary describes enemy as “one hostile to another; one who hates another; a foe; an adversary; an antagonist; a hostile force, army, fleet, or the like.” The enemy’s goal is to destroy anything that comes in the enemy’s way that would prevent such an enemy from the achievement of set goals and purposes. Hence, any person or group that performs actions that are detrimental to our environment, to our very own life may be viewed as our deadly enemy.

Destructive Intent of American Corporations

Regardless as to whether or not Americans as a whole perceive it, we may single out the ten deadly enemies of the American people and of all people of all nations as a matter of fact. These are ten American largest corporations whose product is virtually lethal. They put in danger not only the people who work for such industries but also those who are directly or indirectly affected by their deadly products. They are all linked to wars and they all view peace as their outright enemy since peace would eventually render their product obsolete.

This means, they would not cease embracing their Satanic God, known as the never-ending-accumulation of wealth and money. These top deadly enemies make billions of dollars annually on the premise that the end justifies the means. To this end, they employ psychologists to study the mood of the people and to come with advertisement proposals so as to present their product deceitfully to the people. They want the American people either to accept it by all means or, at least, to remain indifferent about it. There is only one thing they do not want absolutely, namely, to see people openly critical against their deadly product.

In this presentation, we are not going into details on the nature of the deadly product of such ten big corporations. We are simply going to pinpoint them and bring them into the open for everyone to see and comprehend. We hope that those who are interested in the preservation of our environment and life would investigate on their own the extent of irreversible damage these monsters of our earthly society are procuring.

We are going to enlist them briefly and to explain what they do with a brief comment on how their product leads to the destruction of our environment and of our life. Needless to say, the fact that they may produce good product should not be a justification of their continued existence the way they are.

1. Lockheed Martin Corporation, better known by many as Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, is located in Forth Worth, Texas. This company chose to specialize in the manufacture of military aircrafts whose job is to devastate entire nations mercilessly in the name of national security, peace and world stability! It produces F-16 Fighting Falcon, the versatile air-lifter C-130J Super Hercules, the stealth fighter F-117 Nighthawk, and the next generation fighter F/A 22 Raptor. All these are meant to be used not by civilians for positive and constructive purposes, but by the military for negative and destructive activities.

This lethal company has been awarded contracts to build the multi-service and multi-mission F-35 Joint Strike Fighter! Lockheed Martin sells its products to any nation that gives the right price under the pretext that such nations have a right for self-defense! Like Retired US Admiral Gene La Rocque remarked in his videotapes: “Military product is manufactured primarily not for the defense of the USA or of any other country but merely for profit.”

2. Boeing Company is viewed as the largest aerospace company in the world. It is commissioned to make commercial jets that it sells to any nation that wishes to purchase such a product. Although Boeing tries to stress the word “commercial” in its advertisements, it is also in the business of making military aircraft and missile in addition to phantom works. It tries to justify its product as an effective means for the United States to defend itself against the enemy. Here we need to ask: Who is the enemy? At one time the answer was: The Soviet Union. However, after the Soviet collapse they came out with another enemy known as the rogue states, which consist of a group of some five to six banana republics where people are starving and are having surmountable problems.

Like every other big industry, Boeing is primarily concerned with profit. To this end, it would not object to provide every single nation on earth with its product as long as involved nations would pay the right price. Confronted with such a reality, the concept of nationalism and patriotism for Americans becomes literally meaningless. And to distract the American people from the industry’s malicious intent, the stress on the concept of patriotism emerged to be popular. This explains why nowadays you see some of the top executives in these deadly corporations, along with top US government officials, wearing an American flag pin on their chest.

3. Northrop Grumman Corporation works under the guise of national security, civil and industrial needs by providing advanced information technology systems whose ultimate goal is to make American wars more devastating as to kill the maximum amount of people possible with the least effort. Among other devices, it has developed Kinetic Energy Interceptors Missile Defense Battle Management Capabilities. This company has made the waging of wars as its source of income. Behind the scenes it makes sure that wars are constantly taking place, even if it had to provide weaponry systems to potential enemies and then instigate them to use them via third parties. This would be needed to give them the excuse to start a devastating war where everyone, including Americans, would be a loser and no one a winner.

We need to keep in mind that in the United States both individuals and corporations have the freedom to make money the way they want. This policy has enabled the manufacturers of all kinds of weapons to develop into lucrative businesses no matter how much their product would prove to be detrimental to innocent people. After all, as we learned from the Iraqi war, the massacre of innocent Iraqis in tens of thousands has been referred by American politicians who support fully the weapons industry not as victims but merely as collateral damage, like people were a piece of discarded furniture.

4. General Dynamics Corporation is one of the major military contractors. Recently it was awarded $900 million contract for the production of 2.75 inch rockets from the US Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. This corporation, like other similar ones, is in the business of air and water pollution and of hastening the road to Armageddon. Under the guise of peace, General Dynamics continues to fleece the US government of tens of millions of dollars, money that would have been used constructively to provide homes for the homeless, give our children adequate health care and education, and enable researchers to find remedies to such deadly maladies as cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, among others.

General dynamics is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia and it employs over 70,000 people worldwide. In 2004 it had revenue of over $19 billion dollars. Its lethal product is used for expeditionary combat systems, armaments and munitions as well as shipbuilding and marine systems among. This corporation is responsible for rockets that can be fired from a variety of rotary and fixed platforms that include, among others, US Army apache and US Marine Corps Cobra attack helicopters. One of the best sources to see what this corporation, along with other deadly ones mentioned in this presentation, is doing would be the internet.

5. Raytheon Company specializes in high technology with operations in commercial and defense electronics, engineering, construction, aviation, and major appliances. This company has embarked on advertisements that show the company’s concern for the “needs of the people” starting with giving assistance to families of US military men in Iraq. At the same time, this company supports the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Most of its war products are in testing today. In spite of its effort to establish a good image as being humanitarian and peaceful, Raytheon does nothing positive and constructive for peace in the sense that it works for the prevention of war rather than for the waging of war.

The idea that these deadly enemies in America of our earthly community would work for a genuine peace through the development of a program of international disarmament and arms control not only it does not exist in their agenda, but the very thought of it may be easily dismissed as craziness! This company, like the others enlisted in this presentation, has people trained in talking with top government officials by presenting them with videotapes showing how the development of more sophisticating and devastating weapons would enhance the national security of the United States. Unfortunately, most of the US government officials, mostly Republicans, fall easily into trap and concede to allot more and more money for more and more weapons and wars.

6. United Technologies Corporation claims to be a $37 billion company whose products include heating and cooling fire and security systems along with Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, Sikorsky helicopters and UTC Power fuel cells, among others. As stated earlier, these deadly corporations are in the business of making money through the production mostly of devastating lethal products. Recently, Sikorsky S-92 helicopter won Korean Presidential competition. This type of helicopter is now sold to South Korea. United Technologies Corporation states that what it manufactures is merely for national defense and security of the United States and of all the other countries that purchase such products.

There is no war machinery whatsoever that is said to be manufactured for purpose of the destruction of the infrastructure of nations and the massacre of numerous innocent people. When this happens we already know what they would say relative to the horrendous crimes that are committed against innocent people in every way. It’s merely collateral damage! The best contribution that this company could do is to get out of the war business, the sooner the better. We need to develop an international program of disarmament and arms control. At the same time, we need to leave the job of international relations and peace in the hands for world-wide humanitarian organizations and out of the hands of the government’s officials.

7. Halliburton Company claims to be one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industries. No wonder it moved so quickly to take hold of the oil in Iraq shortly after the American invasion and occupation. This company employs 100,000 people in over 120 countries. These people are primarily trained in drilling and formation evaluation, fluid systems, production optimization as well as digital and consulting solutions. Over the past several years, this company made it clear that it wants to be second to none in technological leadership, operational excellence as well as innovative business relationships, and dynamic workforce.

Three of the most dangerous and abusive companies in the USA are the trio corporations consisting of the weapons, oil and construction companies. They seem to work hand in hand. The weapons industry destroys the infrastructure of a nation such as it has been in Iraq, then the oil industry steps in to take charge of the existent oil of such nation and other rich natural resources when available, while the construction company steps in to rebuild what the weapons industry destroyed successfully. Needless to say, these three big corporations seem to work hand in hand like they were a mafia type of organization.

8. General Electric Company seems to be one of the most astute companies in the world when it comes to the advertisement of its product. It focuses on products that are mostly used by the general public, like bulbs and refrigerators. When it comes to the products that are harmful to people, it tends to play it cool and hardly makes any public advertisements. This company has some $500 billion dollars in assets and has business in 47 nations around the world. It has been heavily involved in nuclear weapons emitting toxic wastes that made countless thousands of people have numerous health problems many of whom died prematurely. A videotape report was made to illustrate this reality entitled: Deadly Deception.

This videotape report was produced by a concerned private humanitarian organization known as Corporate Accountability International, and could be contacted at 46 Plympton Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02118. This organization has been very active in protecting the life of ordinary citizens whose air has been dangerously polluted by big corporations that included lately the giant oil corporations of Exxon/Mobil, and Chevron/Texaco. It also got after other big corporations like Coca-Cola, which has been draining all of the pure water they can get hold on, and tobacco giants like Phillip Morris whose structured deceitful advertisements about their lethal product has hooked millions on nicotine most of whom were sent to their grave already. General Electric Company remains a very dangerous company because of its involvement in nuclear weapons.

9. Science Applications International Corporation is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States. Like the other mentioned big corporations, this corporation is also involved in military ventures. Just recently it signed a contract with the US Air Force to provide system engineering and integration support for the Joint Mission Planning system (JMPS) for a period of 12 years. The contract exceeds $200 million dollars. The ultimate purpose would be to make US military missions, as they are called, more effective. In plain words, the objective would be for the US Air Force to become more devastating in future wars on any regional or global scale.

Some of the work that is performed deals with health care, energy and telecommunication. Needless to say, each of these deadly companies do provide services that could be termed to be positive and beneficial but such services do not seem to be the focus of the company as a whole. Besides, this giant corporation is trying to work hand in had with military vehicles, homeland security as well as anything that goes under the titled of national security, whatever that may mean since such a phrase has been so much misused and abused in the past. Some of its major clients may be enlisted as criminal justice, space ventures, which may include control of weapons in space, and effective transportation in addition to others.

10. Computer Sciences Corporation provides mostly consulting, systems integration and design, and software for industries and for governmental requirements. Although this corporation is also involved with health services, its focus seems to be on aerospace and defense dealing with weapons and military equipment for purpose of waging of endless wars. The US government spent billions of dollars on this industry at the expense of the American people’s health care and education. Such money could have been used to improve Americans’ quality life through the elimination of hunger, the provision of homes for the homeless, and the cure of diseases that are killing Americans unnecessarily.

According to the United Nations report on the children’s state of health in every country, one out of five children in the USA suffers from malnutrition and hunger. As stated by retired top military commanders of the US Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC, these big military corporations are not primarily concerned with the defense of the American nation, nor of any other nation as a matter of fact. Their primary and only concern is profit as stated eaerlier. When the Soviet Union collapsed the United States was given the opportunity to bring about a permanent world peace through the development of an international program of disarmament and arms control. After all, this has been a major goal of the United Nations since its establishment in 1945.

We are submitting a list of names and addresses of main offices of these top ten deadly enemies of humanity in America in the order of billions of dollars that were made out of the manufacture and sales of military ammunitions and weapons of mass destruction during the year 2004.

1. Lockheed Martin Corporation, 6901 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20917, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

2. Boeing Company, 100 North Riversides, Chicago, Illinois 60606, USA, Phone: [phone],

3. Northrop Grumman Corporation, 1840 Century Part East, Los Angeles, California 90067, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

4. General Dynamics Corporation, 13880 Del Sur Street, San Fernando, California 91340, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

5. Raytheon Company, 870 Winter Street, Waltham, Massachusetts 02451, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

6. United Technologies Corporation, 275 Westminster Street, Suite 400, Providence, Rhode Island 02903, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone], Fax: [phone]

7. Halliburton Company, 5 Houston Center, 1401 McKinney, Suite 240 C, Houston, Texas 77020, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

8. General Electric Company, 1717 East Interstate Avenue, Bismarck, North Dakota 58503, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

9. Science Applications International Corporation, 10260 Campus Point Drive, San Diego, California 92121, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

10. Computer Sciences Corporation, 2100 East Grand Avenue, El Segundo, California 90245, USA, Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

In conclusion, the American people have the sacrosanct duty to bring these ten deadly enemies of humanity in America under control by refusing to manufacture weapons and deadly military equipment and to insist with such corporations to replace without delay their lethal products with constructive items that would be beneficial to all people without exception.

Dr. Charles Mercieca. President of International Association of Educators for World Peace NGO, United Nations (ECOSOC), UNDPI, UNICEF, UNCED & UNESCO Professor Emeritus of Alabama A&M University

Copyright: Dr. Charles Mercieca.

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Zu dem Tatort von letzten Sonntag ein Wort. In Gitmo sitz ein Verdächtiger aus Bremen, den, ich glaube, die Pakistanis in ihrem Land aus einem Reisebus geholt haben und an die USA überstellt haben. Er soll Kontakte zu den Attentätern haben.
Sonst der Film war ein Fixierbild, dass sehr schön mit Versatzstücken gearbeitet hast, aber in dem Land der Dichter und Denker wird sowas alles gleich ernst genommen.

June 10, 2005
Report Details F.B.I.`s Failure on 2 Hijackers
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/politics/10fbi.html?hp&ex=…

WASHINGTON, June 9 - The F.B.I. missed at least five chances in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, to find two hijackers as they prepared for the attacks and settled in San Diego, the Justice Department inspector general said in a report made public on Thursday after being kept secret for a year. Investigators were stymied by bureaucratic obstacles, communication breakdowns and a lack of urgency, the report said.

The blistering findings mirror those of the independent Sept. 11 commission last summer and a joint Congressional inquiry in 2002 but they also provide significant new details about the many bureaucratic breakdowns that plagued the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the attacks and are likely to fuel questions about the bureau`s efforts to remake itself. The Sept. 11 commission had access to an earlier version of the inspector general`s study and incorporated parts of those findings in its final report.

In the case of the San Diego hijackers, for instance, the report disclosed that an F.B.I. agent assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to pass on information to the F.B.I. about the two men in early 2000 - 19 months before the attacks - but was blocked by a C.I.A. supervisor and did not aggressively follow up. That set the stage for a series of bungled opportunities in an episode that many officials now regard as their best chance to have detected or disrupted the Sept. 11 plot.

Many passages in the public version of the report were blacked out to shield information still considered sensitive by the government; an entire 115-page section on one terror suspect was withheld.

The report provides new information about the bureau`s mishandling of a warning from an agent in Phoenix in July 2001 about Middle Eastern extremists connected to Osama bin Laden using American schools to receive aviation training.

The F.B.I.`s cumbersome computer system - still beset by problems today - did not automatically forward the agent`s memorandum to bureau officials who were supposed to receive copies of it, the report found. Those agents who did see the warning did not have the time to follow it up, or disregarded it because they felt the presence of Middle Eastern flight students was already commonly known. The agents were also concerned that racial profiling had become so "hot" an issue that they could not pursue the Phoenix agent`s suspicions, according to the report.

But the report stopped short of recommending disciplinary action against any F.B.I. employees.

"What we found were significant deficiencies in the way the F.B.I. handled these issues," Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general, said in an interview. "We don`t believe it was misconduct on the part of individuals so much as systemic problems, but we do recommend that the F.B.I. review the performance of individuals on its own."

The F.B.I. said in a statement that it had taken significant steps since the Sept. 11 attacks to address the types of problems the inspector general identified.

"By building our intelligence capabilities, improving our technology, and working together, we have and will continue to develop the capabilities we need to succeed against all threats," said Cassandra Chandler, an assistant director at the bureau.

Still, the depth of bureaucratic problems the report discusses is likely to intensify the debate about whether the F.B.I. has made enough progress since the attacks in remaking itself into an agency able to detect and disrupt terror threats within the United States.

The F.B.I. withstood efforts by some critics last year to create a new domestic intelligence agency modeled on Britain`s MI-5, with many lawmakers saying they were impressed by the leadership of F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III.

But in recent weeks, questions about the F.B.I.`s future have resurfaced, driven by mixed reports from outside groups about the bureau`s success in reorganizing. Of particular concern are the F.B.I.`s difficulties in hiring and training terrorism analysts and in developing a modern computer software system to allow agents to search case files. The bureau scrapped a $170 million "virtual case file" system and announced a new plan this week.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has frequently criticized the bureau, said Thursday, "We can hope the F.B.I. is making the needed changes, but the simple answer is it looks like they`ve got a long ways to go."

He said he was "not at the point yet" of favoring a new domestic intelligence agency to supplant the F.B.I., but added, "When you get reports like this, you`re getting closer."

The report showed, Mr. Grassley said in an interview, that "even when there were eyes and ears before 9/11 that told the F.B.I. things that needed to be known, they ignored it, and they just didn`t have the capability to connect the dots."

Kristen Breitweiser, a leader of a Sept. 11 survivors` group whose husband died in the attacks, called the report "a long time coming."

She said it was "wholly unacceptable that more than three years after 9/11, the F.B.I. still doesn`t have a useable computer system, and we`re still dealing with the same problems we were before. How much ineptitude are we going to tolerate?"

The inspector general`s report, totaling more than 400 pages, was completed in July 2004 in classified form.

But it was kept secret for the last year, in part because of concerns from government officials about classification issues and in part because of objections from defense lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui and the federal judge in his terrorism case, who said the public release could compromise his prosecution. In order to make the report public, the inspector general agreed to delete a 115-page section that dealt with F.B.I. missteps in investigating Mr. Moussaoui`s activities in the summer of 2001. The Mossaoui section will most likely be released publicly only after he is sentenced.

A separate report by the inspector general at the C.I.A. concerning that agency`s performance before Sept. 11 has not yet been given to Congress or released publicly. It is believed to contain sharp criticism of officials at the highest levels of the agency, including George J. Tenet, the former intelligence chief, and James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director of operations. Its completion has been delayed by objections raised by lawyers for some of the officials believed to have been named.

The report by the Justice Department inspector general uses only first-name aliases to identify F.B.I. employees who played roles in both the handling of the San Diego hijackers and the Phoenix memo.

The case of the San Diego hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Al-Hazmi, has been a source of friction between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. since Sept. 11, and the inspector general cites missteps and communication failures at both agencies.

The two men were known to have taken part in a meeting of Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in 2000 and entered the United States weeks later, settling in San Diego before taking part in the Sept. 11 attacks as two of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

The F.B.I. was aware of the Malaysia meeting but was not formally told by the C.I.A. that Mr. Midhar had gotten a visa to enter the United States, the report found. Still, an F.B.I. agent assigned to the C.I.A. knew about the visa and sought to share that and other information about Mr. Midhar with F.B.I. officials in New York and Washington, even drafting a memorandum.

But the report found that a C.I.A. supervisor blocked its sending, saying the agent did not have the proper authority. After another inquiry, the agent did not follow up.

The incident underscored problems in the use of F.B.I. agents assigned to the C.I.A. who found their jobs there were "ill-defined and with little direction," the report said.

Other missed opportunities came when F.B.I. agents failed to aggressively question a San Diego informant who was renting the men an apartment. Other key pieces of information were not passed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I., the report found.

The F.B.I. in New York remained unaware of much of what the C.I.A. knew about the two men when bureau agents undertook a cursory search for them weeks before the attacks, the report said.

The New York office assigned few resources and an inexperienced agent to track the men, and "little urgency was given to the investigation," the report said. "The F.B.I. was not close to locating Midhar and Hazmi before they participated in the Sept. 11 attacks," it concluded.

Even after an F.B.I. agent came to realize that Mr. Midhar was in the United States and might have valuable information, the Aug. 28, 2001, memo the agent sent to determine his whereabouts was marked "routine," the lowest level of urgency.

Agents in New York on the bin Laden unit "recognized that there was some urgency to the Midhar investigation." Yet the office "did not treat it like an urgent matter," assigning the case to an inexperienced agent, the report found. "The F.B.I. lost several important opportunities to find Hazmi and Midhar before the Sept. 11 attacks," it concluded.

The results were similarly dispiriting after an agent in Phoenix, Kenneth Williams, wrote a memorandum in July 2001 about his concerns that Osama bin Laden had initiated a "coordinated effort" to send operatives to the United States to receive aviation training.

The memorandum was dated July 10 but was not entered into the F.B.I.`s computer system until July 27, the inspector general found. It was forwarded from one counterterrorism section to another with no concrete action taken; one agent noted it would require "tremendous effort" to set up the canvassing operation on flight schools that Mr. Williams recommended, the report said.

The inspector general found that while the memorandum was regarded as an informed theory, not a specific warning, it "warranted strategic analysis from the F.B.I., which it did not receive, and timely distribution, which it did not receive."

The F.B.I.`s computer problems played a role, the report said. Supervisors in Washington who were copied in the memorandum`s "attention line" were not automatically notified they had received it; no supervisors saw it as of Sept. 11, the report concluded.

The inspector general`s office said he could not conclude whether more aggressive review "would have uncovered the Sept. 11 plot" but it "should have been handled differently."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 10, 2005
Losing Our Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960`s America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times`s series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives` entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I`ll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn`t emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970`s, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It`s not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what`s going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For example, it`s a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth. Yet this year`s Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970`s have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren`t sharing in the economy`s growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there`s good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won`t be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let`s try to do something about the politics of greed.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Friday, June 10, 2005

Attacks in Yusufiyah, Mosul, Kut
Islamic Parties Meet to Shape the Constitution

A vehicle accident near Hit in Iraq left a Marine dead on Wednesday, according to AP. 1,683 US military personnel have died so far in Iraq.

al-Sharq al-Awsat: A mortar attack aimed at a military site at Yusufiyah instead hit two civilian homes and killed two Iraqis and wounded 3. Guerrilla attacks in Mosul killed two policemen and wounded several other persons, including the wife, children and relatives of one of the policemen, whose house was targetted. The other policeman died when mortar shells rained down on the police station in Mosul. 5 were wounded in that attack. In Telafar the day before yesterday, a car bomb went off prematurely and killed 4 guerrillas. In Kut, police said that the day before yesterday, a grenade attack on the center of the Islamic Action Organization in the city left 2 persons wounded and wrought extensive damage to the building and its environs.

al-Sharq al-Awsat A source in the Iraqi Islamic Party said that an Islamic consultation committee has been formed from Sunni and Shiite religious parties and boards to discuss some constitutional issues before proposing them to the parliamentary committee charged with drafting the permanent constitution. The committee includes the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, and the Badr Organization.

Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru explain why the new Iraqi Army is unlikely to take over security duties effectively any time soon. The last sentence of the report is chilling.

Borzou Daragani in the LA Times reports on back channel contacts between the US Embassy in Baghdad and the Sunni Arab guerrilla movements. Some observers quoted in the article express skepticism about the sincerity of the contacts on both sides.

Major General Joseph Taluto admits that "good, honest Iraqis" form part of the guerrilla movement fighting the US presence. Taluto admits that 99 percent of fighters captured by the US in Iraq are Iraqis. He also offers a realistic assessment of the character of the guerrilla movement:


""I think there is a small core of foreign fighters. I don`t know how big that is but there is some kind of capability here, and it`s being replenished. Then there is a group of former regime personnel they`re the facilitators. They make all the communications, move the money, they enable things to happen. Their goal isn`t the same as the foreign fighters but they`re using them to do what they want to do.">



Tidbits from the Iraqi Press via BBC World Monitoring:


For June 8, 2005:

Al-Dustur publishes on the front page a 100-word report citing Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling for the inclusion of the "multiplicity" principle and the recognition of the majority`s opinion in the new permanent constitution, and adding: "The role of religious authorities is to study the legal fatwa from all aspects." . . .

"Al-Manarah publishes on page 2 a 1,000-word article by Ali al-Husayni criticizing the people who claim that the formation of the southern federal bloc will lead to fragmentation of Iraq. The writer says that citizens of Basra and other southern governorates have been deprived of their share of natural resources even after the downfall of the former regime, and thus they have the right to benefit from the resources and develop their region.

Al-Manarah publishes on the front page and on page 6 a 900-word editorial by Chief Editor Dr Khalaf al-Munshidi strongly criticizing the chaotic situation in the country. The writer says that both Basra and Maysan police chiefs have announced the presence of unofficial police commando brigades in their governorates. The writer adds that the Advisory Council in a number of governorates has declared Thursday as the weekly holiday while in others it is still on Saturday. The writer notes that this chaos indicates the continuing political vacuum in the country. . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr carries on page 1 a 100-word report citing Muqtada al-Sadr calling on the Iraqi Government to "refrain from accusing the Arab Sunnis of backing terrorism." Al-Sadr is cited as saying that such accusations "kindle sectarian strife," adding that the government must "include all Iraqis in the political process." Ishraqat al-Sadr runs on page 1 a 150-word report citing Muqtada al-Sadr accusing the US forces of "collaborating with terrorists," during a meeting with Karbala Governorate Council, adding that "the Ba`thists, terrorists, and occupation" Are enemies of Iraq. Ishraqat al-Sadr publishes on page 1 a 300-word text of a statement issued by the Iraqi Elites Group calling on the Iraqi Government to release detainees belonging to the Al-Sadr trend. . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr runs on page 8 a 1,500-word report citing Muqtada al-Sadr`s replies to a number of questions posed to him by Iraqi women. The questions revolve around the current political and constitutional process and the role of women in social and political issues. . .

Al-Zaman carries on the front page a 250-word report citing a statement by the Association of Muslim Scholars condemning the decision of the Transitional Government to extend the stay of "the occupation" forces in Iraq. The report cites Shaykh Abd-al-Salam al-Kubaysi, a member within the Association, saying that Operation Lightning is targeting those who are against "the occupation". . .

Al-Dustur publishes on page 4 a 100-word report saying that the Sunni Waqf Diwan has denounced the raids carried out by the Al-Husayn Commandos Brigade, affiliated to the Interior Ministry, in the mosque at Al-Za`faraniyyah area, and the arrest of the brother of the mosque`s imam. The report adds that the brigade also conducted raids on a mosque in Sab abkar Sunni District and arrested 45 persons including the head of the agricultural department at the Sunni Waqf. . .

Al-Zaman carries on page 8 a 150-word report citing Diya al-Sa`di, the general secretary of the Iraqi Lawyers Association, saying that the ban on the Iraqi Judiciary from dealing with lawsuits against "the occupation" forces represents a violation of the Geneva Convention. . . .

Al-Mada publishes on the front page a 500-word report saying that the newspaper has learned that the Al-Ramadi Emergency Squad is preparing itself for peace keeping operations in the city, paving the way for the withdrawal of the US forces, which have imposed a siege on the city for over three months. . .

Al-Dustur publishes on page 6 an 80-word report saying that the Interior Ministry has called on the people with expired weapon licenses to renew them at the ministry. . .

Al-Manarah publishes on page 3 a 250-word report citing Justice Minister Abd-al-Husayn Shandal asserting that the ministry has asked the Iraqi government to demand that the multinational forces lift the right of veto from some files. . .

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 200-word report citing the new fuel crisis in Al-Muthanna Governorate. [This province is the site of the rich Rumaila oil field, which has 500 wellheads.]

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 5 an 80-word report quoting oil sources as saying that Iraq intends to reduce oil production at Basra to 1.5m barrels per day . . .

Al-Furat publishes on page 3 a 300-word unattributed article saying that due to the frequent electricity outages, most Iraqi people are dependent on electric generators, a matter that contributes significantly to the fuel crisis in the country. The writer believes that it is more feasible from an economic point of view to construct power plants. . . .

Al-Zaman carries on page 5 a 400-word article by Rabah Al Ja`far commenting on the similarity in the tragic situation of Palestinians and Iraqis. . .

posted by Juan @ [url6/10/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/attacks-in-yusufiyah-mosul-kut-islamic.html[/url]

Piles of Smoking Guns

Kind readers have drawn my attention to other leaked documents on the British side that lend support to the implications of the Downing Street memo, which alleges that Bush had decided on a war against Iraq by summer, 2004 and would fix the intelligence around the policy.

The Daily Telegraph for 18 September 2004 first quoted from a leaked memo by Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador in Washington, describing his meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in March, 2002.

A pdf file of the original of this memo was on the web earlier, but I cannot now find a copy. Perhaps a kind reader can provide the URL. In the meantime, it has been typed up and published at Scoop. Here are some revealing passages. Meyer notes the need to "wrongfoot" Saddam with regard to WMD inspections (this is a constant refrain among officials of the Blair government, that Saddam could be tricked into war if the US and UK just demanded the return of weapons inspectors, which they thought he would refuse, supplying a casus belli). Then Meyer reports Wolfowitz`s remarks:

"If the UK were to join with the US in any operation against Saddam, we would have to be able to take a critical mass of parliamentary and public opinion with us. It was extraordinary how people had forgotten how bad he was.

"4 Wolfowitz said that he fully agreed. He took a slightly different position from others in the Administration, who were focussed on Saddam`s capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. The WMD danger was of course crucial to the public case against Saddam, particularly the potential linkage to terrorism. But Wolfowitz thought it indispensable to spell out in detail Saddam`s barbarism. This was well documented from what he had done during the occupation of Kuwait, the incursion into Kurdish territory, the assault on the Marsh Arabs, and to his own people. A lot of work had been done on this towards the end of the first Bush administration. Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel. I said that I had been forcefully struck, when addressing university audiences in the US how ready students were to gloss over Saddam`s crimes and to blame the US and the UK for the suffering of the Iraqi people.

"5 Wolfowitz said that it was absurd to deny the link between terrorism and Saddam. There might be doubt about the alleged meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi intelligence (did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting?). But there were other substantiated cases of Saddam giving comfort to terrorists, including someone involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center (the latest New Yorker apparently has a story about links between Saddam and Al Qaeda operating in Kurdistan).

"6 I asked for Wolfowitz`s take on the stuggle inside the Administration between the pro- and anti- INC lobbies (well documented in Sy Hersh`s recent New Yorker piece, which I gave you). He said that he found himself between the two sides (but as the conversation developed, it became clear that Wolfowitz was far more pro-INC than not). He said that he was strongly opposed to what some were advocating: a coalition including all outside factions except the INC (INA, KDP, PUK, SCIRI). This would not work. Hostility towards the INC was in reality hostility towards Chalabi. It was true that Chalabi was not the easiest person to work with. Bute had a good record in bringing high-grade defectors out of Iraq. The CIA stubbornly refused to recognise this. They unreasonably denigrated the INC because of their fixation with Chalabi. When I mentioned that the INC was penetraded by Iraqi intelligence, Wolfowitz commented that this was probably the case with all the opposition groups: it was something we would have to live with. As to the Kurds, it was true that they were living well (another point to be made in any public dossier on Saddam) and that they feared provoking an incursion by Baghdad, But there were good people among the Kurds, including in particular Salih (?) of the PUK. Wolfowitz brushed over my reference to the absence of SUnni in the INC: there was a big difference between Iraqi and Iranian Shia. The former just wanted to be rid of Saddam."



The document shows that Wolfowitz knew very well that Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction were not a presssing issue. The Defense Department consistently pretended otherwise in 2002 and 2003. It shows that he consistently misunderstood Iraqi Shiites as non-ideological and unreligious, contrasting them to Iranian Shiites. It shows that he was touchingly trusting of Chalabi`s ability to provide good intelligence on Iraq. It shows that he was concerned to differentiate the Iraqi regime (which invaded and occupied Kuwait) from Israel (which invaded and occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and earlier had invaded and occupied Sinai). His method was to focus on Saddam`s mass murders. Israel had been brutal, had expelled a lot of people from their homes, but unlike Saddam had not murdered tens of thousands. (Israeli`s 1982 invasion of Lebanon is estimated to have killed 10,000 innocent civilians, but if one is playing a numbers game, the Iraqi Baath was worse by several orders of magnitude).

A good overview of the record of Iraq decision-making as revealed in leaked British memos is at the BBC Panorama site.

Helpful readers have sent me another piece of evidence that George W. Bush was determined to have a war against Iraq even while running for president in 1999-2000, long before September 11:


by Russ Baker (HOUSTON) October 28, 2004 -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: `One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.` And he said, `My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.` He said, `If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I`m not going to waste it. I`m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I`m going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father`s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he`s at 91 percent in the polls, and he`d barely crawled out of the bunker."



For more evidence, see my "The Lies that Led to War" at Salon.com.

posted by Juan @ [url6/10/2005 06:14:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/piles-of-smoking-guns-kind-readers.html[/url]

The Downing Street Memo and "Fixing Around"

At least one commentator has been quoted in the press as questioning what British Intelligence chief Richard Dearlove meant in the Downing Street Memo by the phrase "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The full passage reads, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In the story on the Bush/Blair press conference by Mark Memmott of the Gannett News Service writes:


` Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being "fixed around" Iraq policy. " `Fixed around` in British English means `bolted on` rather than altered to fit the policy," he says.`



Niblett`s suggestion is not plausible for many reasons. First of all, the phrase begins with "but". Why say, "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" if what was meant was that "the intelligence and facts were being bolted on the policy?" Clearly something was amiss, or "but" would not be used.

Second, for the "intelligence and facts" to be "bolted onto" the policy would still indicate some shady dealings. The only straightforward way of doing things would be to "bolt" the policy onto the intelligence and the facts.

It is true, as Niblett says, that the phrase "to be fixed around" can mean "to be bolted onto." This engineering site says "The problems relate to the form of construction employed in the early 20th century whereby external masonry was fixed around a steel frame."

But a policy is not a building and engineering language may not be the best referent.

This British borough site discussing hiring policies says, "Interview times are fixed around family demands." In this phrase, it is clear that interview times are being made malleable to accommodate another factor. If we say in this context that "intelligence" is "fixed around policy," then intelligence is being made malleable to accommodate policy.

A British bulletin board on futures trading gives, the "spreads are fixed around live market prices . . ." Here again, the principle is that market prices dictate the spreads. In the Dearlove statement, that would mean policy was dictating intelligence.

An Australian Green website has "We suggest that the penalty should be fixed around the expected price for the more expensive anticipated renewable sources . . ." Here the price governs the penalty. Substitute "we suggest that the intelligence should be fixed around the policy" and it would be clear that the policy would be governing the intelligence.

Clearly, in British and Commonwealth English, the phrase "fixed around" is used to mean "dictated by" with regard to soft subjects such as schedules, prices and penalties. That you can also say that chrome is "fixed around" a car`s bumper is simply not dispositive. Intelligence and policy are more like schedules, prices and penalties than they are like masonry.

I think it is pretty clear what the Downing Street Memo means, on both sides of the Atlantic.

posted by Juan @ [url6/10/2005 06:04:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/downing-street-memo-and-fixing-around.html[/url]
Thursday, June 09, 2005

Hersh on Journalism and the Internet

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh is interviewed in The Guardian. He has some canny comments on journalism and blogging. Hersh is a giant in investigative journalism who broke both My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and without him the Republic would be in even worse shape.

He makes the key point that it used to be a New Yorker story might die if the New York Times did not pick it up, but now it can circulate widely via the internet and the bloggers. Excerpts:


The net does one thing great for people like me: it used to be that if I wrote a good hard story for the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times didn`t pick it up then we all felt bad. Now the internet is so vibrant that everything`s on it on blogs, logs or websites. The blogs are still very undisciplined though and they can be very vicious . . .
Has the net made it harder to cover up stories such as Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration is amazingly competent at doing it. In England, with all the leaks that get out, they`re running into big problems, but in America the administration is brutal in dealing with dissent. The big impact of the net is that there`s an astonishing amount of information to be accessed by people who know their way. For me, the net is all about information flow, and in the long run it`s going to mean better information.



As someone who has read and admired him all my life, it meant a lot to me that Hersh listed Informed Comment among his "Internet Favorites."

posted by Juan @ [url6/9/2005 08:45:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/hersh-on-journalism-and-internet.html[/url]

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Talk time: Seymour Hersh

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh`s book Chain of Command is out in paperback this week
Interview by Hamish Mackintosh
Thursday June 9, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1501797,00.htm…

Guardian
Has the word-processor made the writing process easier? The computer has certainly made everything easier as it`s far more fluid and you can move things around. You`re more interested in taking a chapter and turning it inside out than you would be with a typewriter. Everybody was worried 25 years ago that kids weren`t learning how to write and nobody was communicating any more - then the internet and email started. Now everyone`s worried that blogs will drive newspapers out of business, but it`s not going to happen.

So Dan Gillmor`s idea that "we are the media" isn`t quite the case yet? The net does one thing great for people like me: it used to be that if I wrote a good hard story for the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times didn`t pick it up then we all felt bad. Now the internet is so vibrant that everything`s on it on blogs, logs or websites. The blogs are still very undisciplined though and they can be very vicious.

No chance of a Seymour Hersh blog then? If I were smart I`d do it but I don`t really care. I know a lot of journalists have put up a web page or blog but that`s a bit too involved for me. I`m the type of person that when my screen blanks out, I immediately start screaming and dial my youngest son. It`s a generational thing. I keep saving my work but I don`t want to know anything about the soul of the machine. I just bought a new Dell computer with broadband so I could jump around the net more - I was happy with a 56k modem but everybody laughed at me.

Has journalism`s role changed in the internet age? There`s tremendous disappointment with the American coverage of the war so when I give talks I tell people to get online and check out your paper, the Telegraph or Der Spiegel - Al-Jazeera has an English page now too (http://english.aljazeera.net). I gave a talk to the Poynter Foundation (www.poynter.org) recently, who are a bunch of progressive thinkers trying to work out where to go with the kind of journalism I do, which is expensive, time-consuming and there`s worry about sources and diminishing market.

Has the net made it harder to cover up stories such as Abu Ghraib? The Bush administration is amazingly competent at doing it. In England, with all the leaks that get out, they`re running into big problems, but in America the administration is brutal in dealing with dissent. The big impact of the net is that there`s an astonishing amount of information to be accessed by people who know their way. For me, the net is all about information flow, and in the long run it`s going to mean better information.

How important is an online presence to the New Yorker? I don`t know for sure but I think it`s a big deal for them. I know when I have a good story going they get about half a million hits a day. They were slow getting into the online business as they only did it about four years ago.

Visit: www.newyorker.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Seymour Hersh`s favourites

www.juancole.com

www.dell.com

www.gateway.com
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international

www.independent.co.uk

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Number of millionaires rises in Bay Area, U.S. and world
Report finds rich getting richer by an average of 8.2%
- Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 10, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/10/B…

The rich are getting richer -- and there are more of them, according to an annual report on world wealth.

About 2.5 million Americans, or almost 1 percent of the population over age 15, have more than $1 million in financial assets such as stocks, bonds and bank accounts, according to a study published Thursday by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch & Co. The report did not factor in the value of people`s primary residences, which obviously would increase the number of millionaires.

Worldwide, 8.3 million people were millionaires in 2004, up from 7.7 million in 2003. Their combined wealth rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion.

In the Bay Area, according to a separate study that the report`s backers commissioned from research firm Claritas, 5 percent of all households in the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas have at least $1 million in financial assets. That was the highest percentage among the 18 regions included.

Although New York has the most millionaire households -- 101,764 -- they represent only 2.8 percent of the city`s total households.

Despite the high percentage of local millionaires, the Bay Area had the lowest growth among millionaire households from 2003 to 2004. The 31,908 millionaire households in the San Francisco metropolitan statistical area, which includes San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont, represented an increase of 3.51 percent. Meanwhile, the 26,102 millionaire households in the San Jose metropolitan statistical area, which includes San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, had grown 4.75 percent.

By contrast, the number of millionaire households grew at double-digit rates in Houston (12.59 percent increase), San Diego (10.72 percent) and Orange County (10.46 percent).

Rich Hogan, senior vice president of Merrill Lynch in San Francisco, said it makes sense that the rich are getting richer.

"Coming off the heels of a period where money is so cheap to borrow, if you have well-thought-out avenues to invest, you`ve been able to take advantage of basically free money," he said.

Current political conditions are also a factor.

"There`s no question that the tax laws have supported that people with wealth are able to keep a larger percentage of it; the amount they pay in taxes isn`t going up and is similar to the amount in taxes a much less wealthy person pays," Hogan said.

A New York Times analysis this week found that under the Bush administration tax cuts, people who earn more than $10 million a year pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those making $100,000 to $200, 000, while the 400 best-paid people pay about the same percentage of their income in taxes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.

Philip Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University and co- author of "The Winner-Take-All Society" about the growing inequality of earnings, also pointed to the nexus between politics and wealth.

"The increasing concentration of wealth has a political effect," Cook said. "It becomes incredibly important for politicians to win (rich people`s) favor.

"The fact that we`re seeing gradual repeal of the inheritance tax and getting judges who are more favorable to business are two reflections of that, " he said. "With money comes power, and some of that power is political. That`s part of why the public has every reason to be distressed about this trend."

Despite their wealth, affluent people are worried about the financial future, according to a separate study released Tuesday by U.S. Trust Co., which polled a representative sampling of the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans.

More than 80 percent worry that the next generation will have a difficult time financially, while 74 percent worry that educational costs will increase.

Worries about inflation and diminishing returns from the stock market were also up significantly from the previous year. Concerns about terrorism`s impact on the economy and securities market were expressed by 77 percent of respondents, down from almost 90 percent the year before.

For those seeking to chart their own course to millionairedom, the Capgemini/Merrill Lynch report broke out how the very rich allocated their assets.

The millionaires put 34 percent in equities; 27 percent in fixed-income investments; 13 percent in real estate investments; 14 percent in alternative investments like hedge funds, foreign currency and commodities; and kept 12 percent in cash or deposits.

Last year was a "hold-and-see" year for millionaires, the report said, characterizing their asset allocation strategies as growing more conservative.

"Wealthy people are more likely to have an adviser and therefore have a plan as things get sideways," Hogan said. "They tend to act and respond to (changing market conditions) better with disciplined rebalancing programs.

"Essentially what that means is, counter to human behavior of everyone wanting to chase what`s hot, they pare back the asset classes doing better and invest in those doing less well."

E-mail Carolyn Said at [e-mail].


Bay Area mecca for millionaires
Metropolitan Percentage of Number of Growth from
statistical area households households 2003 to 2004
San Francisco* 5% 31,908 3.51%
San Jose** 5 26,102 4.75
Orange County 4 39,059 10.46
Washington, D.C. 4 82,376 9.60
Boston 4 51,759 8.45
Los Angeles 3 92,795 9.27
San Diego 3 34,950 10.72
*This statistical area includes San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont.
**This statistical area includes San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
Source: Claritas


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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/10/B… ©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Global Warmin` Is Fer Idjuts
Exxon writes America`s energy policy, BushCo chops up emissions reports. Is there any hope at all?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

Friday, June 10, 2005

Like anyone is the slightest bit shocked.

Like anyone is the slightest bit appalled anymore by the breathtaking litany of utter BS oozing forth from the White House these days, this time about how one of BushCo`s top oil-lovin` henchmen has been hacking away at countless scientific reports for over two years, editing them at will, all to downplay the effects of emissions on global warming.

His name is Philip Cooney, and he has zero scientific training whatsoever and was formerly the "climate-team leader" (read: top flying monkey) and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the oil industry. He is now chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the group that helps devise and set the nation`s environmental agenda; Cooney`s cuts and edits of scientific emissions and global warming reports often made it into final White House policy.

Isn`t that just the cutest thing? Aren`t you just, like, yawning with ennui at the bitter repetition of it all? At how savagely and biliously common these stories have become?

Or how about that other story about how Bush`s decision not to sign the Kyoto Treaty, the landmark environmental policy signed by 122 other nations to reduce greenhouse emissions, was influenced not at all by sound science or serious concern for the planet, but by pressure put on him by his pals at ExxonMobil and other major oil corporations? Did you read that one?

Thus proving what everyone already knows: Bush cares about as much for the health of the planet and for air quality and for the future of your miserable stupid emphysemic kids as a snake cares for lip balm.

Or rather, in more plain terms, it means this: The environmental policies of the most powerful and gluttonous nation on the planet are being written by the world`s most powerful oil company. Which is, of course, a bit like our national dietary guidelines being written by Burger King, or our national health care guidelines being written by Merck, or our national school curricula being written by lost born-again Neanderthal creationists. Oh wait.

This, as we all now know, is the BushCo way. They lie about environmental devastation, going so far as to hire known skeptics of global warming to testify in court against piles of data compiled by thousands of world-class scientists the world over that prove the obvious direness of the threat.

They lie about abortion and breast cancer. They lie about unemployment data and corporate layoffs. They lie about prison-inmate torture, about intentionally desecrating the Koran and smearing menstrual blood on prisoners and violating the Geneva Convention the way a lonely farmer violates a sheep.

They lie about why a gay male model and former prostitute who ran gay porn Web sites was allowed to pose as a partisan hack reporter in White House press briefings for over two years, allowed to ask softball questions of the president and the press secretary and allowed to sleep overnight in the White House and shall we venture a guess who might`ve been waiting down in the dungeon all those nights, all sweaty and adipose, waiting for hunky Jeff Gannon to come and spank him but good?

And of course, most impressively, BushCo lied about WMDs, about why we`re at war, about why we`re dumping $5 billion along with dozens of dead U.S. soldiers and thousands of wounded per month into the Iraq quagmire (total cost: over $175 billion, and counting -- fast) when our own economy is gutted and the dollar is at a desperate low and the deficit is at an all-time high and our education and health care systems are crumbling and we are, as a nation, essentially running on fumes.

Yes, I know. This isn`t even news anymore. Doesn`t even raise an eyebrow. And how sad is that?

So these latest salvos, these latest disgusting proofs of misprision and environmental abuse, they`re just par for the BushCo course, standard operating procedure for a callous and domineering administration that, if it can`t find the data it needs to support its agenda, simply creates it, edits it, forces it into existence and crams it down your throat and calls it sound government policy.

There are, however, glimmers of hope. There are forces of change at work, despite BushCo`s laziness and resistance and despite his administration`s whorelike devotion to Big Oil and Big Coal and despite his outright ignorance of all things environmental and desperate and imminent.

Look over here. There stand 132 U.S. mayors from all over the nation, including many Republicans and including some from Texas and including Bloomberg from New York, who have bucked the general vicious BushCo idiocy regarding global warming and have agreed to carry out the Kyoto Protocol rules in their own cities, on their own. Seattle, for one, is poised to become, by the end of this year, the only city in the nation whose municipal energy utility produces zero net emissions of greenhouse gases.

And over here are the national scientific academies of all G8 nations, plus those of the three developing countries that consume the most oil on the planet -- China, India and Brazil -- making an unprecedented political gesture by signing a common letter declaring that a plan to address global warming must be put into action immediately, if not sooner.

And they`ve aimed the letter straight at the mumbling, bumbling BushCo, whose only decision on greenhouse emissions to date has been to let the major polluters of the nation self-regulate until 2012, when he`s a faint, painful, cancerous memory and the global warming problem is far worse and even more dire and is shoved onto the plate of the next guy. Aww, thanks Dubya.

Even some of BushCo`s more rabid followers, even some hardcore evangelical Christians, those intelligent few not wrapped up in the nutball Rapture Index and who therefore don`t believe it`s our God-given duty to ravage the planet and burn through all the resources as fast as possible so as to hasten the arrival of a really pissed-off, homophobic Christ, even some powerful evangelicals are urging Bush to get on the global warming issue ASAP, as, according to the Bible, we are supposed to be good stewards of the Earth, not its destroyers.

And you know the global warming issue has become dire when even staunch, lifelong environmental activists like Stewart Brand are beginning to look anew at the old demon of nuclear power to help ease the energy strain on the nation. It`s not because nuclear reactors have become so beautiful and safe and desirable. It`s because the global warming threat has become just that ominous. Going back to nuclear is simply the lesser of two evils. We have little choice.

So there you go. For the next 3.5 years, these alternatives appear to be the only path, the only means toward change. Via grassroots movements, regional lawmaking, commonsense ideas, collectives of like-minded people banding together despite their differences to thwart the idiocy and abuse and general autocracy of one of the most heartless and corporatized and least accountable administrations in American history. Think it`ll work? Think we`ll make it? Stock up on water, keep your fingers crossed and keep handy plenty of SPF 1000.


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. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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Friday, June 10, 2005
War News for Friday, June 10, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Five US soldiers wounded by car bomb near Beiji.

Bring `em on: Two senior Iraqi police officers assassinated in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Senior police officer assassinated in Basra.

Bring `em on: Kirkuk police chief escapes assassination attempt.

Bring `em on: Sixteen Iraqis executed by insurgents near Qaim.

Bring `em on: Oil pipeline near Beiji attacked again.

Bring `em on: Convoy carrying US supplies ambushed near Khaldiyah; "unspecified" casualties reported.

Sunnis offered seats on Iraqi constitutional committee.

Raed`s three point plan. "The ongoing post-war-Iraq plan is not working. When the US administration stops lying to their people, they’ll start searching seriously for an “Exit Plan”. The US administration and other governments that took or still taking a part of the collapsing coalition should adopt a three-point Iraq Roadmap to stop the on going crisis from their side and guarantee the safety of their troops, and give the space for Iraqis to work on healing Iraq from their side too."

MG Taluto didn`t get the GOP talking points. Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary people would take up arms against the US military because `they`re offended by our presence.` In an interview with Gulf News, he said: `If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could [want to fight us].` General Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers key trouble spots, including Baquba and Samarra, also said some Iraqis not involved in fighting did support insurgents who avoided hurting civilians."

Training the Iraqi Army.

An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army`s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."

But the Iraqi soldiers had no clue where they were going. They shrugged their shoulders when asked what they would do. The U.S. military had billed the mission as pivotal in the Iraqis` progress as a fighting force but had kept the destination and objectives secret out of fear the Iraqis would leak the information to insurgents.

"We can`t tell these guys about a lot of this stuff, because we`re not really sure who`s good and who isn`t," said Rick McGovern, a tough-talking 37-year-old platoon sergeant from Hershey, Pa., who heads the military training for Charlie Company.

The reconstruction of Iraq`s security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.


Raid in Tikrit.

Acting on a tip that insurgents lived in the neighborhood, Wood`s unit had planned this raid the previous night before watching a double feature of "Kill Bill" and "Kill Bill II" on a large flat-screen TV in the spacious command center at his battalion`s base in Tikrit. At 4:30 Thursday morning, headlights off, American and Iraqi soldiers rolled into the dark streets in armored humvees and pickup trucks and fanned out silently, unfurling coils of concertina wire to seal off the area. "We don`t have any specific houses. We don`t have any specific names," Wood said. "But we usually catch some people in these raids."

As Wood, 41, trained his rifle on the black-and-white metal gate, his soldiers broke down the padlock on the gate, crossed the tiled yard where men`s dishdashas and women`s dresses hung on a clothesline above a small vegetable garden and rapped on the front door. A barefoot, burly man with a stunned expression on his face opened the door and let them in.

The soldiers rushed past a pair of yellow parakeets sitting in a cage by the front door and entered a dark living room saturated with the warm smell of sleeping bodies. The rays of the flashlights attached to their rifle barrels fell on thick maroon blankets strewn in disarray on the floor, bright plastic flowers in metal vases. A sleepy pre-teen boy in T-shirt and sweatpants peeked out of a bedroom.


Junior officer shortage. "Facing an urgent requirement to field an additional 300 second lieutenants in 2006, Army officials have decided to make it easier for nontraditional officer candidates to enter that career track. Two-star generals now can sign waivers that would allow Officer Candidate School admission for NCOs who are older than 30 or who may have minor criminal or military offenses on their records, according to a memo sent to Army leaders on May 25."

Recruiting shortfall. "A shortfall in recruiting is adding pressure on the U.S. military to show progress in Iraq and divert more resources toward enlistment incentives. With potential recruits opting for civilian jobs in an improving employment market, the Army is expected to report today that it missed its enlistment goal for May by about 25 percent. This bad news -- the fourth-straight monthly shortfall -- follows a Washington Post-ABC News poll this month that found three-fourths of Americans think casualties in Iraq are unacceptably high and two-thirds believe U.S forces are bogged down…An intensified sales campaign has failed to close the recruitment gap for the Army, the largest branch of the armed services. The Army missed its monthly goal in February for the first time in almost five years and fell short again in March and April. The goal for fiscal 2005 is 80,000 recruits; recruitment through the first seven months was 35,926, less than half that. The Army maintains its active force of about 490,000 by offering incentives such as bonuses. It`s ahead of this year`s target for retaining people and is trying to increase its size to about 512,000. `The challenge is not keeping them in, it`s getting them in,` said Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the Army`s chief of personnel."

Commentary

Analysis:

Recruitment for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is on the brink of disaster. Indeed, along with combat, recruiting duty is now considered the worst mission in the military. Although we are in a global war against terrorism, the American citizenry is not being asked for any sacrifice. In the last election, both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) were united in their refusal to consider a return to conscription. "Patriotism-lite" is the order of the day.

But truth to tell, a draft for the 21st Century is the only answer to our national security needs. Such a draft would have three tiers of youth service, with 18-month tours of duty for citizens ages 18 to 25. The first tier would be modeled after a standard military draft. The second tier would be for homeland security, such as guarding our borders, ports, nuclear installations and chemical plants. Included in this category would be police officers, firefighters, air marshals and disaster medical technicians. The third tier would be for civilian national service, such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, assistance for the elderly and infirm, environmental work and the like. Women should be draft-eligible for the latter two categories and, of course, can volunteer for military service as now.

In return, all draftees, as well as voluntary servers, would receive generous financial aid for college and graduate school modeled after the GI Bill of World War II. Non-servers would be ineligible for federal student aid. Today more than $20 billion annually in federal funds is given to students who do not serve their country. We have created a GI Bill of Rights without the "GI."


Analysis:

Against all odds, a national liberation front is emerging in Iraq. Washington hawks may see it coming, but they certainly don`t want it. Many groups in this front have already met in Algiers. The front is opposed to the American occupation and permanent Pentagon military bases; opposed to the privatization and corporate looting of the Iraqi economy; and opposed to the federation of Iraq, ie balkanization. Members of the front clearly see through the plan of fueling sectarianism to provoke an atmosphere of civil war, thus legitimizing the American presence. The George W Bush administration`s obsession in selling the notion that Iraqis - or "anti-Iraqi forces", or "foreign militants" - are trying to start a civil war in the eastern flank of the Arab nation is as ludicrous as the myth it sells of the resistance as just a lunatic bunch of former Ba`athists and Wahhabis.

The Bush administration though is pulling no punches with Iraqification. It`s a Pandora`s box: inside one will find the Battle of Algiers, Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia. All point to the same destination: civil war. This deadly litany could easily go on until 2020 when, in a brave new world of China emerging as the top economy, Sunni Arabs would finally convince themselves to perhaps strike a deal with Shi`ites and Kurds so they can all profit together by selling billions of barrels of oil to the Chinese oil majors. If, of course, there is any semblance of Iraq left at that point.


Analysis: "Under Bush, the Republican Congress has abdicated its responsibilities of executive oversight and investigation. When Republican senator John Warner, chairman of the armed services committee, held hearings on Bush`s torture policy in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White House set rabid House Republicans to attack him. There have been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists that the Senate votes to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN while refusing to release essential information requested by the Senate foreign relations committee. One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon`s demise was the necessity of muzzling the press. The Bush White House has neutralised the press corps and even turned some reporters into its own assets. The disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq, funnelled into the news pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic case in point. By manipulation and intimidation, encouraging atmosphere of self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced the press from dissenting professionals inside the government."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Minnesota soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Michigan soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: New York Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Awards and Decorations

Local story: Pennsylvania Marine decorated for valor in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:25 AM
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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 09, 2005

Iraker: Civilian: 128 Police/Mil: 54 Total:182

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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The Best of Tomdispatch: Chalmers Johnson
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3178


In September 2003, only four months after our President`s "Mission Accomplished" moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq -- but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we`ve known it might well be destroyed. The question of just what Rubicon we might have crossed when American troops first took a bridge over the Euphrates was on my mind -- and Chalmers Johnson`s as well. He sat down early that September, having just seen a production of Shakespeare`s Julius Caesar and wrote out his own version of the fall of the republic, which he entitled "The Scourge of Militarism," an essay as resonant today as it was then. It is the second offering in my Best of Tomdispatch 2003 series.

Looking back almost two years later, Johnson writes,

"The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny. General Tommy Franks, commander of the American assault on Baghdad, predicts that another terrorist attack on the United States would `begin to unravel the fabric of our Constitution,` and he openly suggests that `the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.`

"Another military writer, the historian Kevin Baker, fears that we are not far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 B.C., our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator. `In the end, we`ll beg for the coup,` he writes. At the same time the American public seems apathetic. Most Americans sense that the country is in great trouble, but evidently don`t know how to think about the crisis we find ourselves in. Having been poorly schooled and without an elementary knowledge of earlier republics, the problems of standing armies in any form of democracy, and the threat of militarism (a fear that virtually all Americans shared during our first century as a republic), the American people today stare blankly at the mounting evidence that our military is totally out of control. Back in 2003, my `Scourge of Militarism` essay tried to lay out some new ways to think about our current dilemmas based on what happened to an earlier republic faced with similar conditions. Unfortunately, given what`s happened since, there is no reason to be optimistic about this fate of ours."

At the time, I introduced Johnson`s essay this way -- and I wouldn`t change a word:

We were to be the New Rome. As right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer (emphasis always on the "hammer") wrote in Time magazine near the ides of March, 2001 ("The Bush Doctrine, In American foreign policy, a new motto: Don`t ask. Tell"), "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."

And that was before the terrorists of September 11th flew into the picture. In the wake of our President`s declared "war on terrorism" and an instant "triumph" in Afghanistan, as the drums of war began to pound again, from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to those of the Washington Post, the New Rome analogy only grew and prospered. Empire, once a dirty word in the American lexicon, was suddenly a badge of pride, or at least a Kiplingesque "burden" (as the New York Times Magazine had it in a cover story) to be hoisted on our capacious military shoulders. Our world, once we were done pounding it into shape with "implacable demonstrations of will," would put the Pax Romana and Pax Britannia combined into the shade. There would be nothing like it.

Of course, along came history, which meant the unexpected, and blind-sided our already dazzled neocon imperial dreamers. Now, Chalmers Johnson, who wrote a book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which in the wake of September 11th came to seem all too prophetic, suggests that perhaps the imperial dreamers of this administration picked up the wrong end of the Roman analogy. What if the applicable part wasn`t Pax Romana/Pax Americana, but the fall of the Roman republic under an onslaught of imperial militarism/the fall of the American empire under the same?

Johnson`s newest book, The Sorrows of Empire, takes up the thoroughly under-reported, largely ignored issue of American militarism. Let him now plunge you into a short course in Roman history -- and while you`re reading imagine that anyone in this country ever wanted us to be like the Roman empire in its heyday.

Little has changed since then, I`m afraid. Chalmers Johnson`s books remain indispensable and the militarism he addressed so starkly then is hardly less ignored in our country today (despite the publication of Andrew Bacevitch`s remarkable book The New American Militarism); and, except at websites like Antiwar.com or LewRockwell.com, the fall of the republic isn`t at the top of many American agendas. (Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website recently argued strikingly that our prison complex at Guantanamo should be closed exactly "because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.") One small change: Apologists for the Bush administration no longer speak or write proudly of our "Roman" legions marching forth to global battle, and yet the republic, already in shreds in 2003, remains desperately endangered. This essay was first posted on Tomdispatch on September 9, 2003. Tom

The Scourge of Militarism

    Rome and America

By Chalmers Johnson

The collapse of the Roman republic in 27 BC has significance today for the United States, which took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, all these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read the great Roman political philosopher Cicero and spoke of him as an inspiration to them. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, authors of the Federalist Papers, writing in favor of ratification of the Constitution signed their articles with the name Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul of the Roman republic.

The Roman republic, however, failed to adjust to the unintended consequences of its imperialism, leading to a drastic alteration in its form of government. The militarism that inescapably accompanied Rome`s imperial projects slowly undermined its constitution as well as the very considerable political and human rights its citizens enjoyed. The American republic, of course, has not yet collapsed; it is just under considerable strain as the imperial presidency -- and its supporting military legions -- undermine Congress and the courts. However, the Roman outcome -- turning over power to an autocracy backed by military force and welcomed by ordinary citizens because it seemed to bring stability -- suggests what might happen in the years after Bush and his neoconservatives are thrown out of office.

Obviously, there is nothing deterministic about this progression, and many prominent Romans, notably Brutus and Cicero, paid with their lives trying to head it off. But there is something utterly logical about it. Republican checks and balances are simply incompatible with the maintenance of a large empire and a huge standing army. Democratic nations sometimes acquire empires, which they are reluctant to give up because they are a source of wealth and national pride, but as a result their domestic liberties are thereby put at risk.

These not-particularly-original comparisons are inspired by the current situation of the United States, with its empire of well over 725 military bases located in other people`s countries; its huge and expensive military establishment demanding ever more pay and ever larger appropriations from a supine and manipulated legislature; unsolved anthrax attacks on senators and newsmen (much like Rome`s perennial assassinations); Congress`s gutting of the Bill of Rights through the panicky passage of the Patriot Act -- by votes of 76-1 in the Senate and 337 to 79 in the House; and numerous signs that the public is indifferent to what it is about to lose. Many current aspects of our American government suggest a Roman-like fatigue with republican proprieties. After Congress voted in October 2002 to give the president unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he -- and he alone -- deemed it "appropriate," it would be hard to argue that the constitution of 1787 was still the supreme law of the land.

Checks and Balances

My thinking about the last days of republics was partly stimulated during the summer of 2003 by a new book and an old play. The book is Anthony Everitt`s magnificent account of the man who had his head and both hands chopped off for opposing military dictatorship -- Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome`s Greatest Politician (Random House, 2001). The play was a modern-dress production of Shakespeare`s Julius Caesar, seen at San Diego`s Old Globe theater. The curtain opened on a huge backdrop of Julius Caesar looking remarkably like any seedy politician with the word "tyrant" scrawled graffiti-style beneath his face in red paint. At play`s end, after Octavian`s hypocritical comments on the death of Brutus, who was one of the republic`s most stalwart supporters ("According to his virtue let us use him. . . ."), the picture of Caesar dropped away, replaced by one of Octavian -- soon to become the self-proclaimed god Augustus Caesar -- in full military uniform and bearing a marked resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, Octavian`s military rule did not actually follow at once after the suicides of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC and Shakespeare does not say it did. But that is what the play -- and the history -- are all about: killing Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC only prepared the ground for a more ruthless and determined successor.

The Roman republic is conventionally dated from 509 to 27 BC even though Romulus`s founding of the city is traditionally said to have occurred in 753 BC. All we know about its dim past, including the first two centuries of the republic, comes from the histories written by Livy and others and from the findings of modern archaeology. For the century preceding the republic, Rome had been ruled by Etruscan kings from their nearby state of Etruria (modern Tuscany), until in 510, according to legend, Sextus, the son of king Tarquinius Superbus ("King Tarquin"), raped Lucretia, the daughter of a leading Roman family. A group of aristocrats backed by the Roman citizenry revolted against this outrage and expelled the Etruscans from Rome. The rebels were determined that never again would any single man be allowed to obtain supreme power in Rome, and for four centuries the system they established more or less succeeded in preventing that from happening. "This was the main principle," writes Everitt, "that underpinned constitutional arrangements which, by Cicero`s time [106 to 43 BC], were of a baffling complexity."

At the heart of the unwritten Roman constitution was the Senate, by the early years of the first century BC composed of about 300 members from whose ranks two chief executives, called consuls, were elected. The consuls took turns being in charge for a month each, and neither could hold office for more than a year. Over time an amazing set of "checks and balances" evolved to ensure that the consuls and other executives whose offices conferred on them imperium -- the right to command an army, to interpret and carry out the law, and to pass sentences of death -- did not entertain visions of grandeur and overstay their time. At the heart of these restraints were the principles of collegiality and term limits. The first meant that for every office there were at least two incumbents, neither of whom had seniority or superiority over the other. Office holders were normally limited to one-year terms and could be reelected to the same office only after waiting ten years. Senators had to serve two to three years in lower offices -- as quaestors, tribunes, aediles, or praetors -- before they were eligible for election to a higher office, including the consulship. All office holders could veto the acts of their equals, and higher officials could veto decisions of lower ones. The chief exception to these rules was the office of "dictator," appointed by the consuls in times of military emergency. There was always only one dictator and his decisions were immune to veto; according to the constitution, he could hold office only for six months or the duration of a crisis.

Once an official had ended his term as consul or praetor, the next post below consul, he was posted in Italy or abroad as governor of a province or colony and given the title of proconsul. It is absurd for journalistic admirers of the U.S. military today to pretend that its regional commanders-in-chief for the Middle East (Centcom), Europe (Eucom), the Pacific (Pacom), Latin America (Southcom), and the United States itself (Northcom) are the equivalents of Roman proconsuls.1 The Roman officials were seasoned members of the Senate who had held the highest executive post in the country, whereas American regional commanders are generals or admirals who have served their entire careers away from civilian concerns and risen to this post by managing to avoid making egregious mistakes.

After serving as consul in 63 BC (the year of Octavian`s birth), for example, Cicero was sent to govern the colony of Cilicia in present-day southern Turkey, where his duties were both civilian and military. Over time this complex system was made even more complex by the class struggle embedded in Roman society. During the first two centuries of the republic, what appeared to be a participatory democracy was in fact an oligarchy of aristocratic families that dominated the Senate. Not everyone was happy with this. After 287 BC, when the constitution was more or less formalized, a new institution came into being to defend the rights of the plebs or populares, that is, the ordinary, non-aristocratic citizens of Rome. These were the tribunes of the people, charged with protection of the lives and property of plebeians. Tribunes could veto any election, law, or decree of the Senate, of which they were ex officio members, as well as the acts of all other officials (except a dictator). They could also veto each others` vetoes. "No doubt because their purpose in life was to annoy people," Everitt notes, "their persons were sacrosanct." Controlling appointments to the office of tribune later became very important to generals like Julius Caesar, who based their power on their armies plus the support of the populares against the aristocrats.

The system worked well enough and afforded extraordinary freedoms to the citizens of Rome so long as all members of the Senate recognized that compromise and consensus were the only ways to get anything done. Everitt poses the issue in terms of the different perspectives of Caesar and Cicero; Caesar was Rome`s, and perhaps history`s greatest general; whereas Cicero was the most intellectual defender of the Roman constitution. Both were former consuls: "Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero it lay in finding better men to run the government -- and better laws to keep them in order."

"Remember that you are human"

Imperialism provoked the crisis that destroyed the Roman republic. After slowly consolidating its power over all of Italy and conquering the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily, the republic extended its conquests to Greece itself, to Carthage in North Africa, and to what is today southern France, Spain, and Asia Minor. By the first century BC, Rome dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North Africa, Macedonia (including Greece), the Balkans, and large parts of modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. "The republic became enormously rich on the spoils of empire," Everitt writes, "so much so that from 167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes." The republic also became increasingly self-important and arrogant, believing that its task was to bring civilization to lesser peoples and naming the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (our sea), somewhat the way some Americans came in the twentieth century to refer to the Pacific Ocean as an "American lake."

The problem was that the Roman constitution made administration of so large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and consensus. There were several aspects to this crisis, but the most important was the transformation of the Roman army into a professional military force and the growth of militarism. During the early and middle years of the republic, the Roman legions were a true citizen army composed of small, conscripted landowners. Differing from the American republic, all citizens between the age of 17 and 46 were liable to be called for military service. One of the more admirable aspects of the Roman system was that only those citizens who possessed a specified amount of property (namely, a horse and some land) could serve, thereby making those who had profited most from the state also responsible for its defense. (By contrast, of the 535 members of Congress, only seven have children in the U.S.`s all-volunteer armed forces.) The Roman plebs did their service as skirmishers with the army or in the navy, which had far less honor attached to it. At the beginning of each term, the consuls appointed tribunes to raise two legions from the census role of all eligible citizens.

When a campaign was over, the troops were promptly sent back to their farms, sometimes richer and flushed with military glory. Occasionally, the returning farmers got to march behind their general in a "triumph," the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar, a victory procession allowed only to the greatest of conquerors. The general himself, who paid for this parade, rode in a chariot with his face covered in red lead to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A boy slave stood behind him holding a laurel wreath above his head while whispering in his ear "Remember that you are human." In Pompey`s great triumph of 61 BC, he actually wore a cloak that had belonged to Alexander the Great. After the general came his prisoners in chains and finally the legionnaires, who by ancient tradition sang obscene songs satirizing their general.

By the end of the second century BC, in Everitt`s words, "The responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts." The great general Caius Marius undertook to reform the armed forces, replacing the old conscript armies with a professional body of long-service volunteers. When their contracts expired, they expected their commanders, to whom they were personally loyal, to grant them farms. Unfortunately, land in Italy was by then in short supply, much of it tied up in huge sheep and cattle ranches owned by rich, often aristocratic, families and run by slave labor. The landowners were the dominant conservative influence in the Senate, and they resisted all efforts at land reform. Members of the upper classes became wealthy as a result of Rome`s wars of conquest and bought more land as the only safe investment, driving small holders off their property. In 133 BC, the gentry arranged for the killing of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (of plebian origin) for advocating a new land-use law. Rome`s population continued to swell with landless veterans. "Where would the land be found," asks Everitt, "for the superannuated soldiers of Rome`s next war?"

During the last century before its fall, the republic was assailed by many revolts of generals and their troops, leading to gross violations of the constitution and on several occasions to civil wars. These included the uprisings of Marius and Sulla and of the failed revolutionary Catilina. There was also the Spartacus slave rebellion of 73 BC, put down by the immensely wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus, who in the process crucified some 6,000 survivors. Crassus was a member of the First Triumvirate, along with Pompey and Caesar, which attempted to bring the situation under control by direct cooperation among the generals. Everitt writes, "During his childhood and youth Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the republic to order. . . . [He] noticed that the uninhibited freedom of speech which marked political life in the republic was giving way to caution at social gatherings and across dinner tables. . . . The Senate had no answer to Rome`s problems and indeed sought none. Its aim was simply to maintain the constitution and resist the continual attacks on its authority. . . . The populares had lost decisively with the defeat of Catilina, but the snake was only stunned. Caesar, who had been plotting against Senatorial interests behind the scenes, was rising up the political ladder and, barring accidents, would be consul in a few years` time."

Caesar became consul for the first time in 59 BC enjoying great popularity with the ordinary people. After his year in office, he was rewarded by being named governor of Gaul, a post he held between 58 and 49 during which he earned great military glory and became immensely wealthy. In 49 he famously allowed his armies to cross the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy that served as a boundary against armies approaching the capital, and plunged the country into civil war, taking on his former ally and now rival, Pompey. He won, after which, as Everitt observes, "No one was left in the field for Caesar to fight. . . . His leading opponents were dead. The republic was dead too: he had become the state." Julius Caesar exercised dictatorship from 48 to 44 and a month before the Ides of March had arranged to have himself named "dictator for life." Instead, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a conspiracy of eight members, led by Brutus and Cassius, both praetors, known to history as "principled tyrannicides."

Shakespeare`s recreation of the scenes that followed, based upon Sir Thomas North`s translation of Plutarch, has become as immortal as the deed itself. In a speech to the plebeians in the Forum, Brutus defended his actions. "If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar`s, to him I say that Brutus` love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov`d Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and all die slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?" However, Mark Antony, Caesar`s chief lieutenant, speaking to the same audience, had the last word. He turned the populace against Brutus and Cassius, and as they raced forth to avenge Caesar`s murder, said cynically, "Cry `Havoc!` and let slip the dogs of war."

Who will watch the watchers?

The Second Triumvirate, formed to avenge Caesar, ended like the first, with only one man standing, but that man, Caius Octavianus (Octavian), Caesar`s eighteen-year-old grand nephew, would decisively change Roman government by replacing the republic with an imperial dictatorship. Everitt characterizes Octavian as "a freebooting young privateer," who on August 19, 43 BC, became the youngest consul in Rome`s history and set out, in violation of the constitution, to raise his own private army. "The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans, and the standing legions." Cicero, who had devoted his life to trying to curb the kind of power represented by Octavian, now gave up on the rule of law in favor of realpolitik. He recognized that "for all his struggles the constitution was dead and power lay in the hands of soldiers and their leaders." In Cicero`s analysis, the only hope was to try to co-opt Octavian, leading him toward a more constitutional position, while doing everything not to "irritate rank-and-file opinion, which was fundamentally Caesarian." Cicero would pay with his life for this last, desperate gamble. Octavian, allied with Mark Antony, ordered at least 130 senators (perhaps as many as 300) executed and their property confiscated after charging them with supporting the conspiracy against Caesar. Mark Antony personally added Cicero`s name to the list. When he met his death, the great scholar and orator had with him a copy of Euripides` Medea, which he had been reading. His head and both hands were displayed in the Forum.

A year after Cicero`s death, following the battle of Philippi where Brutus and Cassius ended their lives, Octavian and Antony divided the known world between them. Octavian took the West and remained in Rome; Antony accepted the East and allied himself with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt and Julius Caesar`s former mistress. In 31 BC, Octavian set out to end this unstable arrangement, and at the sea battle of Actium in the Gulf of Ambracia on the western coast of Greece, he defeated Antony`s and Cleopatra`s fleet. The following year in Alexandria Mark Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra took an asp to her breast. By then, both had been thoroughly discredited for claiming that Antony was a descendant of Caesar`s and for seeking Roman citizenship rights for Cleopatra`s children by Caesar. Octavian would rule the Roman world for the next 45 years, until his death in 14 AD.

On January 13, 27 BC, Octavian appeared in the Senate, which had legitimized its own demise by ceding most of its powers to him and which now bestowed on him the new title of Augustus, first Roman emperor. The majority of the Senators were his solid supporters, having been handpicked by him. In 23 BC, Augustus was granted further authority by being designated a tribune for life, which gave him ultimate veto power over anything the Senate might do. His power rested ultimately on his total control of the armed forces.

Although his rise to power was always tainted by constitutional illegitimacy -- not unlike that of our own Boy Emperor from Crawford, Texas -- Augustus proceeded to emasculate the Roman system and its representative institutions. He never abolished the old republican offices but merely united them under one person -- himself. Imperial appointment became a badge of prestige and social standing rather than of authority. The Senate was turned into a club of old aristocratic families, and its approval of the acts of the emperor was purely ceremonial. The Roman legions continued to march under the banner SPQR -- senatus populus que Romanus, "the Senate and the Roman People" -- but the authority of Augustus was absolute.

The most serious problem was that the army had grown too large and was close to unmanageable. It constituted a state within a state, not unlike the Pentagon in the United States today. Augustus reduced the army`s size and provided generous cash payments to those soldiers who had served more than twelve years, making clear that this bounty came from him, not their military commanders. He also transferred all legions away from Rome to the remote provinces and borders of the Empire, to ensure their leaders were not tempted to meddle in political affairs. Equally astutely, he created the Praetorian Guard, an elite force of 9,000 men with the task of defending him personally, and stationed them in Rome. They were drawn only from Italy, not from distant provinces, and were paid more than soldiers in the regular legions. They began as Augustus`s personal bodyguards, but in the decades after his death they became decisive players in the selection of new emperors. It was one of the first illustrations of an old problem of authoritarian politics: create one bureaucracy, the Praetorian Guard, to control another bureaucracy, the regular army, but before long the question will arise: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

Augustus is credited with forging the Roman Peace (Pax Romana), which historians like to say lasted more than 200 years. It was, however, a military dictatorship and depended entirely on the incumbent emperor. And therein lay the problem. Tiberius, who reigned from 14-37 AD, retired to Capri with a covey of young boys who catered to his sexual tastes. His successor, Caligula, who held office from 37-41, was the darling of the army, but on January 24, 41 AD, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and proceeded to loot the imperial palace. Modern archaeological evidence strongly suggests that Caligula was an eccentric maniac, just as history has always portrayed him.2

The fourth Roman emperor, Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54, was selected and put into power by the Praetorian Guard in a de facto military coup. Despite the basically favorable portrayal of him by Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) and years later on TV by Derek Jacobi, Claudius, who was Caligula`s uncle, was addicted to gladiatorial games and fond of watching his defeated opponents being put to death. As a child, Claudius limped, drooled, stuttered, and was constantly ill. He had his first wife killed and married Agrippina, daughter of the sister of Caligula, after having the law changed to allow uncles to marry their nieces. On October 13, 54 AD, Claudius was killed with a poisoned mushroom, probably fed to him by his wife, and at noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero, Agrippina`s son by a former husband, was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68, was a probably insane tyrant who has been credited with setting fire to Rome in 64 and persecuting some famous early Christians (Paul and Peter), although his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years as a patron of the arts.

The short, happy life of the American republic

After Augustus, not much recommends the Roman Empire as an example of enlightened government despite the enthusiasm for it of such neoconservative promoters of the George W. Bush administration as the Washington Post`s Charles Krauthammer, the Los Angeles Time`s Max Boot, and the Weekly Standard`s William Kristol. My reasons for going over this ancient history are not to suggest that our own Boy Emperor is a second Octavian but rather what might happen after he is gone. The history of the Roman republic from the time of Julius Caesar on suggests that it was imperialism and militarism -- poorly understood by all conservative political leaders at the time -- that brought it down. Militarism and the professionalization of a large standing army create invincible new sources of power within a polity. The government must mobilize the masses in order to exploit them as cannon fodder and this leads to the rise of populist generals who understand the grievances of their troops and veterans.

Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military today is a professional corps of men and women who join up for their own reasons, commonly to advance themselves in the face of one or another cul de sac of American society. They normally do not expect to be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment -- steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their military "service." They are well aware that the alternatives civilian life in America offers today include difficult job searches, no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, "privatized" medical care, bad public elementary education systems, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe, it seems to me, not for the political rhetoric of patrician politicians who have followed the Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Perón -- a revolutionary, military populist with no interest in republican niceties so long as he is made emperor.

Regardless of the outcome of the next presidential election, the incumbent will have to deal with the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not telling the public what our military establishment costs and the devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic is in serious trouble -- and that conversion to a military empire is, to say the least, not the best answer.

The first two books in Chalmers Johnson`s Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic -- are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America`s Military (New York: Norton, 2003).

2. Shasta Darlington, "New Dig Says Caligula Was Indeed a Maniac," Reuters, August 16, 2003.

Copyright 2003 Chalmers Johnson


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Our Newest Proconsul
Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050609/our_newest_procons…
June 09, 2005

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil`s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.

It`s a foregone conclusion that the Senate will confirm Zalmay Khalilzad to be the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, replacing John Negroponte. Still, it`s worth stepping back to consider what Khalilzad`s appointment says about the Bush administration`s continuing refusal to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq—and about the Democrats` inexplicable inability to step forward and challenge the president as Iraq continues to deteriorate. His confirmation hearing Tuesday slipped by almost unnoticed, thanks in part to a docile stable of Democrats who decided to give him a free pass, rather than seize the opportunity to lambaste the president`s Iraq policy.

First, on the man himself: it`s hard to imagine anyone worse than Khalilzad for the Baghdad job. Like one of Alexander the Great`s proconsuls, Khalilzad neatly steps into one U.S.-occupied neocolony, Iraq, from another, Afghanistan. Khalilzad, born in Afghanistan, has been deeply involved in U.S.-Afghan policy for more than two decades. He is arguably as much to blame as anyone for the catastrophic mistakes that led first to that country`s civil war, then to the rise of the Taliban, and finally to the Afghanistan of 2005: a warlord-dominated narco-state, in which heroin and opium provide fully half of the gross domestic product, and in which a thriving, Taliban-led Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is recently showing signs of emerging, once again, as a mortal threat to a tottering regime in Kabul. Zalmay Khalilzad, it seems, is getting out just in time.

In Baghdad, Khalilzad will be forced to deal with an Iranian-backed coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties that is that country`s main power. Yet Khalilzad will be right at home. For two decades, Khalilzad has consistently argued that the United States ought to support Iran`s ayatollahs, Afghanistan`s mujahideen and the Taliban.

In the 1980s, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official in charge of the Afghan war, and he worked closely with Thomas Goutierre of the University of Nebraska, whose center received CIA, Pentagon and Unocal funding in the 1980s and `90s, in support of the Islamist guerrillas. That, of course, was the U.S.-backed jihad that catapulted Osama bin Laden to prominence and that created a worldwide network of militant Islamist guerrillas schooled in terrorism, including assassinations and car bombings.

In the early 1990s, during the first Bush administration, Khalilzad was hired by his mentor, Paul Wolfowitz, as a defense policy planner. During that era, Khalilzad argued forcefully that the United States ought to build up the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iraq. He also drafted a controversial defense policy paper for Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that called on the United States to exert a hegemonic, post-Cold War strategy of dominance so that "no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the Soviet Union." It also called for a policy of military preemption of emerging threats. In 2003, the twin policies of hegemony and pre-emption combined to result in the invasion of Iraq—and Khalilzad will now have to deal with the unhappy aftermath.

In the mid-1990s, Khalilzad was a paid consultant to Unocal, the American oil company that was courting the new Taliban government, and he happily attended receptions for turbaned Taliban dignitaries visiting Texas, Nebraska and Washington. The fact that Khalilzad was part of the coterie of U.S. officials and businessmen who genuflected to the Taliban while seeking U.S. influence in Central Asia`s oil and gas industry somehow didn`t make it into the official State Department biography of Khalilzad that was distributed at his confirmation hearing. That biography does note that Khalilzad served as a RAND Corporation military strategist from 1993 to 1999.

The impossible task that awaits him in Baghdad is, at least, poetic justice, for it was Khalilzad who helped to champion the forcible regime-change strategy in Iraq beginning in the 1990s. Along with the core of foreign policy radicals and neoconservative strategists, Khalilzad joined the Project for a New American Century to demand, in 1998, that President Clinton shift adopt a policy for "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz et al., Khalilzad was a key architect of the war-on-Iraq policy that seized the Bush administration from its inception in January, 2001.

Given all this, it is clear that Khalilzad`s appointment is the latest evidence that the Bush administration has no intention of rethinking its Iraq strategy. The United States has only two exit strategies in Iraq: The first is simply to declare victory and get out, and the second is to scrap the current puppet regime, make a deal with the resistance and the Sunni insurgency, and internationalize the oversight of the new government in Baghdad. Khalilzad, of course, will support neither one: he is part and parcel of the failed policy of trying to keep the lid on a growing resistance movement with an occupation army that is not up to the task, and of backing the tenuous, ever more fractious alliance of Shiite religious parties and Kurdish warlords that now purports to control the country. The civil war that looms—whether it is triggered by a Kurdish grab for Kirkuk and Iraq`s northern oil fields, or by a Shiite demand for more Islamization of the country, or any one of several other flashpoints—will happen on Khalilzad`s watch. The seven-point plan for Iraq that Khalilzad alluded to at his confirmation hearings gave not a hint of fresh thinking.

Yet, aside from some mild grumbling, the Democrats let Khalilzad—and the Bush administration—off the hook at his hearing. Polls show that the American public is teetering on the brink of a wholesale rejection of the Bush-Khalilzad Iraq policy: too many U.S. casualties, too much carnage, and, at $1 billion a week, too much money. Perhaps the Democrats are hoping that the 2006 elections will be run on the old, familiar turf of taxes, Medicare, Social Security and the environment. But as in 2004, they will be mistaken. The issues in 2006 are still likely to be terrorism, Iraq, and national security. Their meekness on challenging one of the architects of the administration`s errors in all of those areas is a sign that they still don`t get it.

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed today that Mr. Bush lost The Bill of Rights somewhere between the Washington and Columbus, Ohio.

Mr. Bush had been observed earlier by reporters, who saw the president frantically searching back and forth over the White House lawn looking for something he had lost.

"The Bill of Rights probably fell on the floor or something when he pulled the Patriot Act out of his pocket during his speech in Ohio.

I`m sure no one at the police state rally would have noticed that The Bill of Rights were literally being trampled on by the Commander In Chief.

The president is a little, you know, absent minded and has been known to lose important documents in the past.

I`m sure you all remember how he lost his National Guard and drunk driving arrest records or when he mistakenly shredded the Geneva Conventions," said McClellan.
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Es streitet keiner ab, dass es in Ohio zu Unregelmäßigkeiten gekommen ist, aber die Frage ist und bleibt, ob die Abweichungen so groß sind, dass sie für einen Sieg Kerrys gereicht hätten.
Es wurde in jeder US-Wahl betrogen von beiden Seiten. Aber in der Neuzeit gab es nur eine Wahl die nachweislich verschoben wurde und das schon bei der Vorbereitung zur Wahl und das war Florida 2000.
Bei aller Wertschätzung für Gore Vidal und seinen literarischem Werk. Vidal ist wieder von Italien in die USA zurückgekehrt.

[urlPreserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio ]http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf[/url]


Published on Thursday, June 9, 2005 by The Nation
Something Rotten in Ohio
by Gore Vidal
http://www.thenation.com/

Outside the oil and gas junta that controls two and a half branches of our government (the half soon to be whole is the judiciary), there was a good deal of envy at the late British election among those Americans who are serious about politics. Little money was spent by the three parties and none for TV advertising. Results were achieved swiftly and cheaply. Best of all, the three party leaders were quizzed sharply and intelligently by ordinary citizens known quaintly as subjects, thanks to the ubiquitous phantom crown so unlike our nuclear-taloned predatory eagle. Although news of foreign countries seldom appears in our tightly censored media (and good news, never), those of us who are addicted to C-SPAN and find it the one truly, if unconsciously, subversive media outlet in these United States are able to observe British politics in full cry.

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I say “subversive” not only because C-SPAN is apt to take interesting books seriously but also because of its live coverage of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the only look we are ever allowed at the mouthpieces of our masters up close and, at times, most reflective of a government more and more remote from us, unaccountable and repressive. To watch the righteous old prophet Byrd of West Virginia, the sunny hypocrisy of Biden of Delaware—as I write these hallowed names, I summon up their faces, hear their voices, and I am covered with C-SPAN goose bumps.

At any rate, wondrous C-SPAN has another string to its bow. While some executive was nodding, C-SPAN started showing us Britain’s House of Commons during Question Time. This is the only glimpse that most Americans will ever get of how democracy is supposed to work.

These party leaders are pitted against one another in often savage debate on subjects of war and peace, health and education. Then some 600 Members of Parliament are allowed to ask questions of their great chieftains. Years ago the incomparable Dwight Macdonald wrote that any letter to the London Times (the Brits are inveterate letter writers on substantive issues) is better written than any editorial in the New York Times.

In addition to Question Time, which allows Americans to see how political democracy works, as opposed to our two chambers of lobbyists for corporate America, C-SPAN also showed the three party leaders being interrogated by a cross section of, for the most part, youthful subjects of the phantom crown and presided over by an experienced po-lit-i-cal journalist. Blair was roughly accused of lying about the legal advice he had received apropos Britain’s right to go to war in Iraq for the US oil and gas junta. This BBC live audience asked far more informed and informative questions than the entire US press corps was allowed to ask Bush et al. in our recent election. But Americans are not used to challenging authority in what has been called wartime by a President who has ordered invasions of two countries that have done us no harm and is now planning future wars despite dwindling manpower and lack of money. Blair, for just going along, had to deal with savage, informed questions of a sort that Bush would never answer even if he were competent to do so.

So we have seen what democracy across the water can do. All in all a jarring experience for anyone foolish enough to believe that America is democratic in anything except furiously imprisoning the innocent and joyously electing the guilty. What to do? As a first step, I invite the radicals at C-SPAN who take seriously our Constitution and Bill of Rights to address their attention to the corruption of the presidential election of 2004, particularly in the state of Ohio.

One of the most useful members of the House—currently the most useful—is John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who, in his capacity as ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, led the committee’s Democratic Congressmen and their staffers into the heart of the American heartland, the Western Reserve; specifically, into the not-so-red state of Ohio, once known as “the mother of Presidents.”

He had come to answer the question that the minority of Americans who care about the Republic have been asking since November 2004: “What went wrong in Ohio?” He is too modest to note the difficulties he must have undergone even to assemble this team in the face of the triumphalist Republican Congressional majority, not to mention the unlikely heir to himself, George W. Bush, whose original selection by the Supreme Court brought forth many reports on what went wrong in Florida in 2000.

These led to an apology from Associate Justice John Paul Stevens for the behavior of the 5-to-4 majority of the Court in the matter of Bush v. Gore. Loser Bush then brought on undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the greatest deficits in our history and the revelations that the policies of an Administration that—much as Count Dracula fled cloves of garlic—flees all accountability were responsible for the murder and torture of captive men, between 70 percent and 90 percent of whom, by the Pentagon’s estimate, had been swept up at random, earning us the hatred of a billion Muslims and the disgust of what is called the civilized world.

Asked to predict who would win in ’04, I said that, again, Bush would lose, but I was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004 creative propaganda and the fixing of election officials might very well be so perfected as to insure an official victory for Mr. Bush. As Representative Conyers’s report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio (www.house.gov/conyers), shows in great detail, the swing state of Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even though Kerry appears to have been the popular winner as well as the valedictorian-that-never-was of the Electoral College.

I urge would-be reformers of our politics as well as of such anachronisms as the Electoral College to read Conyers’s valuable guide on how to steal an election once you have in place the supervisor of the state’s electoral process: In this case, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who orchestrated a famous victory for those who hate democracy (a permanent but passionate minority). The Conyers Report states categorically, “With regard to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.” In other words, the Florida 2000 scenario redux, when the chair for Bush/Cheney was also the Secretary of State. Lesson? Always plan ahead for at least four more years.

It is well-known in the United States of Amnesia that not only did Ohio have a considerable number of first-time voters but that Blackwell and his gang, through “the misallocation of voting machines, led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters.”

For the past few years many of us have been warning about the electronic voting machines, first publicized on the Internet by investigator Bev Harris, for which she was much reviled by the officers of such companies as Diebold, Sequoia, Es & S, Triad; this last voting computer company “has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide ‘cheat sheets’ to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand count mandated by state law.”

Yet despite all this manpower and money power, exit polls showed that Kerry would win Ohio. So, what happened?

I have told more than enough of this mystery story so thoroughly investigated by Conyers and his Congressional colleagues and their staffers. Not only were the crimes against democracy investigated, but the report on What Went Wrong in Ohio comes up with quite a number of ways to set things right.

Needless to say, this report was ignored when the Electoral College produced its unexamined tally of the votes state by state. Needless to say, no joint committee of the two houses of Congress was convened to consider the various crimes committed and to find ways and means to avoid their repetition in 2008, should we be allowed to hold an election once we have unilaterally, yet again, engaged in a war—this time with Iran. Anyway, thanks to Conyers, the writing is now high up there on the wall for us all to see clearly: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” Students of the Good Book will know what these words of God meant to Belshazzar and his cronies in old Babylon.

Gore Vidal’s `Imperial America` will be out in paperback this September.

This article will run in the July 4, 2005 issue of The Nation magazine.

© 2005 The Nation

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Published on Friday, June 10, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Dean Just Told Them The Truth and They Thought It Was Hell
by Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0610-28.htm

This morning I called the Democratic National Committee to tell them that I support Howard Dean`s modern-day version of Harry Truman`s dictum that, "I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."

Timid and fearful Democrats are trembling on national television as they beg Dr. Dean to stop pointing out the hypocricy and misinformation efforts of Republicans in office and Conservatives in the media.

"He doesn`t speak for me," they say, apparently longing for the days when their spokesman was taking big checks from multinational corporations, signing corporate-friendly trade deals, and defending sex scandals.

The simple truth is that corporate interests have hijacked our nation, theocrats want to take us back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials (with gays playing the part of witches), and the "stars" in the corporate "mainstream" media have been so terrified by Bush administration threats of loss of access (which could then lead to the loss of their own 6- and 7-figure income jobs) that they perpetuate administration lies and tremble at the thought of actually asking a tough follow-up question when Bush prevaricates.

Howard Dean points out these uncomfortable truths. And, like the little boy who said that the Emperor had no clothes, those entrenched in the status quo are trying to hush him up.

But the status quo is bankrupting our families, gutting the middle class, putting a bulls-eye on American soldiers and tourists around the world, devastating our environment and our children`s future.

Given that this nation is only one of a half-dozen or so mature democracies still stuck with a system of government (lacking proportional representation or IRV) that requires a two-party system to operate properly, it`s critical that progressives infiltrate and take over the Democratic Party. After all, it was started by radical progressives like Thomas Jefferson, and reached its greatest electoral victories in the 20th Century when Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted an unabashedly progressive agenda.

And the best way for progressives to be heard today, when it`s critical that Howard Dean get support in standing up to corrupt Republicans and spineless Democrats, is for the DNC to hear from us.

Mid-way into my phone call this morning, I realized that if I really wanted the DNC to pay attention to my comments I should make a tangible gesture. I pulled out my Visa card and made a small donation. It was only ten dollars, but if a million of us did the same, it would make people stand up and take notice.

The website for the DNC is www.dnc.org and their phone number is 877 336-7200. Speak out now.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

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10.6.2005

Jeder Rentner ist sich selbst der Nächste
Die neo-konservativen Pläne der Bush-Regierung
von George Ross
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2005/06/10/a0084.text.na…

In Deutschland ist die kapitalgedeckte Altersvorsorge seit dem Börsen-Crash von 2002 out. In den USA hingegen ist sie im Kommen. Präsident Bush plant die künftigen Rentenkonten als Bestandteil seines Projekts einer "Eigentümergesellschaft"
Im November 2004 verkündete George W. Bush, mit seiner Wiederwahl habe er sich ein "politisches Kapital verdient", das er auch zu investieren gedenke. Mit einem neuen Mandat ausgestattet und mit einer Mehrheit in beiden Häusern des Kongresses im Rücken, kündigte Bush denn auch sofort eine Reihe innenpolitischer Reformen an. Die wichtigste ist sein Plan, das System der öffentlichen Sozialversicherung (social security) umzubauen, jenes allgemeine staatliche Rentensystem also, das ein überaus bedeutsames sozialpolitisches Instrument im Sinne von kollektiver Solidarität und Risikoverteilung darstellt.

Der Präsident kündigte weiter an, mit Hilfe dieser Reformen wolle er die Grundlage für eine von ihm so genannte Eigentümergesellschaft schaffen. Unter den Bush-Gegnern in aller Welt ist es schick, den US-Präsidenten als einen sprachlich überforderten und intellektuell minderbemittelten imperialistischen Haudrauf zu sehen. Doch die Konzeption einer "Eigentümergesellschaft" ist das Herzstück einer raffinierten neokonservativen Vision, deren Ziel eine radikale Umgestaltung der innenpolitischen Landschaft ist, die sich deutlich von einem ordinären Neoliberalismus abhebt - und die daher auch auf internationaler Ebene enorme Bedeutung gewinnen kann.

Von den drei Säulen des US-Rentensystems ist die allgemeinen Sozialversicherung die wichtigste. Dieses staatliche Rentensystem ist zugleich die bedeutendste sozialpolitische Errungenschaft der Roosevelt-Ära von 1933 bis 1945 und orientiert sich am Modell der Bismarck`schen Rentenversicherung. Sie garantiert Menschen eine Altersversorgung, die durch eine bestimmte Lebensarbeitszeit einen entsprechenden Anspruch erworben haben.(1)

Die allgemeine Sozialversicherung stellt ein direkt aus den Beiträgen finanziertes System dar. Was jährlich an Beiträgen aus den Arbeitseinkommen eingenommen wird - derzeit von Arbeitgeber- wie von Arbeitnehmerseite je 6,2 Prozent der Lohnsumme, wobei Arbeitnehmer bis zu einem zu versteuernden Jahreseinkommen von 90 000 Dollar versicherungspflichtig sind -, fließt unmittelbar an die Rentner. Die Altersbezüge liegen niedrig, bei etwa 25 bis 30 Prozent der zuletzt erreichten Gehaltshöhe, allerdings mit zusätzlichen Leistungen für Witwen und Invaliden. Dennoch hat diese Altersversorgung seit den 1930er-Jahren die Altersarmut, die zuvor ein großes soziales Problem gewesen war, merklich reduziert.

Diese Sozialversicherung ist nicht nur das wichtigste Element des sozialstaatlichen Systems der USA, sondern auch das größte Programm, das auf den Prinzipien gesamtgesellschaftlicher Solidarität und eines staatlich organisierten Risikoausgleichs beruht. Heute allerdings steht dieses System, wie die öffentliche Altersversorgung in Europa auch, vor großen Finanzierungsproblemen. Da die Menschen länger leben, wird das Verhältnis von arbeitenden Beitragszahlern zu Rentenempfängern ungünstiger.

Derzeit gehen die Generationen des Babybooms der 1960er- und 1970er-Jahre, deren Beiträge die Altersbezüge der Rentner jahrzehntelang finanziert hatten, selbst in den Ruhestand, während der Anteil der erwerbstätigen Bevölkerung schrumpft. Die jüngste offizielle Schätzung geht davon aus, dass die Zahlungen aus dem Sozialversicherungsfonds bereits 2018 das Beitragsaufkommen übersteigen werden. Bis 2042 könnte das ganze System bankrott sein.

Präsident Bush hat sich aus diesen Annahmen ein "Krisenszenario" gebastelt, mit dem er eine neokonservative Reform des Sozialversicherungssystems vorantreiben will. Im Zentrum dieses Plans steht die Idee, dass jüngere Arbeitnehmer 4 Prozent ihrer Lohnsteuer - und zunächst jährlich maximal 1 000 Dollar - in ein privates "persönliches Rentenkonto" einzahlen.

Der Markt ersetzt den Generationenvertrag
Dieses Konzept will er mit folgenden Argumenten verkaufen: Erstens würden solche nach Marktprinzipien organisierten Konten höhere Erträge abwerfen als die Treuhandfonds der staatlichen Sozialversicherung, die nur in ertragsschwache Staatspapiere investieren dürfen. Ältere Arbeiter, deren Bezüge auf dem existierenden Niveau garantiert sein sollen, wären an diesem neuen System nicht beteiligt. Auch jüngere Arbeitnehmer könnten sich für das existierende System und gegen ein persönliches Konto entscheiden, werden dies aber wahrscheinlich nicht tun, weil sie Zweifel an der Überlebensfähigkeit der staatlichen Sozialversicherung haben und davon ausgehen, dass ihre Altersbezüge im Lauf der Zeit gekürzt werden.

Zweitens würde der Vorteil des neuen Systems für den Inhaber des Rentenkontos darin bestehen, dass ihm die Einlagen "persönlich gehören" und dass er entscheiden kann, wie diese Gelder angelegt werden sollen. Und drittens hat der Bush-Plan eine wichtige Dimension, die ihn für viele - insbesondere auch für manche Demokraten - annehmbar machen könnte. Er sieht die schrittweise Einführung einer "progressiven" Reduzierung der Altersbezüge für die Mittelklassen vor, wobei mit den eingesparten Geldern für ärmere Beitragszahler, denen die Behörden Bedürftigkeit bescheinigen, eine Mindestrente finanziert werden soll.(2)

Die Gegner des Bush-Plans argumentieren zunächst prinzipiell: Kollektive Solidarität und ein gesamtgesellschaftlicher Risikoausgleich seien bewährte Ansätze, an denen man besser nichts ändern sollte. Außerdem gehen viele Kritiker davon aus, dass es die "Krise" des Sozialversicherungssystems gar nicht gibt und dass eine "Anpassung" des bestehenden Systems die Probleme zumindest mittelfristig beherrschbar macht. So könnte man etwa das Rentenalter anheben und die Möglichkeiten der Frühverrentung einschränken, was weitere Mittel frei machen würde.

Auch könnten die Lohnsteuersätze steigen und könnte die Obergrenze für die obligatorische Altersversicherung deutlich über die geltenden 90 000 Dollar Jahreseinkommen angehoben werden, um auch Besserverdienende heranzuziehen. Des Weiteren berufen sich die Gegner des "persönlichen Kontos" auf die Erkenntnisse von Ökonomen, wonach neue Investoren an den Aktien- und Rentenmärkten aufgrund falscher oder unzureichender Informationen falsche Entscheidungen treffen und damit Geld verlieren könnten.

Der wichtigste praktische Einwand gegen den Bush-Plan betrifft jedoch die Kosten des Systemwechsels. Denn zunächst werden die Beiträge statt in die allgemeine Sozialversicherung, die noch die laufenden Renten zahlt, auf die persönlichen Konten umgeleitet. Dies würde eine Finanzierungslücke von mehr als einer Billion Dollar aufreißen. Wo das Geld herkommen soll, ist noch völlig unklar. Die Regierung denkt offenbar an eine höhere Staatsverschuldung - just in einer Zeit, da Bush mit seinen Steuerkürzungen bereits ein fatal hohes Staatsdefizit herbeigeführt hat.

Diese Einwände und Gegenvorschläge basieren auf der Annahme, dass es der Bush-Regierung darum gehe, das dauerhafte Überleben des Sozialversicherungssystems zu sichern. Doch das Hauptziel dieser Reform ist ein ganz anderes: Sie will die Verpflichtung auf die Prinzipien der Solidarität unter den Staatsbürgern und des sozialen Risikomanagements durch die öffentliche Hand untergraben und letztlich abschaffen. Bush selbst hat es in seiner schlichten Art so ausgedrückt: "Wer etwas besitzt, hat ein vitales Interesse an der Zukunft unseres Landes. Je mehr Besitz es in Amerika gibt, umso mehr Vitalität haben wir, und umso mehr Menschen haben ein vitales Interesse an der Zukunft unseres Landes."(3)
Ein Gegenteil von neoliberal
Entscheidend ist dabei, privates Eigentum so stark wie möglich in der Gesellschaft zu verankern, das heißt über den Besitz des eigenen Hauses hinaus (69 Prozent der US-Bürger haben ein eigenes Haus, das ihren größten Vermögenswert darstellt) auf andere Werte wie Aktien und Rentenpapiere auszuweiten. Die vorgeschlagenen persönlichen Altersvorsorgekonten sollen dieses Projekt vorantreiben. Und die "progressive" Umverteilung der Leistungen, die im Lauf der Zeit erfolgen soll, hat zwar angeblich zum Ziel, die langfristigen Finanzierungsprobleme der Sozialversicherung zu beheben, aber sie soll auch die mittleren Einkommensklassen stärker als bisher in die private Alterssicherung hineindrängen. Damit würden sich aber zugleich die Vorbehalte dieser Mittelklasse gegenüber den Subventionen für die Armen derart verstärken, dass die Unterstützung für die Logik der solidarischen Versicherung auf breiter Front schwinden dürfte.

Hinter diesem ganzen Konzept steht eine auf John Locke (1632-1704) zurückgehende Überzeugung, die bei vielen Amerikanern eng mit dem historischen "New Frontier"-Erlebnis zusammenhängt. Demnach gehen die Besitzer von Eigentum, ob Einzelpersonen oder Familien, mit ihrem Besitz sorgsamer um als die Regierung. Deswegen fördern Regierungsprogramme die Fähigkeiten der Menschen nicht, sondern machen die Empfänger nur abhängiger.

Wahre "Freiheit", um Bushs Lieblingswort zu benutzen, beruht auf den Ressourcen und der Fähigkeit, grundlegende Entscheidungen im Hinblick auf die individuelle wie die Zukunft der Familie selbst zu treffen. Diese Begriffe verhalten sich spiegelverkehrt zu den Vorstellungen des "linksliberalen Lagers" der USA und der europäischen Sozialdemokraten, die angesichts sozialer Ungerechtigkeit, versagender Marktmechanismen und der Notwendigkeit, das "Gemeinwohl" zu sichern, auf staatliche Intervention, Schutzprogramme und öffentlicher Leistungen setzen.

Bei alldem darf man eines nicht außer Acht lassen: Die "Eigentümergesellschaft" ist eine neokonservative und nicht etwa eine neoliberale Formel im Sinne der Thatcher-Politik.(4) Besonders deutlich wird dies an der Rolle der Regierung, die nach Auffassung der Neokonservativen an vielen Stellen auf die Gesellschaft einwirken muss, um den Bürgern auf die Sprünge zu helfen - sie also zu motivieren, Besitz zu akkumulieren und ihnen beizubringen, wie man diesen intelligent investiert. Daraus ergibt sich ein weiterer Unterschied hinsichtlich der Haushaltspolitik. Solche neokonservativen Programme können gigantische neue Staatsausgaben nötig machen. Die Neokonservativen betreiben also nicht nur auf internationaler Ebene eine aktive Interventionspolitik, sondern auch innenpolitisch - zumindest insoweit, als sie "freie" neokonservative Individuen schaffen wollen, denen moralische Kategorien einer umfassenden gesellschaftlichen Solidarität zuwider sind.

Die USA haben ihren "New Deal" und ihren "Fair Deal" erfunden, sie hielten es mit der "Great" und der "Good Society", mit dem "Compassionate Conservatism" und ähnlichen Parolen.(5 )Deshalb könnte man die "Eigentümergesellschaft" als eine der rhetorischen Formeln abtun, die von den Regierungen in Washington ständig produziert werden, um die Banalität oder die Leere ihrer Programme möglichst bombastisch zu überdecken. Doch man würde die Durchschlagskraft der US-Neokonservativen unterschätzen, wenn man dieses Schlagwort oder zumindest die ihm zugrunde liegenden Vorstellungen nicht ernst nehmen würde. Ebenso wichtig ist die Erkenntnis, dass die Bush-Meute die aktuellen Trends in der politischen Landschaft und in der Gesellschaft wittert, die unter den geeigneten Umständen eine neue Strategie zur Durchsetzung der Eigentümergesellschaft möglich machen könnten.

Zunächst einmal ist daran zu erinnern, dass die Wähler in den USA George W. Bush und den Kongressfraktionen der Republikaner einen rauschenden Wahlsieg beschert haben. Allein dies zeigt schon, dass der innenpolitische Widerstand gegen ein neokonservatives Programm nur sehr schwach ausgeprägt ist. Hinzu kommt, dass es in den USA für eine Eigentümergesellschaft ein solides Fundament gibt, insofern das Engagement für umfassende Sozialprogramme immer höchst begrenzt war. In der jüngeren Geschichte hat es so etwas wie eine gesamtgesellschaftliche Solidarität im Grunde nur für die Gruppe der Älteren gegeben.

Dagegen waren die Programme zugunsten der Einkommensschwachen - trotz weit verbreiteter Armut - erstens knapp gehalten und zweitens als Strafe konzipiert, das heißt weniger auf Integration als auf Stigmatisierung angelegt. Die Krankenversicherung ist eher privat als öffentlich organisiert, wobei dennoch 15 Prozent der Bevölkerung ohne jeden Versicherungsschutz bleiben. Dazu ist sie teurer als irgendwo sonst auf der Welt und erwiesenermaßen äußerst ineffizient.(6)
Selbst die "working poor" sollen Eigentum erwerben
Die Reformen der jüngsten Zeit haben diese Tendenzen noch gefördert und zugespitzt. Als die von Clinton geplante Gesundheitsreform den Bach runterging, blieb den meisten Amerikanern nur die individuelle Entscheidung für eines von vielen privaten Versicherungsprogrammen. Deren Palette reicht von äußerst luxuriösen bis zu minimalistischen Lösungen. Der Rest blieb mangels finanzieller Ressourcen völlig unversichert.

Die Reform des sozialen Systems von 1995 verschärfte die Straffunktion des Armutsbekämpfungsprogramms und verstärkte die Anreize in Richtung einer "Eigentümergesellschaft" sogar für die working poor, die Beschäftigten mit geringem Lohneinkommen.(7) Das Gesetz über verschreibungspflichtige Arzneimittel, das Bush in seiner ersten Amtsperiode auf den Weg brachte, führte teure Programme ein, die den älteren Bürgern einen Teil ihrer medizinischen Ausgaben ersetzen und zugleich starke Anreize enthalten, um sie in private Krankenversicherungen zu drängen.

Zudem wurden eine Reihe ergänzender Steuergesetze verabschiedet, die ebenfalls in Richtung "Eigentümergesellschaft" weisen. Sie brachten etwa größere Steuerersparnisse für Leute, die Hypotheken aufnehmen oder wohltätige Spenden geben, billige Kredite, die einen Teil der Studiengebühren abdecken sollen, sowie verschiedene Arten von "Vouchers" und andere Instrumente, die eine "individuelle Wahl" der schulischen Ausbildung begünstigen sollen.(8)

Für solche Reformen in Richtung einer "Eigentümergesellschaft" findet die Bush-Mannschaft einen fruchtbaren sozialen Untergrund vor. Gut bezahlte industrielle Arbeitsplätze werden in rasantem Tempo abgebaut; das Ergebnis sind immer mehr working poor, die kaum gewerkschaftlich organisiert sind und nur selten zur Wahl gehen. Die Gruppen, die politisch und gesellschaftlich zählen, machen die solide "Mittelklasse" aus. Diese umfasst die obersten 20 Prozent der Einkommensempfänger wie auch etwas weniger bemittelte Schichten, die aber reale oder eingebildete Gründe für die Erwartung haben, dass sie oder ihre Kinder einmal in die Mittelklasse aufsteigen.

In den heutigen USA ist diese politisch entscheidende Mittelklasse gezwungen, auf den Erwerb der Art von "Vermögenswerten" zu setzen, die von den Verfechtern der "Eigentümergesellschaft" propagiert werden, also von privaten Immobilien, die mit der Zeit an Wert gewinnen, persönlichen Ersparnissen (in der Regel in Gestalt privater Pensionspläne) und Steuerkrediten für die Versorgung und Ausbildung der Kinder. Hinzu kommt, dass die Einkommen in den USA seit 1980 immer ungleicher geworden sind als in anderen reichen Gesellschaften (wo die Ungleichheit ebenfalls erheblich zugenommen hat), während sich zugleich die soziale Mobilität erheblich verlangsamt hat.(9)

Diese Entwicklungen haben zu einer neuen Unsicherheit beigetragen und bei der Mittelklasse einen wilden Ehrgeiz geschürt, die eigenen materiellen Erfolge an den Nachwuchs weiterzugeben. Das gilt vor allem für die Leute, die bereits genügend "Werte" angesammelt haben, um aussichtsreiche Investitionen in den relativen Erfolg ihrer Kinder vorzunehmen. Diese Familien mit den nötigen Mitteln denken lange und gründlich darüber nach, wo sie ein Haus kaufen, damit sie die Chancen ihrer Kinder verbessern, in sicherer Umgebung aufzuwachsen und gute Kindergärten, Schulen und nachbarschaftliche "Netzwerke" vorzufinden. Die besten US-Universitäten eröffnen die besten Karrierechancen, doch die Aufnahmekriterien sind streng, weshalb die Eltern über Jahre hinweg gezielte Förderungsprogramme organisieren. Doch da die Spitzenuniversitäten private Unternehmen sind und pro Studienjahr mindestens 40 000 Dollar kosten, haben sich US-Bürger der Mittelklasse damit abgefunden, dass sie im Alter von 45 oder 50 Jahren einen Teil ihrer Immobilien verkaufen oder Kredite aufnehmen müssen, um den Kindern "das College zu zahlen".

Die Hoffnung auf sozialen Aufstieg ist in den heutigen USA zu einer Art "Würfelspiel" geworden, wobei der finanzielle Einsatz sehr hoch, der Erfolg aber in keiner Weise garantiert ist. Und schließlich ist auch das Ende des ganzen Spiels - in Form eines langen und auskömmlichen Ruhestandes - nur selten gesichert. Doch das ganze System verstärkt entschieden die Parole "Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste", mit der auch die Werbung für die "Eigentümergesellschaft" arbeitet.

Science-Fiction? Die Neue Rechte meint es ernst
Das Konzept mag schrecklich sein und nach politischer Science-Fiction klingen - doch für die heutigen USA ist die "Eigentümergesellschaft" keineswegs eine nur entfernte Möglichkeit. Bei allen Erfolgen, die sie schon errungen hat, ist die US-amerikanische Neue Rechte immer noch hungrig, ehrgeizig und intellektuell ernst zu nehmen. Die geschlagene Linke einschließlich der Demokratischen Partei ist schwächer und intellektuell ärmer, als es ihr selbst - und den meisten ausländischen Beobachtern - bewusst ist.

Viele Amerikaner wissen, dass ihnen die harte neoliberale Politik, die das Wall Street Journal und andere Organe der Wirtschaft propagieren, ein sehr hartes Leben bringen wird. Diese Sackgasse der konservativen Strategie vermeidet die "Eigentümergesellschaft", indem sie einen aktiven Staat und öffentliche Ausgaben zulässt, die Rahmenbedingungen schaffen sollen, innerhalb deren die Bürger sich für die ein oder andere Art von Investitionen ihrer privaten Mittel entscheiden. Die zentralen Begriffe dieses Konzepts plädieren denn auch eher auf einer moralischen - und nicht so sehr auf einer ökonomischen oder religiösen - Ebene für eine neue "rechte Gesellschaftsordnung". Sie liefern also die ethische Rechtfertigung für eine Gesellschaft, die Armut stigmatisiert, einen von der Mittelklasse getragenen Konsens herstellt und es den Reichen gestattet, noch reicher zu werden.

Dass das heutige Amerika marschiert - und zwar im Wortsinne -, bekommen allemal diejenigen mit, die das Geräusch ihrer Marschstiefel im Ohr haben. Wenn man Amerika verstehen will, muss man aber erkennen, dass es auch im metaphorischen und kulturellen Sinne marschiert, und zwar in dem Takt, der durch die Dynamik der Globalisierung vorgegeben wird. Freilich hat man bisher über die neokonservative Musik, die diesen Marsch begleitet, noch nicht hinreichend nachgedacht. Wer die neokonservative Schule amerikanischen Typs als naives Hayek`sches Credo abtut, wonach die Märkte alle Probleme lösen, verhält sich auf gefährliche Weise kurzsichtig. Entsprechend ihrer besonderen Sicht der Welt muss man sie als eine aktivistische, staatlich gesteuerte und oft sehr teure Interventionspolitik ansehen, mit dem Ziel, eine Massenbasis zu schaffen und zu erhalten, die alles ablehnt, was nach "kollektiv" riecht, egal ob es sich um Konzepte der Vergangenheit (wie die Sozialversicherung) oder um Rezepte für die Zukunft handelt.

Und wenn "die Leute" dieses Konzept noch nicht zurückweisen, dann geht es jetzt eben darum, "die Leute zu verändern", bis sie mitmachen. Die geplante Reform der Sozialversicherung wird womöglich kurzfristig, während der Amtszeit von George W. Bush, noch nicht zustande kommen, weil sie nach wie vor ein viel zu heißes Eisen ist. Doch das neokonservative Gedankengut hat bei der Eroberung Amerikas schon große Erfolge erzielt, und es wäre ausgesprochen töricht, darauf zu setzen, dass diese Vision irgendwann wieder in der Versenkung verschwindet.

Wahrscheinlich werden die USA sehr hartnäckig versuchen, das Konzept der "Eigentumsgesellschaft" als Modell für die Organisation des sozialen und des politischen Systems auch zu exportieren. Wichtige Interessengruppen außerhalb der USA und insbesondere in Europa könnten veranlasst werden, sich mit diesem Modell anzufreunden. Es steht also sehr viel auf dem Spiel - das Jahrhunderte währende Bemühen, den Kapitalismus zu humanisieren und zu demokratisieren. Die Gefahr steht uns deutlich vor Augen, doch vorgewarnt sein bedeutet leider nicht automatisch, dass wir dagegen auch gewappnet sind.

Fußnoten:
(1) Die beiden anderen Säulen des Rentensystems beruhen auf Marktprinzipien. Es sind die selten gewordenen unternehmensfinanzierten privaten Alterspensionen einerseits und die erst seit kurzem bestehenden individuell angelegten "Ruhestandskonten" andererseits. Dazu: Jacob Hacker, "The Divided Welfare State", Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2002.
(2) "The New York Times", 30. 4. 2005.
(3) Zitiert nach der Presseerklärung des Weißen Hauses vom 9. 8. 2004.
(4) Margaret Thatcher beharrte darauf, dass für sie die Konzeption von "Gesellschaft" völlig bedeutungslos sei. Für sie zählte nur der Markt.
(5) "New Deal": US-Präsident Roosevelts Wirtschaftsprogramm von 1933 zur Überwindung der Großen Depression. "Fair Deal": Präsident Trumans Bürgerrechts- und Sozialprogramm von 1948. "Great Society": Präsident Johnsons Programm von 1965 mit der Gründung der Krankenversicherungen Medicare und Medicaid. "Good Society": "Menschenfreundliches" Konzept des Kommunitaristen Robert Bellah nach seinem gleichnamigen Buch von 1991. "Compassionate Conservativism": Präsident George W. Bushs These von 2001, nach der Bedürftige von Kirchen und Staat "erlöst" werden. Die Bezeichnung "mitfühlender Konservatismus" stammt von dem Publizisten Marvin Olasky (Anm. d. R.).
(6) Siehe Paul Krugman, "Passing the Buck in U.S. Health Care", "International Herald Tribune", 23./24. April 2005, S. 6.
(7) Dass Präsident Clinton sich dieser Reform verschreiben musste, um die Chance auf eine Wiederwahl zu haben, zeigt nur, wie stark die US-Wähler in den letzten Jahrzehnten in Bezug auf sozialpolitische Fragen nach rechts abgedriftet sind.
(8) Dazu Christopher Howard, "The Hidden Welfare State", Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1997.
(9) Dazu in knapper Form der ""Economist", 1. 1. 2005, S. 22-24.
Aus dem Englischen von Niels Kadritzke

George Ross ist Direktor des Center for German and European Studies an der Brandeis University, Massachusetts, und Mitarbeiter des Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies an der Universität Harvard.

Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7686 vom 10.6.2005, Seite 12-13, 620 Dokumentation, George Ross

© Contrapress media GmbH Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des taz-Verlags

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

10.6.2005
Libanons Demokratie ohne Demokraten
von Alain Gresh
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2005/06/10/a0030.text.na…

In Beirut wird wohl bald Saad Hariri regieren, Sohn des im Februar ermordeten Exministerpräsidenten Rafik Hariri. Nach den Parlamentswahlen sind die alten Machtstrukturen wieder da. Von der Aufbruchstimmung der "Zedernrevolution" ist kaum noch etwas zu spüren.
Saad Hariri triumphierte. Von überall her erhielt er Glückwünsche und Grußadressen: aus Saïda im Süden, aus der Bekaa-Ebene im Westen, aus der Region um Tripoli im Norden und aus den Stadtvierteln von Beirut. Und alle Absender - Wohlfahrtsorganisationen und Familienverbände, die sunnitische Muslimliga, aber auch einzelne Journalisten - waren sich in ihrem Lob für den neu Gekürten einig. Man pries seine Entschlossenheit, den Kurs seines Vaters fortzusetzen, und bekundete die Überzeugung, er werde den Libanon in eine bessere Zukunft führen.

In geradezu sowjetischem Stil wurden diese Elogen im Fernsehen immer wieder vorgetragen - dazu eine Stimme aus dem Off, die Dankbarkeit angesichts der überwältigenden Zustimmung zur Entscheidung der "Familie" für ein neues Oberhaupt zum Ausdruck brachte. Eine Gruppe von Abgeordneten, ergänzt um mehrere ehemalige Minister, schwor dem neuen Herrn die Treue. Und in den Tagen darauf erhielt er die höchsten Weihen. Frankreichs Staatspräsident Jacques Chirac gewährte ihm eine mehr als einstündige Audienz, und US-Präsident George W. Bush empfing ihn auf seiner Ranch - in Gegenwart des saudischen Kronprinzen Abdallah.

Wer ist nun dieser allerhöchste Erlöser? Ein beinahe Unbekannter, den die libanesische Tageszeitung L`Orient Le Jour als "Telekommunikationsexperten" vorstellt. Saad Hariri, 35, ist der zweitälteste Sohn des am 14. Februar ermordeten früheren libanesischen Ministerpräsidenten Rafik Hariri. Nach einem Studium an der Georgetown University in Washington, D. C., war er Generaldirektor von Saudi Oger Ltd., einem Mischkonzern mit 35 000 Angestellten und einem Jahresumsatz von 2 Milliarden Dollar. Saad Hariri ist sunnitischer Muslim und verfügt über gute Beziehungen zum saudischen Königshaus, vor allem zum Sohn des mächtigen Staatsministers Prinz Abdelasis Ben Fahd. Die Frage nach seiner politischen Erfahrung wurde von niemand gestellt.

Hariri wurde keineswegs von einer Partei oder politischen Organisation nominiert, sondern von "der Familie" - der Begriff hat im Libanon offenbar nichts Zweideutiges. Sie tat dem Volk ihre Entscheidung in einer Verlautbarung kund. Die beiden Hauptpunkte: Nasek Hariri, die Witwe des Ministerpräsidenten, werde "Aufsicht und Leitung aller sozialen und wohltätigen Einrichtungen" übernehmen, "die der Märtyrer des Libanon gestiftet hat". Punkt zwei: Sein Sohn Saad werde "die Verantwortung und die historische Führungsrolle in allen politischen und nationalen Angelegenheiten übernehmen, um auf allen Ebenen das Werk des nationalen Wiederaufbaus fortzusetzen".

Das klingt ganz nach einer Erbfolge. Doch im neuen "demokratischen Libanon", dessen Entstehung allseits gefeiert wird, scheint diese dynastische Politik nicht auf Kritik zu stoßen. Auch interessiert sich niemand dafür, weshalb Bahia Hariri, die Schwester des Ermordeten, politisch kaltgestellt wurde. Sie hält immerhin einen Sitz im Parlament und spielte bei den Protestkundgebungen nach dem Attentat auf ihren Bruder eine zentrale Rolle.

Für die Journalisten, die ihn rühmten, fand Saad Hariri begütigende Worte: "Nichts wird sich ändern. Ich werde alles fortführen, was mein Vater begonnen hat. Auch was die Stiftungen angeht, werde ich, werden wir seinen Weg fortsetzen."(1) Manchen Beobachtern erschien die Aussage wie Ironie. Schließlich hatte Rafik Hariri alle bedeutenden Medien und die Mehrzahl der einflussreichen Journalisten wiederholt mit großzügigen Spenden bedacht.

Es ist schon eine merkwürdige Sache: In einem Land, das eine syrische Besatzungsarmee von fast 20 000 Mann beherbergt hat, genießen die Medien eine Freiheit, von der die übrige arabische Welt nur träumen kann - gerade Staaten wie Ägypten und Saudi-Arabien, die sich als Garantiemächte des demokratischen Wandels im Libanon verstehen. Aber die Meinungsfreiheit im Libanon unterliegt zwei entscheidenden Einschränkungen: Man spricht nicht über die Rolle der syrischen und libanesischen Geheimdienste und ebenso wenig über die Stellung und den Reichtum von Rafik Hariri, geschweige denn über seine Mitverantwortung für die wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Probleme des Landes, insbesondere die gewaltige Staatsverschuldung. Nur das erste dieser beiden Tabus ist inzwischen nicht mehr unantastbar.

In einem Punkt scheinen sich alle einig zu sein: Der Libanon hat die Zeiten der inneren Zerrissenheit endgültig hinter sich gelassen. So viel ist in wenigen Monaten geschehen, dass man es noch kaum begreifen kann. Auslöser dieser rapiden Entwicklung war die Entscheidung des syrischen Staatspräsidenten Baschar al-Assad von Ende August 2004, seinem wichtigsten Verbündeten im Libanon, dem Präsidenten Émile Lahoud, eine Mandatsverlängerung um drei Jahre zu gewähren. Damaskus hielt es nicht für nötig, diese autoritäre Strategie mit irgendjemandem abzustimmen.

Einen Präzedenzfall hatte es 1995 gegeben. Damals wurde die Amtszeit von Präsident Elias Hraoui um drei Jahre verlängert - gegen heftigen Protest im Libanon und im Ausland. Doch die regionalen und internationalen Bedingungen haben sich gewandelt. Frankreich und die USA sind nicht mehr so nachsichtig. Am 2. September 2004 verabschiedete der UN-Sicherheitsrat mit 9 von 15 Stimmen die Resolution 1559: Darin wird der Rückzug Syriens aus dem Libanon und die Entwaffnung der Milizen gefordert, womit natürlich die Hisbollah und die palästinensischen Gruppen gemeint sind.

Ministerpräsident Rafik Hariri machte nach einigem Zögern Front gegen die syrische Begünstigung von Staatspräsident Lahoud und trat zurück. Seine Ermordung am 14. Februar 2005 - in den meisten Medienberichten sofort dem syrischen Geheimdienst zugeschrieben - löste eine Massenbewegung aus, deren Höhepunkt eine gewaltige Demonstration am 14. März in Beirut bildete. Zu hunderttausenden verlangten die Libanesen al-haqiqa, die Wahrheit (über das Attentat). Sie forderten die Ablösung der Geheimdienstchefs im Libanon und den Abzug der syrischen Truppen. Kann man in diesem Ereignis auch den Beginn einer Versöhnung zwischen den feindlichen Lagern im Libanon sehen, zwischen Sunniten und Schiiten, Drusen und Maroniten?

In den nationalen und internationalen Medien war viel von einer "Zedernrevolution" die Rede, einem friedlichen Umbruch nach dem Vorbild der "Rosenrevolution" in Georgien oder der "Revolution in Orange" in der Ukraine. Doch solche einfachen Bilder werden der komplexen Situation nie gerecht. Es hieße die besondere Geschichte des Landes übergehen, wollte man sie nur nach dem Schema eines Kampfs zwischen Gut und Böse, zwischen Demokratie und Totalitarismus begreifen.

Zweifellos hatte die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung genug von der Dauerpräsenz der syrischen Truppen, von den immer neuen Einmischungen in die libanesische Politik, der bestimmenden Rolle der Geheimdienste. Syriens Verdienste bei der Beendigung des libanesischen Bürgerkriegs und der Stützung des südlibanesischen Widerstands gegen die israelische Besatzung sind unbestritten. Aber die Führung in Damaskus hat mit einer langen Reihe von Fehlentscheidungen Unzufriedenheit und Feindseligkeit geweckt. Das räumte auch Präsident Baschar al-Assad in seiner Rede vom 5. März ein, mit der er den Rückzug der syrischen Truppen ankündigte.

Geradezu unglaublich scheint allerdings, dass genau jene Führer, die schon im Bürgerkrieg die führenden Rollen innehatten und bis zu ihrem jüngsten Gesinnungswechsel überwiegend mit Syrien kollaborierten, noch immer die bestimmenden Größen sind. In den vergangenen Monaten konnte sich nicht etwa eine neue politische Persönlichkeit etablieren - nein, tonangebend bleiben die Gemayel, Dschumblatt, Hariri, Frangié, Schamoun und so weiter. Keiner aus dieser alten Garde hat irgendeinen Vorschlag zur Reform des traditionellen Systems gemacht, das auf Korruption und dem Proporz zwischen den Clans und Konfessionen basiert.

Sie setzen einfach auf die Losung "Syrien ist an allem schuld". Alle Mittel sind ihnen recht, selbst das absurde Gerücht, dass 80 000 syrische Haushalte kostenlos Strom aus dem libanesischen Elektrizitätsnetz beziehen. Und die Korruption? "Dafür machen wir einfach die Syrer verantwortlich", erklärt ein Wirtschaftswissenschaftler, "genauso, wie wir 1983 die Schuld an allen unseren Schwierigkeiten den Palästinensern zugeschoben haben. Also stellt niemand die Frage, was die libanesische Führung beiseite geschafft hat. Und wie es eigentlich möglich war, dass wir es im Rahmen eines nationalen Aufbauprogramms auf eine Staatsverschuldung von mehr als 30 Milliarden Dollar gebracht haben."

Das Prinzip, nach dem der Libanon bisher funktionierte, geht auf die Zeit nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg zurück. 1920 wurde Frankreich vom Völkerbund das Mandat über das Land verliehen, und damals wurden die Rechte der insgesamt 17 ethnisch-religiösen Gemeinschaften geregelt. Die wichtigsten sind bis heute unter den Christen die (katholischen) Maroniten, die Griechisch-Orthodoxen und die Griechisch-Katholischen, sowie auf der muslimischen Seite die Schiiten (darunter die Drusen) und Sunniten. In Artikel 95 der 1926 von Frankreich erlassenen libanesischen Verfassung heißt es: "Bis auf weiteres und in der Absicht, Eintracht und Gerechtigkeit herzustellen, sollen die Gemeinschaften proportional im Kabinett und in den öffentlichen Ämtern vertreten sein."

In der Praxis bedeutete dieses System, das auch nach der Unabhängigkeit des Libanon 1943 beibehalten wurde, eine Vormachtstellung der Maroniten. Es war ein ungeschriebenes Gesetz, dass die Maroniten den Staatspräsidenten stellten, während der Ministerpräsident ein sunnitischer und der Parlamentspräsident ein schiitischer Muslim sein sollte. Entsprechend war die Sitzverteilung im Parlament geregelt: 60 Prozent für die christlichen Gemeinschaften, 40 Prozent für die Muslime.

1989 beendete eine durch Syrien moderierte Friedenskonferenz im saudischen Taif den seit 1975 anhaltenden Bürgerkrieg, der zehntausende Tote gefordert hatte. Teil der Abkommen war auch eine Neufassung der Proporzregelung. Mit Blick auf die demografische Mehrheit der Muslime von schätzungsweise 60 Prozent vereinbarten die Parteien eine gleichwertige Repräsentation auf allen Ebenen.

Im Einzelnen hieß es: "Die Abschaffung des politisch-konfessionellen Systems stellt eine wichtige nationale Aufgabe dar, die durch eine Serie von Maßnahmen zu erfüllen ist." Jeweils nach den Parlamentswahlen sollte "unter dem Vorsitz des Staatschefs eine nationale Kommission gebildet werden, der auch der Ministerpräsident und der Parlamentspräsident sowie Persönlichkeiten aus Politik, Gesellschaft und Geistesleben angehören. Aufgabe dieser Kommission ist es, das politisch-konfessionelle System zu prüfen, dem Parlament und dem Kabinett Vorschläge zu seiner Abschaffung zu unterbreiten sowie deren Umsetzung zu überwachen."

Aus den Parlamentswahlen von 1992 ging Rafik Hariri als Sieger hervor. In seiner ersten Amtsperiode als Ministerpräsident wurden alle politischen Reformen auf Eis gelegt. Eigentlich hatte man in dem langen, gnadenlosen Bürgerkrieg vor allem um die Auflösung des politisch-konfessionellen Systems gestritten. Er hatte den gegenteiligen Effekt: Die Einzelnen fanden zuletzt Schutz und Zuflucht nur noch bei ihrer eigenen ethnisch-religiösen Gemeinschaft.(2 )Die( )Zugehörigkeit zu einem Clan oder einer Religionsgemeinschaft war bedeutsamer als jede ideologische Orientierung.

Bloß kein Nachdenken über die eigene Geschichte
Außerdem bewirkte die 1989 vereinbarte Straffreiheit für alle Führer der Milizen, dass man im Libanon nicht groß über die eigene Geschichte nachdenken musste - es war ja einfacher, den Bürgerkrieg als einen "Stellvertreterkrieg" zu begreifen, eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen Palästinensern, Israelis und Syrern. Letztlich wurde das politisch-konfessionelle System gestärkt - und das erschien gerade den jungen Libanesen stabiler zu sein als vor dem Bürgerkrieg. "Wir bleiben unter uns", meint Ahmed, Student an der Amerikanischen Universität von Beirut, die immerhin den Ruf hat, über dem Konfessionsstreit zu stehen. "Freunde hat man nur in der eigenen Glaubensgemeinschaft. Als wir alle gemeinsam nach dem Anschlag auf Rafik Hariri auf die Straße gegangen sind, hat das Misstrauen eher noch zugenommen. Jeder fragte sich insgeheim, was die anderen wohl dachten, was sie eigentlich im Schilde führten."

Während die multikonfessionellen Parteien der Linken, etwa die Kommunisten, an Einfluss verloren, setzten andere politische Gruppierungen mehr denn je auf die Religionszugehörigkeit. Amal und Hisbollah gaben sich als "Vertreter" der Schiiten. Die Sunniten - ohne eigenen nationalen Führer - schlossen sich Rafik Hariri an. Die nur dem Namen nach "sozialistische" Partei von Walid Dschumblatt blieb durch ihre drusische Gefolgschaft geprägt. Die Maroniten schlossen sich 2000 in der Organisation Kornet Schahuan zusammen - ein bunter Haufen, dem nicht nur die extrem rechten "Forces Libanaises" und die "Patriotischen Kräfte" des soeben aus dem Exil zurückgekehrten Generals Michel Aoun angehören, sondern auch der frühere Staatspräsident Amin Gemayel und die "Nationalpartei" des Schamoun-Clans.

In diesem politischen System gilt die Loyalität gegenüber dem Familienclan mehr als jedes in der Sache begründete politische Bündnis, und selbstverständlich tritt ein Sohn das politische Erbe des Vaters an. Die traditionelle maronitische Führungsschicht, die seit den Verträgen von Taif in sich zerstritten und ohne politischen Einfluss ist, hielt den Patriarchen Nasrallah Butros Sfeir für einen Verräter, nachdem er in Washington und Paris als "Vertreter der maronitischen Gemeinschaft" hofiert worden war. Zur Neufassung des Wahlgesetzes gab er nach Rücksprache mit den maronitischen Bischöfen ein ablehnendes Votum ab: Die Christen seien "nach dem Prinzip der Listenwahl nur befugt, 14 der ihnen zustehenden Abgeordneten zu wählen. Über die restlichen 50 Sitze entscheiden die Stimmen von Muslimen."(3) Nasrallah Sfeir glaubt, dass im neuen Libanon wieder die alte Lagermentalität herrschen wird: Maroniten stimmen für Maroniten, Drusen für Drusen … Wo bleibt also die Demokratie?

Symbolisches Zentrum der "Zedernrevolution" von Anfang 2005 ist der "Platz der Märtyrer" in Beirut. Hier fanden alle großen Protestkundgebungen gegen die syrische Besatzung statt. Hier steht auch eine Zeltstadt, ein "Freedom Camp" nach dem Vorbild von Tiflis und Kiew. Seit dem Rückzug der syrischen Truppen am 26. April hat der Ort allerdings deutlich weniger Zulauf.

Zu einer Demonstration finden sich heute immerhin ein paar hundert Jugendliche ein. Es sind überwiegend Studenten, Anhänger der Forces Libanaises (FL), die die Freilassung von Samir Geagea fordern, ihrem "Märtyrer der Freiheit". Gleichzeitig finden auch in maronitischen Städten und Dörfern Kundgebungen statt, die den politischen Druck für die Entlassung des einstigen FL-Führers verstärken sollen. Geagea sitzt seit elf Jahren im Gefängnis. Zehntausende von Kerzen werden entzündet, um den "Märtyrer" zu ehren, und zehntausend Demonstranten machen sich aus Beirut und dem Umland auf nach Bkerké in den Bergen nordöstlich der Hauptstadt, wo das maronitische Patriarchat residiert. Dort findet eine Art Abschlusskundgebung statt - in Gestalt einer Messe, die Roland Aboujaoudé abhält, der Generalvikar des maronitischen Patriarchats.

Wer ist Samir Geagea? Eine englischsprachige Zeitung(4 )bezeichnet ihn als den Drahtzieher von Mordanschlägen auf den früheren Ministerpräsidenten Omar Karamé und einige andere politische Konkurrenten Geageas aus dem christlichen Lager, als da sind Dany Schamoun, der Sohn des früheren Staatspräsidenten Camille Schamoun, und Tony Frangié, der Sohn des früheren Staatspräsidenten Soleiman Frangié. Ein Amnestiegesetz von 1991 sieht vor, dass Kriegsverbrecher, gegen die noch ermittelt wird, nicht begnadigt werden können. Tatsächlich traf diese Bestimmung allein auf Samir Geagea zu - und seither protestieren die Anhänger der FL gegen dieses "Unrecht", denn zahlreiche andere Verurteilte sind längst auf freiem Fuß.

Im Libanon tut man sich schwer mit der historischen Wahrheit. Erst kürzlich scheiterte der Versuch, ein neues Geschichtsbuch für den Schulunterricht herauszugeben, weil man sich über die Darstellung des Bürgerkriegs von 1975 bis 1989 nicht einigen konnte. "Von einer Geschichte, die nicht der jeweils offiziellen Version entspricht, wissen wir einfach nichts" erklärt Karim, ein Student. "Jeder lernt, was seine Gemeinschaft lehrt - und wir reden untereinander nicht über solche Fragen." Es sieht nicht so aus, als werde sich daran etwas ändern.

Solidarität mit dem Mörder von Sabra und Schatila
Samir Geagea ist kein gewöhnlicher Krimineller. Wie sein Chef Beschir Gemayel gehörte er zu denen, die im Juni 1982 den Einmarsch der israelischen Armee unter dem damaligen Verteidigungsminister Ariel Scharon in den Libanon begrüßt hatten. Zu Beginn der Belagerung von Westbeirut durch israelische Truppen erklärte Gemayel gegenüber den Israelis, wie hilfreich er für sie sein könne: "Wir haben bereits die Wasser- und Stromversorgung unterbrochen. Und wir sind bereit, auch militärisch einzugreifen. Wenn man uns in der Schlacht um Beirut braucht, werden wir an Ihrer Seite kämpfen. Aber erst wenn die Macht in unseren Händen ist, werden Sie sehen, wie wertvoll unsere Unterstützung für Sie sein kann."5

Am 23. August 1982, im Schutz der israelischen Panzer, wurde Bechir Gemayel zum Staatspräsidenten gewählt, am 14. September fiel er einem Attentat zum Opfer. Sein Bruder Amine übernahm das Präsidentenamt. Damals kümmerte es die Staatengemeinschaft wenig, dass die beiden Präsidentschaftswahlen unter israelischer Oberhoheit stattgefunden hatten. Doch dann folgten die Ereignisse vom 16. bis 18. September: In den Flüchtlingslagern Sabra und Schatila wurden tausende Palästinenser - überwiegend Frauen, Kinder und alte Menschen - Opfer eines kaltblütig geplanten Massakers: Die israelische Armee erlaubte den Forces Libanaises das Eindringen in die Lager.

Direkt verantwortlich für diese Verbrechen waren zwei FL-Kommandanten: Elie Hobeika, der am 24. Januar 2002 unter ungeklärten Umständen ums Leben kam(6) - und ebenjener Samir Geagea. Dass er demnächst vielleicht freikommt, wird in den Palästinenserlagern nicht gleichgültig aufgenommen. "Die libanesischen Sicherheitskräfte waren nicht in der Lage, die syrischen Arbeiter zu schützen, die in den vergangenen Wochen Opfer von Übergriffen wurden", meint Marwan Elias, Mitglied der Verwaltung des Lagers Mar Elias, das mitten in Beirut liegt: "Wie also sollten sie imstande sein, uns zu verteidigen?"

Seit dem 14. Februar kam es tatsächlich immer wieder zu Gewaltakten gegen syrische Arbeiter, die zu hunderttausenden im Libanon beschäftigt sind, vor allem in der Landwirtschaft und im Baugewerbe - und zwar ausnahmslos zu Billiglöhnen. Die Angriffe forderten mehrere Todesopfer und lösten eine Rückwanderungswelle aus, die einige Branchen hart getroffen hat. Amnesty international hat deshalb an die libanesische Regierung appelliert, die Verantwortlichen zu ermitteln und zu bestrafen.(7 )Dass sich die Palästinenser jetzt ungeschützt fühlen, ist also leicht nachzuvollziehen.

Viele Libanesen dagegen sind begeistert, dass sie endlich die syrische Bevormundung los sind. Und sie hoffen auf die Ergebnisse der Kommission, die das Attentat auf Rafik Hariri untersucht. Aber die Zukunftsperspektiven werden damit nicht besser. Nach wie vor stehen sich die ethnisch-religiösen Gemeinschaften äußerst misstrauisch gegenüber.

Bei den großen Kundgebungen der letzten Monate fiel auf, dass von keiner Seite ein klares Reformkonzept eingebracht wurde. Auch der Streit um das Wahlgesetz macht deutlich, wie sehr die feindlichen Lager nach wie vor bestrebt sind, nur die eigenen Interessen zu verfolgen. Mit Ausnahme der Amal und der Hisbollah konnte sich niemand für die Idee begeistern, das politische System des Libanon durch eine sukzessive Einführung des Verhältniswahlrechts zu "öffnen".

Joseph Samaha, Leitartikler der Tageszeitung Al-Safir, gehört zu den wenigen Journalisten, die sich keinen falschen Illusionen hingeben: "Wir haben es hier nicht mit einer neuen Form von Nationalgefühl zu tun, sondern mit synchronen politischen Initiativen der verschiedenen Gemeinschaften. Nur das hat die Illusion einer Einheit der Nation erzeugt."

Wenn sich die Sunniten in großer Zahl an der Kundgebung am 14. März beteiligt haben, so lag das nicht nur daran, dass sie wirklich wissen wollten, wer für den Mord an Rafik Hariri verantwortlich war. Sie glaubten auch, ein Zeichen gegen die beeindruckende Demonstration der Schiiten unter Führung der Hisbollah setzen zu müssen, die am 7. März mehrere hunderttausend Menschen zusammenbrachte. Dazu gehörten viele Bewohner der Elendsquartiere im Süden der Hauptstadt, die auf diese Weise symbolisch ins Stadtzentrum vordrangen, in dem traditionell nur die christliche und die sunnitische Oberschicht wohnen.

Im Sammeltaxi in Beirut äußern sich der Fahrer und ein Fahrgast ganz begeistert über Frankreich - aber man gibt mir auch ein paar gute Ratschläge mit auf den Weg: "Gehen Sie bloß nicht in die Schiitenviertel. Wenn die dort merken, dass Sie Franzose oder Amerikaner sind, schneidet man Ihnen gleich die Kehle durch." Einige Tage zuvor hatte die Hisbollah sich Zugang zum Büro einer schiitischen Wohlfahrtseinrichtung verschafft und die gegen die Sunniten gerichteten Flugblätter dieser Organisation vernichtet. Der Graben zwischen Sunniten und Schiiten ist tiefer denn je zuvor, vertieft noch durch die Bilder von zerstörten schiitischen Moscheen aus dem Irak. Die Politik der Vereinigten Staaten in diesem Lande, die auf den ethnischen und religiösen Gegensätzen zwischen Schiiten, Sunniten und Kurden beruht, nährt im Libanon die Befürchtung, das Land könne einem amerikanischen "Komplott" zur Spaltung der Nahostregion zum Opfer fallen: "Der konfessionell aufgeteilte Libanon ist genau das Modell, das die USA in der gesamten Region durchsetzen wollen", fürchtet ein libanesischer Intellektueller.

Wie die Trennungslinien zwischen den Gemeinschaften heute verlaufen, macht eine neuere Meinungsumfrage deutlich.(8) Eine der entscheidenden Fragen ist die nach der Entwaffnung der Hisbollah. Sie wird von den Maroniten uneingeschränkt befürwortet, doch bei den Sunniten sind 31 Prozent und bei den Schiiten 79 Prozent dagegen. Entsprechend wünschen die Maroniten ein politisches Engagement Frankreichs und der USA im Libanon, während die große Mehrheit der Sunniten und Schiiten dies ablehnt.

Der Kolumnist Joseph Samaha meint allerdings, dass im aktuellen Machtpoker gerade die Maroniten die großen Verlierer sein könnten: "Für die Christen war es sehr befriedigend, dass bei den Kundgebungen immer die libanesische Flagge gezeigt wurde. Doch alle, die da mit von der Partie waren, werden ihren Anteil an der Macht einfordern.

Sobald es nicht mehr nur um die Bürgerrechte geht, sondern um ein neues System des Ausgleichs zwischen den konfessionellen Gruppen, werden natürlich wieder die zahlenmäßig stärksten Gemeinschaften, also die Schiiten und Sunniten, die Macht für sich beanspruchen. Ein Ende des Kampfs zwischen den Religionsgemeinschaften ist deshalb nicht abzusehen."

Fußnoten:
(1)" "Al-Hayat" (Beirut), 22. 4. 2005.
(2) Zur Geschichte des Konflikts siehe Elizabeth Picard, "Liban, Etat de discorde", Paris (Flammarion) 1988.
(3) "The Daily Star" (Beirut), 12. 5. 2005.
(4)" "The Daily Star" (Beirut), 21. 4. 2005.
(5) Zitiert nach Alain Ménargues, Les Secrets de la guerre du Liban, Paris (Albin Michel) 2004, S. 305.
(6) Hobeika hatte sich bereit erklärt, als Zeuge vor einem belgischen Gericht auszusagen, das wegen der Rolle von Ariel Scharon bei den Massakern von Sabra und Schatila ermittelte.
(7) Siehe die Presseerklärung von amnesty international vom 21. 4. 2005: "Lebanon: Stop attacks on Syrian workers and bring perpetrators to justice".
(8)" "The Daily Star", 21. 4. 2005.
Aus dem Französischen von Edgar Peinelt

Der Autor ist Chefredakteur von "Le Monde Diplomatique". Im Februar erschien sein Buch "1905-2005: les enjeux de la laïcité", Paris (L`Harmattan).

Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7686 vom 10.6.2005, Seite 1,10-11, 146 Dokumentation, Alain Gresh

© Contrapress media GmbH Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des taz-Verlags

[Joerver]

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Wax Audio (MF)

This is brilliant!  

Imagine George Bush 

singing John Lennon`s 

Imagine.  

Funny stuff.

[url]http://ia201137.eu.archive.org/hdb1/items/Imagine_This/ImagineThis.mp3[/url]
Imagine there`s no heaven,
It`s easy if you try...

[Joerver]

June 9, 2005
Q&A: Iraq`s Militias
http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot2_060905.html

What`s the status of Iraq`s various militia groups?

Despite repeated U.S. requests for them to disband, Iraq`s various ethnic and sectarian militias continue to exist, and in some cases, are on a path to being recognized as part of Iraq`s security apparatus. On June 8, for example, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani praised an Iran-trained Shiite militia known as the Badr Organization and the Kurdish peshmerga security force. The continued operation of these militias raises fears among experts that security responsibilities in Iraq will increasingly be enforced not by a unified, U.S.-trained army, but by a diverse group of potentially feuding militias that could deepen the nation`s sectarian divisions.

What are the various militia groups in Iraq?

They vary, experts say. There are a growing number of small, homegrown, paramilitary-style brigades being formed by local tribes, religious leaders, and political parties. Some battle Iraq`s largely Sunni insurgency alongside official Interior and Defense ministry troops; others operate without official assistance or sanction. The larger, more established militias, such as the Badr Organization and peshmerga, are tied to Iraq`s leading political parties, organized along sectarian lines, and enforce order in their respective regions. The relationship of these groups to the official U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces is variable and complex.

Who are the peshmerga?

They are a Kurdish liberation army whose name translates literally to "those who face death." Elements of the force, whose roots stretch back to the 1920s, fought against Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and provided military backup during the U.S.-led coalition`s ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The peshmerga is now believed to comprise some 100,000 troops, and serves as the primary security force for the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq. Iraq`s Kurds have repeatedly insisted that the peshmerga remain intact as a fighting force as a condition of their remaining loyal to Baghdad instead of seeking an independent state. Kurdish officials have also requested that Iraq`s interim government security forces operate in Iraqi Kurdistan only with the prior permission of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

What is the Badr Organization?

It is the Iranian-trained wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shiite party in Iraq. During the U.S.-led occupation government`s crackdown on militia groups in 2003, the 10,000-strong militia changed its name from the Badr Brigade to the Badr Organization of Reconstruction and Development and pledged to disarm. The group, however, has reportedly remained armed, and today operates mainly in Shiite-controlled southern Iraq, where a number of regional governments are dominated by SCIRI representatives. One of Badr`s recent offshoots is a feared, elite commando unit linked to the Iraqi Interior Ministry called the Wolf Brigade. Sunni leaders have recently accused the Badr Organization of revenge killings against Sunni clerics and unlawful kidnappings.

What other Shiite militia groups are there?

Among them:

* The Mahdi Army.Loyal to the young, anti-U.S. cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, this group of thousands of armed loyalists fought U.S. forces for much of last year before agreeing to an October 2004 ceasefire. Recent news reports suggest the militia, which controls much of Sadr City, a Baghdad slum of some 2.5 million Shiites, may be regrouping and rearming itself. Muqtada al-Sadr has refused to participate directly in the Iraqi government, though some of his followers were elected to seats on the Iraqi National Assembly.
* Defenders of Khadamiya. This group is comprised of roughly 120 loyalists to Hussein al-Sadr, a distant relative of Muqtada al-Sadr and a Shiite cleric who ran on former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi`s ticket in the January 30 elections. The brigade was formed to guard a shrine in northern Baghdad popular among Shiites, and is one of a number of similar local forces that have emerged.

What is the Wolf Brigade?

The most feared and effective commando unit in Iraq, experts say. Formed last October by a former three-star Shiite general and SCIRI member who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, the Wolf Brigade is composed of roughly 2,000 fighters, mostly young, poor Shiites from Sadr City. Members of the group reportedly earn as much as 700,000 Iraqi dinars, or $400, per month, a large sum in Iraqi terms. They dress in garb--olive uniform and red beret--redolent of Saddam Hussein`s elite guard; their logo is a menacing-looking wolf.

How did the Wolf Brigade earn its reputation?

Last December, the Wolf Brigade--backed up by the Iraqi army and U.S. military--achieved notoriety after launching a series of counterinsurgency operations in Mosul, a Sunni stronghold northwest of Baghdad. Their popularity was further buoyed by the success of Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, a primetime show on U.S.-funded Al Iraqiya television that features live interrogations of Iraqi insurgents by commandos. In one recent show, Abu Walid questioned around 30 shabbily dressed suspects, some clutching photos of their victims, waiting to confess their crimes.

Is the brigade controversial?

Yes. Some Iraqis accuse the Wolf Brigade of targeting Palestinian refugees in Iraq, using torture to extract confessions from prisoners, and slaying six Sunni clerics. Walid denies the charges, which have raised sectarian tensions. Human-rights groups also accuse creators of the counterterrorism television show of violating the Geneva Conventions by publicly humiliating the detainees. Among Shiites, however, there are patriotic songs devoted to the group. The brigade`s fierceness has given it a mythical aura: Iraqi parents reportedly warn their children about the "wolves."

Are there other commando units?

A growing number of counterterrorism commando units are cropping up in Iraq, experts say. Many of them are modeled after the Wolf Brigade, with names like the Tiger, Snake, or Scorpion brigades, and operate out of makeshift quarters like a bombed-out bunker, a former girls` school, and an aircraft hangar, news reports say. It`s not clear if these groups are under the aegis of the Interior Ministry.

Are there any Sunni-led commando units?

Yes. At least one counterinsurgency unit is headed by a former officer of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party. The Special Police Commandos, like the Wolf Brigade, have a reputation for brutality, but the group is also considered one of Iraq`s most effective and well-disciplined counterinsurgency units. It was formed last September by General Adnan Thavit, a 63-year-old Sunni and former intelligence officer in the Iraqi Air Force who was thrown in prison for plotting a coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. Armed by the Iraqi government, the brigade has heavy ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, and AK-47 assault rifles. Most of its 5,000 members are hand-selected by Thavit and are former members of Saddam Hussein`s elite Republican Guard. Experts say they have been an effective fighting force because they are well-trained, know the lay of the land, and can gather quality intelligence in places like the Sunni triangle because of their close ties to neighborhood clans. In a May New York Times Magazine article on the Special Police Commandos, Peter Maass wrote, "The integration of the commandos into the security forces staunches one flow of experienced fighters into the insurgency."

Are the militia sanctioned by Iraq`s government?

Some are, but not all. Though largely autonomous, commando units like the Wolf Brigade are used in conjunction with Iraq`s army and police forces, including special-ops units like the 36th Commando Battalion and 40th Brigade. Their funding and training come from the Iraqi government. Nominal control of these brigades falls under the ministries of Interior and Defense. The peshmerga, on the other hand, are under Kurdish authority. The extent of official government support for the Badr Organization is unclear, but may be growing. (Iraq`s Interior Minister Bayan Jabr is himself a former high-ranking official in the Badr Brigades.) The government is not believed to support the Mahdi Army and other private militia groups that oppose the government`s authority.

Why does the Iraqi government support some militias?

Part of the reason, experts say, is to fill in the security gaps left by the local police and army, who have a reputation for ineffectiveness and corruption. Their use also reflects a clear strategy by the Iraqi government to "get tough" on insurgents, says Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "[These groups] are willing to use brutal methods and have emerged because Iraq`s security forces are not coming along as expected," he says.

What is the U.S. view of the militias?

In the past, the U.S. government has said it opposes the use of unsanctioned militias. But on June 8, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, told reporters that the Iraqi government`s growing use of militias "is an Iraqi issue that they will decide and that they will deal with." Last year, the U.S. military fought alongside the Wolf Brigade and other commando units in counterinsurgency operations in Mosul and Samarra. Some experts credit the U.S. military with giving assistance to commando units in the form of money, training, and equipment. "Our policy [in Iraq] is to equip those who are the most effective fighters," says Thomas X. Hammes, a former Marine officer and counterinsurgency expert. "[These commando units] may be a marriage of convenience and ultimately may be absorbed into the army or disbanded."

What risks do the militia and commando units pose?

Some experts question their allegiance to the national government, because they are generally drawn exclusively from sectarian or ethnic communities, whether Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd. In Iraq, as anywhere, increased sectarian tension can result when members of one ethnic group or community are charged with policing and arresting another. "There`s a concern that what they`re creating [are] armed militia with no loyalty to the national government," Hammes says. "I think it`s better to go with an organized national army, because otherwise you get militia, and that`s a first step toward a civil war." Some experts also predict rising tensions between Iraqi army officers and leaders of semi-sanctioned militia. Others fear that a Shiite-led Interior Ministry may seek to purge its ranks of Sunnis, which could prompt them to join the insurgency.

--by Lionel Beehner, staff writer, cfr.org

* Copyright 2005

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June 10, 2005
Microsoft bans `democracy` for China web users
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050610_81…

Microsoft`s new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing`s political censors.

Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".

It was possible to enter such words within blogs created using MSN Spaces, but the move to block them from the more visible section of the site highlights the willingness of some foreign internet companies to tailor their services to avoid upseting China`s Communist government.

Beijing has long sought to limit political debate on the internet and is in the throes of a campaign to force anybody who operates a website to register with the central government.

MSN this year became the first big international internet service to win a licence to offer value-added telecoms services in China, a coup that was possible in part because of its decision to team up in a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment (Sail). Sail is an investment arm of the Shanghai city government. Microsoft has also been careful to ensure that news and other content offered through the Chinese MSN portal are provided by local partners who can work within the informal and shifting boundaries set by China`s unseen army of internet censors.

The MSN Spaces service, however, is directly operated by the joint venture, Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, in which Microsoft holds a 50 per cent stake.

MSN on Friday declined to comment directly on the ban on sensitive words, but its China joint venture said users of MSN Spaces were required to accept the service`s code of conduct. "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," the joint venture said. The MSN Spaces code of conduct forbids the posting of content that "violates any local and national laws".

But while China`s ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political dissenters, there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as democracy.

* © Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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June 11, 2005
One Nation, With Niches for All
By STACY SCHIFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/opinion/11schiff.html

E. B. White claimed he knew his wife was the girl for him when she referred to dental floss as "tooth twine." I take his point. I also tried to buy "tooth twine" recently. By any name, that is an exercise in frustration, or affluence-induced A.D.D., or option overload. If there is plain old standard issue dental floss out there, it is on the shelf with the all-purpose running shoes and the unadulterated, adjectiveless cup of coffee.

In taking cluster analysis and its classifications to the logical extreme, are we not building a superfinicky society? Five minutes in any Starbucks line will answer that one. We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation. This is a country in which 40 percent of the eligible population doesn`t vote, but can be expected to maneuver its way through a sprawl of options every time it heads out for tooth twine. Increasingly the brick-and-mortar world resembles the virtual one: an infinite landscape of microscopic subcategories, in which one loses oneself, twice.

Stacy Schiff, the author of [urlBen Franklin Took On France With Insouciant Diplomacy]http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E3DA1F3FF935A35757C0A9639C8B63&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews[/url ] and a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a guest columnist.

A friend in Seattle - I`ll call him Mitch, because that is his name - reports a full-scale identity crisis in the toothpaste aisle. There he stood, two coupons in hand. Was he ready to become a rejuvenating-effects, tartar-protection kind of guy, or was he wed to the fight against tobacco stains? And to think it all used to boil down to squeezing from the bottom.

The transformative power is dizzying. The pressure is on; the paralysis sets in. It`s like a torture session with a demonic optometrist. If A is better than B, and 2 is better than 3, is A better than 2? How to choose among tartar-control and whitening and breath-enhancing? And moreover - this is America - why should we have to? I want it all. Darwinistically speaking, shouldn`t "whitening" have automatically ceded to "extra whitening" anyway?

As an American Dental Association spokesman, Dr. Richard Price, admits, the proliferation is out of control. "You should not need a Ph.D. to go through a dental aisle," he says. He points to a healthy economy, and to the marketing wizards who realized that while cavities had no future, a multitude of other niches remained to be filled. "If you build it they will come," Dr. Price says, which is precariously close to something on which P. T. Barnum once banked. There`s a niche born every minute, too.

It turns out that there are some good excuses for the toothpaste aisle, an aging population and the advent of the electric toothbrush among them. It`s also true that E. B. White`s pharmacy was not supersized. The options have expanded to fit longer shelves, fatter wallets, bigger homes. Both our refrigerators and our expectations are outsized. This is manifest destiny meets "American Idol." The only thing that has not expanded proportionately is my brain capacity.

Hasn`t Procter & Gamble heard about the dumbing down of America? To say nothing of the fact that we have simultaneously managed to boil the political discourse down to red states vs. blue states.

Is there a name for what I`m experiencing? Of course there is, replies John Quelch, the Harvard Business School consumer marketing guru, who began laughing as soon as he heard the words "toothpaste aisle." He was quick to diagnose "analysis paralysis at the point of sale." Paco Underhill, perhaps our most diligent student of the science of shopping, terms it the "confusion index." And yes, it`s growing. As are the fractures among us.

Mr. Quelch offers only one survival strategy: "Walk on by." After all, he says, "It wouldn`t happen if we didn`t buy it." The manufacturers of toothpaste are not exactly worrying about our tuning out. It`s a free market. Furthermore, Mr. Quelch adds, "it`s rather difficult to compute all the sales that never happen because of analysis paralysis."

You can`t please all of the people all of the time, but you can sell a segment of them something at least that often. The market won`t rest until it has located that last stalwart who isn`t budging until he hears about cough-suppressing, posture-correcting, wrinkle-reducing, memory-enhancing, antioxidant dental floss. On the other hand, when he meets someone who shares that passion, he can be certain he has found precisely the girl for him.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 11, 2005
Zealots at the Air Force Academy
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/opinion/11sat2.html

In an overdue burst of candor, the superintendent of the Air Force Academy has acknowledged that his campus is so permeated with evangelical proselytizing that it will take years to rid the institution of religious intolerance. Lt. Gen. John Rosa Jr. said he finds the problem of cadets unfairly pressured to adopt Christian beliefs and practices occurring throughout "my whole organization," with offenders among faculty, staff and students.

"Perception is reality," the general apologetically declared of numerous complaints that cadets` constitutional rights have been violated by militant evangelists wielding peer pressure with the blessing of authority figures in the chain of command.

In a meeting with concerned Jewish civilians, General Rosa said recently that the problem is "something that keeps me awake at nights," and that he even had to reprimand his second in command, a born-again Christian, for fervidly pressuring cadets. One campus chaplain went so far as to warn hundreds of cadets that those "not born again" would "burn in the fires of hell," according to campus interviews by the Yale Divinity School. In an authorized study, Yale investigators concluded the problem was rife.

Yet the superintendent`s admission was the Air Force`s most honest acknowledgment of how bedeviled the campus is. "If everything goes well, it`s probably going to take six years to fix it," General Rosa estimated. The problem, however, is that all is not going well. Reforms were promised last year, but were compromised by heavy-handed editing from the Air Force`s chief chaplain. When Capt. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran chaplain, dared to complain of cadets being abused by "systemic and pervasive" proselytizing, the Air Force transferred her to Asia. General Rosa should bring the major back if he is serious about the cleanup.

An inspector general`s report is promised soon from the Air Force. But it will take much more prodding, especially civilian pressure from President Bush, Congress and taxpayers, to undo the damage and restore the separation of church and state as a showcase principle at the academy.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Army Aims to Catch Up on Recruits in Summer
Numbers Are Down tor Fourth Month
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 11, 2005; A01

The Army announced yesterday that it missed its recruiting goal for the fourth consecutive month, a deepening manpower crisis that officials said would require a dramatic summer push for recruits if the service is to avoid missing its annual enlistment target for the first time since 1999.

The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army`s recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months -- on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year.

The Pentagon is also considering asking Congress to double the enlistment bonus it can offer to the most-prized recruits -- from $20,000 to $40,000 -- and to raise the age limit for Army active-duty service from 35 to 40, he said.
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Staff Sgt. Stephen Pate, left, and Sgt. Mark Ward recruit in Hays, Kan. Enlistment often peaks during the summer.
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"The challenge is one of historic proportions," Rochelle said, acknowledging that he is not sure whether the traditional summer surge in Army recruits will take place, or how large it might be.

Violent, long deployments to Iraq and a sound job market at home have combined to reduce what the Army calls the "propensity to enlist" -- the percentage of young Americans willing to consider Army service -- which dropped from 11 percent last year to about 7 percent this year.

"What I don`t know, in all candor, is how the reduced propensity will dampen" the recruiting prospects of summer, Rochelle said in an interview. "I wish the summer period were about twice as long."

The Army`s recruiting difficulties are only expected to grow. "Next year promises quite frankly, given the size of our entry pool, to be an even tougher fight," he said. "God forbid a downward trend" in the willingness to serve, he added.

The Army missed its May active-duty recruiting goal of 6,700 by 1,661 recruits, pushing the shortfall for fiscal 2005 to 8,321 -- or more than a month`s worth of recruits. The shortfall would have been 37 percent if the Army had not lowered its May goal. Overall, the Army has sent 40,964 enlistees to boot camp, and has four months to nearly double that figure to reach the 80,000 goal for this fiscal year.

Army, Navy and Marine Corps reserve forces also missed their goals for May. Army National Guard enlistments for the month fell short by 29 percent, Army Reserves by 18 percent, Marine Corps Reserves by 12 percent and Navy Reserves by 4 percent, according to figures released yesterday by the Pentagon.

The Army is struggling the most, as it provides the bulk of the forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is working to increase in size to 512,000 by adding 30,000 troops to fill 10 new brigades.

The sluggish flow of enlistments means that Army boot camps are less than half full -- training at 46 percent of their capacity this month, compared with 91 percent in May 2004, said Harvey Perritt, spokesman for the Army`s Training and Doctrine Command. For example, the Army`s infantry training center at Fort Benning, Ga., had by May trained only 8,700 of its fiscal year goal of 24,500 infantrymen.

The Army can meet its goals only with a "massive influx of recruits" to boot camp this summer, Perritt said.

To produce that summer windfall, the Army is paying an increasingly high price -- in dollars and in drawing resources from other missions -- while the nation`s all-volunteer Army is facing its longest sustained combat ever.

The 500 additional recruiters the Army plans to bring on this summer will be seasoned noncommissioned officers taken from active-duty units, Rochelle said, representing "a very substantial sacrifice" for an Army stretched thin in Iraq.

More recruiters on the payroll, in addition to a major advertising campaign, and increased recruiting bonuses of as much as $20,000 have substantially increased the average cost of recruiting one person -- from $1,250 two years ago to $1,500 today, he said.

Projecting even bigger problems next year, the Army is preparing to ask Congress to approve higher incentives and legal changes to broaden the pool of candidates. The Army has leveraged incentives "right to the legislative limits in every category," Rochelle said. Proposals under consideration in the Pentagon include doubling the maximum enlistment bonus to $40,000 for troops in high-demand jobs such as intelligence, infantry, special operations and civil affairs, as well as linguists, Rochelle said.

Another proposal would raise the age limit for active-duty Army recruits from 35 to 40. The Army raised that limit for its reserve elements in March, but increasing it for the active-duty force requires congressional approval. Rochelle said the change would bring in soldiers with greater experience and maturity, while making little difference in terms of physical abilities -- saying that today`s 40-year-olds are in better physical shape than they were when the law was written.

Army officials stress that they are not lowering standards in the push for recruits. But they acknowledge they are slightly less selective in some areas -- for example, by taking more enlistees who lack high school diplomas.

The Army also moved this month to take a harder look at keeping first-term soldiers in the force who might otherwise have been kicked out for problems such as drug abuse, poor conduct, or for failure to meet fitness or body-fat standards.

The change grew from concern in the Army over a rise in the number of soldiers departing before serving a full three-year term -- from 14.2 percent last year to nearly 15 percent in the first half of fiscal 2005. To reduce that attrition, the Army put higher-level officers in charge of such decisions, to ensure that soldiers are not let go unnecessarily.

A nationwide initiative launched last month to allow people to serve 15-month terms, not including training, has so far drawn only 44 additional recruits. But Rochelle said some people initially attracted to recruiting stations by the offer may have signed up for longer terms after learning of the greater benefits.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Katherine Harris war die Verantwortliche für die Wahl und Jeb in Florida 2000.

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The thousands of bodies I’ve seen prove that death is just a heartbeat away
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=645…

Saturday, 11th June 2005, by Robert Fisk


The old question asked by those of us in the trade is: just how much is a journalist’s life worth?

Early on Thursday evening, I watched the Lebanese laying roses and lighting candles on the Beirut street where "they" murdered Samir Kassir just over a week ago. Who "they" are we may never know - though we may suspect - because Samir’s widow Gisele has already said that she puts no trust in the Lebanese police investigators.

But Lebanon is an educated country whose people read voraciously and care about their writers. So it was good to see that a journalist’s assassination could bring 200 people out to mourn his terrible end and to demand - as they have of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri’s murder - the truth. They want Furn al-Hayak Street to be renamed after Samir Kassir of An Nahar, who was blown up as he climbed into his car.

Two hundred did not quite equal the million Lebanese who turned out after Hariri’s murder; the exchange rate of journalists to ex-premiers appears to be around 1:5,000. But it does raise the old question - so passionately asked by those of us in the trade - as to just how much a journalist’s life is worth.

Samir wrote eloquent but brutal articles against the Syrian presence in Lebanon and against the dark figures within Lebanon’s own security apparatus who worked for Damascus; which, so we all assume, is the reason for his killing, along with his work for the Lebanese political opposition. Indeed, the Lebanese have a long, unholy record of murdered journalists.

Among the first of the country’s "martyrs of the press" was Salim el-Lowzy, who ran the magazine Hawadess. He had written against the Syrians and, after visiting Beirut to attend his daughter’s wedding in 1976, was kidnapped while driving to the airport to fly back to London. His body was found with his right - writing - hand burned away with acid. Before or after death? - we all asked at the time.

I’ve known too many of my own colleagues who have died here. A German friend, researching an article for Stern magazine on Palestinian gun-running, received telephone warnings to leave Lebanon. He refused and, returning home one night, was shot down in front of his wife, almost certainly by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command.

I remember one bright March morning in 1985, bidding my friends Tewfiq Ghazawi and Bahij Metni of CBS television goodbye as we raced on our separate journeys to an Israeli-Hizbollah battle in southern Lebanon. When we got there, the blast of an Israeli shell blew me uninjured through the doorway of a house. But the same tank sent another shell into a neighbouring street where Tewfiq and Ghazawi were filming. I saw what was left of them later, in bits on the floor of the Sidon mortuary. Villagers were scraping their flesh off the walls of the street for the next 24 hours.

Some of my colleagues died because they behaved rashly amid war. Sean Toolan of The Observer was carrying on an affair with the wife of a Palestinian businessman when he was stopped on his way home from a bar and attacked by men who thrust ice-picks into his face.

Others lost their lives because they were doing their job in the most terrible of conflicts. I remember carrying Olivier Quemener’s camera legs for him in Algiers one afternoon. Next morning, he set out to film in the Casbah and was found an hour or so later, dead of bullet wounds, his wounded reporter colleague lying weeping beside his body.

I’m still not sure why I still walk in harm’s way. There’s nothing vicarious about war and I’m no war junkie. The thousands of bodies I’ve seen prove that death is just a heartbeat away. But "monitoring the centres of power" - to use Amira Hass’s fine description of journalism and its business of challenging governments - means witnessing the filth of the battlefield. To do that, you’ve got to go there.

More of us are dying in wars than ever before. And fewer people, I fear, care about us than ever before. This is not just because of the enormous toll of civilians who are being cut down in our modern wars - journalists deserve no god-like status above any other human (we, after all, can fly home business class if we tire of war, unlike the huddled masses who cannot escape) - but also, I suspect, because of the way in which too many of us like to pose on screen, to put military helmets on our heads, to parade our flak jacketed selves in front of tanks, to dress up in army costume.

I even remember a young American who turned up to report the 1991 Gulf War - Lou Fontana of WISTV, South Carolina, to be exact - wearing boots camouflaged with paintings of dead leaves, purchased for the desert at Barrons Hunting Supplies store. Anyone who has glanced at a picture of a desert, of course, must surely have noticed the absence of trees. But far greater problems ensue when reporters ostentatiously carry weapons.

I can still remember the chill I felt when I saw Geraldo Rivera of Fox News appear on screen in Afghanistan in 2001 toting a gun. Even worse were his words. "I’m feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he vouchsafed to the world. "And this catharsis I’ve gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living." It was the last straw. The reporter had become combatant.

But Rivera was not about to face Osama bin Laden (or anyone else) in a duel to the death. It was pure show business. And alongside this growing habit of transmogrification from journalist into fighter - which started, I think, in the Vietnam War - has been the continuing culture of journalistic self-denigration, of journalists who regard their own profession as cynically as some of their readers.

We should not be self-important. But I, for one, dislike our constant use of the word "hack". Sure, we can call ourselves "scribes", and I’m all for self-mockery. "I’m off to hammer on the anvil of literature," I used to joke to AP photographers during the Lebanese war - and they would all dutifully groan.

But a "hack" is a suborned hand, someone who’ll write anything for a pound, a horse for common hire. If we wish to be respected - if we wish to be believed - shouldn’t we treat ourselves with a bit more respect?

The most recent British Press Awards ceremony, an exercise in self-abuse - which newspaper editors have rightly decided to boycott until it cleans up its act - is part and parcel of the same problem. It’s a bit difficult to thunder about the iniquities and lies of our political leaders when we’re wearing the clothes of the court jester.

Ditto with death. It’s right to mourn a journalist, but the death of a "hack" is a matter of little count. Samir Kassir took himself seriously. He took journalism seriously. He was no "hack". But then again, I suppose that’s why they murdered him.

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Ossis auf der Überholspur
[urlFound: Europe`s oldest civilisation]http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=645976[/url]
Angie ist nicht gemeint!

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Saturday, June 11, 2005

5 Marines Killed, 4 Wounded
21 Bodies Found
Sunnis Reject offer on Constitutional Committee

Guerrillas killed 5 Marines near Haqlaniyah in Anbar Province on Thursday.

Some 21 bodies were discovered near Qaim in western Iraq, some executed mafia style with a bullet to the back of the head. Two were beheaded. Twenty Iraqi soldiers were kidnapped recently in that area, but it is unknown whether any of the bodies belonged to those captured.

Reuters reports a string of violent attacks on Thursday and Friday:


"Near the northern oil refining town of Baiji, a suicide car bomber wounded four soldiers in a U.S. military convoy on Thursday, the military said. . ."

"Two worshippers were wounded after Friday prayers at a Shi`ite mosque in Baghdad`s troubled Dora district when gunmen opened fire on the building . . .

In the northern city of Kirkuk, where Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen are vying for control of vast oil resources, the head of the anti-terrorist police -- a Kurd -- was shot dead in his car."



Al-Zaman clarifies that the man killed was Lt. Col. Rahim Uthman Said, the director of counter-terrorism in Kirkuk. Also killed was his deputy, Major Ghanim Jiyad Jabbar.

It adds that in Basra, police Gen. Karim al-Daraji, the commander of the police academy for southern Iraq and his brother were killed in a hail of bullets when their car was cut off by another vehicle. Al-Daraji, who had survived two earlier assassination attempts, is the highest-ranking member of the security forces killed in Basra since the fall of Saddam.

Al-Zaman says that the American general in charge of Operation Lightning, a sweep of Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Iraq, has caused the guerrillas to switch from car bombings to assassinations as their primary tactic. He admitted that there might well be reprisals from the guerrillas for the arrest of about 1000 suspected militants during the operation. About 50 of those arrested have been Arab foreign nationals.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a roadside bombing intended for an American convoy in South Baghdad instead killed an Iraqi and wounded another.

Reuters says that the Sunni Arabs rejected an offer to add 15 Sunnis to the 55-member parliamentary committee that is charged with drafting the constitution. There are only two Sunni members of parliament on the committee at present. Only MPs have the right to vote on the committee. The additional members would only be able to consult, though several top Iraqi politicians have given undertakings that the committee will seek broad consensus on all contentious issues.

The Sunni Arabs want 25 additional seats, more than the 15 that the Kurds have. In part this demand reflects their unrealistic estimation of the size of their ethnic group. They often assert that Iraq has a Sunni Arab majority. In fact, Shiites probably form 62 percent and Kurds may be 18 percent. Given that Christians, Turkmen and some other small minorities make up 5 percent, Sunni Arabs could be as little as 15 percent of the population.

Given that it is June 11 and the constitutional committee has still not been finalized, the likelihood that a whole constitution can be drafted by August 15, which always seemed a stretch, has become completely absurd.

The International Crisis Group is anyway recommending that the Iraqi government take its time and invoke the provision in the interim constitution that allows it to postpone the deadline for finalizing the constitution for 6 months.

Al-Zaman: The Iraqi Islamic Party said Friday that it was not enough for the American government to issue statements deploring the desecration of the Quran by US military interrogators at Guantanamo prison. The Bush administration statement condemning the incidents cannot erase them, he said. The statement made fun of the allegations by the Americans ("and the Zionists") that these were isolated incidents in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Buca and the Occupied Territories of Palestine.

It asked, "What impelled the Zionists and the Americans to desecrate a book revealed by God, if not a culture of hatred and an attempt to erase the Other?" It added, "The perpetrator is one, the crime is premeditated, and the hatred for Islam and Muslims is ongoing and without let in an unlimited series."

Iraqi petroleum production will not exceed 1.5 million barrels at day for some time, according to Petroleum minister Ibrahim Bahru`l-Ulum. Iraq had been producing nearly twice that before the war.

posted by Juan @ [url6/11/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/5-marines-killed-4-wounded-21-bodies.html[/url]

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Latest Fatality: Jun 10, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 1282 , US: 1697 ,June05: 30

Iraker: Civilian: 140 Police/Mil: 86 Total: 226
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Dahr Jamail`s Iraq Dispatches

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June 10, 2005
State Sponsored Civil War
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000254.…

Yesterday at a conference in Baghdad, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a prominent Shia leader who is also the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq announced, “In gratitude to the efforts, sacrifices and heroic positions of our brothers and brave sons from the Badr Organization.”

“We must give them the priority in bearing administrative and government responsibilities especially in the security field,” he added, while the “President” of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, listened on.

The Badr Organization (formerly known as the Badr Brigade) was formed by al-Hakim’s brother in the ‘80’s to fight Saddam Hussein. It has long since received funding and other “support” from Iran.

While civilians in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, Baquba, Baghdad, Haditha and other cities in Iraq continue to complain of being beaten, looted and humiliated by the members of the Iraqi Army who are members of both the Badr Organization and Kurdish Peshmerga, these militias now have the overt backing of the interim Iraqi “government.”

It is also being reported that members of the Badr Organization, who are essentially running much of the “security” in southern Iraq at this point, have been instituting Sharia law. Thus, women are reporting being threatened with death or rape if they attend university, and more conservative clothing rules are being enforced.

Recently a Sunni cleric was assassinated in the south.

Harith al-Dhari, the head of the influential Sunni group the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), recently accused the Badr of killing members of the AMS, when he bluntly announced, “It is the Badr Brigades which is responsible for these killings.”

One of my Iraqi friends here in Amman recently told me that Sunni who live in the south are being pressured by members of the Badr Organization to relocate elsewhere. It should also be noted that the Badr came back to Iraq on the heels of the invaders.

“You and your (Kurdish) brothers are the heroes of liberating Iraq,” added Talabani at the aforementioned conference.

So we have the US-backed Iraqi “government” overtly (they have been doing this covertly for quite some time) pitting Shia and Kurdish militias against the primarily Sunni resistance. State sponsored/propagated civil war-although most Iraqis continue to fear and loath the idea, and so many Iraqi political and religious organizations continue to work tirelessly to avert the worsening of this now low-grade civil war.

Meanwhile, violence continues across Iraq. Car bombs are a daily occurrence, yet now we have seen motorcycle bombs, push-cart bombs, donkey bombs, donkey-cart bombs, dog bombs, human bombs, bicycle bombs and recently two Iraqi policemen dying from eating poisoned watermelon.

Roadside bombs continue to take their toll on US soldiers and are now the number one killer of occupation forces. At least 1,679 have died in Iraq since the invasion, along with roughly 100 times as many Iraqis.

I’ve been getting some interesting emails, indicative of sagging morale, from American’s serving or about to serve in Iraq, including vets...

One man who is a security contractor writes, “Many nationalitiess from the planet, many cowboys. I feel like Tonto. Some of these boys are psycho. Been there done that on the international radar.”

I received an email a ways back from a veteran who said, “I am a former soldier that does not agree with what is going on in Iraq. I do NOT agree with the current administration on most issues, but especially the way they are going about this illegal and immoral war.
I am deeply ashamed of what my country has done, and I am determined to do whatever I can to help those few brave reporters like yourself that are trying to uncover the truth to do so.”

Like many people, he assumed I am Iraqi because of my name, even though I’m 3rd generation Lebanese. He’d included some helpful information for me to use, then added,

“For what it is worth, I apologize for the actions of my country. I don`t consider myself a traitor or unpatriotic, but what I am seeing is so very wrong on so many levels that it is really eating at me, so much so that I felt compelled to write you about what I know. I’m so very sorry...”

Another soldier who will be deployed to Iraq this summer said, “I personally believe it was the wrong war…we should have concentrated more on Afghanistan.”

I wrote him back and told him I honored his desire to serve his country, but wished he had better leadership than the current US administration who led the country into Iraq with lies. He responded,

“I feel honored to meet a great American like you. You know man, sometimes we guys feel betrayed by our own government. I personally signed up to serve my country not to serve any particular leader.”

Another US soldier in Iraq right now writes, “Do I think it (the war) was started for moral reasons? Of course not.”

Posted by Dahr_Jamail at June 10, 2005 12:57 PM

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

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Saturday, June 11, 2005
War News for Saturday, June 11, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Five US Marines killed by roadside bomb near Haqlaniya.

Bring `em on: One US tank, two Humvees destroyed by roadside bomb near Haditha.

Bring `em on: Seven US soldiers wounded by car bomb in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Two Oil Ministry employees assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Ten Iraqis killed, three wounded in bus ambush near Hilla.

Bring `em on: Eight Iraqi police commandos killed by suicide bomber in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Ten Iraqis killed, 27 wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed in drive-by shooting in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Contractor convoy ambushed near Habbaniya; casualties reported.

Bring `em on: US troops kill two Iraqi security guards in Baghdad fratricide incident.

Tal Afar.

Khadija is one of only three patients in the building. The hospital has 200 beds and just a few weeks ago was treating 200 to 300 patients a day.

Since then, the U.S. and Iraqi armies have launched a major operation in this city of 200,000 near the Syrian border to capture or kill insurgents. The violence has left the the city shattered.

Doctors here say most people are now afraid to come here -- afraid they`ll be caught in the crossfire between insurgents and the Iraqi army guarding the hospital.

Ahmed says some of the patients who come to the hospital refuse to stay, saying they`re safer at home.

He`s been doing his residency at the Tal Afar hospital for only five days, but the young Baghdad doctor has already requested a transfer.

"Baghdad is safer than Mosul and Mosul is safer than here. ... Tal Afar is the most dangerous area in Iraq now."

The hospital is a particular target. U.S. and Iraqi forces seized it from insurgents two weeks ago. A soldier from the U.S. Army`s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment was killed securing the building.

"Prior to us going there the hospital was considered under anti-Iraq forces control," says Lt. Col. Christopher Hickey. "So much so that the police did not want to go to the hospital to take their wounded."

As in the rest of Tal Afar, most of the time there`s no running water in the hospital and in the daytime, no electricity. One of the generators was shot up and the staff hasn`t been able to repair it.



Wolfie`s brigade. "Also, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest during the morning roll call at the headquarters of Iraqi police Wolf Brigade commandos at about 8 a.m. (12 a.m. EDT) Saturday, Iraqi police said. Three police commandos were killed and 17 were wounded, police said. The bomber was standing among the commandos, leading police to suspect he may have been a commando, or dressed in a commando uniform, police said."

VA Secretary says veterans needlessly complicate the system.

More mental health resources are needed to deal with stress from Iraq and Afghanistan now, before those veterans develop even more serious mental problems, according to Democrats and veteran support agencies.

On Thursday both groups lobbied for legislation to increase funding for mental health treatment, to extend health-care coverage for veterans returning from war, and to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop a long-term plan for treating troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Over the years and out of necessity the VA has developed some of the best mental health care in the world,” said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

“Unfortunately, this care is slipping, and it’s occurring at the worst time, when demand for care is about to explode.”

Earlier, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson offered a mixed reaction to a host of Democrat-sponsored bills, voicing support for general plans to improve mental health care but rebuffing most of their legislative efforts.

He said a long-term mental health plan is already being developed by department officials, although no deadline has been set.

Nicholson opposed a measure to expand post-war health care coverage from two years to five years, saying it would needlessly complicate the current system.


Fuck up and move up. "Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, the former second-in-command in Iraq — criticized for leadership failures in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal but cleared of wrongdoing recently in an Army investigation — has been selected to head up the Army’s infantry operations and training at Fort Benning, Ga."

Recruiting crisis. "The Army is having to turn to more high school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants to fill its ranks, accepting hundreds of recruits in recent months who would have been rejected a year ago, according to Army statistics. Eight months into the recruiting year, the percentage of new recruits in the Army without a high school diploma has risen to 10 percent, the upper limit of what the Army is willing to accept, from 8 percent last year. The percentage of recruits with scores in the lowest acceptable range on the standardized test used to screen potential soldiers has also risen to 2 percent, also reaching the Army`s limit, from slightly more than a half-percent last year, reaching the highest level since 2001."

Recruiting duty. "Eric Burri was not one of his difficult recruits. `He walked into my office and said, "When can I enlist? I want to know when I can join,"` Army Sgt. First Class John Delk recalled. That was two years ago, and Burri was the first soldier Delk recruited. On Friday, Delk found out that Army Spc. Burri, 21, had been killed in Baghdad. Delk said Burri`s death hit him especially hard, because the Wyoming soldier made it a point to stay in touch after he joined. `Every time he came home he stopped in to let me know how he was doing,` Delk said. `He thanked me every time. He was the kind of soldier everyone would want to have on their side.` Delk conceded that news of a local death in Iraq won`t make his job any easier, as the Army continues to struggle meeting recruitment goals."

Skills draft?

The decline in general Army recruiting in recent months has been precipitous. On Wednesday, for instance, the Army said that it had missed its recruitment goal for May by more than 25 percent – that after lowering its monthly target. It was the fourth month in a row that recruitment fell short. Perhaps more importantly, unlike February and March, which are traditionally slow periods for recruiters, May is usually a busy month as students begin to graduate or anticipate graduation from high school.

While media reports have focused on the problems the Army and Marine Corps are having with recruitment, the retention of highly trained specialists is as serious, if not more so, for the long-term ability of the military to sustain operations around the globe. Kiley notes that some 36,000 medical staff – doctors, nurses, technicians — have deployed to southwest Asia from the Army alone in the past four years. That is not only time away from home, but in some cases an interruption of their training as internists or medical students.

The bonuses offered to Wheat and others to work as private consultants are part of a series of strategies designed to bring in highly trained people and to hold on to those already in the service.


Contractors.

The contractors work in a legal shadow world, largely unregulated by either the U.S. or Iraqi government. Under an order signed by Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer III in June 2004, as the U.S.-led occupation drew to a close, contractors are immune from prosecution in Iraq as long as the actions in question were performed as part of their work.

Almost since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, there have been tensions between the private forces and the military.

Soldiers resent the perks the contractors enjoy. Contractors routinely make three or four times the pay of troops — more than $100,000 a year.

Some troops and officials see the contractors as "cowboys" who enrage ordinary Iraqis with wanton behavior. Journalists have observed them pointing their guns and firing rounds at Iraqis who come too close. Contractors have been seen racing around Baghdad, Fallouja and other hotspots in armored SUVs, forcing Iraqi civilians off the road.

At a conference this year in Washington, Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes noted that the military and the contractors had different objectives: The military wants to win the war and contractors want to serve their clients.

He pointed to the protection provided to Bremer by contractors as an example of divergent interests. The U.S. wanted to win over Iraqis, he said. But the aggressive tactics the contractors used to shield Bremer sometimes alienated them, he said.

"We can always get another ambassador," Hammes joked grimly.


My sentiments exactly, Col. Hammes. That silly, strutting popinjay, Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul III did more to ensure the failure of the occupation than any other individual.

Hyde Bill.

Some of the proposals, including barring membership in the UN Human Rights Commission to governments with bad rights records, echo recommendations made by Annan himself in his own comprehensive reform agenda, "In Larger Freedom: For Development, Security, and Human Rights, for All."

Kraus, however, warned that the unilateral and threatening way Hyde`s proposals were being presented - and the resentment that it was likely to cause - was likely to undercut Annan`s own reform efforts.

Hyde`s bill, for example, would unilaterally reduce Washington`s share of the UN`s regular biannual budget from 25% to 22%. It also mandates that once the budget is approved, it cannot be increased without consensus agreement (giving Washington or any other government an effective veto), and, in any case, cannot increase beyond 10%, thus depriving the world body of its ability to cope with unanticipated emergencies.

It also calls for the shifting of 18 programs, including economic and social affairs, least-developed countries, trade and development, refugee protection, international drug control, and Palestinian refugees, from the regular assessed budget to voluntarily funded programs, thus giving "all countries more control over how to best invest their contributions," said Hyde. If this reform is not adopted, the bill calls for Washington to redirect its contributions to "priority areas, which include internal oversight, human rights, and humanitarian assistance".

The UN Public Information Office and international conferences are also targeted for major across-the-board reductions, beginning with a 10% cut for 2007 followed by a 20% cut in 2008.

The bill mandates the creation of an independent oversight board and an ethics office with broad investigative authority over suspected mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and other kinds of wrongdoing within the UN, its agencies and peacekeeping operations.

Countries subject to sanctions by the Security Council or country-specific human-rights resolutions would be banned from serving on the UN Human Rights Commission. In a bow to Israel, the bill also mandates that no UN human rights body could have a standing agenda item that related only to one country.


Just another GOP ploy to destroy FDRs legacy.
Commentary

Editorial: "The United States has a lot at stake here, and the Bush administration has pushed hard behind the scenes for broader Sunni inclusion. But Washington does not want to look as if it is micromanaging Iraqi politics. And, as the government`s love fest with the militias painfully showed, American advice isn`t always heeded. What is still badly lacking in Iraq is an effective United Nations presence. The United Nations at its best can supply the kind of international legitimacy and impartial expert advice that could help guide the disorganized Sunnis and the inexperienced government politicians toward a better, more farsighted relationship."

Editorial: "This bill, which passed out of the House International Relations Committee on Wednesday, demands a long list of reforms at the United Nations. Some are reasonable. It`s fine to call for a code of conduct for peacekeeping troops, who have sometimes abused the civilians they were supposedly protecting; the United Nations already has a code, but it needs to disseminate it better to the troops. Likewise, cuts in spending on U.N. conferences, which allegedly cost as much as $8,000 per hour, are sensible. But some of the reforms demanded by the bill are not so good. Requiring that certain programs be funded on a voluntary basis by U.N. members rather than by automatic membership payments would exacerbate the precarious hand-to-mouth budgeting that saps morale and efficiency. But the bill`s worst feature is that it mandates a 50 percent cut in U.S. payments to the United Nations if some of its proposals don`t get implemented; other proposals come with a threat of a 25 percent cut. This is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail into an antique table: Even if you`re aiming at the right nail, you`re going to cause damage."

Opinion: "What is a concerned parent to do, especially as recruitment efforts are redoubled? In my town of Cookeville, Tenn., when Quakers and Vietnam War veterans informed students how they could serve their country in other ways, they were banned from the high school for months and called "anti-American." But when an Army recruiter presented a program called "What Patriotism Is" to all the second-graders (7-year-olds) in our county, no one said a word. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are legally obligated to inform parents of their right to `opt out` of having information about their children given to the military. But the schools often fail to inform, or bury opt-out information in legally obscure language at the back of a student handbook. Opting out seems rather insignificant given the fact that recruiters have physical access on a frequent basis to our schoolchildren. Without doubt, a great debt is owed to our military, and a military career can be a path of pride and opportunity. The government has a duty to ensure that the military has the soldiers and equipment it needs. But the government must also ensure the protection of our children and safeguard the role of public schools as places of learning. The military should not be permitted to use our schools as vehicles to send young people to war. "

Casualty Reports

Local story: Idaho Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Three Ohio Marines killed in Iraq.

Local story: Louisiana soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Mississippi Marine dies in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee Guardsman dies in Iraq.

Local story: Louisiana Department of the Army civilian killed in Iraq.

Local story: Two Illinois Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Arkansas soldier wounded in Iraq.
# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:32 AM
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Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria.
Wieder ein großer Österreicher, dessen Erfolge nicht richtig gewürdigt werden.

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Dieser Artijel ist die Übersetzung von [urlWho Cares? vom 07.06.05]http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000253.php#more[/url]

Wen interessiert’s?
von Dahr Jamail
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1448&PHPSESSID=0e3e946346d…

ZNet 10.06.2005
Heute bereiteten die Selbstmordattentäter dem Irak wieder einen Höllentag. Mindestens 18 Menschen wurden getötet, über 67 verletzt.

Vier der Anschläge haben sich im Bagdader Raum ereignet. Betroffen waren Angehörige der Irakischen Sicherheitskräfte und mehrere US-Militärkonvois. Die Anschläge in Bagdad gehen unvermindert weiter und das trotz einer großangelegten irakischen Sicherheitsoperation (mit US-Unterstützung) überall in Bagdad.

Die Kleinstadt Rawa, nahe Al-Qa’im, wurde Sonntagnacht erneut vom US-Militär bombardiert. Das Militär gibt die Bombardierung zwar zu, leugnet aber, dass es dabei zu zivilen Opfern kam. Auf Al-Dschasiera (Satellitenprogramm) waren heute Bilder von Privathäusern zu sehen, die dem Erdboden gleichgemacht wurden sowie Rawaer Zivilisten, die aussagen, das Bombardement habe sieben Zivilisten das Leben gekostet.

In Hawija (bei Kirkuk) schlugen drei Autobombenselbstmordattentäter gegen mehrere irakische Sicherheits-Checkpoints zu. Auch dabei starben Iraker. Gleichzeitig brachen in Tal-Afar (nahe Mosul) wilde Gefechte zwischen amerikanischen Soldaten und dem irakischen Widerstand aus. Während ich diesen Bericht hier tippe, sind die Gefechte noch im Gange.

Es scheint nach wie vor, als ob die Bush-Administration den Schutz der Iraker im Irak nicht auf der Agenda hat, vielleicht sind sie ihnen auch egal - oder beides.

Heute schickte mir jemand folgende E-mail. Der Inhalt ist interessant:

“Ich operierte von Camp Anaconda aus - das liegt nahe Balad. Fast alle hier - ob in Uniform oder Vertragsarbeiter - waren sich einig, das langfristige Ziel der Bush-Administration ist in erster Linie Öl. Das Denken und Fühlen (der Menschen) ist zweitrangig und weit weniger wichtig als das Thema Petroleumprodukte. Schließlich konkurrieren die USA weltweit immer noch um Ressourcen. Ich hoffe, dieses Thema wird von den Medien intensiver diskutiert.”

Dazu passt, was mir ein befreundeter irakischer Arzt aus Bagdad erzählt. Er war gestern in Ramadi. Dort hätten US-Soldaten die Anbar Medical School angegriffen, während die Studenten gerade ihre Prüfungen ablegten: “Sie (die US-Soldaten) drückten das vordere Schultor ein, sie benutzten dazu Humvees, es war barbarisch... Sie terrorisierten die weiblichen Studenten, während sie zwei Studenten festnahmen, die gerade ihre Prüfung schrieben. Daraufhin stellten sie die Privatwohnungen des Universitätsdekans und der Dozenten unter Belagerung, obwohl sich deren Familien darin befanden.

Mein Freund erzählte mir auch, er sei kürzlich in Haditha gewesen (wir erinnern uns: ‘Operation Offener Markt’). Dort sei eine große Anzahl Zivilisten verhaftet worden.

“Sie nahmen sogar einen meiner Freunde und dessen Vater mit, nur, weil sie Dokumente über eine bevorstehende Demonstration in deren Haus fanden”, berichtete er mir.

Vor kurzem verkündete die von den USA gestützte irakische “Regierung” die Verhaftung von 900 “mutmaßlichen Militanten” im Irak. Inzwischen bedeutet der Ausdruck “mutmaßliche Militante” wohl zunehmend, dass es sich um Personen handelt, die einfach nur zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort waren (nämlich, wenn irakische oder amerikanische Sicherheitskräfte gerade eine Operation durchführen).

Natürlich gehen auch die Plünderungen von Privathäusern im Rahmen von Razzien und die Verhaftung unschuldiger Iraker weiter. Diese Praxis hat inzwischen ein solches Ausmaß erreicht, dass Laith Kuba, Sprecher des irakischen Premierministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari, sich hinsichtlich der massiven “Sicherheitsoperation” in Bagdad zu folgender Stellungnahme genötigt sah:

“Einige Menschen beklagen sich, die Soldaten hätten in manchen Fällen die Gelegenheit benutzt, um sich an Bargeld und anderen Dingen zu bereichern. Das ist nicht auszuschließen. Die Klagen, die mir zu Ohren kamen, bezogen sich auf die Aggressivität einiger dieser Trupps während ihrer Arbeit. Einige Leute ließen halbwegs durchblicken, es komme ihnen so vor, als kopierten diese (Soldaten) teilweise das Verhalten anderer, ausländischer Soldaten. Ich denke, diese Kritik ist in manchen Fällen berechtigt”.

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail. Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll

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Bush hat Graham als seinen großen Retter bezeichnet. Graham hatte auch in D die Stadien und Plätze gefüllt. Er unterscheidet sich doch von den jetzigen evangelikalen Predigern.

June 12, 2005
Spirit Willing, One More Trip Down Mountain for Graham
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12graham.html?hp=…

MONTREAT, N.C., June 8 - After more than five decades spent preaching to 210 million people in 185 lands, the Rev. Billy Graham is all but marooned in his log house on a mountaintop ridge.

The evangelist shuffles with a walker down a small ramp into his living room. He has prostate cancer, hydrocephalus and the symptoms of Parkinson`s disease, and last year broke a hip and his pelvis. He says he leaves the mountain only three or four times a year, and cannot even remember his last time down.

"When you get to be 86 years of age as I am, all of the world is passing you by," he said, sitting on his front porch for a rare interview.

Nevertheless, Mr. Graham is now preparing to venture down the mountain to travel to New York City for another evangelistic crusade - a three-day outdoor revival meeting beginning June 24 in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

"Maybe this will be the last crusade I`ll ever hold," he said in a conversation on his porch that lasted more than an hour, during which he reflected on his own mortality, his close attention to the funeral of Pope John Paul II, his son Franklin`s comments that Islam is an "evil and wicked" religion ("Let`s say, I didn`t say it"), and his regrets, including comments about Jews he made 30 years ago to President Richard M. Nixon that were tape-recorded.

For the last half century, Mr. Graham has been the central figure behind the dramatic postwar resurgence of evangelical Christianity in America. His crusades delivered new believers to churches nationwide; his embrace of mass media paved the way for a generation of evangelists; and his magazines, training programs and the retreat center he founded helped to shape many of today`s most prominent Christian leaders.

Now, at a time when other evangelical leaders are plunging into political issues, Mr. Graham has subtly set himself apart, steadfastly refusing to talk about politics, the evangelical movement or any of the issues important to evangelical conservatives, like abortion, homosexuality and stem cell research.

"I feel I have only a short time to go, and I have to leave that to the younger people," he said.

"I`m just going to preach the gospel and am not going to get off on all these hot-button issues," he said when politics was broached again later. "If I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience on an issue that is not the issue I`m promoting. I`m just promoting the gospel. And after they come to Christ, they hopefully come to a church where they will learn more about their responsibility in society."

Mr. Graham himself always courted politicians and powerful people, befriending every American president, Republican and Democrat alike, from Harry S. Truman on. The hallway leading to his bedroom is a gallery of the Grahams in younger days posing with Queen Elizabeth, Richard Nixon and even President Kim Il Sung of North Korea.

The evangelist was particularly close with the Bush family. President Bush has said it was a talk with Mr. Graham that prompted him at age 40 to stop drinking and get serious about his Christian faith.

But Mr. Graham said that while he counted many politicians among his friends, "I never endorsed but one politician that I know of, and that was the governor of Texas many years ago," he said, referring to John B. Connolly, a close friend. "And I regret that, even though he got elected."

Mr. Graham also said he deeply regretted remarks he made that emerged three years ago, when 500 hours of audio tapes recorded surreptitiously in the Nixon White House were finally released by the National Archives. On a tape recorded in 1972, Mr. Graham agreed with Mr. Nixon`s assertion that liberal Jews dominated the media. "They`re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Mr. Graham said on the tape, and added further:

"A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I`m friendly with Israel. But they don`t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."

When the tape was made public in 2002, Mr. Graham issued a written apology and met with Jewish leaders. In the interview, he said: "I apologized to them; I said, I need to come to you on hands and knees. Because I didn`t remember it, I still don`t remember it, but it was there. I guess I was sort of caught up in the conversation somehow."

He added that Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel had given him a Bible inscribed "To Billy Graham, a great friend of Israel," and that Yitzhak Rabin had been a "close friend." He said that while in New York, he plans to meet with Jewish leaders.

"Everywhere I`ve gone since that episode, I`ve been welcomed extra-warm" by Jewish leaders, he said, "and I appreciate them forgiving me."

Although Mr. Graham moved and spoke slowly, his blue eyes were sharp. He wore a bright blue blazer that matched his eyes, and pressed blue jeans. He said that every day from about 11 a.m. on, he goes numb over most of his body and especially in his face. "I don`t feel normal. It`s a neurological thing," he said. "If I tell my hand to reach up it`s a delayed action between my brain and what happens."

His son Ned, who runs a missionary organization based in Sumner, Wash., now stays with his parents and helps care for them. Several assistants and nurses make the trek each day up the steep winding road, through two security gates to the top of the mountain.

Recently a storm swept through, cutting down trees and leaving them without electricity for several days. A backhoe was still digging out the damage, and a wall of dirt blocked the view from the front porch.

In 1995 Mr. Graham named another son, William Franklin Graham III, as president and chief executive officer of his organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In 2002, Franklin Graham set off an international furor when he called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion."

Asked about his son`s remarks, Billy Graham answered, "We had an understanding a long time ago, he speaks for himself." Pressed further, he responded, "Let`s say, I didn`t say it." Then he recounted how, while on a crusade in Fresno, Calif., soon after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, he asked to be taken directly from the airport to the local mosque to show support for the Muslims there.

Asked whether he agreed with those who anticipate a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, he quickly said, "I think the big conflict is with hunger and starvation and poverty."

Much of Mr. Graham`s declining energy these days is devoted to preparing for the New York event. He chose New York in response to a request several years ago from more than a dozen New York City pastors who came to his home and made a case that after the Sept. 11 attacks, New Yorkers were in need of a spiritual revival.

He added that he was also drawn to New York by "nostalgia" because of his fond memories of his crusade there in 1957 at Madison Square Garden, which catapulted his ministry to national prominence.

Mr. Graham said he recently wrote to Bill and Hillary Clinton to invite them to attend the crusade but had not yet heard whether they would come. In preparation for the crusade, he subscribed to New York newspapers, combing them for anecdotes to use when he preaches.

His voice is weak, but he rehearses it daily "like an opera singer," he said, demonstrating with a booming "Yes, yes, YES LORD." His wife, Ruth, bedridden but sharp as a tack, likes to joke by responding from her recliner in the bedroom, "No, no, no."

Mr. Graham`s last crusade was in Los Angeles in November. He speaks now from a podium designed to allow him to sit while speaking. He has been invited to do another crusade in London but said he would not decide until he could assesses how it went in New York.

Mortality is on his mind. Of the pope`s funeral, he said, "I watched every bit of it." Asked why, he said: "He was teaching us how to suffer, and he taught us how to die. I didn`t agree with him on everything theologically, but as a person and as a man, he set a great example and he was a wonderful personal friend to me."

Mr. Graham said that with each health setback, "I`ve rejoiced in all of it." The Lord, he said, was making it possible for him to relate to other suffering people.

The other night he said he caught an old clip of himself being interviewed on "Larry King Live." "I looked at myself, it was only six or seven years ago, but I looked so vigorous," he said. "And I thought to myself, how different things were to me then than they are now."

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`The Survivor`: Measuring His Success

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By ALAN EHRENHALT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/books/review/12COVER-EHREN…

MILLIONS of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990`s, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

THE SURVIVOR Bill Clinton in the White House. By John F. Harris. Illustrated. 504 pp. Random House. $29.95.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals` longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. ``They are unanimous in their hate for me`` he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ``and I welcome their hatred.`` Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

Viewed in historical perspective, Clinton-hatred is not easy to explain. Certainly the Monica Lewinsky affair does not explain it. The people who detested the president after that dalliance became public were essentially the same ones who had detested him in 1992. They merely grew louder.

There is, of course, a simpler argument that some Clinton haters use to explain the persistence of their passion. They say that he was, to put it bluntly, a very bad president -- immature, self-absorbed, indecisive in domestic affairs and disastrously weak when it came to representing America in the affairs of the world.

It is this argument that John F. Harris utterly demolishes in ``The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,`` his thorough, readable and scrupulously honest account of the Clinton years. Harris, who was The Washington Post`s White House correspondent from 1995 through 2000, is no Clinton apologist. His portraits of the decision-making process he witnessed reveal a president who indeed lacked discipline in his daily routine; examined and re-examined policy choices endlessly, to the frustration of his advisers; and was fearful about the use of military force abroad, even in behalf of the most defensible causes.

But over the course of 500 pages, Harris also documents the history of a president who, however frustrating he may have been in style and method, usually made the right choices in the end -- even when he felt that he was hurting himself politically. The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity that marked the second half of the decade. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed against the advice of his closest Democratic allies, turned out to be the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990`s.

On Bosnia in the early years and then on Kosovo in 1999, the president did shrink from military action while hostilities continued and innocent people died. But the war in Bosnia was settled at an administration-sponsored peace conference in Ohio in 1995, and a few weeks of American bombing persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to give up his assault on Kosovo in 1999. By the time Clinton left office, Bosnia was in the midst of a peaceful recovery, and Milosevic had been deposed from power and was awaiting trial as a war criminal.

Harris tells all the important stories of the Clinton years in detached, workmanlike prose that not only tracks the events and decisions but offers perceptive judgments of the figures who were close to the president as they unfolded. The national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was ``a shrewdly political man`` who, when Clinton barked at him, ``was comfortable barking right back.`` The chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, was a natural organizer who, as Harris saw him, protested a little too often about his preference for business over politics. The treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, had ``an appreciation for shades of gray and a disdain for absolutes that were very much like Clinton`s.``
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Moments before accepting renomination in 1996, President Clinton takes a deep breath.
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Most impressive is Harris`s balance and fairness. All of Clinton`s conspicuous personal failings are detailed, including the sexual obsessions that ultimately cost him much of his reputation. But his warmth, optimism and sense of larger purpose come through equally well. ``However heedless he could sometimes be in his personal life,`` Harris writes in the closing pages, ``Clinton brought a dutiful sensibility to his public life.`` Having tangled with the president numerous times over eight years of reporting on him -- and having chronicled some of those conflicts openly in the pages of his newspaper -- Harris sounds at the end very much as if he would enjoy having a few dinners with Clinton in years to come. In this, he is similar to so many of the people, from all walks of life, who have come to know Bill Clinton well -- including a large number of his political enemies. If it were only Clinton`s admirers who enjoyed his company, he would not be the social celebrity he has become since 2001.

Most presidents -- most public leaders -- are complex human beings, and that is certainly true in Clinton`s case. But as Harris makes clear, he was more than that: he was a man who appreciated complexities and pondered them endlessly; who saw the ambiguity in nearly any policy situation; who loved to tease out the subtleties and distinctions that lesser minds found uninteresting. Occasionally during the Clinton presidency, writers dredged up Scott Fitzgerald`s definition of a first-rate intelligence: that of someone who could hold two opposed ideas in his head at the same time and still function. No one in the past century of American politics met that test better than Clinton.

Sometimes it brought him serious trouble, as when he labored to tell the literal but not the contextual truth to prosecutors in the Lewinsky case, and left much of the public angry at him. Sometimes it made him maddeningly slow to make up his mind. Erskine Bowles once marveled at Clinton`s ability to ``analyze all the factors, all the risks and opportunities, and weigh them brilliantly.`` On those occasions, Bowles said, all the president needed was someone who could make sure he wasn`t influenced to change his mind by the last old friend whom he happened to talk to on the phone. Such is the hazardous life of any politician blessed -- or cursed -- by the ability to see all sides of a difficult question.

But if Clinton was indecisive, he was also supremely resilient. This is the quality that seems most to impress Harris, and the one the title of his book emphasizes. Clinton may have been a man plagued by uncertainties, but he was also a man who never gave up. Not when the Republicans humiliated him in the 1994 election; not when they seemed to have him cornered in budget negotiations the following year; not when the Lewinsky case seemed as if it would force him out of office in disgrace. ``I`m the big rubber clown you had as a kid,`` he told Newt Gingrich, his Republican nemesis, in 1995. ``The harder you hit me, the faster I come back up.`` That very trait -- documented by Harris in situation after situation -- portrays a strength of character seldom acknowledged by Clinton`s many critics.

If, as Harris believes, Clinton was in the most important ways a competent president -- and certainly not a combative or ideological one -- then the conundrum of Clinton-hatred remains essentially unsolved. Harris does try to explain it. He suggests -- as others have -- that Clinton, not entirely through his own doing, suffered as the embodiment of a generation and a set of values that much of the country had never understood or been willing to accept. He was the tangible symbol of the Baby Boom, its conceits, its self-absorption, its lack of discipline and failures of responsibility. He was a child of the 1960`s preaching to millions of people who had never come to terms with the 1960`s and didn`t want to be reminded of them.

Robert Reich, Clinton`s labor secretary and close friend since their Oxford days together, told Harris that Clinton`s personal history of youthful rebellion and conventional adult success, all achieved without significant personal sacrifice, was threatening to many Americans, even if they themselves did not entirely understand why. And so they despised him. And they despised his wife. Whether Hillary Clinton manages in the end to overcome this generational taint may be one of the more significant political questions of the next few years.

The generational issue is surely not the only explanation of Clinton hatred, but it may be the most persuasive one anybody has presented so far. Ultimately there will be others. The debate about Bill Clinton, about his character and achievements and moral worth, will go on long after the subject himself has departed from the scene. Clinton ``was too vital and too vexing a character to be easily forgotten or dismissed,`` Harris writes. This is a complex, interesting and subtle book about a complex, interesting and subtle man.

Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine and author of ``The United States of Ambition`` and ``The Lost City.``

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June 12, 2005
Don`t Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?hp

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook`s. "I just want you to remember that I wrote `Follow the money,` " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President`s Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein`s book or in The Post`s Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward`s contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood`s version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate`s 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn`t explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon`s in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration`s prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon`s special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn`t run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today`s blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the `72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon`s wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC`s "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times`s Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn`t mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson`s sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president`s men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president`s men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam`s holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan`s president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend`s little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media`s center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That`s a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair`s scoop, interrupted President Bush`s post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.

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June 12, 2005
Interrogating Ourselves
By JOSEPH LELYVELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/magazine/12TORTURE.html

I. The Silence After Abu Ghraib

In order to get to the nub of the question of what we as citizens really expect and require of American interrogators facing supposed terrorists -- how far we`re prepared to allow those asking the questions to venture into the dark realm of brutalization and coercion -- let`s for argument`s sake put aside the most horrific, shameful cases, those of detainees who died under interrogation: that of Manadel al-Jamadi, for instance, whose body was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice when it was carried out of an Abu Ghraib prison shower room a year and a half ago, where he`d been handcuffed to a wall; or Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who, elsewhere in Iraq, appears to have been thrust headfirst into a sleeping bag, manhandled there and then, finally, suffocated. By anyone`s definition of torture -- even that of the Bush administration, which originally propounded (and later withdrew) a strikingly narrow definition holding that torture occurs only when the pain is ``of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure`` -- these cases answer the question of whether torture has been committed by our side in what`s called the global war on terror. No one steps forward to condone what`s plainly illegal under United States and international law. And although we`ve seen no indication that blame will attach to any official or command officer at any level for these killings, there are small signs that conclusions have been drawn somewhere between the Pentagon and White House, signs of an overdue housecleaning, or maybe just a tidying up. By the coldest cost-benefit calculation, a dead detainee is a disaster: he cannot be a source of ``actionable intelligence,`` only fury. So there`s now a new policy, ``Procedures for Investigations Into the Death of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the U.S.,`` that was duly conveyed last month to the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations body, in a subsection of a longer report. The subsection`s heading even carried a whiff of contrition. It was ``Lessons Learned and Policy Reforms.`` Also, the Pentagon has let it be known that it`s preparing a new manual for interrogators that prohibits physical and psychological humiliation of detainees. What interrogation techniques it does allow are listed in a classified annex as, presumably, are any hints of what can happen when those techniques fail to produce the desired results. Can the detainee then be handed over to another agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, that may not be constrained by the new directives? Or to units of a foreign government like the counterterrorism units now being financed and coordinated in Iraq by the United States?

In other words, if there has been a housecleaning, to how much of the shadowy counterterrorism edifice constructed since Sept. 11 does it now apply? The cases we know about, after all, are mostly old cases, even if we recently learned about them. We`ve been told little about what`s now going on in interrogation rooms at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib -- what the limits are now supposed to be. While Defense Department investigators are still kept busy looking into detainees` complaints of abuse in Iraq, it has to be acknowledged that we`ve yet to hear of any fatalities under interrogation in 2004 or 2005.

It has been more than a year now since we (and, of course, the region in which we presume to be crusading for freedom) were shown a selection of snapshots from Abu Ghraib with their depraved staging of hooded figures, snarling dogs and stacked naked bodies. For all the genuine outrage in predictable places over what was soon being called a ``torture scandal`` -- in legal forums, editorial pages, letters columns -- the usual democratic cleansing cycle never really got going. However strong the outcry, it wasn`t enough to yield political results in the form of a determined Congressional investigation, let alone an independent commission of inquiry; the Pentagon`s own inquiries, which exonerated its civilian and political leadership, told us a good deal more than most Americans, so it would appear, felt they needed to know. Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. ``You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,`` Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ``I think they want it blurry.``

One result is that we`ve insulated ourselves from the really pertinent, really difficult question: How do we feel about coercive techniques that are commonly, if somewhat cavalierly, held to fall short of torture? These methods are variously known as C.I.D. (for ``cruel, inhuman and degrading`` treatment) or H.C.I. (for ``highly coercive interrogation``); or, in blander Pentagon-speak, ``counterresistance strategies`` (ranked in order of severity in two groups, Class II and Class III); or ``professional interrogation techniques,`` to use the postmodern gloss recently offered by the director of Central Intelligence, Porter J. Goss, to describe ``waterboarding`` (a refinement of the ancient practice of water torture, with which American troops first experimented a hundred years ago on Philippine insurgents). All these terms are sometimes loosely subsumed in opinion articles under the heading ``torture lite`` (though you might wonder what`s so ``lite`` about waterboarding). None of them would be remotely legal in an investigation of an American on American soil.

This broad category of abuse was originally deemed by agile government lawyers to be just inside the realm of what`s legal for foreigners held abroad so long as there`s no intent on the part of interrogators to cause permanent physical or psychic harm; in other words, if no conspicuous scars are left by techniques from sleep deprivation to solitary confinement in a filthy windowless cell to the denial of toilet facilities and medical assistance to the pouring of icy water on a body that may be naked, hooded or lightly clothed to shackling that same body in positions of stress -- or, possibly, all of the above, combined in an atmosphere of general menace, suggesting to the prisoner that, however long it has lasted, what he has experienced may be only the beginning. How widely torture lite is practiced now and who authorizes it is a matter of pure guesswork for anyone who doesn`t happen to be an official with a high security clearance or a ranking member of a Congressional intelligence committee.

Discussion by human rights lawyers tends to assume that nothing has been learned by policy makers except more effective methods of covering up. On the right, occasional complaints can now be heard that Donald Rumsfeld`s Pentagon has lost its nerve. (``Red tape now entangles the interrogation process,`` Heather Mac Donald complained early this year in The City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy organization. She went on: ``Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by officials who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives.``) Meanwhile, torture lite has been the subject of a little-noticed but intense debate involving rights groups, law professors, ethicists, counterterrorism theorists and military lawyers, all vying for the attention of a tiny minority of the Congress, Republican as well as Democrat -- a minority that feels frustrated, in some cases even incensed, by the resolute unwillingness of the majority to probe glaring questions of who really authorized what once ``the gloves came off`` (to use an oft-repeated phrase) in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. At issue are the questions of whether torture lite can ever be legal and who, if anyone, reviews the rules a president makes in secret.

The answer, at present, often seems to be no one. An implicit understanding has been reached, or so I would argue, between the governed and those who govern: that the prime task is the prevention of future attacks on our own soil as opposed to the punishment of past attacks; that extralegal excesses, not excluding kidnappings and physical abuse, may be necessary in the effort to suppress terrorists seeking to implant sleeper cells in our midst and equip them with deathly substances and bombs; that in pursuit of this goal, much can be forgiven, including big mistakes (the abuse and indefinite detention of innocent people, the tacit annulment -- for foreigners, anyway -- of legal guarantees, not to mention a costly war of dubious relation to the larger struggle); and that the less we know as a people about our secret counterterrorism struggles and strategies, the less we contemplate the possibly ugly consequences, the easier it will be for those in authority to get on with the job of protecting us.

when it comes to imminent threats of terrorism, the democratic process doesn`t demand open debate. I offer that judgment regretfully as an empirical conclusion, not a moral argument. It`s easy to see why the Abu Ghraib scandal didn`t intrude for even a moment on last year`s presidential campaign: if John Kerry had tried to raise it, he not only would have been castigated for calling our troops torturers, he`d also have invited questions about how far he was willing to go to resist terror. Politicians, driven by fear, know they`re far more likely to be held accountable after the next catastrophe for what they didn`t do to prevent it than they are to be made to justify their passivity on detention issues now.

For the same reasons, civil libertarians of all stripes -- those who would extend constitutional rights and the protections of international law to foreign detainees wherever they`re held -- don`t get much traction because they have no ready answer to the question of how this would make Americans safer. Specifically, they mostly don`t say what kind of interrogation they would conduct, under what rules, if they were charged with preventing the next terrorist attack. Would they, for example, give presumed Al Qaeda terrorists Miranda warnings in Arabic about their rights to a lawyer and to remain silent?

All of which leaves no easily agreed-on answer to the question of where we should draw the line on the use of coercive force in interrogation. As matters stand, that`s up to an administration that after the Sept. 11 attacks entertained an argument that any attempt to enforce the United Nations Convention Against Torture (ratified by the United States, with reservations, in 1994) would be an unconstitutional interference with the powers of the commander in chief; an administration that says it abhors torture but prefers not to be pinned down on what it now considers torture to be. That`s an issue, we`re led to understand, for private negotiation between the C.I.A. and the attorney general. The rest of us can be forgiven if we draw the implication that we`re expected to butt out if we can`t accept at face value the pious promises of humane treatment for detainees that are regularly served up by administration spokesmen. Instead of worrying about what`s real but unknowable, we get to watch the Fox TV counterterrorism serial ``24,`` in which torture is just another tool the good guys have to wield and clean-cut technicians are always on call to administer electric shocks to recalcitrant conspirators.

Here I have to admit to what may seem a moral debility. As a journalist who had reported on torture and torture victims, and who therefore thought he knew something about the subject, I was surprised that I was finding it harder than most commentators and most people I knew to take a fixed view of coercive force in interrogation. I didn`t know whether it was effective, whether it had any potential, as sometimes claimed, to save thousands of lives by preventing a catastrophic attack. If it did, I wondered if coercive force could be considered unthinkable. And I wondered whether it was more reprehensible morally than accepting the ``collateral damage`` in dead and maimed innocents that occurs when you target a house or cave with a missile or a bunker-buster bomb in order to extinguish a terrorist. At the same time, I strongly suspected that it wasn`t controllable, that it would have its own collateral damage -- to innocent people, to the interrogators themselves and to our ideas about the rule of law. It made me uncomfortable to hear our own leaders telling us what a security police chief in apartheid-era South Africa long ago said to me -- that we should ``let the experts fight it out with the terrorists in the shadows.`` (``We also have to work . . . sort of the dark side, if you will,`` Vice President Dick Cheney said shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. ``We`ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. . . . ``)

Basically, I accepted the point, at least as far as the struggle against Al Qaeda and its imitators was concerned, but it`s striking how often the hard men who make the hard decisions to fight it out in the shadows snatch the wrong people, then fail to follow through. Only after a new commanding officer had arrived and official inquiries had issued their reports did we learn that 40 percent of those penned up at Guantanamo never belonged there in the first place. At Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the record was even worse: two-thirds of the detainees were eventually said to have been innocent of terrorist links. At least when they were picked up. Who knows what leanings they developed or links they forged during and after their interrogations?

A life spent mostly as a reporter had left me unfit for deep thought of a sedentary kind. So, uncomfortable with both absolutist positions -- the trusting ``do what you have to do in secret`` carte blanche versus the pure ``no coercive force ever`` position held by those who are strict constructionists when it comes to laws against torture lite as well as torture -- and equally dubious about the feasibility of a decent middle ground, I set out with notebook in hand several months ago to speak to politicians on Capitol Hill, spymasters, interrogators and legal experts. My hopes were that their experience and conclusions would shed light on the ingredients of a successful interrogation, whether these included coercion and, if so, how much, and whether there was anything that ordinary citizens could safely be told about what goes on in the shadows. My itinerary wasn`t arduous. It involved traveling to Washington for conversations on Capitol Hill; then to Cambridge, Mass., to talk to law professors with a range of strong views on my subject; and finally to Israel, a country whose Supreme Court had asserted its jurisdiction and declared in 1999 that not only torture but all forms of ``cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment`` -- the term for torture lite used in the Convention Against Torture -- were illegal under Israeli law. At least there, it seemed, the security services that conduct interrogations had adapted themselves over many years to the idea that some legal standards might actually apply on the dark side. That was more or less the American view until just after 9/11.


II. What the Interrogators Know

When the prisoner is important enough and the interrogator has time to invest in the subtle task of undermining his resolve, the best practitioners perform like accomplished actors fully inhabiting their roles. Recounting their successes, they show some of the same dramatic flair. Chatting in a lounge of a Tel Aviv hotel, a former chief interrogator of the Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, briefly acted out his part in order to make the point that violence was seldom necessary. It can be enough to just lay the latest Amnesty International report on the table, he said, drumming his fingers in pantomime on the imagined document. ``Have you read this?`` he said as if speaking to a detainee. ``It tells the sort of things we can do.`` Dramatic pause. ``And it doesn`t include the answers of those who were afraid to speak to Amnesty International.`` Second dramatic pause, meaningful stare, husky whisper. ``Or the answers of those who can no longer speak.``

In the telling of the former chief interrogator -- who insisted that he be identified only by his initials, H.B.A. -- an interrogation was a contest of brains, of personalities. An unequal contest, by definition: one party determines the rules and may change them at any moment -- manipulation in pursuit of a moral end, saving lives (even if an archly implied threat is, strictly speaking, illegal under international law that`s formally accepted by both Israel and the United States).

A celebrated former station chief for the C.I.A. reminisced at his Washington club about a series of interrogations in Khartoum, Sudan, nearly two decades ago in which a recalcitrant Libyan agent was eventually coaxed into giving up a full accounting of the apparatus in which he`d worked. All it took was the painstaking deconstruction, bit by bit, of the prisoner`s worldview. This was done by giving him a peek at unpredictable intervals, as if by accident, at Arabic newspapers portraying conditions of unrest and then revolt in Tripoli, leading finally to a front page that bannered the death of Qaddafi and the collapse of the regime. The prisoner had no way of knowing that the papers had been specially printed by the agency for his eyes only. So he drew the intended conclusion that there was no one left to whom he owed allegiance except his friendly interrogator. Start to finish, I was told, the interrogation took the better part of a year.

Jack Cloonan, a recently retired F.B.I. agent with a reputation for uncanny success in conveying a sense of warm, fatherly protectiveness and concern to suspects he encountered, acted out for me his first moments with Abdel Ghani Meskini, a young Algerian living in Brooklyn, where he specialized in credit-card fraud. Meskini had been assigned a role in the so-called millennium plot to explode a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on or about Jan. 1, 2000. Cloonan began by asking the man whether he`d had a chance to pray; he then indicated the direction of Mecca. Next he asked whether the prisoner had been served halal food. Then the agent inquired softly after his parents and the concern they must now be feeling for the welfare of their son. Soon Meskini had relaxed to the point that Cloonan, sliding into the role of surrogate father, could start guiding him to a conclusion about what his real father would want him to do in this predicament: help the investigator prevent bloody carnage in the hope that he could be reunited one day with his family. The would-be terrorist was not immune to a soft approach. It took just one afternoon for Meskini to start talking.

So, yes, these impressive veterans of different services had excellent stories to tell, which, like most stories that are brought back from the dark side, the hearer has no real way of verifying. Still, I was soon persuaded of the point they were making with the accounts they offered as parables: that in the best of cases, violence may sometimes have to be alluded to as a distasteful option but needn`t be used. But what about the everyday cases, where hours of interrogations yield fragments of information that help fill in the jigsaw puzzle that analysts are trying to assemble? If I pressed my question about violence in these and other conversations, the almost invariable answer, as if learned by rote in the same school, was that too much violence produced unreliable information because people will say anything, admit to anything, as a way of gaining surcease from unbearable pain. Torture, in other words, is a useful tool for gaining confessions when the facts are deemed not to matter. (Or as a former political prisoner I knew in South Africa said to me, making the same point as he recounted his own experience of electric-shock torture, ``You`ll have to prepare many yeses.``)

Only occasionally did I hear examples cited of what might be termed, if you can stomach neutral language, the efficacy of torture. There`s the case of Abdul Hakim Murad, an Arab living in Manila who was picked up and reportedly tortured by Philippine interrogators who, so the story goes, inserted burning cigarettes into his ears. That, it`s sometimes said, led to the foiling of Operation Bojinka -- a 1995 plot to set off bombs on 11 passenger jets. It also may have led to the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the original attempt in 1993 to bomb the World Trade Center. (Actually, others say the key leads came not from the interrogation but from the painstaking ``mirror imaging`` of deleted files in what`s termed ``slack space`` in the hard drive of a laptop captured at the Manila apartment.)

Then there was the waterboarding in 2003 of Yousef`s uncle, the putative mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who`s invariably referred to as ``K.S.M.`` rather than his name, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. K.S.M., we`re led to believe, was soon broken and soon talked. However, official sources again differ on a key point -- whether he talked about the past or future, about the plot he led or plots that had yet to surface. One former official who had seen the complete record of the interrogation told me it ``saved thousands of American lives.`` I found that hard to believe. My own feeling was that my source was getting carried away either by my promise of anonymity or his wish to demonstrate his own effectiveness. If a plot on such a scale had been demonstrably foiled, I can`t help believing, we`d have heard of it at some point during the 2004 presidential campaign.

So, on the basis of the scant amount of information available to those of us who will never be shown interrogation logs, I still think the case for actual torture remains shaky even by the most amoral and pragmatic standard. What then of torture lite? What about the crudely brandished threat of unbearable pain or the carefully calibrated administration of somewhat bearable pain as routine techniques for shocking and disorienting a prisoner, conveying to him a sense of hopelessness from which there is only one possible escape? It`s a question that few theorists care to debate openly. How many lives would have to be demonstrably saved before such intimidation and punishment achieve a kind of moral sanction? If it could be shown with some certainty that, say, 10,000 lives would be saved, few purists would argue against the infliction of pain. If the number was a much smaller multiple of 10 and the degree of uncertainty candidly acknowledged, the true murkiness of the issue in the real world would have to be faced.

Agencies that employ interrogators on the counterterrorism front are loath to say anything in public that might be taken by prospective detainees or their handlers as suggesting that there could be limits to what they do, boundaries they won`t cross, on the theory that resistance is easier if the prisoner has an idea of what he will have to withstand. For home consumption, they`d like to avoid suggesting that there are no limits. That puts a premium on purposeful ambiguity, on double talk. Commentators and editorial writers who deplore torture use the ``slippery slope`` argument to avoid facing the issue of lesser forms of coercion. Any breach in the norms of due process, they contend, is sure to be taken as license for the grossest abuse. That argument may be true, even profoundly true, but it`s also something of a dodge, for it leaves unanswered the question of whether coercive interrogation ``works.``

In Israel, I was repeatedly told that coercive interrogation had effectively thwarted missions of would-be suicide bombers, saving lives. (I also heard that restrictions on the use of coercive interrogation had cost innocent lives in at least two cases.) But no one would describe a specific case. Weeks after I left Jerusalem, I finally received a communication from a high security source willing to get into particulars. The source made a sweeping claim that ``hundreds of terror attacks . . . intended to cause the deaths of an inestimable number of innocent civilians`` had been prevented by intelligence revealed in interrogations. The single example out of these hundreds that I was given turned out to be the same one that the Israeli Justice Ministry cited in a letter to Human Rights Watch a couple of months earlier. It was the case of Nasim Za`atari, a Jerusalem resident who scouted out potential targets for Hamas, then helped suicide bombers with their disguises and guided them to targets. Za`atari had already had a hand in two bus bombings -- one of them killed 23 Israelis on Aug. 19, 2003 -- when he was detained and interrogated the following month. Before his capture, he`d also agreed to guide three bombers from Hebron to new targets in Jerusalem. Soon after he was broken in interrogation, Israeli security forces assassinated the Hamas recruiter who had prepared the candidates for suicide bombing and seized the bomb belts they would have worn, which were concealed in an ordinary washing machine that a moving company had picked up in Hebron. I wasn`t explicitly told whether force was actually used to break Za`atari, only that if it was, it did not ``fall within the definition of torture in international law.`` Left to draw my own conclusion, I concluded that force had been deemed essential.

Legal theorists debate the question of what`s called the ticking-bomb scenario and whether it can ever exist in the real world. Here was a concrete Israeli answer. It was reasonable to imagine that a dozen or maybe several dozen lives were saved in this instance by the timely use of force. The plain fact seems to be that, sooner or later, most forms of interrogation work with most prisoners who have been deprived of comrades, a reliable sense of time, of whether it`s night or day and any external reason for resistance.

``The only difference is the time factor,`` said Danny Rothschild, now a security consultant in Israel and the United States, formerly a high official in the Israeli security service, expressing with some distaste the minimal case for the occasional use of coercion. ``And sometimes time is precious.``


III. Restraining the Leviathan

The premise that coercive force may have its uses in the interrogation of suspected terrorists was accepted as a given by a task force that gathered at Harvard last year. Made up largely of lawyers with government experience in key jobs on the security side, the task force`s mission was to address the issues that are usually ducked in hopes of drawing a plan for balancing security needs with freedoms we used to take for granted. (The project, sponsored jointly by the Kennedy School and the Harvard Law School, was underwritten in part by the Department of Homeland Security.) The lawyers wanted rules on the use of coercive force, a code with declared limits, a process of oversight and accountability, none of which clearly exist now in the Bush administration`s approach to interrogations in its so-called global war. In other words, they were proposing a tightly supervised, highly qualified license for the application of torture lite.

The final version of the report was written by Prof. Philip B. Heymann of the law school, a former deputy attorney general, and Juliette N. Kayyem of the Kennedy School, a former legal adviser to Attorney General Janet Reno. Judge Michael Chertoff, who has since become secretary of Homeland Security, was among the participants who didn`t dissent from the team`s assumption that torture lite works. (Only one did, a San Francisco lawyer named Michael Traynor, who wrote that he remained ``highly skeptical that degradation and humiliation of human beings is an effective means for eliciting truthful information.``) For a brief time early this year there was a slight hope among the report`s adherents that its approach might be embodied in legislation that could attract bipartisan support. What it attracted instead was the wrath of human rights groups and the cold indifference of an administration that had little interest in limiting its authority or submitting its tactics to review.

So it was just a lifeless concept, a mere pedagogic example by the time Kayyem visited Prof. Sanford Levinson`s course, ``Torture, Law and Lawyers,`` at Harvard Law School in April. ``You think that if it works and it`s something less than torture, it`s O.K.,`` Levinson said, challenging Kayyem to declare the guiding principle on which the task force would have permitted a limited use of coercive force in interrogations involving terrorists.

``If it comes with a process,`` she replied, meaning a legal process. ``Cut to the chase, we were a room full of people who think it works.``

It`s worth dwelling on the proposals as they touch on coercive interrogation, if only because their failure to gain support is a fair index of how much (meaning how little) concern exists today beyond law schools, human rights groups and the military`s own uniformed lawyers for making our laws consistent with our practices. The idea was not to remove highly coercive interrogation, or H.C.I., from the American counterterrorism arsenal but to set strict legal limits on its use. Blatant torture would have been absolutely out; ditto forms of torture lite that ``shock the conscience``; ditto the farming out (in official jargon, ``rendition``) of terrorist suspects to foreign governments that practice torture, even, presumably, if they were being swapped for intelligence the United States couldn`t otherwise get. The president would have had to sign off on permitted coercive techniques, on whether they could be combined and for how long; Congressional committees would have had to be briefed; and before these techniques were used in any particular case, senior officials would have to make a determination in writing that there was ``probable cause`` to believe significant information could be obtained. All of this would be done in secret, but if these standards were not met, a victim would be able to sue for civil damages, even a foreigner held outside the United States. So, you see, it would all have been legal, according to the book.

In exceptional instances under this proposal, where lives were clearly at stake, only the president could have authorized more extreme methods of coercion, methods that might ``shock the conscience.`` He would have had to do it in writing and tell oversight committees ``within a reasonable period.``

One of the main sponsors of last year`s Intelligence Reform Act, Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat and the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, found merit in the Harvard approach. I asked her whether she thought a line could be drawn distinguishing acceptable forms of coercive force from unacceptable ones. ``We have to try,`` she said. ``If you`re serious about trying to get information in advance of an attack, interrogation has to be one of the main tools. It has to be made to work. I`m O.K. with it not being pretty.`` But when it came to giving legislative sanction for the limited use of torture lite, there wasn`t anything like a consensus among those few in Congress who had worried aloud about the American way of interrogation.

Senator John McCain has the heavy distinction of being the only member of the Senate who has ever suffered torture. He says he was ``stunned`` last year when the White House resisted an amendment he helped sponsor to the Intelligence Reform Act that declared simply that the C.I.A. was obliged to respect all laws and international treaties against cruel and inhuman interrogation practices and torture. McCain seems to find it impossible, however, to speak of his own trauma when addressing the issue. So he won`t be drawn into a comparison of the Hanoi Hilton with Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Plainly this is a matter of intense personal resistance rather than political calculation, a refusal to revisit his darkest memories merely to score a debating point. Asked about the use of force in interrogation, he avoids eye contact and stares at the wall. Fidgeting with his pen, he finally speaks in a constricted voice, as if he`s not getting enough air, saying he couldn`t support any provision in law for an approved list of coercive techniques.

``You don`t need to get into questions of whether its O.K. to break someone`s right arm but not his left foot,`` he says, his voice trailing off. That morning I`d read the pages in McCain`s autobiography about the savage beatings to which he`d been subjected in Hanoi. I knew that his right arm had been broken.


IV. The Prohibition Experiment

The Israeli Supreme Court`s landmark decision didn`t attempt to weigh broken arms against broken feet, sleep deprivation against stress positions, torture lite against torture heavy. It declared categorically that no form of highly coercive interrogation is authorized by Israeli law, that all forms were illegal under international covenants Israel had signed. ``Human dignity,`` wrote Aharon Barak, the president of the court, ``also includes the dignity of the suspect being interrogated. . . . Violence directed at a suspect`s body or spirit does not constitute a reasonable investigation practice.`` What`s illegal in a police station in an ordinary criminal case, the ruling said plainly, is illegal in one of the security service`s interrogation rooms in a case of terrorism.

Barak`s court didn`t lightly or swiftly come to this conclusion in 1999. The issue of torture lite had been put squarely on the table as early as 1987 by a commission headed by Moshe Landau, one of Barak`s predecessors as head of the highest court and the judge who 26 years earlier had presided over the Eichmann trial. Landau found that the agents of the security service had routinely perjured themselves in court on issues of abuse and coercion and that they were behaving outside the law. Landau was merely saying out loud what was already widely known. ``Everyone knew -- they knew we were lying,`` said Ami Ayalon, who was head of the General Security Service (another name for Shin Bet) when the Supreme Court finally rendered its 1999 decision. ``Members of the Knesset knew, ministers all knew, the judges knew.``

Yet Landau`s commission frankly acknowledged that ``moderate physical pressure`` -- yet another way of describing torture lite -- might sometimes be necessary as an interrogation tool. His report came, or so it`s widely believed, with a secret annex specifying which coercive techniques might be permissible. For more than a decade -- the decade that saw the first intifada and the start of the Oslo peace process -- ``moderate physical pressure`` became an elastic byword in Israeli interrogation rooms. Landau had inadvertently given the interrogators a provisional license for a list of humiliating and brutal coercive techniques like violent shaking, in which the detainee would be grabbed by his shirt front and jerked back and forth with his head bobbing spasmodically (a method that proved to be lethal in at least one case). ``Moderate physical pressure`` also came to cover the introduction of the notorious shabach position, in which the detainee was hooded and placed on a low chair with a seat tilting down, pitching him forward while his arms were tightly handcuffed behind him in an unnatural, contorted way so that they had to support his weight, for two or three hours at a stretch. This could be augmented by other stressful standing and squatting positions including the qambaz, or frog position, or accompanied by loud music and verbal abuse full of crude sexual innuendos about the prisoner`s mother, sister or wife. The combination of all these methods over prolonged periods produced a regime sometimes known as shabeh.

The respected Israeli human rights organization B`Tselem contended that the combination was nothing less than torture. In 1998, in a relatively quiet period, more than two years before the start of the second intifada, B`Tselem estimated that at least 850 Palestinians and possibly more than 1,200 were being tortured annually. According to its figures, this was about 85 percent of all Palestinians in interrogation. The figures were not seriously challenged. Finally, in 1999, the court said this was all illegal.

Israel is a small country in constant conversation with itself at all levels of society, including the upper echelons of government, on the subject of its perpetual security crisis. Ami Ayalon, the security chief, said he was privately in touch with Barak before the decision and even invited him to speak to his agents on issues of international law. Not surprised when the decision was finally handed down, the security chief promptly announced that his interrogators would obey the court.


That may sound like a happy ending, a triumph for the rule of law. But what actually changed? Not as much as the sweeping judicial edict seemed to promise, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, a human rights group that seeks to monitor what happens to detained Palestinians. The committee maintains that Ayalon`s pledge to abide by the Supreme Court`s decision was never wholly enforced and seriously broke down after the outbreak of the second intifada. Torture remains routine in Israeli detention centers, the committee contended, offering affidavits taken within the last year from prisoners like Bahij Mahmoud Bader, who, in a statement summarized by the group, said that after his arrest last July, his interrogators actually ``put before him a list of the methods of torture that they later used.`` Then they worked down the list, forcing him to stand facing a wall with his hands tied behind his back and his knees bent for hours at a time; blindfolding him and slapping him; seating him backwards on a chair with his hands and feet bound in a painful position while two interrogators, one behind and one in front, shoved his upper torso back and forth as if playing catch with a medicine ball. As usual, curses, threats and denial of sleep were all chapters in his story. Later, so he testified, he was informed that his wife and mother had been arrested and that his family home might be demolished if he failed to cooperate.

The committee had a batch of affidavits taken within the last year that describe coercive interrogations. I was told it could easily gather more if it had enough lawyers to interview prisoners.

The human rights group B`Tselem takes a different view. It asserts that the number of Palestinian prisoners subjected to what are sometimes now called ``special methods`` or ``military interrogation`` remained comparatively low, measured by the dozens rather than the hundreds over the course of a year, and that the actual methods used are now somewhat less severe than in the past. (The chairs to which detainees are shackled are usually normal chairs, not the special short stools with a forward tilt that the Supreme Court proscribed. The suffocating hoods have mostly been replaced by blackened goggles. Suspects may be shoved back and forth, but they`re not routinely subjected to the bone-rattling shakings that were part of the old drill.) Bassem Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, which focuses on abuses in the territories under the Palestinian Authority, agreed. He said in an interview in Jericho that no one in his right mind would prefer a Palestinian jail to an Israeli one. During the first intifada, he noted, 20 Palestinians died in Israeli prisons; during the second, none did. Over the whole period, there were more deaths in detention in the jails of the Palestinian Authority than in Israeli jails.

``Here Israel has a very important lesson to teach the United States,`` said Jessica Montell, the American-born executive director of B`Tselem. She was making a point diametrically opposed to a contention that turns up regularly in Arab media and on the Internet without much evidence to support it, that the Pentagon has schooled itself on Israeli interrogation methods and manuals. She was not speaking as an apologist for present practices; she was acknowledging a new restraint in Israel since the Supreme Court`s ruling.

A new generation of Israeli interrogators has been trained. Discipline in the ranks and close monitoring of detailed interrogation plans -- characteristics already attributed to the security service -- became even stricter. Most, if not all, interrogations are now videotaped and subject to review. Interrogators always have partners; they are seldom left alone with prisoners. And, of course, they all speak Arabic. The great majority of Palestinians passing through Israeli interrogation rooms may still be subjected to dire threats of actual physical abuse. The ordinary prisoner might still be isolated, deprived of sleep, chilled or stifled by a drastic temperature change in a windowless cell until thoroughly disoriented. But then after some days, he`s likely to be put in a cleaner cell with fellow Palestinians. They may tell him they don`t trust him, that they`re afraid he`s an Israeli spy. Actually they`re the asafeer, or ``birds,`` the stool pigeons who will coax him into talking. He may suspect as much, but he`s so glad to be speaking softly with fellow Palestinians after the shouting, curses and crude sexual innuendoes to which the interrogators frequently resort, he usually talks. The cell, of course, is bugged. No one has touched him. This sort of approach, I was told, is just as effective as the old stress positions, which are meant to be reserved now for extraordinary cases.

``You know what?`` asked Danny Rothschild, the security veteran. ``The results are the same. Which shows you could have done without brutal interrogation.``

Nowadays no interrogator can resort to physical means without approval from on high. Theoretically, this comes only in ``ticking bomb`` situations, in which there`s a chance of forestalling an actual plot. If it comes, the permissible duration for the application of the designated coercive technique will be clearly indicated; time logs are then kept, hour by dreary hour, and regularly reviewed. ``It`s frightening the way everything is done and reported,`` said Lea Tsemel, a Jewish defense lawyer who specializes in Palestinian political cases. ``It`s very professional now.``

Such approval from the security chief for the use of ``special methods`` is a matter of administrative discipline. It has no standing in law. The Supreme Court said so explicitly. Still, the security chief continues to give his approval in important cases, and six years after the court declared itself, no one has brought a case alleging ``cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment`` back to the Supreme Court. The court broadly hinted that its prohibition on coercive methods could be waived in an extreme circumstance if a case were brought after the abuse had occurred. It suggested that an interrogator might then be able to avail himself of the old common-law defense of ``necessity`` -- in essence, that he acted to avert a greater evil. Without any cases, the defense has yet to be tested.

Hannah Friedman, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, explained why her group had yet to bring such a case to the Supreme Court. She had been warned that if the committee brought a new case alleging torture at a time when suicide bombings had aroused public opinion, it might provoke a decision that would weaken the legal standard that had just been raised. Under those circumstances, even the committee against torture must have felt it had to be realistic. If the present lull in the conflict continues, she said, the committee may yet bring a case.


V. Candor and Complicity

Viewed through an Israeli prism, the United States still has a lot to learn about the uses and consequences of coercive force, of torture lite, in interrogations. A lot to learn as practitioners: Israeli security specialists are amazed by the multiplicity of commands engaged in the American interrogation scramble, by the short tours of duty and high turnover of interrogators, by the reliance on interpreters and outsourcing to contractors and foreign governments. ``Unprofessional`` is the mildest word they use.

And a lot to learn on the judicial side where, it might be said, we`re a decade or more behind the Israeli experience. Cases that may lead our courts to confront the issue and decide whether they have jurisdiction are still only in preparation. If eventually some federal court asserts its authority, the government can be expected to appeal. It could be years before such a case made its way to our Supreme Court. Israel, by contrast, upholds a clear legal standard, which it makes some effort to observe, at least more than it did in the past. Is this really a difference? Perhaps only to the degree that the Israeli service is now looking over its shoulder at the court, knowing that recourse to the judges is readily available.


Had my journey then taught me anything?


It taught me that democracies are more than likely to evade the basic question of whether torture lite can ever truly be justified for as long as they feel threatened. So they shrink from authorizing it by law, as Professor Heymann`s Harvard group proposed that Congress do and as the Supreme Court in Israel invited the Knesset to do. Democracies` self-regard as communities that are supposed to be on the side of human rights inhibits the candor such statutes would require. Even if the intent is actually to limit the use of coercive techniques, what government wants to be the first since the Enlightenment to proclaim such a draconian code? And what politician wants to shed his carefully maintained ``deniability`` in order to secure the antagonistic value of accountability? By definition, that could be personally costly.

Still, it seemed to me that the idea of legislating standards for the application of torture lite is one of the two available positions that meet any test of intellectual honesty. It offered a form of due process for torture lite (the lawyerly prescription, it might be said, of people out of power brooding on the authoritarian temptation facing people now in power). But if intellectual honesty were the only test, the more satisfying position would be an insistence on obeying existing legal standards of due process, an absolutist refusal to stretch the law in order to legitimize torture lite. Any time the authorities then felt that a compelling national interest left them no choice but to sanction the use of force in an interrogation, they`d know they were breaking the law and could conceivably be prosecuted. Very rarely, upholders of this position conceded, breaking the law could be the right thing to do. The Israeli example can be taken to show that the threat of prosecution would then be largely theoretical.

I found myself bouncing back and forth between the two positions -- the unattainable ideal that brooked no compromise of the law and the unattainable compromise. Since both were unattainable, it didn`t seem to matter where I came out. I preferred the ideal, but if coercive force was inevitable under both regimes, I had to admit, not being a lawyer, to a sneaking regard for the one that acknowledged as much. But, of course, the position that rules doesn`t get hung up on intellectual tests. It says we`ll do what we have to do: don`t ask, don`t tell. Even when clear evidence of the effectiveness of torture lite is hard to come by, democracies threatened by terrorism shrink from laying down the weapon. Should the threat ever pass, we can be expected to repress any memory of its use as we now try to do in daily life while it persists. Then we`ll discover how much gratitude or resentment has accrued to us in the places where we`ve operated, among the descendants of those we`ve detained.

Joseph Lelyveld is the author of ``Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop,`` which was excerpted in the magazine earlier this year. He is a former executive editor of The New York Times.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Sunday, June 12, 2005

Bush and Blair Committed to War in April, 2002
Leaked Cabinet Briefing Shows British Knew War was Illegal

The London Times has dropped another bombshell document concerning the planning of the Iraq war in Washington and London.

The leaked Cabinet office briefing paper for the July 23, 2002, meeting of principals in London, the minutes of which have become notorious as the Downing Street Memo, contains key context for that memo. The briefing paper warns the British cabinet in essence that they are facing jail time because Blair promised Bush at Crawford in April, 2002, that he would go to war against Iraq with the Americans.

As Michael Smith reports for the London Times, "regime change" is illegal in international law without a United Nations Security Council resolution or other recognized sanction (national self-defense, or rescuing a population from genocide, e.g.). Since the United Kingdom is signatory to the International Criminal Court, British officials could be brought up on charges for crimes like "Aggression."

Smith quotes the briefing and then remarks on how it shows Bush and Blair to be lying when they invoke their approach to the UN as proof that they sought a peaceful resolution of the Iraq crisis:


` “It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003. `



The Cabinet briefing makes crystal clear that Blair had cast his lot in with Bush on an elective war against Iraq already in April, 2002:


"2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq`s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted."



This passage is unambiguous and refutes the weird suggestion by Michael Kinsley that the Downing Street Memo did not establish that the Bush administration had committed to war by July, 2002.

British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith is quoted in the Downing Street Memo:

"The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change."



The briefing paper discusses this issue further:


"11. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council."



It makes me deeply ashamed as an American in the tradition of Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, and King, that in their private communications our international allies openly admit that the United States of America routinely disregards international law. The Geneva Conventions were enacted by the United Nations and adopted into national law in order to assure that Nazi-style violations of basic human rights never again occurred without the threat of punishment after the war. We have an administration that views the Geneva Conventions as "quaint." The US has vigorously opposed the International Criminal Court.

The cabinet briefing, like Lord Goldsmith, is skeptical that any of the three legal grounds for war existed with regard to Iraq. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the US or the UK. Saddam`s regime was brutal, but its major killing sprees were in the past in 2002. And, the UNSC had not authorized a war against Iraq.


"The legal position would depend on the precise circumstances at the time. Legal bases for an invasion of Iraq are in principle conceivable in both the first two instances but would be difficult to establish because of, for example, the tests of immediacy and proportionality. Further legal advice would be needed on this point."



The tactic of presenting Saddam with an ultimatum that he should allow back in weapons inspectors, in hopes he would refuse, is again highlighted in this document:


"14. It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However, failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003. "



In his report about the Cabinet briefing, Walter Pincus focuses on the passages that worry about the apparent lack of planning by Bush for the day after the war ended.

The briefing says:


"19. Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks. . . A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of Government might replace Saddam Hussein`s regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor. We must also consider in greater detail the impact of military action on other UK interests in the region."



The British were clearly afraid that the US would get them into Iraq without a plan, and then Bush might just prove fickle and decamp, leaving the poor British holding the bag.

The briefing is also prescient that the Middle East region would be hostile or at most neutral with regard to an Iraq war, and that less international participation would lessen the chances of success.

I found the passage on the information campaign chilling:


"20. Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action. "



The polite diplomatic language hides the implications that there would be a global black psy-ops campaign in favor of the war, conducted from London. Since the rest of the briefing already admits that there was no legal justification for action, the proposal of an information campaign that would maintain that such a justification existed must be seen as deeply dishonest.

One press report said that the British military had planted stories in the American press aimed at getting up the Iraq war. A shadowy group called the Rockingham cell was apparently behind it. Similar disinformation campaigns have been waged by Israeli military intelligence, aiming at influencing US public opinion. (Israeli intelligence has have even planted false stories about its enemies in Arabic newspapers, in hopes that Israeli newspapers would translate them into Hebrew and English, and they would be picked up as credible from there in the West.

The International Criminal Court home page is here. We find in its authorizing legislation, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Section on Jurisdiction, which reads as follows:


"Article 5
Crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court

1. The jurisdiction of the Court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. The Court has jurisdiction in accordance with this Statute with respect to the following crimes:

(a) The crime of genocide;

(b) Crimes against humanity;

(c) War crimes;

(d) The crime of aggression."



It is not clear to me that the court is yet able to take up the crime of aggression, because legal work remained to be done in defining the crime precisely and in having that language adopted by the UNSC.

If it were able to do so, some groups in Europe may now feel that there is a basis for proceeding against the Blair government for knowingly committing an act of aggression. They might argue that when, in March, 2003, it became clear that the United Nations Security Council would not authorize a war against Iraq; and when it was clear from the reports of the UN weapons inspectors that they were finding no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs; and when it was murky as to whether Saddam was actively killing any significant numbers of Iraqis in 2001-2003--that Blair should have pulled out and refused to cooperate in an Iraq invasion. The cabinet brief and the memo of the July 23 meeting demonstrate conclusively that members of the Blair government knew that they were involved in plans that were as of that moment illegal, and that no legal basis for them might be forthcoming. Ignorance is no excuse under the law, but here even ignorance could not be pleaded.

Since the US is not a signatory to the ICC, it is not clear that it could proceed against Bush et al.

posted by Juan @ [url6/12/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/bush-and-blair-committed-to-war-in.html[/url]

More than 35 Killed by Iraqi Guerrillas
US Kills 40 Fighters with Missile Strike

CBC/AP reports:


The new wave of violence began Friday evening when a suicide bomber targeted patrons of a falafel restaurant in the Shiite Shula quarter of Baghdad, killing 10 persons, some of them children waiting for ice cream.

On Saturday, a former commando of the Interior Ministry`s Wolf Brigade blew himself up at its HQ, attempting to assassinate the commanding officer, but killing 3 other persons instead.

Likewise, another Interior Ministry brigade, in the Mansur quarter of Baghdad, was attacked with machine gun fire from a car, which killed 3.

In Diyara, an hour south of Baghdad, guerrillas shot 11 Iraqi construction workers in their minibus. They were employed at Iraqi government and US bases.

A suicide bomber detonated his payload in front of the Slovakian Embassy, wounding 4 persons. Presumably he was protesting the presence of 109 Slovak troops among the coalition forces in Iraq.

In southern Baghad, guerrillas shot two petroleum ministry employees to death, and wounded a third man.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in a cemetery in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, killing 2 Iraqis and wounding 3 other family members.

U.S. soldiers shot to death two Iraqis and wounded two others in Baghdad when their car came too close to an American armoured patrol, military spokesman Lt. Jamie Davis said.

Iraqi police broke up a garage that was manufacturing car bombs, arresting 5.

US Marines fired seven missiles at guerrillas near Qaim, and it is alleged that they killed 40 of them.

posted by Juan @ [url6/12/2005 06:22:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/more-than-35-killed-by-iraqi.html[/url]

Cole on Iraq, 2002-2003

By the way, it has been alleged by some of my detractors that I supported the Iraq War. My position on the war was in fact very complex. I thought it was a terrible idea, but declined to come out against it because I believed that if Saddam`s genocidal regime could be removed by the international community in a legal way, that some good would have been accomplished. But the bottom line is that I thought a war would be legal only if the United Nations Security Council authorized it. I can produce witnesses to my having said that if the UNSC did not authorize the war, I would protest it. When Bush threw aside the UNSC, I became a critic. I still resist the notion that US and UK troops have died in vain, but my conviction that they wouldn`t did not actually suggest support for the war on a political plane, as some have alleged.

This is what I was thinking in February, 2003, in response to someone at H-Diplo who demanded complete US control over Muslim radicals throughout the world. I`m not sure how anybody reads this as an endorsement of an Iraq war!


Nor is it clear that going about having serial wars with Iraq, Iran, Syria, N. Korea, and apparently ultimately China [these are the ideas thrown out by the Richard Perle/ Paul Wolfowitz circle that controls our Defense Department] is going in any way to help with this task of surveillance and infiltration. Surely serial wars in the region are a distraction from the struggle against terrorism, especially since those
countries are not doing anything to the US.

Moreover, the idea that a US military occupation of Iraq will deter as oppose to provoking more attacks on US interests is awfully optimistic. The main problem an organization like al-Qaeda has is to recruit further members and keep current members from melting away in fear. They recruit best when the young men are angriest. What are they angry about? The Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza; the almost daily shooting by the Israeli army of innocent noncombatants; the progressive colonization of Palestinian territory by--let us say--idiosyncratic settlers from Brooklyn (all of this is on t.v. every day over there); the harsh Indian police state erected over the Muslims of Kashmir; the economic stagnation and authoritarian policies of many Middle Eastern governments that are backed by the US; and the poverty and prejudice Muslim immigrants to places like France and Germany experience daily.

I don`t have any idea how to resolve all these grievances; but the young men are very angry about and humiliated by them, and al-Qaeda plays on that anger to seduce them into attacking US interests. A US occupation of Iraq is not going to address the grievances, and is likely to create new bitterness and so help the recruitment drive. If the US really wanted to stop terrorism, it would invade the West Bank and Gaza and liberate the Palestinians to have their own state and self-respect, instead of heading to Baghdad.

Iraq is rugged; tribal forces are still important; and the majority population is Shiite, as is that of neighboring Iran. What will happen if US bombs damage the Shiite shrines, the holiest places for 100 million Shiite Muslims in Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bahrain? What will happen if there is a riot in a shrine city like Karbala and US marines put it down by killing rioters? Do we want 100 million Shiites angry at us again? (Lately they have calmed down and it is the radical Sunnis that
have given us the problems). What happens if the Iraqi Sunni middle classes lose faith in secular Arab nationalism because the Baath is overthrown, and they turn to al-Qaeda-type Islam, in part out of resentment at American hegemony over their country? What will happen if we give the Turks too much authority to intervene in Kurdistan, and fighting breaks out between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds, and if the
Iraqi Kurds turn against the US?

Colin Powell explained in Qatar last week on an Arabic talk show that the US war will be followed by a period of US military administration of the country by a general, followed by a year or two of US civilian administration of the country. This plan is an abandonment of earlier pledges to Iraqi expatriate dissidents that there would be a direct transition to a new Iraqi government. There has been a howl of outrage and betrayal by Kanan Makiya and other dissidents, once close to the Bush White House. If our friends and supporters among Iraqi dissidents are so unhappy now, will everyone in Iraq be just delighted to still be under US administration a year or two from now?

So, this business about controlling everybody all around the world just sounds to me like pie in the sky, and the same sort of thinking that got us mired in the jungles of Vietnam.

I will be ecstatic to see Saddam go. But I have a bad feeling about this, as Han Solo once said prophetically.

posted by Juan @ 2/27/2003 08:28:45 AM

posted by Juan @ [url6/12/2005 06:03:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/5-marines-killed-4-wounded-21-bodies.html[/url]

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Die London Times hat nachgelegt wie schon bei Juan Cole besprochen.

June 12, 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael Smith
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.

Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.

Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.

AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.

It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.

Democrats.com, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it.

The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.




Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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June 12, 2005

Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html

The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.

PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY

IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials)

Summary

Ministers are invited to:

(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales for possible action.

(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.

(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. This should include a call from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US military plans to the President on 4 August.

(4) Note the potentially long lead times involved in equipping UK Armed Forces to undertake operations in the Iraqi theatre and agree that the MOD should bring forward proposals for the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements under cover of the lessons learned from Afghanistan and the outcome of SR2002.

(5) Agree to the establishment of an ad hoc group of officials under Cabinet Office Chairmanship to consider the development of an information campaign to be agreed with the US.

Introduction

1. The US Government`s military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.

2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq`s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.

3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.

4. In order to fulfil the conditions set out by the Prime Minister for UK support for military action against Iraq, certain preparations need to be made, and other considerations taken into account. This note sets them out in a form which can be adapted for use with the US Government. Depending on US intentions, a decision in principle may be needed soon on whether and in what form the UK takes part in military action.

The Goal

5. Our objective should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or to international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD. It seems unlikely that this could be achieved while the current Iraqi regime remains in power. US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein`s regime, followed by elimination if Iraqi WMD. It is however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.

US Military Planning

6. Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq. In a `Running Start`, military action could begin as early as November of this year, with no overt military build-up. Air strikes and support for opposition groups in Iraq would lead initially to small-scale land operations, with further land forces deploying sequentially, ultimately overwhelming Iraqi forces and leading to the collapse of the Iraqi regime. A `Generated Start` would involve a longer build-up before any military action were taken, as early as January 2003. US military plans include no specifics on the strategic context either before or after the campaign. Currently the preference appears to be for the `Running Start`. CDS will be ready to brief Ministers in more detail.

7. US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. This means that legal base issues would arise virtually whatever option Ministers choose with regard to UK participation.

The Viability of the Plans

8. The Chiefs of Staff have discussed the viability of US military plans. Their initial view is that there are a number of questions which would have to be answered before they could assess whether the plans are sound. Notably these include the realism of the `Running Start`, the extent to which the plans are proof against Iraqi counter-attack using chemical or biological weapons and the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight.

UK Military Contribution

9. The UK`s ability to contribute forces depends on the details of the US military planning and the time available to prepare and deploy them. The MOD is examining how the UK might contribute to US-led action. The options range from deployment of a Division (ie Gulf War sized contribution plus naval and air forces) to making available bases. It is already clear that the UK could not generate a Division in time for an operation in January 2003, unless publicly visible decisions were taken very soon. Maritime and air forces could be deployed in time, provided adequate basing arrangements could be made. The lead times involved in preparing for UK military involvement include the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements, for which there is no financial provision.

The Conditions Necessary for Military Action

10. Aside from the existence of a viable military plan we consider the following conditions necessary for military action and UK participation: justification/legal base; an international coalition; a quiescent Israel/Palestine; a positive risk/benefit assessment; and the preparation of domestic opinion.

Justification

11. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council. A detailed consideration of the legal issues, prepared earlier this year, is at Annex A. The legal position would depend on the precise circumstances at the time. Legal bases for an invasion of Iraq are in principle conceivable in both the first two instances but would be difficult to establish because of, for example, the tests of immediacy and proportionality. Further legal advice would be needed on this point.

12. This leaves the route under the UNSC resolutions on weapons inspectors. Kofi Annan has held three rounds of meetings with Iraq in an attempt to persuade them to admit the UN weapons inspectors. These have made no substantive progress; the Iraqis are deliberately obfuscating. Annan has downgraded the dialogue but more pointless talks are possible. We need to persuade the UN and the international community that this situation cannot be allowed to continue ad infinitum. We need to set a deadline, leading to an ultimatum. It would be preferable to obtain backing of a UNSCR for any ultimatum and early work would be necessary to explore with Kofi Annan and the Russians, in particular, the scope for achieving this.

13. In practice, facing pressure of military action, Saddam is likely to admit weapons inspectors as a means of forestalling it. But once admitted, he would not allow them to operate freely. UNMOVIC (the successor to UNSCOM) will take at least six months after entering Iraq to establish the monitoring and verification system under Resolution 1284 necessary to assess whether Iraq is meeting its obligations. Hence, even if UN inspectors gained access today, by January 2003 they would at best only just be completing setting up. It is possible that they will encounter Iraqi obstruction during this period, but this more likely when they are fully operational.

14. It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However, failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003.

An International Coalition

15. An international coalition is necessary to provide a military platform and desirable for political purposes.

16. US military planning assumes that the US would be allowed to use bases in Kuwait (air and ground forces), Jordan, in the Gulf (air and naval forces) and UK territory (Diego Garcia and our bases in Cyprus). The plans assume that Saudi Arabia would withhold co-operation except granting military over-flights. On the assumption that military action would involve operations in the Kurdish area in the North of Iraq, the use of bases in Turkey would also be necessary.

17. In the absence of UN authorisation, there will be problems in securing the support of NATO and EU partners. Australia would be likely to participate on the same basis as the UK. France might be prepared to take part if she saw military action as inevitable. Russia and China, seeking to improve their US relations, might set aside their misgivings if sufficient attention were paid to their legal and economic concerns. Probably the best we could expect from the region would be neutrality. The US is likely to restrain Israel from taking part in military action. In practice, much of the international community would find it difficult to stand in the way of the determined course of the US hegemon. However, the greater the international support, the greater the prospects of success.

A Quiescent Israel-Palestine

18. The Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank has dampened Palestinian violence for the time being but is unsustainable in the long-term and stoking more trouble for the future. The Bush speech was at best a half step forward. We are using the Palestinian reform agenda to make progress, including a resumption of political negotiations. The Americans are talking of a ministerial conference in November or later. Real progress towards a viable Palestinian state is the best way to undercut Palestinian extremists and reduce Arab antipathy to military action against Saddam Hussein. However, another upsurge of Palestinian/Israeli violence is highly likely. The co-incidence of such an upsurge with the preparations for military action against Iraq cannot be ruled out. Indeed Saddam would use continuing violence in the Occupied Territories to bolster popular Arab support for his regime.

Benefits/Risks

19. Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks. In particular, we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective as set out in paragraph 5 above. A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of Government might replace Saddam Hussein`s regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor. We must also consider in greater detail the impact of military action on other UK interests in the region.

Domestic Opinion

20. Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.

Timescales

21. Although the US military could act against Iraq as soon as November, we judge that a military campaign is unlikely to start until January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in Washington. That said, we judge that for climactic reasons, military action would need to start by January 2003, unless action were deferred until the following autumn.

22. As this paper makes clear, even this timescale would present problems. This means that:

(a) We need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August, through contacts betweens the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels;

Click here to find out more!


Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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URGENT CARE
Africa`s Suffering Is Bush`s Shame
Millions are dying because of American policy.
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op…[/

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a Columbia University economist and special advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

June 12, 2005

President Bush last week brazenly brushed aside British Prime Minister Tony Blair`s call for a doubling of aid to Africa. Blair and other European leaders have taken on the task of fighting extreme poverty — and Bush watches from the sidelines. To justify its dereliction, the Bush administration perpetuates a mythology that contributes to the premature deaths of millions of people each year.

The U.S. is a generous provider of aid to Africa, the mythology says, but Africa is corrupt and mismanaged and thus cannot absorb more aid. In addition, there is no room in the budget to do any more than what we are currently doing. This multipart fantasy is widely shared in the U.S. and recalls Napoleon`s dictum that "history is a fable often told."

The facts are otherwise. Total annual U.S. aid for all of Africa is about $3 billion, equivalent to about two days of Pentagon spending. About $1 billion pays for emergency food aid, of which half is for transport. About $1.5 billion is for "technical cooperation," essentially salaries of U.S. consultants. Only about $500 million a year — less than $1 per African — finances clinics, schools, food production, roads, power, Internet connectivity, safe drinking water, sanitation, family planning and lifesaving health interventions to fight malaria, AIDS and other diseases.

Measure of a Continent`s Misery Leading causes of death in Africa (in 2002) HIV/AIDS: 2.1 million Malaria: 1.1 million Cardiovascular disease: 1 million Diarrhea-related diseases: 707,000 Poor nutrition: 143,000 Syphilis 89,000 War: 85,000 * Number of people living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa 25.4 million (2004) * Number of United Nations peacekeepers in Africa 51,094 (2005) * Worst life expectancy in Africa 34 years, Sierra Leone (2002) * Worse rate of HIV infection in adults, ages 15 to 49 38.8%, Swaziland (2004) * Source: United Nations and World Health Organization

The myth that more aid would be squandered is pernicious. Once in a while, the industrialized countries try to accomplish something real in Africa. Notable examples are smallpox eradication begun in the 1960s, control of river blindness in the 1970s, increased child immunization in the 1980s, Jimmy Carter`s initiatives to fight Guinea worm, trachoma and leprosy in the 1990s and Rotary International`s bold efforts to eliminate polio this decade.

These interventions throughout Africa were remarkably successful. That they could be easily monitored was a key to their success. More victories could have been achieved — in food production, malaria control and AIDS treatment — if the efforts had been undertaken. Instead, U.S. aid was minuscule and misdirected into consultants` salaries and emergency food shipments.

If the administration were more than modestly interested in helping Africa, it could learn about the huge gains made possible by Blair`s plan to provide about $50 billion a year to Africa by 2010 — with the U.S. kicking in $15 billion to $20 billion. With that money, Africa could control killer diseases, triple food production and cut hunger, and improve transportation and communications.

These steps, incidentally, would accelerate the continent`s transition to lower fertility rates and slower population growth because they would contribute to a lower child mortality rate and economic gains, which would help persuade couples to have fewer children.

The new aid would not involve guesswork or be a blank check. Consider one example. Malaria will kill up to 3 million children this year, overwhelming Africa`s meager hospitals. Yet five measures could end this: long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets (cost: $7 per net); effective medications freely available to the poor; community health workers trained in malaria control; medical diagnostic capacity at the local level; and indoor insecticide spraying where appropriate. The cost: $3 billion a year for the industrialized countries, $1 billion for the U.S. — about 10 times what`s currently spent on malaria control.

The administration`s claim that budget restraints prevent more spending on Africa is the most cynical of its contentions. The president has cut taxes by more than $200 billion a year, with the wealthiest Americans the chief beneficiaries, and has raised military spending by $200 billion a year. But when $20 billion is needed to keep the poorest of the poor in Africa alive and put the continent`s economies on a path toward long-term growth, there`s no money available.

The millions of Africans who die young and the hundreds of millions going hungry are not victims of fate. They are the consequences of U.S. policy.

Americans want to do better.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Das ist eine Leistung für eine US-Zeitung. Am gleichen Tag wie die Meldung herauskam wird sie auf der Titelseite der WaPo veröffentlicht.

washingtonpost.com
Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan
Advisers to Blair Predicted Instability


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 12, 2005; A01

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" notes that U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

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The July 21 memo was produced by Blair`s staff in preparation for a meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial on both sides of the Atlantic since last month`s disclosure of official notes summarizing the session.

In those meeting minutes -- which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo -- British officials who had just returned from Washington said Bush and his aides believed war was inevitable and were determined to use intelligence about Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction and his relations with terrorists to justify invasion of Iraq.

The "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," said the memo -- an assertion attributed to the then-chief of British intelligence, and denied by U.S. officials and by Blair at a news conference with Bush last week in Washington. Democrats in Congress led by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), however, have scheduled an unofficial hearing on the matter for Thursday.

Now, disclosure of the memo written in advance of that meeting -- and other British documents recently made public -- show that Blair`s aides were not just concerned about Washington`s justifications for invasion but also believed the Bush team lacked understanding of what could happen in the aftermath.

In a section titled "Benefits/Risks," the July 21 memo states, "Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks."

Saying that "we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective," the memo`s authors point out, "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." The authors add, "As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

That memo and other internal British government documents were originally obtained by Michael Smith, who writes for the London Sunday Times. Excerpts were made available to The Washington Post, and the material was confirmed as authentic by British sources who sought anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter.

The Bush administration`s failure to plan adequately for the postwar period has been well documented. The Pentagon, for example, ignored extensive State Department studies of how to achieve stability after an invasion, administer a postwar government and rebuild the country. And administration officials have acknowledged the mistake of dismantling the Iraqi army and canceling pensions to its veteran officers -- which many say hindered security, enhanced anti-U.S. feeling and aided what would later become a violent insurgency.

Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost "slightly over $30 billion," adding, "I can`t imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years." As of May, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Congress has approved $208 billion for the war in Iraq since 2003.

The British, however, had begun focusing on doubts about a postwar Iraq in early 2002, according to internal memos.

A March 14 memo to Blair from David Manning, then the prime minister`s foreign policy adviser and now British ambassador in Washington, reported on talks with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Among the "big questions" coming out of his sessions, Manning reported, was that the president "has yet to find the answers . . . [and] what happens on the morning after."

About 10 days later, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote a memo to prepare Blair for a meeting in Crawford, Tex., on April 8. Straw said "the big question" about military action against Hussein was, "how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better," as "Iraq has no history of democracy."

Straw said the U.S. assessments "assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq`s WMD [weapons of mass destruction] threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured. . . ."

Later in the summer, the postwar doubts would be raised again, at the July 23 meeting memorialized in the Downing Street Memo. Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, the British intelligence service, reported on his meetings with senior Bush officials. At one point, Dearlove said, "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, appearing June 5 on "Meet the Press," disagreed with Dearlove`s remark. "I think that there was clearly planning that occurred."

The Blair government, unlike its U.S. counterparts, always doubted that coalition troops would be uniformly welcomed, and sought U.N. participation in the invasion in part to set the stage for an international occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, said British officials interviewed recently. London was aware that the State Department had studied how to deal with an invasion`s aftermath. But the British government was "shocked," in the words of one official, "when we discovered that in the postwar period the Defense Department would still be running the show."

The Downing Street Memo has been the subject of debate since the London Sunday Times first published it May 1. Opponents of the war say it proved the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision.

Neither Bush nor Blair has publicly challenged the authenticity of the July 23 memo, nor has Dearlove spoken publicly about it. One British diplomat said there are different interpretations.

Last week, it was the subject of questions posed to Blair and Bush during the former`s visit to Washington.

Asked about Dearlove being quoted as saying that in the United States, intelligence was being "fixed around the policy" of removing Hussein by military action, Blair said, "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all." He then went on to discuss the British plan, outlined in the memo, to go to the United Nations to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq.

Bush said he had read "characterizations of the memo," pointing out that it was released in the middle of Blair`s reelection campaign, and that the United States and Britain went to the United Nations to exhaust diplomatic options before the invasion.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Die Karikatur habe ich vermißt

Der Link zum vorigen Postings: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

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Sunday, June 12, 2005
War News for Sunday, June 12, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two marines killed in roadside bomb attack in Saqlawiyah.

Bring `em on: Forty killed in US air strikes on the western Iraqi city of Karabilah.

Bring `em on: Eleven Iraqi construction workers killed when their minibus was raked with gunfire in Diyara.

Bring `em on: Ten Iraqis killed in a bomb attack on the mainly Shia Shula district of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Casualties reported in bomb attack outside the Slovakian Embassy in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: The bodies of three murdered Iraqis have been found on the roadside in Dourah, a southern suburb of Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed in a bomb explosion in a cemetery in Najaf.

Bring `em on: Iraqi truck driver killed in convoy attack in Mosul.

Bring `em on: American soldier killed by IED in Bayaa, a southern suburb of Baghdad.

Bring em on: Two Iraqis working at an American base killed in bomb attack in Fallujah.

Make it Legal: Another damning piece of evidence:

Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.


As if US military forces weren`t bogged down enough as it is but Condolezza Rice has vowed to stop any attacks against Turkey from neighboring Iraq, Turkey`s foreign minister said, adding that Ankara expects greater US cooperation in fighting Kurdish rebels. "Mrs Rice has promised us that no terrorist action against Turkey from Iraqi territory will be allowed," Abdullah Gul told Turkey`s Anatolia news agency late Tuesday after meeting Rice in Washington.

Wolfie`s Brigade. Better known by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, he runs his own television show, Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, on which alleged insurgents make confessions.

"[The bomber] failed to reach him so he blew himself up in the courtyard," Jabor said. Two other former members of the unit were being hunted, he added.

Body parts littered the compound, close to the interior ministry and police academy, which houses the Wolf Brigade. One officer was injured.

French hostage and her Iraqi companion freed after five months captivity in Baghdad.

Opinion and Commentary

Reality:

President Bush`s continuing upbeat comments about the war in Iraq don`t reflect reality.

American soldiers continue to be killed and maimed, and Iraqi troops appear far from ready to assume the burden of their nation`s security. Insurgents` bombs and bullets take a steady toll on the Iraqi people and their leaders. Citizens in the capital city of Baghdad cope with unclean water and little electricity while fearing the random attacks on civilian targets.

Yet, Bush has said on more than one occasion, "I`m pleased with the progress."

He may be. The American public is not.

Only 41 percent of Americans support the president`s handling of the war, according to the results of an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Friday. That`s the lowest level of support recorded since the AP-Ipsos poll was launched in 2003.

Dwindling support is also reflected in the Army`s inability to recruit new soldiers. The Army, which initially had a goal of 8,050 for May and later lowered it to 6,700, reported that it was able to recruit only about 5,000 men and women last month.

President Bush owes the American people an honest, realistic status report on the war. He should go on television and, as Sen. Joe Biden said Thursday, explain why he believes that Americans must stay in Iraq to ensure the self-determination of its people.


Thanks to regular reader and fellow blogger asterism for catching this editorial in the Financial Times that slipped under my radar. It`s a subscription article but here is the editorial in full.

The past month in Iraq has witnessed such appalling carnage that most of those involved in the country`s fate have either been awed into silence or chosen to obfuscate. President George W. Bush, for example, purports to believe that 600 Iraqi civilians died this month because a defeated insurgency against the US occupation is in despair. One has to wonder what the situation would look like if the insurgents were winning.

Without re-rehearsing the dismal catalogue of delusion and bungling that has characterised US stewardship of Iraq, it is important to be clear about the salient facts of what is happening now. Iraq is on the brink of a sectarian war that could suck in its neighbours and make the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 look tame by comparison.

There is really very little going on in the world right now more important than stopping this from happening.

January`s election marked a historic turning point not only for Iraq but for the region. The raw courage of the millions of Iraqis who braved the threats of revanchist ba`athists and butchering jihadis to turn out to vote has indelibly stamped the future of the Arab world. Because of their valour, no Arab tyrant is safe on his throne, whether or not he is a US client.

But the tactics of the jihadis drawn into Iraq by the US invasion have switched since the election. They want civil war between Sunni and Shia - even more than they appear to care about fighting US "crusaders" and their allies, whom they in any case blame for bringing the Shia to power. Until now, the Shia majority has kept its eye on the prize of democratic empowerment and - restrained by a clerical establishment led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani - forsworn reprisals against Sunni provocation.

This now appears to be changing - marking arguably the most dangerous moment since the invasion of Iraq.

The good news is that a significant cross-section of Sunni notables and clerics - some with links to nationalist insurgents - has signalled its wish to join the political and constitutional process the Sunnis boycotted in January. The bad news is that the jihadi element of the insurgency is so spooked by this that it is trying to turn Iraqi streets almost literally into rivers of blood - and that the Shia are finally retaliating. Sunni leaders are beginning to turn up mangled and dead.

Exceptional measures such as the current "lockdown" of Baghdad by up to 40,000 Iraqi security forces are justified to combat this. Greater openness by the Shia victors of the elections towards the Sunni minority is also more than ever essential. But it is time too that Iraq`s neighbouring Sunni rulers - watching the downtrodden Shia rise to power with undisguised horror - start helping. The US loudly alleges Syrian connivance with the Iraq insurgency. It should also tell its friends in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to stop anti-Shia agitation that risks fanning the flames of sectarian war.


Remember what the Financial Times said on May 30, 2005. "There is really very little going on in the world right now more important than stopping this from happening."

War Games:
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If a foreign spy had sneaked in to this week`s inaugural round of the game in a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, the early scenes would have encouraged a suspicion that the superpower was on the slide.

"Astonishing,`` commented one of the game`s controllers. "They are reacting like the Senate: talk, talk, talk, and letting China walk all over them.``

As Japan and South Korea despaired of their old protector, the mood in America`s rivals was close to euphoric.

"We still don`t have to admit to having nuclear weapons,`` crowed Iran`s war game president. "Just issue a statement that we have redeployed our forces to be `asymmetric`… to deter any invader.``

China`s politburo was yet more upbeat. "Why must we accommodate the US?`` asked its war game president, responding to a Washington overture. "We are on the upswing. They are on the down.``

But ultimately China`s and Iran`s internal weaknesses put a brake on their ambitions. China was awarded first place in the "game", but only just, and America came a close second. "So was the US losing?" asked Mr Barnett, who believes in conciliating and not confronting China.

"From the point of view of the American people the presidents [in the game] would be pretty popular. Americans are not getting killed in a war and are not `meddling`.

"No major wars - this is the definition of a happy ending. America was losing to win."


Susan in the comments thread yesterday recommended "The Dreams of Sparrows". I do to.

Dahr Jamail writes:

One of my Iraqi friends here in Amman recently told me that Sunni who live in the south are being pressured by members of the Badr Organization to relocate elsewhere. It should also be noted that the Badr came back to Iraq on the heels of the invaders.

“You and your (Kurdish) brothers are the heroes of liberating Iraq,” added Talabani at the aforementioned conference.

So we have the US-backed Iraqi “government” overtly (they have been doing this covertly for quite some time) pitting Shia and Kurdish militias against the primarily Sunni resistance. State sponsored/propagated civil war-although most Iraqis continue to fear and loath the idea, and so many Iraqi political and religious organizations continue to work tirelessly to avert the worsening of this now low-grade civil war.

Meanwhile, violence continues across Iraq. Car bombs are a daily occurrence, yet now we have seen motorcycle bombs, push-cart bombs, donkey bombs, donkey-cart bombs, dog bombs, human bombs, bicycle bombs and recently two Iraqi policemen dying from eating poisoned watermelon.


Next stop Syria:

From Syria to Egypt, from Lebanon to Iraq, along the length and breadth of the Arab world the presumed drive toward greater democracy and openness is lurching along, often coming to sudden halts. Whether brazenly blocked by a ruling party and an elite determined to preserve their hold on power, as in Syria, or stealthily undermined by the same old political bosses, as in Lebanon, progress is patchy, to say the least. And the causes are remarkably similar across the region: a mixture of deep sectarian, regional and tribal divisions, a lack of neutral central institutions, and a clientele system that creates powerful mafias and capi di tutti capi that look after their own in a winner-take-all environment.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration, undeterred by the bloody chaos in Iraq, still seems intent on spreading its ill-fitting idea of democracy in the region, with Syria its possible next target. A well-informed analyst in Damascus told me that the United States is preparing an "Iraq scenario" for the country, including possibly imposing a no-fly zone in the Kurdish-dominated north. The United States` rumored plans are likely to backfire, slowing down reform or halting it altogether. Worse, they could plunge Syria and Lebanon into violent chaos.


Four Point Plan:

1. Pull our troops out of Muslim countries in order to make clear that we do not have a war against Islam. Until we do this, 90% or more of the Muslims in the world will continue to believe that America is making war on Islam at the behest of Israel and other interests that are detrimental to Islam and the world’s Muslims. One has only to see the number of Muslims being detained in the world and in American prisons and you can see how Muslims see America’s behavior in the world. Also, tear down the Israel wall for starters.

2. We must quit trying to follow the Bush doctrine of “continuous war” on the rest of the world. America will never be able to conquer the whole world, and it’s time it quit trying. Bush hasn’t yet realized this because he keeps listening to the senile Dick Cheney and the ambitious Zionist, Paul Wolfowitz and the ignorant Donald Rumsfeld. Remember, to show how ignorant Rumsfeld is, one has but to look at his recent comments about China to a joint committee of the Congress, when he said, “We hope China will join the civilized world and …” Donald, do you realize that China is one of the oldest civilizations in the world, one of the greatest and we are but a recent upstart. Cheny and Wolfowitz’ ignorance is shown because they both told the U.S. media that the Iraqis would greet the American troops “with flowers and cheers.” Obviously, they were, and are, living in La La Land.

3. America must get its house in order and quit farming jobs out to alleged American corporations like Halliburton and others who have their headquarters offshore, pay few taxes if any, and who couldn’t care less about America or its workers. Add to this, that America must treat its workers better; if not, then our whole economy will crash like a house of cards (that may happen anyway because of the Fed printing money, with the help of the U.S. Government, that is basically worthless paper.)

4. America must once again value truth, honesty and courage. Bill Clinton was a bigger liar and charlatan than Dick Nixon, yet he never was put out of office; GW Bush is even worse, and has committed more impeachable offenses than any president in American history, yet he remains in office. It is clear that the American media and the American people no longer value truth, honesty or courage—they prefer blowhards, liars and men who show bravado but not real courage—i.e., Clinton, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Ashcroft, Bremer and the rest of the ilk.


Militias:

Washington sought to disarm the militias during the months of formal occupation, but failed. It sought to prohibit them under the Iraqi interim constitution, and failed again. Now, despite Washington`s advice to the contrary, the elected government has embraced these militias and showered them with public praise. Many Sunnis, meanwhile, are convinced that the Badr Organization, an Iranian-trained group led by the powerful Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has begun waging warfare against Sunni communities and leaders.


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June 12, 2005
Web of cold-blooded lies
Eric Margolis is appalled by Anglo-U.S. scheme to scare citizens into backing Iraq war
By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN
http://www.torontosun.ca/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2005/…

PARIS -- In July 2002, the head of MI-6, Britain`s secret intelligence service, briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet on U.S. plans to attack Iraq.

Sir Richard Dearlove ("M" to James Bond fans) reported that U.S. President George Bush had decided to invade oil-rich Iraq in March 2003, in a war "to be justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Translation: The U.S. and British governments would concoct charges against Iraq to justify war.

After Britain`s attorney general warned that unprovoked invasion of Iraq would violate international law, Dearlove opined with oily cynicism, "If the political context were right, people would support regime change." Translation: Use propaganda and scare tactics to whip up war fever.

British and U.S. intelligence agencies were ordered to produce "evidence" to justify a war. In the U.S., faked "evidence" and grotesque lies were fed to the frightened public by pro-war neo-conservatives and frenzied national media. The U.S. Congress clapped for war like trained seals.

In October 2002, Bush actually claimed in a national speech that Iraqi "drone" aircraft were poised to shower germs and poison gas on America. Vice-President Dick Cheney insisted this absurd allegation was the "smoking gun" that justified invading Iraq. Blair ordered his cabinet to support the invasion.

Bush, in his subsequent State of the Union speech, warned that Iraq was importing uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons aimed at the U.S. This ludicrous claim was based on a forged document. The forgery was back-channelled to the Pentagon through neo-fascists in Italian military intelligence.

And so it went. Lie after lie. Scare upon scare. Fakery after fakery, trumpeted by the tame media that came to resemble the lickspittle press of the old Soviet Union. Ironically, in the end, horrid Saddam Hussein turned out to be telling the truth all along, while Bush and Blair were not.

MI-6`s smoking-gun memo, revealed for the first time last month in London by the Sunday Times, would have forced any of Europe`s democratic governments to resign in disgrace. But not Bush and Blair. Far from it. Though hounded over his Iraq lies by Britain`s media, Blair squeaked through a tight election thanks only to the pathetically inept opposition Conservatives, who also backed the Iraq war.

By contrast, U.S. mass media amply confirmed charges of bias and politicization levelled against them by first ignoring the MI-6 memo story, then grudgingly devoting a few low-key stories to the dramatic revelation. Front pages, meanwhile, featured outing of the Nixon era`s "Deep Throat," who, it turned out, was part of a cabal of Nixon-haters rather than a selfless patriot.

In retrospect, former president Richard Nixon`s misdeeds appear trivial compared to Bush`s illegal, unnecessary and catastrophic war against Iraq, which has so far killed some 100,000 Iraqis and Americans, cost $275 billion US, and made America`s name mud around the globe.

But as Nazi bigwig Herman Goering observed correctly, a government can get away with anything provided it scares its citizens enough.

France and Germany both knew from their own intelligence services that the Anglo-U.S. accusations against Iraq were nonsense and Saddam was no threat to anyone save his own miserable people.

That is why they refused to join the war in spite of U.S. threats and tempting offers of oil concessions in postwar Iraq. Britain readily accepted.

The U.S. ordered its intelligence services to shut their eyes, toe the White House party line and accept as genuine patently false reports about the Mideast from known disinformers and self-serving sources that wanted to see Iraq destroyed.

But don`t just blame Bush and Blair. VP Cheney, CIA boss George Tenet (aka "Dr. Yes"), Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other senior administration officials who promoted falsehoods over Iraq and war fever were just as guilty of deceiving and misleading the American people and Congress.

Kudos go to Blair`s former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who refused to be party to the lies and resigned. No senior U.S. official had the guts or ethics to follow Cook`s admirable example.

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Joerver: Denen geht der Arsch auf Grundeis...


Mach weiter so!

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BUSH CONSIDERS CLOSING GUANTANAMO ON WEDNESDAYS
President’s Proposal Falls Short of Gitmo Opponents’ Demands
http://www.borowitzreport.com/default.asp

Hoping to appease those who have called in recent days for the U.S. to close the detention center at Guantanamo, Cuba, President Bush announced today that he was considering closing the facility on Wednesdays.

Mr. Bush made the proposal in remarks in the White House Rose Garden today, telling reporters, “Under my plan, there would zero tolerance for abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo, on Wednesdays at least.”

Moments after the president made his announcement, opponents of the Guantanamo facility blasted the plan, arguing that closing the detention center one day a week but leaving it open the other six fell far short of the drastic action that was needed.

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del), told reporters, “Guantanamo is a public relations nightmare, and closing it on hump day won’t get it done.”

Perhaps bowing to such pressure, the president revised his earlier statement, telling reporters that, in addition to Wednesdays, he would be willing to close the facility early on Fridays so that guards could “get a head start on the weekend.”

President Jimmy Carter, one of many current and former world leaders who support closing the Guanatamo facility entirely, said that merely closing the detention center on Wednesdays and at noon on Fridays would send the “wrong message” to the Muslim world.

Moments after Mr. Carter made his statement, Mr. Bush offered his official response: “Okay, we’ll close it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays but that’s my final offer.”

Elsewhere, the White House defended its decision to edit a report on global climate conditions after it was revealed that it had changed the word “catastrophic” to “nice.”

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June 13, 2005
As Iraqi Army Trains, Word in the Field Is It May Take Years
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/international/middleeast/1…

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq - A small but telling test of Iraq`s fledgling army came recently in this troubled farm town south of Baghdad, when a group of Iraqi soldiers, ending a house raid and rushing to board pickups they use as troop carriers, abandoned the blindfolded, handcuffed man they had come to arrest.

"They left the detainee," an astonished American soldier said, spotting the man squatting in the dust along a residential street. "They just left him there. Sweet."
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The Iraqi troops were on their seventh house raid of the morning, part of a cordon-and-search operation in an area of towns and farmland so dangerous that American soldiers call it the Triangle of Death. Prompted by the soldier, the Iraqis ran back for the detainee, and managed much of the rest of their mission effectively, rounding up 13 insurgent suspects in three hours without having to call for direct involvement of the watching American troops.

Such limited successes stand against a backdrop of American disappointment with many of the Iraqi units, whose effectiveness is crucial to a future American troop withdrawal.

Despite the Bush administration`s insistent optimism, Americans working with the Iraqis in the field believe that it could be several years, at least, before the new Iraqi forces will be ready to stand alone against the insurgents.

A few days before the Mahmudiya raids, Iraqi soldiers at a local checkpoint apparently fell asleep in the hours before dawn, and the checkpoint was ambushed by insurgents. They tossed a grenade into the building, then stormed in and executed those left alive, killing at least eight Iraqis, American soldiers said. Since the attack, American troops have been conducting nighttime patrols to make sure the Iraqis stay awake.

The American command has already created military transition teams of soldiers to work with Iraqi troops, and there are plans for up to 10,000 Americans to be attached to Iraqi units at every level from divisions down to battalions and companies, with up to 10 men at the battalion level, and 2 with each company.

"I just wish they`d start to pull their own weight without us having to come out and baby-sit them all the time," said Sgt. Joshua Lower, a scout in the Third Brigade of the First Armored Division who has worked with the Iraqis. "Some Iraqi special forces really know what they are doing, but there are some units that scatter like cockroaches with the lights on when there`s an attack."

The Iraqi troops` story is one of light and dark, American officers say. Especially in regions sympathetic to the insurgents, they have performed woefully, with Sunni Arab soldiers making little secret of their support for Saddam Hussein and their contempt for the Americans.

Among Shiite and Kurdish soldiers, the overwhelming majority in the new army, the Americans say, there are problems beyond loyalty - those inherent in building a new army, at breakneck speed, in the midst of a brutal war.

"We are realists," said Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot and West Point graduate who is a spokesman for Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American who heads the coalition training command in Baghdad. "Are the Iraqis doing everything perfectly? No, they are not. But they`re in the fight, and they`re taking more casualties than we are.

"Increasingly, it is the Iraqis who are bearing the burden of this war, even more than Americans."

The Mahmudiya raids were one measure of where things stand.

After taking office on May 3, Iraq`s Shiite majority government, finding its way after centuries of Sunni Arab rule in Baghdad, was confronted by a new insurgent offensive.

It ordered a crackdown across the Baghdad region, deploying thousands of Iraqi troops. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari called it the largest Iraqi-led military operation yet, making it a highly visible test of the American exit strategy.

But the Baghdad sweeps have underscored the raft of problems the American command has identified in the Iraqi force buildup, including hasty recruiting, insufficient training and a weak command structure, leading to breakdowns in discipline, especially in combat.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon suggested that an initial drawdown of the 140,000 American troops in Iraq might begin by the end of this year. Now, American generals are saying it could be two years, perhaps longer.
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Iraqi special forces soldiers in training outside Baghdad demonstrate an assault on a building, using live ammunition in a so-called shoot house.
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Few Battalions Are Operational

At three main training centers established at former Hussein-era bases - Taji, north of Baghdad; Kirkush, near the Iranian border; and Numaniya, southeast of Baghdad - a $5.7 billion American-financed program to train and equip the new forces is in high gear, graduating soldiers in battalion-size classes of 1,500 troops.

From a single American-trained Iraqi battalion a year ago, the American command says there are now 107 battalions of Iraqi troops and paramilitary police units, totaling 169,000 men. The total is set to rise to 270,000 by next summer, when 10 fully equipped 14,000-man Iraqi Army divisions are scheduled to be operational.

But figures alone tell only part of the story, since only three battalions are rated fully operational by the Americans, and many others are far behind in terms of manpower, training and equipment.

General Petraeus, 52, commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion, then was tapped to lead the rebuilding of the Iraqi forces last spring. By then, it was clear that disbanding the old army - a decision made early in the American occupation, when the emphasis was on rebuilding Iraqi institutions from scratch - had been a blunder, and that the few Iraqi units assembled and trained in the first year of the American presence here were crumbling under widespread desertion, and, in one case, at Taji last April, of mutiny when ordered into battle at Falluja.

General Petraeus`s international training team is 1,100-strong, and new recruits graduate quickly: three weeks` training for veterans of the old army, eight weeks for newcomers. But the training is rigorous, similar to an American boot camp, and better, Iraqi officers say, than anything under Mr. Hussein, when a trainee infantryman was allowed a maximum of three bullets a month on the firing range.

Morale at the camps seems high. At the end of one recent eight-week course at Kirkush, graduates marched close-ordered in the 110-degree noontime heat, shouting "Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!" and "Army! Army! Army!" In the old days Iraqi soldiers, in the same cadence, shouted "Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!" and "Baath! Baath! Baath!"

Many new soldiers, and most officers, are veterans of the Hussein-era army, and American officers believe they could become a formidable force. As an example, the Americans cite the 1,000 men serving in Iraqi special forces units - some of them veterans of elite commando units under Mr. Hussein - who have trained at a heavily guarded base outside Baghdad that reporters visit only on condition they not disclose its location. The Iraqis are equipped much like the American Army`s elite Delta Force - with lightweight rip-proof camouflage uniforms, black balaclavas, Humvees and American weapons like M-4 rifles.

The Iraqis have been deployed, in units stiffened by Americans, in some of the war`s toughest operations, like the offensive that recaptured Falluja in November and assaults in other cities, like Mosul and Najaf, where insurgents have threatened to take control. Last month, General Petraeus, flanked by visiting generals from the American Special Forces, glowed as he watched in a hangar at the special forces` base as the Iraqis stormed a mock enemy-held house and simulated a room-by-room raid with live ammunition and stun grenades.

"You have been to virtually every part of Iraq where there are insurgents, and you have done great service to your country," he told rows of tough-looking men lined up for a medals ceremony. As the men stepped forward, American officers ticked off their achievements: more than 700 combat missions, 500 insurgents killed, 1,400 captured. "You are the best of the best," the general said. He concluded in Arabic: "Shukran jazilan" - "Many thanks."

At Camp Phoenix, General Petraeus`s headquarters inside the Green Zone, the American nerve-center in Baghdad, American officers answer doubts about the buildup by pointing to a steady flow of new recruits, despite relentless insurgent targeting of recruiting centers and convoys moving to and from training centers. By unofficial count, more than 1,000 recruits or trainees have been killed in suicide bombings and ambushes since the revised training program began last year. But American officers, with statistics for virtually every other aspect of the program, say they have none on the numbers of Iraqis killed in such attacks.

In any case, the Americans say the response to calls for new recruits has exceeded requirements: 7,000 men, they say, turned up outside the Numaniya base one winter morning in response to false rumors of a fresh call. But with Iraq`s unemployment rate at 30 percent or more, and as much as 60 percent among the poorest classes, a regular pay packet is a powerful incentive, army trainees and others say. A common soldier`s base pay can be up to $340 a month, rising to $950 for generals.

Many doctors at Baghdad`s best hospitals earn $500 a month or less, and many other Iraqis survive on $200 or less a month.

Briefings at Camp Phoenix focus on the numbers. In a briefing at the end of April, American officers ticked off the catalog of equipment delivered to the Iraqis under General Petraeus`s command: 9,000 vehicles, 140,000 flak jackets, 480,000 uniforms and 270 million rounds of ammunition. They also said 24,000 Iraqis were employed on $1.9 billion worth of American-financed construction projects, from building bases, barracks and command centers to constructing 240 border forts as part of the effort to stem insurgent infiltration, especially from Syria.

But at the highest levels of the American command, and at the Pentagon, there has been growing unease about the reliance on meeting statistical targets without, many officers say, a corresponding emphasis on the quality of the troops moving into the field, on the command abilities of their officers and on the communications networks that will let Iraqi units coordinate their operations and communicate with other units.

One of the Americans who has made his frustrations known is Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, who has pushed for greater efforts to build up the command abilities of the new forces, at every level from company commanders to generals.

On some occasions, American officers say, General Casey, normally affable, has barked his exasperation over the issue, saying that having new divisions of Iraqi troops means little unless the troops "are connected to something," meaning an effective command-and-control network.

With many senior officers from Mr. Hussein`s era excluded because of links to past atrocities, relatively few of the new commanders have experience of high command. Men who were majors under Mr. Hussein have been promoted to generals, and some former generals who have been brought back were once assigned to war colleges or logistics tasks.

"If they could, Iraqi generals would spend their time deciding on the location of every checkpoint in every city and town in the country," one American officer said.

Iraqis as First Line of Defense

One of the toughest tests yet for Iraqi forces came on May 29, the first full day of the new government`s crackdown across the Baghdad region.

Striking first, insurgents attacked with a sequence of ambushes and suicide bombings across their strongholds in western Baghdad. At 3:45 p.m., they attacked one of the most heavily secured sites in the city, the Interior Ministry`s Major Crimes Unit, often used to hold captured rebels.

Three car bombs struck on roads near the detention center, followed by an attack by about 50 rebels using grenades, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, according to an Iraqi police officer who said he had helped fight off the attack. He said the aim appeared to be to free a large group of detainees, including about 50 women, a former police commander in the northern city of Mosul seized as an insurgent spy, and a doctor from a Baghdad hospital who had been caught videotaping the detention center a few days before the attack.

But the attempt failed, and Iraqi and American commanders credited their strategy - the Iraqis as the first line of defense, backed up by American reinforcements.

"They had this urgent situation, they started making calls, we responded in support, and the insurgents didn`t achieve any military objectives," Brig. Gen. C. Donald Alston, chief spokesman for the American command, told reporters. "The Iraqi forces did what we have been working on all along, and that is bringing together and integrating in a competent military way Iraqi and American forces to achieve the military effect we need."

A less optimistic view taken by other American officers was that even a police detention center protected by 20-foot concrete blast walls and watchtowers with mounted machine guns needed American firepower to defend it.

American officers said a unit of American Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles was sent urgently to the center`s defense, supported by Apache attack helicopters. Some accounts from Iraqis living near the detention center said some Iraqi defenders abandoned their posts before American reinforcements arrived.

In Mahmudiya, American officers traced many of the problems with Iraqi units to a lack of competent junior officers, coupled with enlisted men with minimal training, motivation centered on the monthly pay, and equipment that included cheap fiberglass helmets and poor-quality flak jackets.

First Lt. Carlos Montalvan, an American officer attached to the unit that conducted the house raids, described it as "pre-MOC," not even minimal operational capability. The unit "should have been locked down for several months to train and to do static operations," he said.

A lack of basic infantry tactics surfaced during the raids, when Iraqi troops assigned to watch the houses while raiding parties entered to make arrests gathered closely together outside, rarely taking up defensive positions. On several occasions, Sgt. First Class Michael Hanaway admonished the Iraqi soldiers to watch the perimeter instead of staring at the house being raided.

"You`ve got to look that way," he shouted, motioning. "Not at me. That way." The sergeant sighed. "They probably shouldn`t have been out here," he said.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Mahmudiya for this article, and John F. Burns from Baghdad. Layla Isitfan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Die Folge des Mangels an Freiwilligen ist, dass die Qualität des Personals leidet. Man nimmt halt alles und das hat dann Folgen bei militärischen und nicht militärischen Handeln der Army.

June 13, 2005
They Won`t Go
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13herbert.html

George W. Bush is in no danger of being ranked among the nation`s pre-eminent commanders in chief. Not only has he been unable thus far to win the war in Iraq, but on his watch significant sectors of the proud U.S. military have been rapidly deteriorating.

The Army reported on Friday that it had fallen short of its recruitment goals for a fourth consecutive month. The Marines managed to meet their recruitment target for May, but that was their first successful month this year.

Scrambling to fill its ranks, the Army is signing up more high school dropouts and lower-scoring applicants.

With the war in Iraq going badly and allegations of abuse by military personnel widespread, young men and women are increasingly deciding that there`s no upside to a career choice in which the most important skills might be ducking bullets and dodging roadside bombs.

The primary reason the U.S. went to an all-volunteer military in 1973 was to ensure that those who did not want to fight wouldn`t have to. That option is now being overwhelmingly exercised, discretion being the clear choice over valor. Young people and their parents alike are turning their backs on the military in droves.

The Army is so desperate for even lukewarm bodies that it is reluctant to release even problem soldiers, troops who are seriously out of shape, or pregnant, or abusing alcohol or drugs. And it is lowering standards for admission to the junior officer ranks. For example, minor criminal offenses that previously would have been prohibitive can now be overlooked.

At the same time Army recruiters have been chasing high school kids with such reckless abandon that a backlash is developing among parents who, in many cases, want the recruiters kept out of their children`s schools.

"To the extent that we think students are threatened by recruiters, it`s our job to intervene," said Amy Hagopian, a co-chair of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle. Ms. Hagopian, who has an 18-year-old son, complained that recruiters too often put the hard sell on impressionable high school youngsters without informing them of the potential dangers of a life in the military.

Recruiters with the gift of gab go into the schools with a glamorous pitch, bags full of goodies for the kids (T-shirts, donuts, key chains) and a litany of promises they often can`t keep. The kids don`t hear much about their chances of being maimed or killed, or the trauma that often results from killing someone else.

(A soldier`s job is to kill. I can still hear the drill sergeants in basic training screaming at us decades ago: "What are you? What are you?" And we`d scream back: "Killers! Killers!" And the sergeants would say, "What is your purpose?" And we would shout: "To kill! To kill!")

The Army, frantically searching for solutions, is offering enlistments as short as 15 months and considering bonuses worth up to $40,000. But it may be facing a problem too difficult for any amount of money to overcome. Americans are catching on to the hideousness and apparent futility of the war in Iraq. Five marines were killed in a single bomb attack in western Iraq on Thursday. On Friday, a front-page Washington Post headline described the effort to rebuild the Iraqi military as "Mission Improbable."

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, and 60 percent believe the war was not worth fighting.

There`s something frankly embarrassing about a government offering trinkets to children to persuade them to go off and fight - and perhaps die - in a war that their nation should never have started in the first place. It`s highly questionable whether most high school kids are equipped to make an informed decision about joining the military, which is exactly why they`re targeted. The additional knowledge and maturity gained in the first few years after high school make it easier for a young man or woman to make a wiser, more meaningful choice, pro or con.

The parents of the kids being sought by recruiters to fight this unpopular war are creating a highly vocal and potentially very effective antiwar movement. In effect, they`re saying to their own children: hell no, you won`t go.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Cheney: U.S. Not Aiming To Close Guantanamo
Other Republicans Say Prison Is a Liability
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 13, 2005; A02

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the administration has no plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as some prominent Democrats have recommended, but other Republicans said that reports of mistreatment of prisoners there have made the prison a growing global liability.

Additional information about aggressive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo surfaced yesterday that could heighten the debate further.

In remarks to be broadcast today on Fox News, Cheney said the administration was reviewing its options at the prison "on a continuous basis." But he defended its track record, saying, "The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people."

But Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that the situation in Guantanamo is one reason the United States is "losing the image war around the world," and that closing the prison could help in that contest.

"It`s identifiable with, for right or wrong, a part of America that people in the world believe is a power, an empire that pushes people around, we do it our way, we don`t live up to our commitments to multilateral institutions," Hagel told CNN`s "Late Edition." He said Defense Department leaders have not taken responsibility for the excesses at the prison, which have included controversial harsh treatment of prisoners and desecrations of the Koran.

On Friday, Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) called the prison "an icon for bad stories."

There are about 540 inmates at Guantanamo -- most captured in Afghanistan or otherwise associated with al Qaeda. None of the inmates has been charged, and some were returned to their homes after it was determined -- sometimes years after they were captured -- that they did not pose any danger.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a hearing Wednesday on the detainee issue.

"We`ve actually created a legal black hole there," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the committee`s ranking Democrat, said on CBS`s "Face the Nation." "We`re the country that tells people that we adhere to the rule of law. We want other countries to adhere to the rule of law. And in Guantanamo, we are not."

Speaking on the same show, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) defended the prison as necessary. "When you catch somebody in Afghanistan or other parts of the world that`s engaged in the war of terror, you need to take them off the battlefield," he said. "Prisoners of war are released when the war is over. Well, there`s nobody to sign a surrender treaty with here. So you`ve got a hybrid system."

An article published yesterday by Time magazine documenting the interrogation of one prisoner added to the controversy. The magazine quoted from a log made during the winter of 2002-03 of the treatment of Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi man suspected of having close ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The magazine said he was questioned in a room filled with pictures of Sept. 11 victims, was made to urinate in his pants and was told to wear photos of near-naked women around his neck. He was also forced to bark like a dog and was turned down at times when he asked to pray, the magazine said.

The Defense Department said in response that Qahtani`s questioning was handled in a professional manner and that he gave important information about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda infiltration routes.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Monday, June 13, 2005

Things You Wouldn`t expect to Happen if You Listened to Bush and Cheney


You wouldn`t expect Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Prison to have been put in "stress positions," or physically poked and shoved, or subjected to "The Invasion of Space by the Female," or to have had their heartbeat driven down to 35 beats a minute by the constant harassment, or to have them ask for crayons to write a will because they had decided to commit suicide. Some of the log of an interrogator has been published by Time magazine.

You would not expect that Iraq,
instead of being a beacon of democracy to neighbors like Iran, seems instead to have been a beacon of car bombings. Nine persons were killed in bombings around Iran on Sunday. Some of the bombings occurred in the oil-rich Khuzistan region, which is half Arab. The crazed Ledeenites and others who desperately want war against Iran or turbulence inside Iran are not actually going to like it if Ahvaz becomes so unstable that petroleum can`t be pumped (as has already happened in Iraq.) Take more petroleum off the world market, and the price will jump from an already high $52 a barrel.

You wouldn`t expect the pro-Syrian Hizbullah (Hezbollah) and its allies in Lebanon to get 10 seats in the Bikaa Valley, bringing the total number of seats held by Hizbullah and its allies to 33 out of 128.

You wouldn`t expect the anti-Syrian "Lebanese Forces" faction of Christians to be crushed by returned Gen. Michel Aoun, whose list won 15 of 16 seats in the largely Christian district northeast of Beirut.

You wouldn`t expect the resurgent Taliban to have used a roadside bomb to wound 4 US troops in Qandahar, Afghanistan. After all, resources were pulled out of Afhganistan beginnning in late winter of 2002, on the grounds that it was all taken care of.

You wouldn`t expect 7 Marines to have been killed in Iraq since Friday. More than 1700 US military personnel have died in Iraq since the war began.

You wouldn`t expect 28 bodies of Sunni Arabs to be found in Baghdad, their bodies riddled with bullets.

You wouldn`t expect Republican members of Congress to demand a timetable for the withrdrawal of US troops from Iraq!

You wouldn`t expect nearly 6 in ten of Americans to say they want at least some troops withdrawn from Iraq.

You wouldn`t expect Sunni Arabs of Iraq to say that now is the worst they have ever had it.

-----

Will blog more Monday afternoon.

posted by Juan @ [url6/13/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/things-you-wouldnt-expect-to-happen-if.html[/url]

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Yes, it`s all Dean`s fault. If only he would defend Bush like the rest of the Democrats...

I really, really with Dean would resign in disgust.
Why should he stay around when his yellow-ass
party would rather back Bush than him?

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Sunday, June 12, 2005
You go to War with the Politicians you have

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

I was doing some research for tomorrow`s news post and I came across this, and I feel it`s worth a separate thread in itself:

This man is a Republican Representative. He is Vice Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Vice Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and he is the author of "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America...and How the CIA has Ignored It"

Today on [urlMeet the Press]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8130648/[/url] this "expert" politician had this to say:

REP. WELDON: I`ve been raising this issue for the past two years. Iran is a major player. Ayatollah Khomeini, not the Iranian people, because they`re not the problem. Ayatollah Khomeini`s the problem. And he has a separate council of nine that`s been fomenting unrest in Iraq during this entire time, and that`s what`s increasing. That`s what`s increasing dramatically as we attempt to stabilize the country.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think we`re in the last throes of the insurgency?

REP. WELDON: No, I don`t. I think Iran is going to continue to escalate their building support so eventually, whatever government there takes hold is going to have to deal with Iran and eventually become a partner of Iran.



Mr Weldon, expert that you are, [urlAyatollah Khomeini died in June 1989.]http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/1/newsid_2521000/2521003.stm[/url]

Mr Weldon, expert that you are, please advise us of the Iranian assisted insurgency?
# posted by Friendly Fire : 2:30 PM
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Latest Fatality: Jun 11, 2005

June05: 35



Iraker: Civilian: 185 Police/Mil: 97 Total: 282

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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The Best of Tomdispatch: Mike Davis
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3241

It didn`t take long for the war crimes to begin -- in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo, in Iraq. By November 2003, Mike Davis was writing about them for Tomdispatch. And in introducing his piece, "The Scalping Party," I suggested that the seeds of our future were well-planted and already beginning to sprout their monstrous crop. I wrote on that November 14th, over a year and a half ago:



    "Operation Iron Hammer" just went into its second night in Baghdad with the limited use of helicopters and an AC-130 gunship over the capital and the destruction of at least one building. Part of a new "get tough" policy announced by Centcom head Gen. John Abizaid, it represents an escalation in the "urban warfare" that everyone, by late last April, assumed would never happen. Meanwhile, in the Sunni triangle our military has started dropping 500-pound bombs around the flashpoints of Falluja and Tikrit. In a guerrilla war, this is the equivalent of conceding defeat in the struggle for popular support in an area. A 500-pound bomb is a completely indiscriminate weapon.



    So helicopters and gunships firing over urban areas, 500-pound bombs as a response to pinprick guerrilla attacks, lurching tactics and "mid-course" corrections, escalating daily attacks on American and allied forces, escalating casualties (already at something like 2-4 American dead a day and cumulatively higher than our casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam war), escalating frustration at being unable to sort the enemy from the civilian population, lowering morale among administration and occupation officials and at the level of the troops. Believe me, we`ve been down this path before and it leads nowhere good.



    Here are typical comments made this week by American commanders:



    "`Although the coalition can be benevolent, this is still the same lethal formation that removed the former oppressive regime (of Saddam Hussein),` Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez told a regular news briefing... `We will not hesitate to employ the appropriate levels of combat power,` he said as a slide of a fighter jet dropping bombs was displayed behind him... `Not a single tool that we have available would be spared if necessary to defeat that enemy,` Sanchez said." (Andrew Grey, "U.S. military chief vows to `get tough` in Iraq," Reuters)



    And that`s the polite version. Move a little farther down the line of command and here`s what you get: "`This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them,` said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment" -- a statement made after U.S. units moved through Tikrit "firing at houses suspected to be harboring hostile forces in the wake of an apparent attack on a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six U.S. soldiers." (U.S. Retaliates After Black Hawk Crash)



That, of course, was just the beginning. Within the year, we would loose our Air Force in a major way on heavily populated, urban Iraq -- certainly a war crime. But here`s the point: it was all so foreseeable, along with some version or other of Abu Ghraib, the lit cigarettes in ears and endless stress positions, the ongoing checkpoint killings, the sweeping arrests of vaguely military-age Iraqi men (not to speak of women and children), and so on. I wrote back in 2003, "Now, along comes Mike Davis, who sends a flare into the dark night sky and illuminates a landscape many would rather leave unlit." To this day, it seems, most Americans would prefer to leave that landscape -- ever darker, ever grimmer -- in the shadows and go about their business.



Davis, looking back from the vantage point of today offers the following mini-commentary by way of introduction to his 2003 piece:



    Let`s face it, a tolerance for atrocity is now enshrined at every level of American culture. The Toledo Blade`s brave unearthing of the story of the Tiger Force`s murderous sojourn in the Song Ve Valley in Vietnam back in 1967 has been smothered in silence and indifference just as was the Associated Press revelation in 1999 that a American massacre of hundreds of Korean civilians had taken place at No Gun Ri in 1950. And because we are unmoved by the war crimes of the past, we are passive in the face of the monstrous acts being committed in our names today. Where are the congressional investigations, the public outcries, and the campus protests in the wake of the revelations about the torture regimes at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and Guantánamo?



    Part of the answer, I think, has to do with the failure of progressives -- especially anti-war activists of my generation -- to sustain a public fight over the moral legacy of U.S. genocide in Southeast Asia. After Nixon brought the boys back home, the antiwar movement disarmed unilaterally. In contrast, pro-war forces, organized through powerful veterans` organizations and a caucus of warrior politicians, have never ceased to refight the war on the terrain of memory and public history. The open sore of Vietnam, never lanced, has become the Republicans` most prized symbolic property.



    When the Democrats eventually realized that Vietnam -- their war, after all -- would not go away, they became patriotic revisionists as well. Indeed, a major goal of the Democratic Leadership Council -- the principal group driving the party rightward through the 1980s and 1990s -- has been to put the shields and spears back in the hands of its candidates. Vietnam -- according to John Kerry and even Bill Clinton -- was an American tragedy and it was finally time to honor our heroes.



    This kind of solipsistic thinking has erased the Vietnamese people from history. Not even the Japanese ruling party has gone as far as the American Democrats in the rehabilitation of war crimes and war criminals. (New School President Bob Kerrey -- whose reputation seems to have suffered little damage from testimony that he massacred unarmed villagers in Vietnam -- is a case in point.)



    On the other hand, this may be nothing new. Our ancestors made heroes out of Indian killers and built statues to scalping parties. Why should we be any different?



Now, consider Davis`s piece first posted on November 14, 2003 and try to imagine where all this is likely to end.

Tom

The Scalping Party
By Mike Davis

In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s.

Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly became intoxicated with gore. They began to exterminate local farmers as well as Indians, and when there were no innocents left to rape and slaughter, they turned upon themselves with shark-like fury.

Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy`s imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book`s obvious allusion to "search and destroy" missions à la Vietnam.

But Blood Meridian, like all of McCarthy`s novels, is based on meticulous research. Glanton - - the white savage, the satanic face of Manifest Destiny -- really existed. He`s simply the ancestor most Americans would prefer to forget. He`s also the ghost we can`t avoid.

Six weeks ago, a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio -- the Toledo Blade - tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates Blood Meridian in the most ghastly and unbearable detail. The reincarnation of Glanton`s scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101 Airborne Division known as "Tiger Force." The Blade`s intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the Central Highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.

Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then escalated to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, "It didn`t matter if they were civilians. If they weren`t supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn`t understand fear, I taught it to them."

Early on, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off their ears as souvenirs. One member -- who would later behead an infant -- wore the ears as a ghoulish necklace (just like the character Toadvine in Blood Meridian, while another mailed them home to his wife. Others kicked out the teeth of dead villagers for their gold fillings.

A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that "he killed so many civilians he lost count." The Blade estimates that innocent casualties were in "the hundreds." Another veteran, a medic with the unit, recalled 150 unarmed civilians murdered in a single month.

Superior officers, especially the Glanton-like battalion commander Gerald Morse (or "Ghost Rider" as he fancied himself), sponsored the carnage. Orders were given to "shoot everything that moves" and Morse established a body-count quota of 327 (the numerical designation of the battalion) that Tiger Force enthusiastically filled with dead peasants and teenage girls.

Soldiers in other units who complained about these exterminations were ignored or warned to keep silent, while Tiger Force slackers were quickly transferred out. As with Glanton`s gang, or, for that matter, Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile extermination squads, in the western Ukraine in 1941, atrocity created its own insatiable momentum. Eventually, nothing was unthinkable in the Song Ve Valley.

"A 13-year-old girl`s throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted, and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut. An unarmed teenager was shot in the back after a platoon sergeant ordered the youth to leave a village, and a baby was decapitated so that a soldier could remove a necklace."

Stories about the beheading of the baby spread so widely that the Army was finally forced to launch a secret inquiry in 1971. The investigation lasted for almost five years and probed 30 alleged Tiger Force war crimes. Evidence was found to support the prosecution of at least 18 members of the platoon. In the end, however, a half dozen of the most compromised veterans were allowed to resign from the Army, avoiding military indictment, and in 1975 the Pentagon quietly buried the entire investigation.

According to the Blade, "It is not known how far up in the Ford administration the decision [to bury the cases] went," but it is worth recalling whom the leading actors were at the time: the Secretary of Defense, then as now, was Donald Rumsfeld, and the White House chief of staff was Dick Cheney.

Recently in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, who was instrumental in exposing the My Lai massacre, decried the failure of the corporate media, especially the four major television networks, to report the Blade`s findings or launch their own investigations into the official cover-up. (Since then, ABC news and Ted Koppel`s Nightline have both covered the subject.) He also reminds us that the Army concealed the details of another large massacre of civilians at the village of My Khe 4, near My Lai on the very day in 1968 when the more infamous massacre took place.

Moreover, the Tiger Force story is the third major war crimes` revelation in the last few years to encounter apathy in the media and/or indifference and contempt in Washington.

In 1999, a team of investigative reporters from the Associated Press broke the story of a horrific massacre of hundreds of unarmed Korean civilians by U.S. troops in July 1950. It occurred at a stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri and the unit involved was Custer`s old outfit, the 7th Calvary regiment.

As one veteran told the AP, "There was lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ‘em all. .... Kids, there was kids out there, it didn`t matter what it was, eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot them all." Another ex-soldier was haunted by the memory of a terrified child: "She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl. With machine guns."

A reluctant Pentagon Inquiry into this Korean version of the Wounded Knee Massacre acknowledged that there was a civilian toll but cited very low figures for the dead and then dismissed it as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent in war," despite overwhelming evidence of a deliberate U.S. policy of bombing and strafing refugee columns. The Bridge at No Gun Ri (2001), by the three Pulitzer Prize-winning AP journalists, currently languishes at near 600,000 on the Amazon sales index.

Likewise there has been little enduring outrage that a confessed war criminal, Bob Kerrey, reigns as president of New York City`s once liberal New School University. In 2001, the former Navy SEAL and ex-Senator from Nebraska was forced to concede, after years of lies, that the heroic engagement for which he received a Bronze Star in 1969 involved the massacre of a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. "To describe it as an atrocity," he admitted, "is pretty close to being right."

The blue-collar ex-SEAL team member who revealed the truth about the killings at Than Phong under Kerrey`s command was publicly excoriated as a drunk and traitor, while powerful Democrats -- led by Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, both Vietnam veterans -- circled the wagons to protect Kerrey from further investigation or possible prosecution. They argued that it was wrong to "blame the warrior instead of the war" and called for a "healing process."

Indeed covering up American atrocities has proved a thoroughly bipartisan business. The Democrats, after all, are currently considering the bomber of Belgrade, General Wesley Clark, as their potential knight on a white horse. The Bush administration, meanwhile, blackmails governments everywhere with threats of aid cuts and trade sanctions unless they exempt U.S. troops from the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court.

The United States, of course, has good reason to claim immunity from the very Nuremburg principles it helped establish in 1946-47. American Special Forces troops, for example, were most probably complicit in the massacres of hundreds of Taliban prisoners by Northern Alliance warlords several years ago. Moreover, "collateral damage" to civilians is part and parcel of the new white man`s burden of "democratizing" the Middle East and making the world safe for Bechtel and Halliburton.

The Glantons thus still have their place in the scheme of Manifest Destiny, and the scalping parties that once howled in the wilderness of the Gila now threaten to range far and wide along the banks of the Euphrates and in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.

Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities and the forthcoming Monster at the Door: the Global Threat of Avian Influenza (New Press 2005).

Copyright 2003 Mike Davis



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In these times, do as ancient Romans did -- and survive
Negotiate with foes, slash commitments
- John Arquilla
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archi…
Sunday, June 12, 2005

It isn`t easy being great. Just look at ancient Rome, the most successful empire the world has ever seen, thanks to its superb military.

But the idea of an orderly Pax Romana is an historical fiction. For at the height of its power, Rome still engaged in almost constant warfare. Even the peace-loving philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius spent most of his time fighting against tribal raiders and outbreaks of terror on the frontiers. His "Meditations`` were almost all written in camp.

Sound a bit like our own situation?

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has been the world`s sole superpower, a military colossus whose capabilities far outmatch those of any other nation. Yet our dominant sense is one of siege rather than celebration, as a seemingly endless stream of enemies has emerged to imperil American security and prosperity.

Perceived threats haven`t come just from terrorists. Even during the decade before Sept. 11, 2001, what might be called our "national security holiday," we saw reason to fight in Iraq and Somalia, occupied Haiti, and sought to bomb the Serbs into submission on two separate occasions.

The attacks on America in 2001 simply drove the point home that a new era of perpetual warfare was now underway. So, like the ancient Romans before us, we feel compelled to man the ramparts all over our vast sphere of influence in an effort to keep the barbarians outside the gates.

Today, our latter-day legions fight terrorists across a broad swath of the Muslim world, from remote sites in the Sahara to the Horn of Africa, on through Iraq and Afghanistan, then to Southeast Asia. Our legions also shore up the security of Taiwan and South Korea, and must always be ready for other contingencies that may arise abruptly at any time or place.

In particular, our military prepares for the possibility that force may have to be used against any country that tries to build nuclear weapons -- handy for threatening neighbors or sending along to terrorists.

Our vigilance is very costly. The tab for our intervention in Iraq has already hit $300 billion, and rises about an additional $1 billion each week. Our overall military spending exceeds $1.25 billion per day. And it`s likely that costs will continue to soar. Even an aggressive base closure policy at home will result in only minuscule savings as a percentage of the total budget.

In the meantime, what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls our "forward leaning" strategic policy -- putting constant, increasing pressure on America`s adversaries -- appears to be driving others into more stubborn opposition to us.

Neither North Korea nor Iran seems to have been "scared straight." Indeed, each probably sees acquisition of a small nuclear arsenal as the only way to withstand America`s coercive diplomacy, now and in the future.

With 17 brigades tied down in Iraq, on top of our other commitments, we are in a sea of troubles. If war erupted on the Korean peninsula as a result of the nuclear brinkmanship crisis, it would be very hard for the U.S. military to send reinforcements anytime soon. Senior Pentagon officials confirmed this recently, in their own elliptical Newspeak, noting that if another war broke out now we could only count on "winning less quickly."

Take matters a few steps further: Add a military crisis with China over the fate of Taiwan. Or factor in the return of Russia as an enemy, perhaps in opposition to the expansion of American influence among the former Soviet republics that lie in an arc around mother Russia from Eastern Europe to central Asia.

We are completely over-stretched right now just trying to cope with minor powers. If the major players ever get back into the "great game," we shall quickly see that our global pre-eminence was a will-o`-the-wisp.

What is to be done?

President Bush has opted, like a good Texan, to keep moving forward. In his second inaugural address, he articulated what amounts to a kinder, gentler version of regime change: spreading democracy all over the globe. And by keeping Rumsfeld at Defense he signaled his support for the true transformation of the U.S. military into a nimbler force capable of dealing with all contingencies in much more focused ways.

But it is hard to be consistent about which countries must become democratic, as many of our key economic and military allies are authoritarians whom we nevertheless want to keep in power. Especially in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. As to the other dictators among the world`s 103 countries that are either not free or only partially free, we can count on Bush`s policy to make new enemies of many of them.

With regard to transforming the military, we are now in the fourth year after Sept. 11 and our armed services still look much as they did before the terror war began. How different this is from four years after Pearl Harbor in 1941. By the end of World War II in 1945, our military had been completely transformed and had vanquished all enemies.

The major difference now is that the U.S. military is the world`s largest bureaucracy, and has proven highly resistant to change. So as we create more enemies, the military is unlikely to save us. Pentagon leadership has both the political clout and the sheer inertia to remain in stasis for years to come.

We`d better come up with some other strategic options. In doing so, it may prove useful to recall how Rome, the greatest power of the past, coped with major threats.

Our own situation looks much like Rome`s when the Empire was at its zenith in the second century. Rome then had no major enemies, but was beset by constant threats and warfare on the edges of its vast imperium.

At the political level, Rome sought not to alienate but to attract. It cultivated allies to share burdens, negotiated with enemies, and embraced their cultures. The 18th century historian Edward Gibbon slyly noted the Romans` intellectual suppleness in assessing all religions to be "equally true, equally false, equally useful."

Militarily, Rome`s strategy was to cap the empire`s commitments. With an ocean to the west, trackless deserts on the south and wide mountain ranges on the east, only the north was wide open. But instead of trying to keep on conquering in that direction, the Romans simply walled off Scotland, then drew lines at the Danube and Rhine rivers and secured the banks with forts and patrol flotillas. The system worked for centuries.

When Rome finally fell in 476, it was due to the failure to transform the legions from infantry to mounted forces capable of countering the nomadic horse archers who eventually brought down the Western Empire.

In the eastern half, though, the Byzantines did rebuild their military with heavy cavalry, and Constantinople outlived Rome by a thousand years. Not a bad payoff.

Can we now do as the Romans did? Of course we can, but we`ll have to start by behaving as pragmatically as the Romans did. If we muffled our rhetoric about spreading democracy, the world would breathe a huge sigh of relief. If we focused on diplomacy and deterrence in dealing with Iran and North Korea, we could avoid war with them. Our willingness to withdraw from Iraq would be a powerful signal to the Muslim world that we do not seek a clash of civilizations.

There`s no way to avoid all military commitments. The demilitarized zone between the two Koreas is the modern counterpart to Hadrian`s Wall. Our navy must secure the Taiwan Strait and other critical sea passages, much as Roman flotillas once patrolled the Rhine, the Danube and the Mediterranean Sea. Even our continuing hunt for terrorists carries echoes of the occasional Roman forays outside the empire to root out bandit havens.

These are all clear-cut tasks that can be undertaken at reasonable cost. If we limit ourselves to them, rather than try to manage an essentially ungovernable world, we may be able to enjoy a Pax Americana even longer than ancient Rome`s peace. If we keep pushing aggressively forward, however, we are bound to fail at ruinous cost. The choice is ours.

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. His views do not represent official Department of Defense policy. Contact us at [e-mail].

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©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Fifty-nine percent of Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq. Which comes closest to your view about what the U.S. should now do about the number of U.S. troops in Iraq: the U.S. should send more troops to Iraq, the U.S. should keep the number of troops as it is now, the U.S. should withdraw some troops from Iraq, or the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Iraq?

June 13, 2005
Nearly 6 in 10 Americans Support Troop Reductions in Iraq
Basic support for the war near all-time low
http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/print.aspx?ci=16771

by Jeffrey M. Jones


GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll finds most Americans favoring a partial or complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq, and for the first time, a majority say they would be upset with the president if he decided to send more troops. This comes at a time when basic support for the war is as low as it has been since the war began. The poll probed Americans` reasons for believing the war was or was not worth fighting. Those who favor the war generally cite the Bush administration`s various stated motivations for going to war, such as freeing the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime. Those who oppose the war believe there was insufficient justification for going to war, or say the costs have been too high given the lack of progress.

The June 6-8 poll finds 56% of Americans saying it was not worth going to war in Iraq, while 42% say it was worth it. These results are essentially the same as in a late April/early May poll (41% worth it, 57% not worth it), which represent the lowest levels of war support since fighting began in March 2003. Since last October, at least half of Americans have consistently said the war was not worth it.

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Gallup asked Americans to explain their positions on the Iraq war. Supporters are most likely to agree with the various motivations for going to war advanced by the Bush administration -- to combat terrorism, to free the Iraqi people from oppression, to protect the United States from the Iraq threat, and to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nine percent say they support the war as a means of promoting peace in the Middle East and 7% say the U.N. resolutions against Iraq needed to be enforced.

In your own words, why do you think the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over? [OPEN-ENDED; MULTIPLE RESPONSES ALLOWED]

BASED ON ADULTS WHO SAY THE SITUATION IN IRAQ WAS WORTH GOING TO WAR OVER
http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/print.aspx?ci=16771

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Two Armies, Two Reporters, Too Much Trouble in Iraq
A remarkable Washington Post article finds Iraqi fighters singing hymns to Saddam Hussein, and these are the ones on our side. It gets worse from there.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissu…

By Greg Mitchell

(June 11, 2005) -- Just back, absurdly well-fed, from E&P`s interactive media conference in New Orleans, I was about to write an entertaining little column on bloggers, journalists and their different notions of "accuracy," when I came across a Friday piece in the Washington Post by two brave and widely-honored foreign correspondents, Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru. The bloggers vs. journos column will have to wait.

The immensely significant Shadid/Fainaru piece is based on their recent (and separate) three-day journeys with American and Iraqi forces. The Iraqi unit was selected by the U.S. military, presumably viewed as one of the best. "The journey revealed fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable differences over everything from the reluctance of Muslim soldiers to search mosques and homes to basic questions of lifestyle," and much, more more, the two men write.

Consider its opening, set in Baiji, Iraq. Keep in mind, these are the Iraqis who on our side: "An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army`s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. `We have lived in humiliation since you left,` one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. `We had hoped to spend our life with you.`

"But the Iraqi soldiers had no clue where they were going. They shrugged their shoulders when asked what they would do. The U.S. military had billed the mission as pivotal in the Iraqis` progress as a fighting force but had kept the destination and objectives secret out of fear the Iraqis would leak the information to insurgents."

This comes just after a Washington Post/ABC News Poll, for the first time, shows that most Americans do not believe the toppling of Saddam Hussein made the United States more secure. The survey also found that nearly three-quarters say the U.S. casualty rate in Iraq is unacceptable; two-thirds believe the U.S. military is bogged down; 60 percent say the war was not worth fighting.

A Gallup poll released Monday found that 59% now favor withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Normally, I refrain from quoting articles at length, but in this case, I will just let the excerpts from the Shadid-Fainaru report roll, with an occasional connecting paragraphs. One can only wonder what the parents of soldiers now serving in Iraq might think of this report if they encountered it:

"The reconstruction of Iraq`s security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.

"Charlie Company disintegrated once after its commander was killed by a car bomb in December. And members of the unit were threatening to quit en masse this week over complaints that ranged from dismal living conditions to insurgent threats. Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don`t respect them.

"In fact, the Americans don`t: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis` courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military`s goal of operating independently by the fall. `I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period,` said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern`s company. `But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won`t be ready before I leave. And I know I`ll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don`t think they`ll be ready then.`"

The Post reporter who joined the inexperienced and under-armored Iraqis received good luck wishes from American soldiers who told him he would need a lot of luck to return unscathed.

"The Iraqi soldiers were a grim lot," according to the Post article, "patrolling streets where they lived and mosques where they worshiped. As they entered their neighborhoods, some of them donned black balaclavas and green scarves to mask their identities. They passed graffiti on walls that, like the town, were colored in shades of brown. `Yes to the leader Saddam,` one slogan read. `Long live the mujaheddin,` said another. Nearly all the men had received leaflets warning them to quit; the houses of several had been attacked by insurgents.

"The men spoke of the insurgents with a hint of awe, saying the fighters were willing to die and outgunned them with rocket-propelled grenades and, more fearsome, car bombs. Zwayid, a father of three, looked in disgust at his own AK-47 assault rifle, with a green shoelace for a strap....

Rick McGovern, a tough-talking 37-year-old platoon sergeant from Hershey, Pa., who heads the military training for Charlie Company, told one of the Post reporters: "Honestly, I don`t think people in America understand how touchy the situation really is right now. We have the military power, the military might, but we`re handling everything with kid gloves because we`re hoping the Iraqis are going to step up and start taking things on themselves. But they don`t have a clue how to do it."

Asked when he thought the Iraqi soldiers might be ready to operate independently, McGovern said: "Honestly, there`s part of me that says never. There`s some cultural issues that I don`t think they`ll ever get through."

The article continued: "Almost to a man, the [Iraqi] soldiers said they joined for the money -- a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base`s gate when they returned from leave.

"The soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days. `In 15 days, we`re all going to leave,` Nawaf declared. The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads....

"Shortly after [an] ambush, a sniper shot a U.S. soldier standing on the roof of a police station, inflicting a severe head wound. The Americans suspected that the fire had come from the nearby Rahma mosque. American and Iraqi troops surrounded the building. Fearful of inflaming resentment, U.S. soldiers ordered their Iraqi counterparts to search the mosque. They initially refused, entering only after McGovern berated them.

"U.S. forces then ordered the Iraqis to arrest everyone inside the mosque, including the respected elderly prayer leader. The Iraqi platoon leader refused, U.S. soldiers recalled. The platoon leader and his men then sat down next to the mosque in protest....

"At 4:30 a.m. Monday, the men of Charlie Company and the entire U.S. battalion -- some 800 soldiers -- set out in a convoy for west Baiji. The Americans used night-vision goggles to see in the dark. The Iraqis had glow sticks. Before the troops had left the base, an Iraqi driver plowed into a concrete barrier, momentarily delaying the convoy.

"U.S. commanders said the involvement of the Iraqis on the mission -- a series of raids to crack a bomb-making cell -- was critical to its success. But the Americans clearly have lowered their expectations for the Iraqis` progress.

"Along dirt roads bisected by sewage canals, the men of Charlie Company crouched, their weapons ready. Before them was their home town, dilapidated and neglected. Cpl. Amir Omar, 19, gazed ahead. `Look at the homes of the Iraqis,` he said, a handkerchief concealing his face. `The people have been destroyed.`

"By whom? he was asked.

"`Them,` Omar said, pointing at the U.S. Humvees leading the patrol."

[Update: In the Monday, June 13, New York Times, a field report on Iraqi performance by John F. Burns and Sabrina Tavernise concludes: "Despite the Bush administration`s insistent optimism, Americans working with the Iraqis in the field believe that it could be several years, at least, before the new Iraqi forces will be ready to stand alone against the insurgents....Earlier this year, the Pentagon suggested that an initial drawdown of the 140,000 American troops in Iraq might begin by the end of this year. Now, American generals are saying it could be two years, perhaps longer."]
Greg Mitchell ([e-mail]) is editor of E&P.



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The Independent
Syria: out the door, back through the window
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=646…

Monday, 13th June 2005, by Robert Fisk

The presence of Damascus’s spies has cast a shadow over the first free elections in Lebanon for 30 years. Robert Fisk reports on the intelligence war that is threatening a nation’s future

The Lebanese went to the elections yesterday as if it was a festival, all music and flags and picnics on the grass opposite the polling booths. The Christian and the Muslim and the Druze of Lebanon lay down with their appropriate tigers. The first free elections in 30 years.

The Mediterranean, far down the mountainside, lay pale green in the evening light. Liberty. The Syrians have gone. But have they? The Mediterranean looks suddenly darker. The intelligence war that has so often smothered Beirut is closing in again.

How war closets this country, bastes it in the oven of history, ensures that the smallest constituency maintains the integrity of the civil war that ended 15 years ago, a conflict in which the Syrians were deeply involved.

I only have to visit a few friends to hear the worst. The Syrians are back. An odd colonel or two, a general here and there, from the intelligence services, of course. True? And, if so, why?

The UN confirmed the withdrawal of all Syrian troops and intelligence officers scarcely a month ago. Now the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, threatens to send his "verification" team back to reconfirm. There are names: Khalouf, Safeitly, Jabour, Ghazaleh ... Syrian intelligence officers. Ghazaleh was the former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.

Or maybe he still is? If the Syrians have returned - out through the door, back through the window, as the Lebanese say - what might they do with the sectarian pot that constitutes all of Lebanon’s tragedies?

Travel through the mountains of Lebanon yesterday and the Druze-Christian war comes back like a tempest. In the village of Kfar Matta - of which more later - the Christians cannot even vote alongside their Druze neighbours, because they killed too many of them in 1983.

The Druze, who lost 270 in a 1983 massacre - which also killed a friend, Clark Todd, a Canadian television correspondent - vote enthusiastically in a school in the centre of their still partly-ruined village. Lebanese soldiers guard them. The Christians of Kfar Matta, however, have to go elsewhere to exercise their democratic vote.

But the Syrians, that’s the thing. Are they back? Alas, they probably are. A dark cloud shadows this awesomely beautiful country, just when we all thought it was safe to go back into the green waters of the sea.

The story so far. Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was murdered in a bombing in Beirut on 14 February, 2005. Opposition politicians blamed the Syrian regime because - so they said - it believed Hariri was behind UN Security Council Resolution 1559, supported by the United States and France, which demanded the withdrawal of the Syrian army and its intelligence officers from Lebanon.

A million Lebanese rallied to demand the truth about his assassination. A preliminary UN investigation concluded "the government of Syria bears primary responsibility for the political tension that preceded the assassination ..."

But now, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassa, a CIA investigation into the murder concluded that between six and nine senior Syrian intelligence officers were involved.

The paper names - as "planners and executors" - of the murder, Colonel Mohamed Khalouf, former commander of the Syrian intelligence offices at the Beau Rivage hotel in Beirut, Colonel Jihad Safeitly, head of Syrian "Political Operations" in Lebanon, and Brigadier General Rustum Ghazaleh, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.

It claims, too, that a secret CIA/FBI investigation was carried out on the Hariri assassination in Lebanon for four days, starting on 18 February, which concluded that four senior members of the Lebanese security forces knew of plans for the murder before it took place and helped monitor Hariri’s movements and select the date of his murder.

One of the paper’s sources said a former Lebanese cabinet minister was also involved. The Lebanese are already trying to guess - accurately - his identity.

This is, as they say, a very serious matter. Even graver is the information which Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, says he has received of continued Syrian intelligence operations in Lebanon. He has been told that - back in Lebanon after their famous "military withdrawal" - are Mohamed Jabour, a Syrian officer formerly based in the Lebanese town of Sofar, high in the hills above Beirut, and Jamer Jamer, who was a spook in the west Beirut Hamra district, and Said Rabah, a Syrian intelligence man from Hamana (in the valley below Sofar), and that all have returned to Lebanon.

And so has Rustum Ghazaleh, the ex-top intelligence man in the country. All of the above, Syria officially denies.

Mr Jumblatt still believes that he is on a Syrian "hit list" and the Americans are banging the same drum almost every day. "Our message to Syria,’’ President George Bush said on Friday " ... is that in order for Lebanon to be free, Syria needs to not only remove its military, but to remove intelligence officers as well."

An anonymous US government spokesman - rather too anonymous for such a comment, perhaps - said the American information came from "a variety of credible Lebanese sources."

The murder of the Lebanese journalist, Samir Kassir, 11 days ago - a writer who was deeply critical of the Syrian Baath party, who had received furious phone calls from Rustum Ghazaleh - was a message to Lebanon: just when you thought it was safe to speak freely, the murderers are still in business.

And how. After Hariri’s murder, one of the top pro-Syrian security officials, Lebanese General Haj Ali, removed the burnt- out remains of the Hariri convoy from the scene of the crime.

Other security officials planted false evidence at the scene. Or so said the first UN investigation team.

Now, it turns out - chillingly for those of us who believed that a clean security leadership had been installed in Lebanon - that the car in which Kassir was bombed was also removed from the scene of the crime within hours, allowing the Lebenese cops to "lose" the detonator of the explosives which killed him.

This is no small matter. At the scene, I watched Lebanese military forensic officers take pieces of the bomb from the burnt vehicle after Kassir’s assassination, placing them in containers.

But the police moved the car, and the detonator - which is the all-important clue to the culprits - disappeared. How very convenient. Detonators have numbers. These codes can be used to discove the manufacturer and, more importantly, the country to which it was sold.

No wonder the Mediterranean looks suddenly darker. No detonator. No numbers. No culprits. There are glitches, of course.

The intelligence teams sniffing around Hariri’s murder are said to be 85 per cent certain of their information about the Syrian intelligence officers but only 15 per cent about the possible involvement in the bombing of Imad Mougnieh, a pro-Iranian Lebanese who is widely regarded as the leader of the hostage-takers who abducted so many Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.

He was not, so they claim, in Lebanon before Hariri’s killing. Which is interesting.

Mr Mougnieh is linked to the Hizbollah, who the Americans - and, of course, the Israelis - want disarmed. If a Hizbollah connection can be foisted on to Hariri’s death, then US demands become ever more powerful.

But Hizbollah had no reason to harm Hariri - whose secret contacts with the Hizbollah leadership have recently been revealed. Are the Americans now bringing politics into the police investigation of Hariri’s death?

The danger of all this spookery, of course, is that it is being played out in a fragile, post-war country whose civil war animosities can be reawoken by a single bomb; hence, presumably the five explosions in Christian areas of Lebanon that followed Hariri’s murder.

Yesterday’s third day of elections - which will decide whether the opposition or the pro-Syrian rump control the next parliament - were, in principle at least, a spirited affair.

Lebanese Christian politicians allied themselves, for votes only of course, with their own former civil war opponents.

Thus in the Christian town of Kahale - a Lebanese Forces bastion in the war - cars were careering through the streets with their occupants waving Hizbollah flags. In the village of Kfar Matta, stranger things were to be observed. In 1983, Christian militiamen - including, tragically, Christians from the same village - embarked on an orgy of killing of their Muslim neighbours. At least 270 men, women and children were butchered.

They included a young Canadian journalist called Clark Todd who was reporting the war.

Fifteen years after the end of that war, the villagers voted for tickets that actually joined former Christian and Druze enemies. It was, some of them claimed, a first step towards a reconciliation. But not yet.

The Lebanese voting system is often described as proportional representation. Actually, it’s proportional sectarian - because the voting lists contain candidates selected by their ethnic origins.

And in Kfar Matta, there has been none of the formal "reconciliation" - musallah in Arabic - that must precede any tribal return to a town or village in which one side has committed a crime. So the Christians of Kfar Matta could not vote in their village, from which they have long fled.

Instead, they were given polling stations in the neighbouring village of Mishrif, next to a cul-de-sac which could not lead to their former homes and those of their victims but which was a few metres inside the parish of Kfar Matta - and thus made the polling stations legal.

Rafic Haddad, a young equity analyst who now lives in Paris - far too young to have been involved in the war - had flown all the way from his home in France, his £350 air ticket an expensive way of subsidising democracy - to vote at Mishrif. "One day we’ll go back to our town - it will happen, there will be conciliation," he said. And that, remarkably, is what the Druze in Kfar Matta told me, too.

Firas Kaddaj wanted this reconciliation. "We have got to have a new Lebanon now that things have changed," he told me in front of the schoolhouse polling station which the Christians of his village could not visit.

But this is a sensitive, desperately dangerous place, in which optimism flowers amid the bougainvillea while threats lay heavy over the landscape.

On Friday night, I drove up for dinner with Walid Jumblatt in his Druze castle at Mukhtara. There was fine wine and the best salads and the funniest of conversations. But Mr Jumblatt, my favourite - indeed, the only - true nihilist in the Arab world - is looking worried. He thinks he is on a hit list. I fear he is, too. I fear all Lebanon is.

So how to end this report from that soft, gentle, ferocious country of Lebanon? With these words: watch out!

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Published on Monday, June 13, 2005 by the lndependent/UK
Beckett Exposes G8 Rift on Global Warming
Global Warming: The US Contribution in Figures
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story…
by Marie Woolf in London and Colin Brown in Moscow


The British Government is deeply disappointed that President George Bush has not made a greater commitment to tackling climate change before the G8 summit, the Environment Secretary has disclosed. In a rare, outspoken critique of the US position on global warming, Margaret Beckett told The Independent of the Government`s frustration at the lack of "common ground" with Washington on the need for action on the environment. The US has consistently blocked attempts by Britain to put progress on tackling climate change alongside G8`s moves to scrap African debt at the Gleneagles meeting of the leading industrialized nations next month.

Global Warming: The US Contribution in Figures * The United States constitutes 4 per cent of the world population * It is responsible for a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions - an average of 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is released by each US citizen every year - the highest of any country in the world, and more than China, India and Japan combined * Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually - consuming more than 850 million trees * There are more than 200 million cars and light trucks on american roads * According to the Federal Department of Transportation, they use over 200 million gallons of petrol a day * Motor vehicles account for 56 per cent of all air pollution in The United States * A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2002 concluded that people living in the most heavily polluted metropolitan areas have a 12 per cent increased risk of dying of lung cancer than people in the least polluted areas * 32 of the 50 busiest US airports currently have plans to expand operations * Every year US industries release at least 2.4 billion pounds of chemicals into the atmosphere * Despite having just 2 per cent of known oil reserves, the US consumes 25 per cent of the world`s oil production * 16 per cent of world oil production goes into american cars alone. * Approximately 160 million people living in 32 US states live in regions with smog and soot levels considered dangerous to health * The new clear air interstate rule aims to cut sulphur dioxide by 73 per cent and nitrogen oxide by 61 per cent in the next 10 years * Around 50 million new cars roll off US assembly lines each year * There are already more than 20 million four-wheel-drive vehicles on US roads * More than 1.5 million gallons of oil were spilled into US waters in 2000 alone * Only 1 per cent of american travel is on public transport, an eighth of that in the UK and an eighteenth of that in Japan * As much as 5.99 tons of carbon dioxide is emitted per American per year, compared with 0.31 tons per Indian or 0.05 tons per Bangladeshi. * The US had 16 major oil spills between 1976 and 1989, whereas France suffered six and the UK five * The average american produces 864kg of municipal waste per year, almost three times the quantity of rubbish produced annually by an Italian

Mrs Beckett added that signing the Kyoto protocol was clearly "off the agenda" for President Bush, who was "coming from a different place in the dialogue" on the issue of global warming. She said the Government had made no secret that it wants the White House to be "more engaged" on climate change. "Certainly there is a degree of disappointment that there isn`t more common ground than there already is," she said.

Her remarks come days after Mr Blair returned from talks with President Bush about global warming in Washington.

At Westminster, Mrs Beckett`s criticism will be interpreted as a sign of growing frustration with the White House over an issue that the Prime Minister wants to see given top billing at the summit in Glenagles. Mrs Beckett said that President Bush was fully aware of the importance Mr Blair had attached to a breakthrough on climate change during his presidency of the G8. "He [Bush] has known for a long time. He has known since before it was in the public domain that Tony had every intention of making climate change as well as Africa a top priority for our G8 year."

But the Prime Minister`s inability to gain concessions from his closest ally, following his backing for military action against Iraq, will be seen by some as a sign that Mr Blair does not have the influence he would like.

Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said America was a "Neanderthal" when it came to the environment. "As an absolute minimum, George Bush must acknowledge the work of his own scientists that climate change is caused by people," he said.

Mrs Beckett acknowledged Britain had no hope of persuading the US to sign up to Kyoto."The US signing up to Kyoto is off the agenda," she said.

The focus now was on creating a dialogue with the US and other major energy users, including India and China, about the way forward.

Her remarks came as Mr Blair headed to Russia to seek the support of President Vladimir Putin for a breakthrough on climate change at the G8 conference. On a flying visit to Moscow and three European capitals, Mr Blair will try to build on the Russian acceptance of the Kyoto targets for tackling climate change to put more pressure on the US to come on board.

As the Prime Minister prepared to fly out at the start of a hectic 48 hours of diplomacy, his official spokesman raised the prospect that Mr Bush could sign up to a more limited agenda, dubbed "Kyoto Lite``, at the Gleneagles summit. "Russia has signed up to Kyoto," he said. "We said as far back as our talks in Johannesburg that we did not expect the US to sign up to Kyoto. The important point is not to make Kyoto into something you sign or there is nothing.

"The important thing is to recognize concerns about climate change. We agree with the US about the need to bring into the fold some emerging countries, India and China, and we believe we will see it at Gleneagles."

The differences between the US and Britain were starkly illustrated in a leaked G8 document seen by The Independent. President Bush said last week that he wanted more international co-operation on "clean nuke." But a draft of a G8 communiqué shows disagreement over the US`s wish for separate section on the role of nuclear power. The draft, Powering a Cleaner Future, says a "UK red line" - area not for negotiation - was the US`s singling out of nuclear power as a clean energy source.

It said: "UK red line: Avoid US suggestion for a separate nuclear heading. This would be quite a serious jump in political attention from previous ... texts. Any statement should be couched in language that leaves it up to individual governments to decide whether nuclear is a suitable part of their energy mix."

Mrs Beckett gave a strong indication that she did not support the revival of nuclear power, and construction of new plants, believed to be favored by Mr Blair, to tackle global warming.

She said new power stations were not the answer to meeting the goal of a 20 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 or a 60 per cent cut by 2050.

She admitted CO2 emissions were rising in Britain, along with the rest of the Northern hemisphere, and said she was "very" disappointed that the UK was in danger of missing those targets.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Published on Monday, June 13, 2005 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
Hypocritical U.S. Fight for `Freedom`
Bush arms repressive regimes, sends guns to nations in conflict, ties aid to support of America`s terror war
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-ophar134302450jun13,0…
by William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan

Despite President George W. Bush`s vow to promote freedom and democracy around the world, U.S. arms sales policy is doing just the opposite.

Most major recipients of U.S. arms sales in the developing world are undemocratic, as defined by our own State Department. And U.S.-supplied weaponry is present in a majority of the world`s active conflicts.

The Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations were no strangers to the policy of transferring U.S. arms to dictators, but this trend has intensified dramatically under the administration of George W. Bush.

Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush`s pledge to "end tyranny in our world" than the United States` role as the world`s leading arms-exporting nation. Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition partners, these alleged benefits often come at a high price.

Arms sales raise security concerns as well. Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe. U.S. sales of military technology to Iraq in the late 1980s helped Saddam Hussein build his war machine. Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents or hostile governments.

As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan while pledging comparable high-tech military hardware to its rival, India, U.S. arms sometimes go to long-standing rivals who may use these weapons against each other if another conflict breaks out. The fact that F-16s can be outfitted to carry nuclear weapons makes these sales all the more dangerous.

Meanwhile, the tens of millions of U.S. arms transfers to Uzbekistan exemplify the negative consequences of arming repressive regimes.

A few statistics demonstrate just how destabilizing current U.S. policy can be.

In 2003, the last year for which full information is available, the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia to Colombia, Pakistan, Israel and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs totaled more than $1 billion.

More than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department`s Human Rights Report in the sense that "citizens do not have the right to change their own government" or those rights were severely abridged. The largest U.S. military aid program, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), increased by 68 percent from 2001 to 2003, from $3.5 billion to nearly $6 billion. The biggest increases went to countries engaged as U.S. allies in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, including Jordan ($525 million increase from 2001 to 2003), Afghanistan ($191 million increase), Pakistan ($224 million increase), and Bahrain ($90 million increase). Arming repressive regimes while simultaneously proclaiming a campaign against tyranny undermines the credibility of the United States and makes it harder to hold other nations to high standards of conduct. It also helps to enhance the power of undemocratic governments, fueling conflict or enabling human rights abuses.

The time has come to impose greater scrutiny on U.S. arms transfers and military aid programs. A good starting point toward a more sound arms sales policy would be to implement the underlying assumptions of U.S. arms export law, which call for arming nations only for purposes of self-defense and avoiding arms sales to nations that systematically abuse human rights.

Equally important, the automatic assumption that arms transfers are the preferred "barter" for access to military facilities or other security "goods" sought from other nations should be seriously reconsidered. Economic aid, political support and other forms of engagement should be explored as alternatives whenever possible.

© 2005 Newsday, Inc.

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Es ist wirklich interessant wie die US-Medien funktionieren. Allein mit welcher Verzögerung sich Fakten in der Öffentlichkeit verbreiten.
Es ist schon alptaumartig, wenn man sich vorstellt, dass in einer Gesellschaft (nicht nur in den USA), in der innerhalb von einigen wenigen Minuten eine Nachricht um die Welt verbreitet werden kann, immer wieder Nachrichten durch bewußtes Verschweigen der Medien oder durch Desintresse der Menschen einfach nicht in das Bewußtsein der Bürger vordringen.

Published on Monday, June 13, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
USA Today and the Downing Street Memo
by Cynthia Bogard
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0613-27.htm

What can reading USA Today tell us about the Downing Street Memo (DSM) story? Zip. Zilch. Nothing. At least that was the case for the first 38 days after the memo was published in London`s Sunday Times. USA Today published not a word about it until June 8, 2005. This week though, the leaked 2002 memo that indicates the Bush Administration had already decided to go to war on Iraq months before it brought the subject before the United Nations finally made it into the nation`s national newspapers, including USA Today (page 8; and reprinted at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0608-01.htm). And it`s likely to get another spike in coverage this Thursday when my hero John (that`s you, Representative Conyers, not you Senator Kerry) opens a Congressional hearing and presents a letter to the president signed by 500,000 voters demanding answers about the DSM.

Why should progressives care what that lightweight daily, USA Today, has to say about the DSM? With a circulation of over 2.2 million, it reaches twice as many Americans as either of the intelligentsia`s papers, the New York Times or Washington Post. It is also the nation`s most "national" paper--the one you`ll find in mini-marts and hotels from Maine to Mississippi, Wisconsin to Washington. When Middle America reads a national paper, it`s typically USA Today. What`s most interesting, if not at all surprising, about USA Today`s relationship to the DSM, though, is how closely the paper mirrors the Bush/Blair and right-wing "minimize, malign and control" strategy for dealing with the memo.

So far, USA Today has only published the one story on June 8. Salon online magazine, however, did interview its senior assignment editor for foreign news, Jim Cox. And the author of the article, Mark Memmott, was interviewed by Bob Garfield on NPR`s On the Media on June 11. A lot can be learned about the strategies that will be used to silence the memo`s import in a quick examination of these primary and secondary USA Today sources.

The News Blackout

The Bush Administration successfully stymied almost all mainstream coverage of the issue until Reuter reporter Steve Holland`s brave question at the joint Bush-Blair news conference on June 7. They had a lot of help from the White House press corps which, despite 19 daily briefings, asked Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan exactly two questions about the memo between May 1 and USA Today`s first mention of it on June 8. But, in an interview with Salon, USA Today`s senior editor Jim Cox did express regrets that he hadn`t assigned the story earlier. Regrets, though, Mr. Cox, are not the same as news.

The "Suspicious Timing" Argument

At the Bush-Blair news conference, the President stated, "Well you know, I read, kind of, the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I`m not sure who they dropped it out is, but I`m not suggesting that you all [indicating assembled White House press corps] dropped it out there." USA Today put it more succinctly, "The Sunday Times` May 1 memo story, which broke just four days before Britain`s national elections,." and On the Media interviewer Bob Garfield echoed this emphasis in his introduction, stating the report of the memo "ran in Britain May 1st, four days before the British election." USA Today editor Cox was quoted in his own paper saying that the memo "was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

What the audience was supposed to make of both the President`s and the media`s statements was that, obviously, London`s Sunday Times was trying to skew election results with this suspiciously timed release. Therefore, the memo itself could not be trusted.

The `Mistaken` Meaning of "Fixed Around"

Perhaps the most quoted phrase of the DSM is the claim Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Robin Niblett, Director of the Europe program at The Center for Strategic and International Studies-a foreign policy focused Washington think tank, helpfully suggested in the USA Today article "that it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being `fixed around` Iraq policy. `Fixed around` in British English means `bolted on` rather than altered to fit the policy," he informed us. During his interview with Garfield, Memmott repeated this point as justification for his paper`s lack of coverage. "Britain and the United States are separated by a common language, I think is the clich*," he said cutely. He then went on to repeat the idea that, "[T]o someone in Britain it`s possible that that phrase `fixed around` could mean attached to or bolted on. Not necessarily skewed." . So that`s where the argument comes down to why it`s so important to find out what the person who wrote that meant."

British semantic subtlety as explanation has been subsequently latched onto in the right-wing blogosphere and was used as an argument for dismissing the memo by conservative National Review`s Rich Lowry, filling in for David Brooks on the Friday weekly wrap-up segment of the Jim Leher News Hour. (Back around the left side of the blogosphere, real Brits wrote in to say that they understood the phrase to mean `rigged` too--just like on our side of the pond.)

The "Old News" Argument

James S. Robbins at National Review Online described the DSM this way: "...the memo simply contains the impressions of an aide of the impressions of British-cabinet officials of the impressions of unnamed people they spoke to in the United States about what they thought the president was thinking. It is sad when hearsay thrice-removed raises this kind of ruckus, especially since a version had been reported three years ago (my italics). As smoking guns go, it is not high caliber."

The "old news is no news" argument isn`t mentioned in the USA Today June 8 story. But when Memmott was asked by Garfield about other reasons for neglecting the story until June 8, he said, "we and other newspapers as well, and other media, had written a lot in early 2002 about how the Bush Administration was beginning the drumbeat, was moving toward the decision to go to war, to take military action in Iraq. It wouldn`t happen until a year later. But there were lots of stories. So there was some sense also among editing ranks, well, we knew this. We knew the Bush Administration had decided well beforehand what its policy course was going to be. Yes this was important. Yes this is a document which seems to put it down on paper. But I think there was a sense of, well is this old news and how important is it?" In his interview with Salon, Cox states, "The memo doesn`t say something we haven`t heard in one way or another over the last two and a half years."

The Authenticity Issue

No one in the British government has denied the authenticity of the document and an unnamed former senior US official is quoted as saying the account of the senior British Intelligence officer`s visit to Washington is "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired." But in the wake of Dan Rather`s public undoing and the recent Newsweek scandal, the press has become hyper-vigilant in its quest for absolute authenticity before running a story.

Senior USA Today editor Jim Cox said to Salon, "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source. There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair`s office)."

When On the Media`s Garfield opened his interview with Mark Memmott, the very first thing he said in response to Garfield`s question about a "gaping hole" in coverage of the memo was, "It`s ironic to some extent. Last year the media was jumped on because of the Texas Air National Guard documents that CBS said it had. Bloggers were all over them about the authenticity of those. Now some in the blogosphere were all over the media for not writing about documents which almost all the media had not seen. Only the Sunday Times of London had actual copies that they said were from reliable sources. Others only had second hand information so that explains a lot of the reluctance, at least on the U.S. media`s part, to really weigh in this on this one, I think. I know there were attempts made to try to authenticate and obtain the information so that we could do a story and we just never got to the point, I`m told, where we could." Later in the interview Garfield picks up on the implication of this view by saying in regards to the DSM, "let`s say it`s authentic for a moment." before continuing with his questions (et tu, BG?).

I repeat, none of the people who were at this high-level meeting have disputed the document`s authenticity.

So let`s summarize. The memo describing the minutes of a meeting attended by our major Iraq war ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisors in which it is stated that the Bush Administration saw military action as "inevitable" and that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action" even though "the case was thin" and the United Nations had not yet been consulted was

a) not important enough to mention at all

b) old news

c) merely a ploy by a British newspaper to skew elections over there

d) a bunch of mistaken allegations based on a failure to understand British English

e) based on a document which Tony Blair himself had not specifically said was true (though he hadn`t denied it either)

f) All of the above.

This, folks, is the framing of the memo that we`re up against, the one being promoted by the Bush Administration and Tony Blair and the one being parroted by much of our fearful mainstream media. This is what most Americans are finding out about the Downing Street Memo (if they`re finding out anything at all). Some regional and local papers have picked up on the story but coverage is spotty so far. Under these circumstances, we might be grateful that most Americans don`t read any newspaper. They get their news from television. Then again, what`s the most watched news on TV? It`s Fox News.

Cynthia Bogard ([e-mail]) is a professor of sociology at Hofstra University in New York.

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Ein Thema, das immer wieder in den USA verharmlost wird. Es kommt mir vor wie GB vor einigen Jahren.
[urlMad Cow USA - The Cover-Up Begins to Unravel]http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0613-28.htm[/url]

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Wegen der Berichterstattung über das Urteil im Jackson-Prozeß fallen heute die politische Nachrichten in den US-Zeitungen aus!
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The britisch also:
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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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"Deep Doc just doesn`t stop" NBC verifies the 7 additional documents!

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THE NATION
Senate Issues an Apology for Inaction on Lynchings
An attack survivor and descendants of other victims are on hand as decades of obstruction are acknowledged. No compensation is offered.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-lync…
By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer

June 14, 2005

WASHINGTON — Seventy-five years after an Indiana mob dragged him from his jail cell and nearly hanged him, James Cameron was on hand Monday to watch the Senate apologize for its failure to try to stop the lynchings that terrorized African Americans well into the 20th century.

Cameron, 91 and in a wheelchair, is believed to be the only living survivor of an attempted lynching. He joined more than 150 descendants of lynching victims to witness the Senate`s acknowledgment that although about 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced — three passed the House and seven U.S. presidents lobbied for such laws — none was ever approved by the Senate.

Also in attendance was Simeon Wright, 62, who was sharing a room with his cousin, Emmett Till, when two white men burst into Wright`s Mississippi home on Aug. 28, 1955, and dragged Till out. Till, who was visiting from Chicago, was suspected of having whistled at a white woman. The 14-year-old was found dead a few days later.

"If we had a federal law in 1955, there is no way those men would have come into my home and taken Emmett and killed him," Wright said.

A total of 4,742 Americans are documented to have been lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the practice most prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to figures provided by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Lynchings occurred in all but four states, and victims included whites, Asians, Italians and Jews. But the practice was most common in the South, and most often aimed at blacks. Of the known victims, 3,452 were African Americans. With local law enforcement officials and juries usually handling the cases, historians have estimated that fewer than 1% of the lynchers were ever convicted.

Supporters of the Senate apology, which had 80 cosponsors and passed by a voice vote, said a federal anti-lynching law could have reduced the violence and would have allowed the federal government to prosecute cases.

The resolution apologizes for the Senate`s failure to act, expressing "the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."

The resolution offers no compensation to victims or their families.

Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP`s Washington bureau, said it was important that Congress follow up the apology with an effort to compensate victims and their families.

"If this is all the Senate does on this issue, it is a rather hollow gesture," Shelton said. "If this is the beginning of a process, then indeed it can be very healthy and very important to our society."

Supporters of the apology said that despite the efforts of various groups, Congress had never apologized for slavery.

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said a book filled with powerful images of lynchings spurred her to push for Monday`s resolution, which she cosponsored with Sen. George Allen (R-Va.).

The book, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," is the work of James Allen, an Atlanta antiques dealer who spent 15 years collecting photographs and postcards of lynchings.

It was the crowds milling about the bloodied, dangling bodies that most disturbed her, Landrieu said. They sometimes included laughing, smiling children dressed in their Sunday best.

The images made her realize, Landrieu said, that these were not crimes committed in secret — they were often community events.

"This was domestic terrorism," she said, "and the Senate is uniquely culpable" for failing to act against it.

Some senators complained that the debate was taking place on a Monday night, when few senators were present, and that the leadership scheduled a voice vote rather than a roll call vote.

"I think that`s a mistake," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said when he rose in support of the resolution. "I think the United States Senate should stand up and every man and woman here would have to vote during a roll call, one way or the other."

Deborah Crawford, 54, said she felt conflicting emotions. Crawford was an adult when she learned that her great-grandfather, Anthony Crawford, was lynched in South Carolina in 1916 after arguing with a white farmer over the price of cottonseed.

She traveled from Chicago and joined dozens of relatives at a luncheon and news conference Monday before the vote.

"I feel that there should be something else, something more than an apology, but I don`t know what," Crawford said.

Cameron, flanked by photographs of the lynching he survived, spoke with difficulty about his experience.

"I was lynched, but I wasn`t lynched like my two buddies," he said. "I was saved by a miracle. They had a rope around my neck, they were going to lynch me right between my two buddies."

Cameron and two friends — Abraham Smith, 18, and Thomas Shipp, 19, were arrested on suspicion of murdering a white man and raping a white woman in Marion, Ind., in August 1930. A mob broke into the jail, dragged Smith and Shipp from their cells, beat and mutilated them, and then hanged them from a tree in the town square.

Cameron, too, was dragged from his cell and to the hanging tree. But in accounts over the years, Cameron has said that he was saved when a single voice in the crowd declared his innocence and the mob let him go.

"They allowed me to stumble, stagger the half block back to the jail," he said. "I`m glad to be here."

Cameron said he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the case and served four years in prison, although the female victim later said he had nothing to do with the assault. In 1993, then-Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh pardoned Cameron.

Also present Monday was Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and a member of the Committee for a Formal Apology, a group that has pushed for the Senate apology for three years.

"I came here to bear witness on behalf of my cousin Jimmy," said Cohen. She said she was the last member of her family who remembered the stories of how her third cousin, 17-year-old Jimmy Gillenwaters, was killed by a mob near Bowling Green, Ky., in 1912.

Each time the House passed an anti-lynching bill, Southern senators filibustered them — once in a monumental battle carried out on the Senate floor for six weeks in the late 1930s.


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Tuesday, June 14, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Bring ‘em on: At least 22 people killed and 80 wounded in suicide bomb attack in Kirkuk. At least five policemen killed and five wounded in suicide car bomb attack on a police station in Kanaan.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers killed in roadside bombing near Ramadi. Eleven employees of American-Iraqi Solutions Group killed Sunday when one of its five-vehicle supply convoys was ambushed east of Ramadi by up to 20 heavily armed gunmen firing from an overpass. Seven badly decomposed bodies, including one Iraqi and six believed to be "Asians," were brought to Yarmouk hospital after being killed in a convoy ambush several days ago. Most had been shot in the face.

Bring ‘em on: Bodies of 17 Iraqi civilians, believed to be people who worked for foreign contractors, found in a desert in Habbaniya in Anbar province. Last Friday at least 17 bodies in civilian clothes were found outside of Qaim. In addition, three bodies were found Sunday under a bridge in northwest Baghdad, three bodies were found Sunday in southeast Baghdad`s al-Baladiyat neighborhood , and another three men were found last Saturday shot to death in Baghdad’s Dora district. It is difficult to tell whether any of these discoveries are the same as some previously reported in earlier posts but my impression is that they aren’t.

Bring ‘em on: Ten Iraqis, including two children, killed and seven wounded in a car bomb attack north of Baghdad. This may be the same attack as the one in Kanaan mentioned in the first entry above.

Vehicle accident: One US Marine killed and three critically injured in Humvee rollover in Iraq.


Negotiating with terrorists: U.S. and Iraqi officials are considering difficult-to-swallow ideas — including amnesties for their enemies — as they look for ways to end the country`s rampant insurgency and isolate extremists wanting to start a civil war.

Negotiations have just begun between U.S. and Iraqi officials on drafting an amnesty policy, which would reach out to Iraqi militants fighting U.S. forces, say officials in both the Iraqi and American governments.

Iraqi Politics

Kurd threats: Kurdish officials have threatened to withdraw from the Iraqi government if it does not amend its political program, an Arab newspaper reported Monday.

The London-based al-Hayat daily quoted Kurdish parliament members as saying they may pull out of the government if Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari`s unilateral decisions continued.

Sunni threats: Iraq`s Shiite-dominated government has been in power less than two months, and minority Sunni Arabs - the dominant force in the nation`s relentless and bloody insurgency - are struggling to find a place in the country`s future.

But the once-powerful community, at its lowest point since the U.S.-led invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein, refuses to accept second-class status and believes it still has trump cards to play - chief among them: withholding approval of a new constitution in a fall referendum.

Under the provisional law now in force, Sunni Arabs can reject the draft constitution in October by voting against it in three of the four provinces where they have a majority. Such a move would force the dissolution of parliament and new elections held, throwing the entire political process a year behind schedule - as envisioned by Washington.

``If we don`t like it in October, we shall vote against it and return the entire political process to point zero,`` said senior Sunni Arab politician and lawmaker Meshaan al-Jiburi.

Saddam: The tribunal that will put Saddam Hussein on trial released a video Monday showing the 68-year-old former dictator — looking drawn and tired but dressed in a pinstriped suit — being questioned about the killings of at least 50 Iraqis in a Shiite town.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal trying Saddam likely issued the new video to show that it is in control of the proceedings and to counter widespread beliefs that it was being directed by Shiites and Kurds who dominate the government and the 275-member National Assembly.

Iraq`s Kurdish president and the Shiite-led government said last week that the ousted leader could appear before the tribunal within two months. They later backtracked after complaints from Saddam`s legal team and the tribunal, which said no trial date has been set.

Life Under Occupation

TB on the rise: Iraqi doctors say they are concerned over an increase in Tuberculosis (TB) cases in the southeastern city of Amarah, fueled by a shortage of medicine and poor living conditions.

The disease, which has been under control in the area for more than 50 years, has been rising steadily since the conflict in 2003.

A survey on living conditions, released by the UN and the Iraqi government in May, stressed that standards had seriously deteriorated over the past two years with poor access to clean water and adequate healthcare.

Contractors kill 12 Iraqi civilians a week!: Iraq`s interior ministry said yesterday it wanted to impose legal boundaries on the private security business after American contractors twice opened fire on US marines.

The move may be supported by the US military, whose patience with the contractors has been tested.

Soldiers have for some time been angered by the salaries earned by the estimated 20,000 armed contractors working in Iraq, many of whom are ex-servicemen.

They are even more unpopular with Iraqis. Interior ministry officials say at least 12 Iraqi civilians are killed by contractors every week in the capital.

"Enough is enough," said an official at the interior ministry. "We are looking at ways to tighten weapons licenses, and to punish the worst cases. The culture of impunity must stop."

Transit point: "There is no drug problem in Iraq," said Abbas Fadhil Mahdi, a former brigadier general in Saddam Hussein`s army who is now a psychiatrist at the capital`s Ibn Rushud hospital.

Iraqi government officials and a U.N. agency that monitors drug trafficking disagree. Hamid Ghodse, president of the United Nations` International Narcotics Control Board, said that since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Iraq has become a transit point in the flow of hashish and heroin from Iran and Afghanistan, the world`s largest producer of opium poppies, to Persian Gulf countries and Europe.


Civil Liberties

Big Dick: Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday he doesn`t believe revelations about the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay have become an image problem for the United States and that the facility should not be shut down.

Cheney did not mention the article in this week`s issue of Time magazine based on an 84-page logbook of the interrogation and treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Guantanamo inmate U.S. officials believe intended to participate in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Time`s article, authenticated by Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita, outlines al-Qahtani`s treatment, which included being refused a bathroom break and forced to urinate in his pants, having a female guard straddle him, being forced to wear pictures of scantily clad women around his neck and being forced to bark and act like a dog.

But the vice president defended the treatment of Guantanamo`s detainees, saying they have been treated "in a human fashion" but do not "qualify" for treatment under the Geneva Conventions "because they are unlawful combatants (who) have not operated in accordance with the laws of war: they haven`t worn a uniform, they target civilians."

"In spite of that they are still treated with respect and dignity," he said.

Respect and dignity: Extracts from an interrogation log, Camp Xray, Guantanamo:

13 December 2002, 1115: Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee`s emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smily face on it and placed on the detainee`s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the "sissy slap" glove. The glove was touched to the detainee`s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee`s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.

20 December 2002, 1115: Detainee offered water—refused. Corpsman changed ankle bandages to prevent chafing. Interrogater began by reminding the detainee about the lessons in respect and how the detainee had disrespected the interrogators. Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know how to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated.

Stealing our freedoms in secrecy: A closed-door vote by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week to expand law enforcement powers under the USA Patriot Act is prompting sharp criticism from some conservative leaders who are otherwise among the most vocal allies of President Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress.

The conservative leaders — who have formed a coalition with critics on the left, including the American Civil Liberties Union — vowed to press their concerns in coming days with public statements, rallies and radio advertisements in key congressional districts.

The conservatives, including former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and political activists who have been long-standing critics of the anti-terrorism law, lashed out with particular force last week against the White House, members of Congress and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales. They said they had expected a more open review of the Patriot Act in which lawmakers considered some limits in order to safeguard civil liberties.

"It is a slap in the face to the Constitution," said Barr, who leads a bipartisan coalition calling for limits on the act.

And they expect us to trust them: Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI learned that 18 Middle Eastern men had obtained licenses in Pennsylvania to haul hazardous materials across the nation`s roadways.

Deeply concerned about another terrorist attack, prosecutors filed fraud charges against the men on Sept. 24, 2001. The next day, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft appeared before Congress. Invoking the threat of attacks with poisons from crop-dusting aircraft or other hazardous materials, he said some of the defendants "may have links to the hijackers."

Within two days, the FBI was backing off that allegation. Two months later, prosecutors in Pittsburgh, where the men -- mostly Iraqis -- were convicted, said they had no apparent terrorist ties. The U.S. attorney`s office later learned that the men never intended to buy the hazardous-materials permits.

Robert Cindrich, a former U.S. district judge who heard the case, said that he would "not continue to characterize this as a successful prosecution of a terrorism case, because it was not."

Yet the case still makes up the largest single portion of the government`s list of terrorism prosecutions.

Commentary

An open letter to the troops: You do not have to follow illegal orders EVER, under any circumstances, and you ARE bound by International Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your sense of plain common decency.

One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And “what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq.” This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law… and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I’m telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.


Take a little break to laugh at an idiot: For a fun example of a Bush dupe struggling to come to terms with Bush incompetence, go check out this Jim Hoagland column. Here are a couple representative sentences:

Yes, much of the criticism of President Bush comes from partisans with their own axes to grind, and from those who opposed the Iraq invasion under any circumstances and always will oppose it, no matter how much Iraqis are helped by it. Such complaints are white noise that Bush and aides no longer hear.

But the White House is too quick to find comfort in the ignorant partisanship of some foes and the partisan ignorance of others -- and in the reality that patience is required in all wars and particularly in one as amorphous and demanding as this struggle has become.

My emphasis. What a douchebag.


Comment: The war has taken a dangerous turn - not in Iraq but here at home. It has lost the support of a majority of Americans.

According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News Poll, for the first time since the war began a majority of the American public doesn`t believe the toppling of Saddam Hussein`s regime has made the United States more secure. The survey also found that nearly three- quarters of respondents say the casualty rate in Iraq is unacceptable; two-thirds believe the U.S. military is bogged down; 60 percent say the war was not worth fighting.

If we learned anything from Vietnam, it is that it`s difficult to wage and win a protracted war without public support. Lyndon B. Johnson learned that the hard way; so will George W. Bush. Johnson used a North Vietnamese gunboat attack on U.S. vessels in the Tonkin Gulf to ask Congress for a blank check he used to dramatically escalate the war in Vietnam. Bush used the post-9/11 fear of terrorism and slanted intelligence to convince Americans Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened our security.

In both cases, the American people were had.

Opinion: With the war in Iraq going badly and allegations of abuse by military personnel widespread, young men and women are increasingly deciding that there`s no upside to a career choice in which the most important skills might be ducking bullets and dodging roadside bombs.

The Army, frantically searching for solutions, is offering enlistments as short as 15 months and considering bonuses worth up to $40,000. But it may be facing a problem too difficult for any amount of money to overcome. Americans are catching on to the hideousness and apparent futility of the war in Iraq. Five marines were killed in a single bomb attack in western Iraq on Thursday. On Friday, a front-page Washington Post headline described the effort to rebuild the Iraqi military as "Mission Improbable."

Analysis: The Bush administration`s confused and confusing foreign policy seems hard to decipher—especially regarding headline-grabbing reports on Abu Ghraib prison and the Guantanamo detainee camp.

Some op-eds on the right argue that abuses did not take place there and that, if they did, they were minor and undertaken by isolated individuals, a few rotten apples. Left-leaning pundits blame what they consider horrors on Mr. Bush and the Pentagon. These interpretations, while on the surface dissimilar, share one central false assumption: that the president and his closest aides are embarrassed by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo—so embarrassed that they don`t want information about it to become public.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the administration, in its usual unsubtle way of dealing with foreigners, does want the outside world to be aware of what happens if you`re "against us": you end up in prison or a detainee camp. Gruesome disclosures about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo serve a purpose: to create the kind of visceral fear abroad about the United States that the administration can exploit in its global "war on terror." It is far safer to be feared than loved, wrote Machiavelli, a far cry from the New Testament but what the Bible-reading president—a firm advocate of capital punishment—seems to ardently believe.

Comment: In evaluating the case for impeaching George W. Bush over the Iraq War, his deceptions about weapons of mass destruction most readily come to mind, but there is also the incompetence of his military strategy, especially Bush’s refusal to recognize how such a complex project might go terribly wrong.

Rather than look at the military prospects realistically, Bush and his advisers pursued a consistent policy of wishful thinking, deceiving the American public about the war’s cost in both money and blood, and ultimately deluding even themselves.

From the expected flower-strewn Iraq welcome in March 2003 to the cheery predictions after the Shiite election win in January 2005, the war has suffered from a macabre “Peter Pan” syndrome, that happy thoughts and some pixie dust of propaganda could lift the U.S. to victory – when instead it has sent tens of thousands of people to unnecessary deaths, including almost 1,700 American soldiers.

Reality was banished not only from the pre-war WMD justifications, it’s been barred from mid-war assessments, too. But the hard truth – recognized from the start by many military experts – was that U.S. chances for prevailing in Iraq were never very good and certainly would come at a high price.

As for the practicality of Bush’s impeachment over the Iraq debacle, the Republican control of Congress may make the debate more theoretical than realistic. But two interrelated arguments could reasonably create a foundation for impeachment: the lies that led the nation into the quagmire and the military negligence that left an American army bleeding in this death trap.

Comment: What we`re talking about here is 1,700 dead Americans – based on a lie.

What we`re talking about here is Lou Allen of Milford, Pa.; Brian Pavlich of Port Jervis; Eugene Williams of Highland; Irving Medina of Middletown; Doron Chan of Highland; Catalin Dima of White Lake; Brian Parrello of West Milford, N.J.; Kenneth VonRonn of Bloomingburg; Joseph Tremblay of New Windsor.

All dead – based on a lie,

What I can`t understand – what`s making my head pop off – is that so many Americans are indifferent to this kind of news. Is it because Americans expect presidents to lie, so it`s not news when they do (unless it involves sex)?

Is it because this is simply confirmation of what we sort of knew all along anyway and – so what – we got Saddam (even though Osama is still at large)?

Is it because no one really cares what happens to our troops – even those of you with those stupid, yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your cars? Tell me, what have you done to support our troops other than put a stupid, yellow magnet on your car?

If you really want to support our troops, I have a suggestion: Demand a confession from George Bush.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Baltimore, MD, soldier killed in Al Taqaddum.

Local story: Two Mississippi National Guardsmen killed in roadside bombing in Iraq.

Local story: Funeral scheduled for Franklinton, LA, civilian killed in Camp Liberty rocket attack.

Local story: Schleswig, IA, soldier killed in roadside bombing near Ramadi.

Local story: Antigo, WI, Marine died from wounds received June 8 in Al Anbar province.

Local story: Wyoming, MI, soldier who was killed in Iraq honored statewide with US flags lowered to half-staff.

Local story: Brownwood, TX, killed in roadside bombing in western Iraq.

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Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
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The Best of Tomdispatch: Rebecca Solnit
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3273

May 2003. It was the best of moments for the neocons and the Bush administration, the worst of times for most of the rest of us. In an unprecedented period of antiwar activism preceding a war, tens of millions of people around the world had marched and protested against our onrushing invasion of Iraq, a decision firmly set in stone, as we now know (as many of us guessed even then), by -- at the latest -- July of 2002 at the latest. By mid-May 2003, the war had already been declared all but over; the antiwar movement had packed up and gone home in despair; and just then -- talk about hope in the dark! -- an "unexpected stranger" (as I then wrote) wandered into Tomdispatch. Quite out of the blue, Rebecca Solnit sent me her essay, "Acts of Hope" -- her argument, perhaps with herself, certainly with all those despairing bag-packers, and ultimately with the atmosphere of gloom and doom descending on us. I posted the essay on May 19, 2003 and, in my lesser moments, it`s cheered me ever since.



Its very fate, or unexpected ongoing life, speaks to the surprises -- some lovely -- that await us all. Solnit developed her arguments into a small but potent book, retitled Hope in the Dark, which has slowly begun to spread around the world in various editions -- and if you don`t have your own copy by now, after all these days/weeks/months/years reading Tomdispatch, well, shame on you. That May, when I posted Solnit`s piece, I introduced it this way. (If you want a slightly fuller sense of how Rebecca Solnit and I e-met for the first time, click here.):

You know how, out of the blue, someone can walk into your life? Sometimes, for a book editor, a manuscript walks in the same way. Sometimes, for a reader, a voice drifts in.

It happened to me recently, and it was the voice of Rebecca Solnit, arriving enfolded in an essay about hope. Hope and consequences, you might say. It seemed to have everything in it I`ve been wanting to say (but, for whatever reason, couldn`t) - or rather everything I`ve been feeling all of us needed to hear and hadn`t.

"Activism," Solnit writes, "is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark." Exactly. And history, she adds, "is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does." At the end of a game, she might have added, it`s so simple. You tote up the score, sort out the winners and losers, close up the board, and go on to something else. At a pause in history, as at present, if you tote up the score, close up the board, and go home, you`re making a disastrous mistake.

A lot of the antiwar movement has done that in the wake of our second Iraq war. And I don`t blame them. All those people marching. All that opposition. And still a war -- and look at the opinion polls now! But what`s so beautiful about Solnit`s piece, the gorgeous writing aside, is that she wants us to stop adding up the score in that game-like way. She wants us to acknowledge the darkness of our moment and our world, but also realize that the score isn`t in, that it can`t be known. Not ever. Not really. And then she wants us to make a wager, to take that leap into the dark, and bet on hope. She wants that because we simply can`t know the consequences of our acts, a point she makes with particular grace.

Looking back, Solnit, who resists her all-American, media-rolodex fate as a pundit of hope, writes the following:

When Hope in the Dark went out on Tomdispatch, I discovered the viral charms of the Internet: the piece took on a life of its own, passed along by e-mail, reposted at many other sites, pirated by alternative weeklies, printed out as a brochure distributed by one activist. Though I`d been reading much of my news online, at Tomdispatch, Common Dreams, Truthout, Z-Net, Alternet, Narco News &etc., I hadn`t quite realized how potent a medium it could be for those who write for it. I became a convert to the power of this medium (and a Tomdispatch regular).

Soon after, I found that I had also inadvertently become hope`s official spokesperson, and so I have been publicly disagreeing with comfortably situated media persons about the subject ever since. Their ability to come up with new and creative ways of hanging onto defeatism remains dynamic as they demand hope be nothing less than a lottery you win every time. They point to the reelection of Bush and Blair and the ongoing war in Iraq to suggest that we should surrender, as though only sure, quick victories were worth living for, or all defeats were final. I wonder, now, if surrender and despair as I encounter them in the US and UK are, in part, luxury goods, for those for whom loss means the blues, not starvation, enslavement, or violent death.

The most powerful spokespeople for hope remain those most in need of it -- Subcommandante Marcos speaking for the Zapatistas; the Coalition of Imokalee Workers, a bunch of farmworker immigrants who won a huge victory against Taco Bell this spring; a Cambodian woman among a group of blue-collar night-school students I spoke to, who told me she was for hope, "because without hope I would not have struggled, and without struggle I would not have survived the Khmer Rouge."

Believe me, this essay is an evergreen. If you haven`t ever read it, don`t miss it. If you have, read it again and imagine what can`t ever be imagined -- the surprises in store for all of us.

Tom

Acts of Hope
Challenging Empire on the World Stage
By Rebecca Solnit

What We Hope For

On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first world war, the first terrible war in the modern sense -- slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes -- Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet? We talk about "what we hope for" in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it`s a more powerful and more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa?

Twenty-one years ago this June, a million people gathered in Central Park to demand a nuclear freeze. They didn`t get it. The movement was full of people who believed they`d realize their goal in a few years and then go home. Many went home disappointed or burned out. But in less than a decade, major nuclear arms reductions were negotiated, helped along by European antinuclear movements and the impetus they gave Gorbachev. Since then, the issue has fallen off the map and we have lost much of what was gained. The US never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Bush administration is planning to resume the full-fledged nuclear testing halted in 1991, to resume manufacture, to expand the arsenal, and perhaps even to use it in once-proscribed ways.

It`s always too soon to go home. And it`s always too soon to calculate effect. I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear movement in the United States in 1963, the one that did contribute to a major victory: the end of aboveground nuclear testing with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother`s milk and baby teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock -- one of the most high-profile activists on the issue then -- say that the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.

Unending Change

A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, activism is often a reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq, we create a global peace movement in which 10 to 30 million people march on seven continents on the same weekend. But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It`s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.

Some years ago, scientists attempted to create a long-range weather forecasting program, assuming that the same initial conditions would generate the same weather down the road. It turned out that the minutest variations, even the undetectable things, things they could perhaps not yet even imagine as data, could cause entirely different weather to emerge from almost identical initial conditions. This was famously summed up as the saying about the flap of a butterfly`s wings on one continent that can change the weather on another.

History is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That`s why you can`t save anything. Saving is the wrong word. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might`ve prevented them from becoming extinct. We will have to continue to prevent that as long as they continue not to be extinct. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor dust doth corrupt, and this model of salvation is perhaps why Americans are so good at crisis response and then going home to let another crisis brew. Problems seldom go home. Most nations agree to a ban on hunting endangered species of whale, but their oceans are compromised in other ways. DDT is banned in the US, but exported to the third world, and Monsanto moves on to the next atrocity.

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you`re lucky you don`t know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees.

As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue of slavery, three quarters of a century passed before it was abolished it in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable. And as the law of unintended consequences might lead you to expect, the abolition movement also sparked the first widespread women`s rights movement, which took about the same amount of time to secure the right to vote for American women, has achieved far more in the subsequent 83 years, and is by no means done. Activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark.

Writers understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might just rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire. Sharon Salzberg, in her book Faith, recounts how she put together a book of teachings by the Buddhist monk U Pandita and consigned the project to the "minor-good-deed category." Long afterward, she found out that when Burmese democracy movement`s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was kept isolated under house arrest by that country`s dictators, the book and its instructions in meditation "became her main source of spiritual support during those intensely difficult years." Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin and Arthur Rimbaud, like Henry David Thoreau, achieved their greatest impact long after their deaths, long after weeds had grown over the graves of the bestsellers of their times. Gandhi`s Thoreau-influenced nonviolence was as important in the American South as it was in India, and what transpired with Martin Luther King`s sophisticated version of it has influenced civil disobedience movements around the world. Decades after their assassinations they are still with us.

At the port of Oakland, California, on April 7, several hundred peace activists came out at dawn to picket the gates of a company shipping arms to Iraq. The longshoreman`s union had vowed not to cross our picket. The police arrived in riot gear and, unprovoked and unthreatened, began shooting wooden bullets and beanbags of shot at the activists. Three members of the media, nine longshoremen, and fifty activists were injured. I saw the bloody welts the size of half grapefruits on the backs of some of the young men--they had been shot in the back -- and a swelling the size of an egg on the jaw of a delicate yoga instructor. Told that way, violence won. But the violence inspired the union dock workers to form closer alliances with antiwar activists and underscored the connections between local and global issues. On May 12 we picketed again, with no violence. This time, the longshoremen acted in solidarity with the picketers and -- for the first time in anyone`s memory -- the shipping companies cancelled the work shift rather than face the protesters. Told that way, the story continues to unfold, and we have grown stronger. And there`s a third way to tell it. The picket stalled a lot of semi trucks. Some of the drivers were annoyed. Some sincerely believed that the war was a humanitarian effort. Some of them -- notably a group of South Asian drivers standing around in the morning sun looking radiant -- thought we were great. After the picket was broken up, one immigrant driver honked in support and pulled over to ask for a peace sign for his rig. I stepped forward to pierce holes into it so he could bungee-cord it to the chrome grille. We talked briefly, shook hands, and he stepped up into the cab. He was turned back at the gates --they weren`t accepting deliveries from antiwar truckers. When I saw him next he was sitting on a curb all alone behind police lines, looking cheerful and fearless. Who knows what will ultimately come of the spontaneous courage of this man with a job on the line?

Victories of the New Peace Movement

It was a setup for disappointment to expect that there would be an acknowledged cause and effect relationship between the antiwar actions and the Bush administration. On the other hand... • We will likely never know, but it seems that the Bush administration decided against the "Shock and Awe" saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few hundred thousand lives.

• The global peace movement was grossly underreported on February 15th. A million people marching in Barcelona was nice, but I also heard about the thousands in Chapel Hill, NC, the hundred and fifty people holding a peace vigil in the small town of Las Vegas, NM, the antiwar passion of people in even smaller villages from Bolivia to Thailand.

• Activists are often portrayed as an unrepresentative, marginal rabble, but something shifted in the media last fall. Since then, antiwar activists have mostly been represented as a diverse, legitimate, and representative body, a watershed victory for our representation and our long-term prospects.

• Many people who had never spoken out, never marched in the street, never joined groups, written to politicians, or donated to campaigns, did so; countless people became political as never before. That is, if nothing else, a vast aquifer of passion now stored up to feed the river of change. New networks and communities and websites and listserves and jail solidarity groups and coalitions arose.

• In the name of the so-called war on terror, which seems to inculcate terror at home and enact it abroad, we have been encouraged to fear our neighbors, each other, strangers, (particularly middle-eastern, Arab, and Moslem people), to spy on them, to lock ourselves up, to privatize ourselves. By living out our hope and resistance in public together with strangers of all kinds, we overcame this catechism of fear, we trusted each other; we forged a community that bridged all differences among the peace loving as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.

• We achieved a global movement without leaders. There were many brilliant spokespeople, theorists and organizers, but when your fate rests on your leader, you are only as strong, as incorruptible, and as creative as he -- or, occasionally, she -- is. What could be more democratic than millions of people who, via the grapevine, the Internet, and various groups from churches to unions to direct-action affinity groups, can organize themselves? Of course leaderless actions and movements have been organized for the past couple of decades, but never on such a grand scale. The African writer Laurens Van Der Post once said that no great new leaders were emerging because it was time for us to cease to be followers. Perhaps we have.

• We succeeded in doing what the anti-Vietnam War movement infamously failed to do: to refuse the dichotomies. We were able to oppose a war on Iraq without endorsing Saddam Hussein. We were able to oppose a war with compassion for the troops who fought it. Most of us did not fall into the traps that our foreign policy so often does and that earlier generations of radicals did: the ones in which our enemy`s enemy is our friend, in which the opponent of an evil must be good, in which a nation and its figurehead, a general and his troops, become indistinguishable. We were not against the US and for Iraq; we were against the war, and many of us were against all war, all weapons of mass destruction -- even ours -- and all violence, everywhere. We are not just an antiwar movement. We are a peace movement.

• Questions the peace and anti-globalization movements have raised are now mainstream, though no mainstream source will say why, or perhaps even knows why. Activists targeted Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron and Lockheed Martin, among others, as war profiteers with ties to the Bush administration. The actions worked not by shutting the places down in any significant way but by making their operations a public question. Direct action seldom works directly, but now the media scrutinizes those corporations as never before. Representative Henry Waxman publicly questioned Halliburton`s ties to terrorist states the other day, and the media is closely questioning the administration`s closed-door decision to award Halliburton, the company vice-president Cheney headed until he took office, a $7 billion contract to administer Iraqi oil. These are breakthroughs.

The Angel of Alternate History

American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities. There`s plenty of what`s worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda. We need to extend the passion the war brought forth into preventing the next one, and toward addressing all the forms of violence besides bombs. We need a movement that doesn`t just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope. And for that we need to understand how change works and how to count our victories.

While serving on the board of Citizen Alert, a Nevada nonprofit environmental and antinuclear group, I once wrote a fundraising letter modeled after "It`s a Wonderful Life." Frank Capra`s movie is a model for radical history, because what the angel Clarence shows the suicidal George Bailey is what the town would look like if he hadn`t done his best for his neighbors. This angel of alternate history shows not what happened but what didn`t, and that`s what`s hardest to weigh. Citizen Alert`s victories were largely those of what hadn`t happened to the air, the water, the land, and the people of Nevada. And the history of what the larger movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted, species unexterminated.

I was born during the summer the Berlin Wall went up, into a country in which there weren`t even words, let alone redress, for many of the practices that kept women and people of color from free and equal citizenship, in which homosexuality was diagnosed as a disease and treated as a crime, in which the ecosystem was hardly even a concept, in which extinction and pollution were issues only a tiny minority heeded, in which "better living through chemistry" didn`t yet sound like black humor, in which the US and USSR were on hair-trigger alert for a nuclear Armageddon, in which most of the big questions about the culture had yet to be asked. It was a world with more rainforest, more wild habitat, more ozone layer, and more species; but few were defending those things then. An ecological imagination was born and became part of the common culture only in the past few decades, as did a broader and deeper understanding of human diversity and human rights.

The world gets worse. It also gets better. And the future stays dark.

Nobody knows the consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways. I was one of thousands of activists at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s, an important, forgotten history still unfolding out there where the US and UK have exploded more than a thousand nuclear bombs, with disastrous effects on the environment and human health, (and where the Bush Administration would like to resume testing, thereby sabotaging the unratified Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty). We didn`t shut down our test site, but our acts inspired the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov, on February 27, 1989, to read a manifesto instead of poetry on live Kazakh TV -- a manifesto demanding a shutdown of the Soviet nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and calling a meeting. Five thousand Kazakhs gathered at the Writer`s Union the next day and formed a movement to shut down the site. They named themselves the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement.

The Soviet Test Site was indeed shut down. Suleimenov was the catalyst, and though we in Nevada were his inspiration, what gave him his platform was his poetry in a country that loved poets. Perhaps Suleimenov wrote all his poems so that one day he could stand up in front of a TV camera and deliver not a poem but a manifesto. And perhaps Arundhati Roy wrote a ravishing novel that catapulted her to stardom so that when she stood up to oppose dams and destruction of the local for the benefit of the transnational, people would notice. Or perhaps these writers opposed the ravaging of the earth so that poetry too -- poetry in the broadest sense -- would survive in the world.

American poets became an antiwar movement themselves when Sam Hamill declined an invitation to Laura Bush`s "Poetry and the American Voice" symposium shortly after her husband`s administration announced their "Shock and Awe" plan, and he circulated his letter of outrage. His e-mail box filled up, he started www.poetsagainstthewar.org, to which about 11,000 poets have submitted poems to date. Hamill became a major spokesperson against the war and his website has become an organizing tool for the peace movement.

Not Left But Forward

The glum traditional left often seems intent upon finding the cloud around every silver lining. This January, when Governor Ryan of Illinois overturned a hundred and sixty-seven death sentences, there were left-wing commentators who found fault with the details, carped when we should have been pouring champagne over our heads like football champs. And joy is one of our weapons and one of our victories. Non-activists sometimes chide us for being joyous at demonstrations, for having fun while taking on the serious business of the world, but in a time when alienation, isolation, and powerlessness are among our principal afflictions, just being out in the streets en masse is not a demand for victory: it is a victory.

But there`s an increasing gap between this new movement with its capacity for joy and the old figureheads. Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction. There is tremendous devastation now. In the time it takes you to read this, acres of rainforest will vanish, a species will go extinct, women will be raped, men shot, and far too many children will die of easily preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: these are victories.

Nearly everyone felt, after September 11, 2001, along with grief and fear, a huge upwelling of idealism, of openness, of a readiness to question and to learn, a sense of being connected and a desire to live our lives for something more, even if it wasn`t familiar, safe, or easy. Nothing could have been more threatening to the current administration, and they have done everything they can to repress it.

But that desire is still out there. It`s the force behind a huge new movement we don`t even have a name for yet, a movement that`s not a left opposed to a right, but perhaps a below against above, little against big, local and decentralized against consolidated. If we could throw out the old definitions, we could recognize where the new alliances lie; and those alliances -- of small farmers, of factory workers, of environmentalists, of the poor, of the indigenous, of the just, of the farseeing -- could be extraordinarily powerful against the forces of corporate profit and institutional violence. Left and right are terms for where the radicals and conservatives sat in the French National Assembly after the French Revolution. We`re not in that world anymore, let alone that seating arrangement. We`re in one that for all its ruins and poisons and legacies is utterly new. Anti-globalization activists say, "Another world is possible." It is not only possible, it is inevitable; and we need to participate in shaping it.

I`m hopeful, partly because we don`t know what is going to happen in that dark future and we might as well live according to our principles as long as we`re here. Hope, the opposite of fear, lets us do that. Imagine the world as a lifeboat: the corporations and the current administration are smashing holes in it as fast (or faster) than the rest of us can bail or patch the leaks. But it`s important to take account of the bailers as well as the smashers and to write epics in the present tense rather than elegies in the past tense. That`s part of what floats this boat. And if it sinks, we all sink, so why not bail? Why not row? The reckless Bush Administration seems to be generating what US administrations have so long held back: a world in which the old order is shattered and anything is possible.

Zapatista spokesman Subcommandante Marcos adds, "History written by Power taught us that we had lost.... We did not believe what Power taught us. We skipped class when they taught conformity and idiocy. We failed modernity. We are united by the imagination, by creativity, by tomorrow. In the past we not only met defeat but also found a desire for justice and the dream of being better. We left skepticism hanging from the hook of big capital and discovered that we could believe, that it was worth believing, that we should believe -- in ourselves. Health to you, and don`t forget that flowers, like hope, are harvested."

And they grow in the dark. "I believe," adds Thoreau, "in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows."

Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (which developed from this piece) and seven other books, including River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which on the Spurs Award of the Western Writers of America, among others. She lives in San Francisco, of course.

Copyright 2003 Rebecca Solnit


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Congressman Maurice Hinchey believes it is time for a Resolution of Inquiry.

Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) spoke to the media yesterday.

Here`s a quote from the Times Herald-Record article: "If the president intentionally twisted the facts about the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war, and lied to Congress about it, and then elicited authorization from Congress to launch a war that`s caused the deaths of 1,700 U.S. men and women along with tens of thousands of others, that is definitely an impeachable offense."
http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/06/13/drhousem.htm

Hinchey told AfterDowningStreet.org on Monday, "I think a Resolution of Inquiry is completely appropriate at this stage. It`s something that should be done."

Contact the Congressman to thank him!
http://www.house.gov/hinchey/contact

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The Independent
Saddam Interrogation Screened - in Silence. The Question Is: Why?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=646…

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday 14 June 2005

There he was, just as his victims looked on his own television screens, his words censored, his arguments unknown, his case as undemocratic as the "judicial" courts in which Saddam destroyed his own enemies.

The Iraqis - or, let us speak frankly, the Americans who tried to censor the old reprobate`s previous court appearance - decided yesterday that his words would also be censored. That is Saddamism. This is how Saddam ran Iraq.

The words were obliterated. And now the Americans and their obedient, Shia-led government, are acting out the same Saddamite line.

The pictures, the BBC admitted, were "mute". What in God`s name did this mean? Who emasculated the BBC to such a degree that it should say such a ridiculous thing? Why were they mute? The BBC didn`t tell us.

If Saddam was really being charged with war crimes over the killings of Shias - which I hope he was - then why, in heaven`s name, didn`t we hear what he had to say? Why use the methods of Saddam himself? The silent film, the assumption of guilt? Or was Saddam telling the court that the United States was behind his regime, that Washington had given him the means to destroy the Halabja Kurds with gas?

How can we know? And when so many of our journalistic brethren failed to challenge the reason why this tape should be "mute", what does this say of us? We are told, by Saddam`s jailers of course, that he is being questioned about the murder of Shia villagers south of Baghdad in 1982. I hope so. But how do we know?

The reality is that Saddam is from Iraq`s past, something from the era before "our" insecurity and destruction and the rape and insurgency and death which has now overwhelmed Iraq.

Yes, there are those who would like to see Saddam brought to justice. But they want safety and law and order and freedom - freedom from us, too - before they care about this crazed old man`s trial. But we insist the Iraqis have bread and circuses before they have freedom. And they must experience our democracy by understanding that the defendant in a court must be shut up and denied his own words in order to appear on the BBC.

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Jun 15, 2005

US dragged down by news from Iraq
By Jim Lobe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF15Ak03.html

WASHINGTON - Readers of the Pentagon`s Early Bird news file, a daily compilation of about 50 stories circulated throughout the US national-security bureaucracy, could be forgiven on Monday for reaching for the Rolaids, a popular over-the-counter medication for queasy stomachs.

As with last Friday`s edition, Monday`s lead stories all dealt with Iraq. Indeed, news about Iraq, which faded to the inside pages after Iraq`s January 30 elections and stayed there well into the spring, has made a surprisingly strong comeback in the Early Bird of late, just like the Iraqi insurgency itself.

Monday`s first story, from USA Today and headlined "Poll: USA is losing patience on Iraq", concerned the most recent Gallup survey, which found that nearly 60% of the public now favors a partial or complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in what the newspaper called "the most downbeat view of the war since it began in 2003".

Item number two, "Officers, military can`t end insurgency", published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, began: "A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 US troops in the last two years."

Despite Vice President Dick Cheney`s confident assertion two weeks ago that the insurgency was in its "last throes", the story featured one particularly telling observation from a US officer who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi troops, regarding how easy it was for the insurgency to replenish its forces. "We can`t kill them," he said. "When I kill one, I create three."

The third story, from The New York Times, seemed designed to play on the tension created in the first story. "As Iraqi army trains, word in the field is it may take years" ran the headline. It was followed by text that noted that top generals who four months ago predicted that Washington could begin withdrawing its 140,000 troops by the end of this year now say "it could be two years, perhaps longer".

That message was positively upbeat compared to the lead story in Friday`s Early Bird headlined "Building Iraq`s army: Mission improbable", co-written by the only fluent Arab-speaker in the mainstream US press, Anthony Shadid.

That nearly 3,000-word Washington Post article, which one Pentagon official called "devastating", concerned the enormous political and cultural gaps that divided US troops from the Sunni Arab soldiers with whom they are paired in northern Iraq, where the insurgency is strongest. While one reporter was embedded with the US troops, Shadid stayed with the counterpart Iraqi unit for more than three days.

Aside from documenting the pervasive sense of distrust and contempt that the two groups of soldiers had for each other, as well as the vastly superior equipment, protection, housing and technology available to the US troops, the story also recounted incidents of outright insubordination by the Iraqi unit.

"The journey revealed fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable differences over everything from the reluctance of Muslim soldiers to search mosques and homes to basic questions of lifestyle," according to the story, which quoted one US reserve officer mocking official White House and Pentagon predictions that Iraqi security forces would be ready soon to fight the insurgency on their own.

"From the ground, I can say with certainty they won`t be ready before I leave," Lieutenant Kenrick Cato told the Post. "And I know I`ll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don`t think they`ll be ready then."

Other lead stories from last week offered little comfort to Early Bird readers. The second story, "Militia backed by Iraqi leaders accused in attacks", from the Philadelphia Inquirer, started: "A militant Shi`ite Muslim group with close ties to Iran has gained enormous power since Iraq`s January election and now is accused of conducting a terror campaign against Iraq`s Sunni Muslim minority that includes kidnappings and murders."

The third story, "Insurgency seen forcing change in Iraq strategy", from the Boston Globe, offered no relief: "Two years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq conflict has evolved into a classic guerrilla war," it noted. It also said that, despite US estimates that it had killed or captured 1,000 to 3,000 insurgents a month, the number of daily attacks has doubled to 70 - as has the number of suicide attacks - in just the past four months, and that the current death toll for US soldiers is running at about two a day.

The Globe also wrote about a recent internal poll that found that nearly 45% of the Iraqi population supported the insurgent attacks, while only 15% of those polled said they strongly supported the US-led coalition. So much for the notion so eagerly embraced by senior administration officials that an elected government would automatically translate into opposition to the insurgency.

Indeed, it now appears that whatever political gains were made as a result of the election have now been largely squandered as a result of the growing alienation of the Sunni population, which is why another New York Times story about efforts to bring Sunnis into the constitution-writing process, "Sunni-Shi`ite quarrel edges closer to political stalemate", offered no relief to the growing pessimism. It too was given prominence in Monday`s Early Bird.

As reflected in USA Today`s poll story, all of these reports have affected public opinion which, aside from a brief spurt of optimism after the January elections, has become steadily more negative since February.

Indeed, last week a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that for the first time since the war began, more than half of the public believed that the US invasion of Iraq had not made the US more safe, and nearly 40% described the situation there now as analogous to the Vietnam War.

"The steady drip of negative news from Iraq is significantly undermining support for the US military operation there," noted Andy Kohout, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which released its own latest findings.

Similar to the Gallup poll, the Pew poll found an all-time high of 46% of the public favoring a withdrawal from Iraq, although, unlike the Gallup poll, it didn`t distinguish between a partial and a complete pullout.

The fear that Iraq could turn out to be similar to Vietnam has also gained traction, according to Kohout, whose latest poll showed that 35% of the public, including a disproportionate number of citizens who say they followed Iraq news particularly closely, believed that the situation would turn out like Vietnam, while 47% still believed the US could stabilize the situation.

Stephen Kull of the University of Maryland`s Program on International Policy Attitudes said he believes the latest polling data do not indicate a "tipping point" where the George W Bush administration may be forced to withdraw, in part because no credible leader has stepped forward with an alternative plan that could assure the public that withdrawal would not make the situation worse.

"But it does create a clear political problem for the president as it affects his own favorability rating, and then Congress doesn`t feel it has to be as responsive to him," said Kull.

Indications that this is indeed beginning to happen are becoming more plentiful. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted 300-128 to defeat a resolution that would have required the president to present a plan for withdrawal from Iraq, but a 122-79 majority of Democrats voted for it, along with five Republicans, including three who had supported the original decision to go to war.

In fact, Congress appears to be lagging behind the public on the issue. Some 72% of Democrats, 65% of independents and 41% of Republicans said they favored a partial or complete withdrawal, according to the Gallup poll.

(Inter Press Service)

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Friedman wird es nie begreifen, die USA sind das Problem, das sie zu lösen glauben.
Nur wenn sie weg sind, kann begonnen werden die anderen Probleme der Region zu lösen.

June 15, 2005
Let`s Talk About Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/opinion/15friedman.html

Ever since Iraq`s remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don`t want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don`t want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don`t want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

Well, we need to talk about Iraq. This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.

Our core problem in Iraq remains Donald Rumsfeld`s disastrous decision - endorsed by President Bush - to invade Iraq on the cheap. From the day the looting started, it has been obvious that we did not have enough troops there. We have never fully controlled the terrain. Almost every problem we face in Iraq today - the rise of ethnic militias, the weakness of the economy, the shortages of gas and electricity, the kidnappings, the flight of middle-class professionals - flows from not having gone into Iraq with the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force.

Yes, yes, I know we are training Iraqi soldiers by the battalions, but I don`t think this is the key. Who is training the insurgent-fascists? Nobody. And yet they are doing daily damage to U.S. and Iraqi forces. Training is overrated, in my book. Where you have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching above its weight. Where you don`t have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching a clock.

Where do you get motivated officers and soldiers? That can come only from an Iraqi leader and government that are seen as representing all the country`s main factions. So far the Iraqi political class has been a disappointment. The Kurds have been great. But the Sunni leaders have been shortsighted at best and malicious at worst, fantasizing that they are going to make a comeback to power through terror. As for the Shiites, their spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has been a positive force on the religious side, but he has no political analog. No Shiite Hamid Karzai has emerged.

"We have no galvanizing figure right now," observed Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi historian who heads the Iraq Memory Foundation. "Sistani`s counterpart on the democratic front has not emerged. Certainly, the Americans made many mistakes, but at this stage less and less can be blamed on them. The burden is on Iraqis. And we still have not risen to the magnitude of the opportunity before us."

I still don`t know if a self-sustaining, united and democratizing Iraq is possible. I still believe it is a vital U.S. interest to find out. But the only way to find out is to create a secure environment. It is very hard for moderate, unifying, national leaders to emerge in a cauldron of violence.

Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort to bring in those Sunnis who want to be part of the process and fight to the death those who don`t. As Stanford`s Larry Diamond, author of an important new book on the Iraq war, "Squandered Victory," puts it, we need "a bold mobilizing strategy" right now. That means the new Iraqi government, the U.S. and the U.N. teaming up to widen the political arena in Iraq, energizing the constitution-writing process and developing a communications-diplomatic strategy that puts our bloodthirsty enemies on the defensive rather than us. The Bush team has been weak in all these areas. For weeks now, we haven`t even had ambassadors in Iraq, Afghanistan or Jordan.

We`ve already paid a huge price for the Rumsfeld Doctrine - "Just enough troops to lose." Calling for more troops now, I know, is the last thing anyone wants to hear. But we are fooling ourselves to think that a decent, normal, forward-looking Iraqi politics or army is going to emerge from a totally insecure environment, where you can feel safe only with your own tribe.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 15, 2005
The Interactive Truth
By STACY SCHIFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/opinion/15schiff.html

It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it`s the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.

More than 60 percent of the American people don`t trust the press. Why should they? They`ve been reading "The Da Vinci Code" and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it`s a movie on the page. But "The Da Vinci Code" is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown`s crackerjack research I`m shooting on sight.

The novel`s success does point up something critical. We`re happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we`re living (and dying for) today. And not only is it remarkably easy to believe what we want to believe. It`s remarkably easy to find someone who will back us up. Twenty-five years ago George W. S. Trow meditated on this in "Within the Context of No Context." Then it indeed appeared that authority and orthodoxy were wilting in the glare of television. Have we exterminated reason in the meantime?

If you are 6 years old and both your parents read one online, you can be forgiven for not knowing what a newspaper is. You would also be on to something. The news has slipped its moorings. It is no longer held captive by two-inch columns of type or a sonorous 6 p.m. baritone. It has gone on the lam. Anyone can be a reporter - or a book reviewer, TV star, museum guide, podcaster or pundit.

This week The Los Angeles Times announced its intention to exile the square and stodgy voice of authority farther yet. The paper will launch an interactive editorial page. "We`ll have some editorials where you can go online and edit an editorial to your satisfaction," the page`s editor says. "It`s the ultimate in reader participation," explains his boss, Michael Kinsley. Let`s hope the interactive editorial will lead directly to the interactive tax return. On the other hand, I hope we might stop short before we get to structural engineering and brain surgery. Some of us like our truth the way we like our martinis: dry and straight up.

Kinsley takes as his model Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and which grows by accretion and consensus. Relatedly, it takes as its premise the idea that "facts" belong between quotation marks. It`s a winning formula; Wikipedia is one of the Web`s most popular sites. I asked a teenager if he understood that it carries a disclaimer; Wikipedia "can`t guarantee the validity of the information found here." "That`s just so that no one will sue them," he shrugged. As to the content: "It`s all true, mostly."

What if we all vote on the truth? We don`t need to, because we will be overruled by what becomes a legend most: entertainment. Twenty-one percent of young Americans get their news from comedy shows. Journalism once counted as the first draft of history. Today that would be screenwriting. As Frank Rich reminds us, the enduring line from Watergate - "Follow the money" - was not Deep Throat`s. It was William Goldman`s. And "Show me the money" was Cameron Crowe, not President Bush.

Evidently Deep Throat himself carped, pre-Watergate, that newspapers failed to get to the bottom of things. Of course apocrypha have always had staying power. That story about the cherry tree was a lie. Especially in unsettled times, we love conspiracy theories. They are comforting and safe. You can go out with a conspiracy theory after dark and not worry about foul play. Before Oliver Stone there was Shakespeare, although he generally had the good grace to let a century or two go by before he contorted history.

What is new is our odd, bipolar approach to fact. We have a fresh taste for documentaries. Any novelist will tell you that readers hunger for nonfiction, which may explain the number of historical figures who have crowded into our novels. Facts seem important. Facts have gravitas. But the illusion of facts will suffice. One in three Americans still believes there were W.M.D.`s in Iraq.

And that`s the way it is.

Stacy Schiff, the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" and a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a guest columnist for two weeks.
E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Saddam hatte Araber im kurdischen Gebiet angesiedelt und dafür Kurden vertrieben. Auch sonstige Minderheiten wie die Turkmenen leben in der Region.
Nun schlagen die Kurden zurück und vertreiben die Minderheiten. Es gibt noch viele ungelöste Probleme im ehemaligen Irak und seitdem die US-Amerikaner die Büchse der Pandora geöffnet haben, fliegt ihnen ein Teil nach dem anderen um die Ohren.
Saddam hatte durch sein Gewaltregime diese Probleme unter dem Deckel gehalten.

washingtonpost.com
Kurdish Officials Sanction Abductions in Kirkuk
U.S. Memo Says Arabs, Turkmens Secretly Sent to the North
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Steve Fainaru and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; A01

KIRKUK, Iraq -- Police and security units, forces led by Kurdish political parties and backed by the U.S. military, have abducted hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmens in this intensely volatile city and spirited them to prisons in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, government documents and families of the victims.

Seized off the streets of Kirkuk or in joint U.S.-Iraqi raids, the men have been transferred secretly and in violation of Iraqi law to prisons in the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Sulaymaniyah, sometimes with the knowledge of U.S. forces. The detainees, including merchants, members of tribal families and soldiers, have often remained missing for months; some have been tortured, according to released prisoners and the Kirkuk police chief.

A confidential State Department cable, obtained by The Washington Post and addressed to the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the "extra-judicial detentions" were part of a "concerted and widespread initiative" by Kurdish political parties "to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner."

The abductions have "greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines" and endangered U.S. credibility, the nine-page cable, dated June 5, stated. "Turkmen in Kirkuk tell us they perceive a U.S. tolerance for the practice while Arabs in Kirkuk believe Coalition Forces are directly responsible."

The cable said the 116th Brigade Combat Team, which oversees security in Kirkuk, had urged Kurdish officials to end the practice. "I can tell you that the coalition forces absolutely do not condone it," Brig. Gen. Alan Gayhart, the brigade commander, said in an interview.

Kirkuk, a city of almost 1 million, is home to Iraq`s most combustible mix of politics and economic power. Kurds, who are just shy of a majority in the city and are growing in number, hope to make Kirkuk and the vast oil reserves beneath it part of an autonomous Kurdistan. Arabs and Turkmens compose most of the rest of the population. They have struck an alliance to curb the ambitions of the Kurds, who have wielded increasing authority in a long-standing collaboration with their U.S. allies.

Some abductions occurred more than a year ago. But according to U.S. officials, Kirkuk police and Arab leaders, the campaign surged after the Jan. 30 elections consolidated the two main Kurdish parties` control over the Kirkuk provincial government. The two parties are the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases; Arab and Turkmen politicians put the number at more than 600 and said many families feared retribution for coming forward.

U.S. and Iraqi officials, along with the State Department cable, said the campaign was being orchestrated and carried out by the Kurdish intelligence agency, known as Asayesh, and the Kurdish-led Emergency Services Unit, a 500-member anti-terrorism squad within the Kirkuk police force. Both are closely allied with the U.S. military. The intelligence agency is made up of Kurds, and the emergency unit is composed of a mixture of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens.

The cable indicated that the problem extended to Mosul, Iraq`s third-largest city and the main city in the north, and regions near the Kurdish-controlled border with Turkey.

The transfers occurred "without authority of local courts or the knowledge of Ministries of Interior or Defense in Baghdad," the State Department cable stated. U.S. military officials said judges they consulted in Kirkuk declared the practice illegal under Iraqi law.

Early on, the campaign targeted former Baath Party officials and suspected insurgents, but it has since broadened. Among those seized and secretly transferred north were car merchants, businessmen, members of tribal families, Arab soldiers and, in one case, an 87-year-old farmer with diabetes. A former fighter pilot said his interrogation in Irbil focused in part on whether he participated in the chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja in March 1988, in which an estimated 5,000 people died.

"I think it`s about revenge," said the man, who identified himself as Abu Abdullah Jabbouri and who was released last week from the prison in Irbil.

Abdul Rahman Mustafa, the Kurdish governor of Kirkuk province, said the reports of abductions were "not true," although prisoners were often transferred to other provinces to relieve crowding. Jalal Jawhar, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk, said some suspects were transferred to prisons in Irbil and Sulaymaniyah with the "complete cooperation" of the U.S. military.

"This is a normal procedure," Jawhar said.

Maj. Darren Blagburn, intelligence officer for the 116th Brigade Combat Team in Kirkuk, acknowledged that Arab and Turkmen detainees were surreptitiously transferred to Kurdish prisons without judicial oversight. He denied any U.S. role in the transfers and said they were necessary because of crowding in Kirkuk`s jails.

Blagburn said he and other U.S. officers intervened with Kurdish leaders after discovering the practice nearly a month ago. He said he was "pretty sure" the practice had ended.

"We put a stop to it," Blagburn said, adding: "One of the myths is that it is spiraling out of control and nobody is doing anything about it and nobody cares. That is absolutely not true."

But across an already tense political landscape in Kirkuk, the campaign has deepened a climate of fear and intimidation.

Gen. Turhan Yusuf Abdel-Rahman, the chief of Kirkuk`s police force, described the abductions as "political kidnappings" orchestrated by the Kurdish parties and their intelligence arms. Abdel-Rahman, who is Turkmen, said at least four Arabs and one Turkmen were seized last week but that "there may be others." On Sunday, two days after Blagburn`s remarks, the U.S. military received reports that nine more Arabs and Turkmens were missing.

Abdel-Rahman said his officers were taking part in the majority of the abductions despite his attempts to stop the practice. He said 40 percent of Kirkuk`s 6,120-member police force was loyal to the two Kurdish political parties. Acting on the parties` orders, uniformed officers carried out the abductions using the police department`s cars and pickup trucks, he said.

"The main problem is that the loyalty to the police is to the parties and not the police force," said Abdel-Rahman, 41, a career officer. "They`ll obey the parties` orders and disobey us."

Abdel-Rahman said he was deeply frustrated. "People ask us about their sons. What should I say to them?"
History of Struggle

The struggle for Kirkuk draws on the city`s tortured history. In a policy known as Arabization, President Saddam Hussein drove out thousands of Kurds and replaced them with Arabs from areas to the south. That step was part of a larger strategy to depopulate the region of Kurds, an effort that peaked at the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. In all, at least 100,000 Kurds were killed and 2,000 villages destroyed as Hussein took revenge for Kurdish support of Iran during the conflict.

After Hussein`s fall, the Kurdish parties seized control of key positions within Kirkuk`s security forces, and the Jan. 30 elections put Kurds in control of the provincial government. They have also emerged as the U.S. military`s main ally in the fight against Sunni Arab insurgents in the region, providing intelligence, support and manpower.

The U.S. military acknowledged picking up detainees in joint raids with the Kurdish-led police and handing them over. But military officials said the secret transfers were ordered by individual Iraqi police commanders. Blagburn said commanders affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party dispatched detainees to an Irbil prison operated by the party`s intelligence arm. Commanders affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan sent detainees to their party`s facility in Sulaymaniyah, he said.

The State Department cable noted that U.S. commanders had denied complicity in the transfers, contrary to the perceptions of Arabs and Turkmens. "Coalition PR efforts to counter the story have been ineffective," stated the cable, which was written by the U.S. Embassy`s regional coordinator.

"What can we do?" asked Jabbouri, the prisoner released last week. "The Americans are with the Kurds, together. They`re walking along the same path."

Jabbouri said he was seized during a raid on his house the night of April 30 in the Kirkuk neighborhood of Rashid. A former fighter pilot who now works as a colonel in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, he pleaded with the Iraqi police and their U.S. colleagues that he had been wrongly targeted by them. The Americans, dressed in civilian clothes and flak jackets, ignored him, he said.

Jabbouri said he was seized with three other men, two of them air force veterans. The Americans photographed the detainees at the entrance to the U.S. air base in Kirkuk, then turned them over to the police, he said. Police placed bags over their heads and moved them between what seemed to be houses in Kirkuk and Irbil for several hours before taking them to the main prison the next day, he said.

There, Jabbouri said, he lived with about 50 men crammed into a 19-by-9-foot cell. The prisoners slept on a bare concrete floor. Conditions were so cramped, he said, the men divided the day into shifts. For three hours, half sat cross-legged while the others lay on their sides in rows and slept.

Jabbouri said he was questioned three times. He said he was treated respectfully. But others in his cell were beaten, he said. Some were forced to wear a 130-pound metal jacket and were beaten when they collapsed, he recalled. Jabbouri said that upon his release he met a fellow prisoner who displayed scars from wounds sustained when he was whipped with a wire cable, sometimes heated over a fire.

"Once you go inside, you never think you`re going to come out," Jabbouri said.

Najat Hassan Karim, the Kurdistan Democratic Party representative in Kirkuk, denied that prisoners were mistreated. "They are lies," he said of the allegations. "There is no torture." U.S. officers said they had no evidence that any of the detainees had been tortured.
Flood of Complaints

The U.S. military first heard of the abductions in late February as families searching for their missing relatives began to appear at the provincial government seat in the city of Kirkuk. Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, who heads a team of U.S. military advisers to the provincial government, said he initially thought the crimes were a recurrence of a wave of ransom-motivated kidnappings last year.

"Then it turned into a new twist: We found out our own brothers-in-arms were involved," Wickham said. By mid-April, the complaints "became a flood," he said. Wickham said he became convinced that the security forces were orchestrating the campaign after seeing letters from the prisoners in the north conveyed to their families by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"Maybe it was naivete on our part, that people would be taken by the police, of all people, to another province," Wickham said. "When we realized what was happening, the first thing we said was, `Stop. Don`t you realize what you`re doing, the tensions that you`re creating?` The second thing we said was, `You`ve got to get them out.` "

Last month, U.S. officers took a list of missing Arabs and Turkmens to the Kurdish parties and asked for their release. The Kurdistan Democratic Party freed 42 prisoners. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has yet to free any. With hundreds of prisoners still unaccounted for, many families said their search had become increasingly desperate. In one Kirkuk neighborhood, Arab residents approached a journalist`s car to ask for help locating their missing relatives.

"When we go to the Americans, they send us to the police," said Osama Danouk, 24. "When we go to the police, they send us to the Americans, and so on, and so on."

His father, Danouk Latif Jassem, was seized March 2 when U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police stormed into his stationery shop. Jassem, blindfolded and handcuffed, was held for 12 days in the jail of the Emergency Services Unit. From there, his son said, he was taken to the prison in Irbil. Jassem`s wife and 12 children have yet to communicate with him, save for two letters he sent through the Red Cross.

"My health is good," he said in one worn letter dated May 17 and folded eight times. "I hope that you don`t worry too much about me. This is the will of God."

The family traveled on eight successive Thursdays to Irbil but was barred from visiting him, they said. They sought help from Arab tribal leaders, human rights organizations, the provincial government, the U.S. military and even the Kurdish parties.

"Four months and no one can help us," said Danouk, grabbing the Red Cross letter. "Just this."

U.S. and Iraqi officials said the abuses were an outgrowth of Kirkuk`s dysfunctional police force, a product of patronage and partisan loyalties. The head of the Emergency Services Unit, Col. Khattab Abdullah Arif, is a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan loyalist and former Kurdish militia fighter with no previous police experience. The provincial police director general, Sherko Shakir Hakim, most recently worked as a taxi driver. Abdel-Rahman, Kirkuk`s police chief, said Hakim refused a central government order to retire two weeks ago after the Kurdish parties promised to pick up his salary.

"With all this, we should be insane," Abdel-Rahman said, smiling darkly.

Abdel-Rahman said he was concerned that the Americans were being duped by the Kurds, who he said have cloaked what is effectively a power grab as a crackdown on the insurgents. Their strategy, he said, is to bolster their alliance with the Americans.

"Unfortunately, they have succeeded," he said.

Blagburn, the intelligence officer, said that even though the Emergency Services Unit is largely responsible for the secret transfers, it continues to provide valuable assistance in the counterinsurgency. Blagburn termed the unit "a very cooperative, coalition-friendly system."

"We know we can drop a guy in there and he`d be taken care of and he`s safe," Blagburn said. "That`s the reason why the ESU is used most of the time. That`s basically the unit we can trust the most."

The State Department cable warned that the abuses by the emergency unit threaten to "seriously undermine [Iraqi government] and Coalition efforts in the region unless procedures are established to enforce Iraqi laws with regard to the transfer of detainees."

As he sat in his house, the fans idle on a scorching day during a blackout, Aissa Ramadan seethed over the seizure of most of his family.

He said they were taken March 17, when U.S. and Iraqi forces arrived at his family`s compound in the village of Shahid Faleh, about 20 miles south of Kirkuk. Ramadan`s three brothers and two sons were taken, along with his 87-year-old father, Ramadan Taha, who walks with a cane. "I wasn`t there," he said. "If I was there, they would have taken me, too."

Three months later, the house still bore signs of the raid: The windows of the mud huts were shattered, closet doors were ripped from the hinges, wedding pictures and a television were broken. Ramadan accused the Iraqi forces of stealing $5,000 from under his father`s bed and 450,000 Iraqi dinars ($300) from his mother`s pocket. One soldier ripped a gold bracelet off his sister-in-law`s wrist, he said. Another hit his mother, in her sixties, in the left shoulder with a rifle butt. Videos of his oldest son`s wedding were confiscated.

Last month, Ramadan`s two sons were released from the Emergency Services Unit`s custody; one said he had been hit so hard in the kidney he was urinating blood. One of Ramadan`s brothers is still in the jail. A policeman told the family they could pay $5,000 to get him freed. A friend who works with the police told Ramadan that his father and two other brothers were taken to Sulaymaniyah.

No one has heard from them since their transfer on March 23.

"If you could see our house on any day, you`d see that we`re having funerals without the corpses," Ramadan said. "Children are looking for their fathers, wives don`t know the fate of their husbands, and mothers are dying 40 times a day."

Ramadan said he had "anger in his heart."

"Tomorrow, I could recruit the entire tribe," he said. "I could block the street in Kirkuk and kidnap 40 Kurds. When you lose patience, you can do anything."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. Shifts Flights Out of Uzbekistan
New Restrictions On Use Force Move
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Bradley Graham and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; A13

Confronted by new restrictions on the use of a critical air base in Uzbekistan, the U.S. military has shifted key operations out of the Central Asian republic, repositioning search-and-rescue planes in Afghanistan and routing heavy cargo flights through neighboring Kyrgyzstan, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The moves amount to little more than an inconvenience so far, the officials said, but could become more problematic if Uzbek authorities refuse to restore freer access to the airfield later this year.

U.S. commanders have considered the large Karshi-Khanabad air base -- dubbed K2 and located in southeastern Uzbekistan -- as a vital logistics hub. Flights in and out of there have supported combat operations against Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and funneled humanitarian assistance to areas in northern Afghanistan.

But Uzbek President Islam Karimov recently curtailed U.S. military operations at the base after U.S. criticism of his government`s shooting of hundreds of protesters in Andijan last month. The restrictions prohibit nighttime operations and also limit flights by C-17 and other heavy cargo aircraft.

The nighttime ban constitutes an unacceptable condition for HC-130 aircraft, which are used for search-and-rescue as well as tanker operations and therefore must be available to fly at all hours, the officials said. Consequently, the aircraft have been relocated to Afghanistan`s Bagram air base, near Kabul.

But ramp space and especially fuel at Bagram are limited, one senior officer said. Fuel must be trucked to the base across narrow mountain passes that can become blocked during winter, he noted. Further, although the HC-130s have been moved, their maintenance facilities remain in Uzbekistan, complicating service.

Heavy cargo planes, meanwhile, which had been disgorging tons of military supplies and humanitarian assistance at the Uzbek air base for shipment into Afghanistan, are being diverted to Manas in Kyrgyzstan. Because Manas, which is outside the capital of Bishkek, is hundreds of miles farther from Afghanistan, the change has meant longer and costlier trips for trucks that pick up the goods, officials said.

Smaller cargo planes such as C-130s are still allowed to land at the Uzbek base. But U.S. commanders are considering shifting some of them to other locations as well, the officials said.

The ban on nighttime operations surprised U.S. authorities, but the restriction on heavy cargo planes had been foreshadowed, the senior officer said. Uzbek officials had complained for months that the big aircraft were damaging the airfield`s old, Soviet-built runway.

"The Uzbek government has been somewhat frustrated with us for being unable to repair the runway and make a firm, longer-term commitment," said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the political sensitivity of the matter.

Money to improve the runway is contained in the emergency supplemental spending bill approved by Congress last month. But the future of U.S.-Uzbek relations remains clouded by differences within the Bush administration over how to respond to the May 13 crackdown on protesters in Andijan.

State Department officials have emphasized the need to prod Karimov to allow an international investigation of the bloodshed. Pentagon authorities fret about the risk of provoking Karimov into further limits on U.S. military access.

Uzbekistan was the focus yesterday of a senior-level discussion among representatives of the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House and other government agencies, officials said. Several denied a serious internal rift.

"We have, despite all the screaming about the alleged differences, been very consistent," said a senior official involved in the discussions. "We have not allowed our legitimate interest in K2 for operations in Afghanistan to be used as leverage against us to soften our democracy message. We`re not going to pull the plug on K2 deliberately, but we`ve sent pretty good messages that the Uzbeks need to do the right thing."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Iraq, Then and Now
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

Post
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; A24

AFTER LAGGING for months, debate on Iraq in Washington is picking up again. That`s a needed and welcome development, but much of the discussion is being diverted to the wrong subject. War opponents have been trumpeting several British government memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush administration`s preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President Bush`s deceptions about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why "the mainstream media" have not paid more attention to them. Though we can`t speak for The Post`s news department, the answer appears obvious: The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration`s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.

Three summers ago the pages of this and other newspapers were filled with reports about military planning for war to remove Saddam Hussein and Mr. Bush`s determination to force a showdown. "Debate over whether the United States should go to war against Iraq," we stated in a lead editorial on Aug. 4, "has lurched into a higher gear." Concern that the Bush administration was not adequately prepared for a postwar occupation -- another supposed revelation of the British memos -- prompted widely reported public hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee starting on July 31, 2002.

One observation in the memos is vague but intriguing: A British official is quoted as saying that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Yet it was argued even then, and has since become conventional wisdom, that Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen exaggerated the threat from Iraq to justify the elimination of its noxious regime. And the memos provide no information that would alter the conclusions of multiple independent investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, which were that U.S. and British intelligence agencies genuinely believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that they were not led to that judgment by the Bush administration.

Debate over whether the war should have been fought is appropriate and no doubt will continue for many years. But it ought not distract from what should be an urgent discussion of the present situation in Iraq. After a lull following January`s elections, violence -- and U.S. casualties -- have returned to the level of last fall; the political process is stuck on the inability of Shiite and Sunni leaders to reach an accommodation, even as the time allotted to completing a constitution slips away. Recent in-depth reports by The Post and the New York Times have suggested that training of the new Iraqi army continues to yield mixed results and that it will be several more years, at least, before Iraqi units can take the place of U.S. troops.

All this should call into question the Bush administration`s present rhetoric and apparent strategy, which assumes that the Iraqi insurgency is, as Mr. Cheney put it, in its "last throes"; that Iraqi units will be ready before the U.S. military, now facing a recruiting crisis, is broken by the strain of deploying more than 130,000 troops; and that the United States can still afford to take a relatively hands-off approach to the political process, leaving Baghdad without an ambassador for months at a time. In fact, the U.S. mission in Iraq seems to be drifting dangerously -- and the president, once again, is not talking frankly to the country about the sacrifice that may be required, or where the troops and other resources for such an effort will come from. Those ought to be the questions at center stage this summer.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Silence in the Face of Truth: The Downing Street Memo
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2005/0506silence.html

By Dante Zappala | June 13, 2005

For the first 30 years of my brother Sherwood Baker’s life, his mission was to be a responsible citizen. He made oaths and he honored those oaths. This made him a loving father and husband. This also made him a noble and committed soldier. He courageously deployed with his National Guard unit to Iraq in 2004.

For the last six weeks of his life, Sherwood’s mission was to provide convoy security for the Iraq Survey Group. He was killed in action, providing site security for the group that was looking for weapons of mass destruction. Mounting evidence indicates that the weapons’ non-existence wasn’t a mistake. It was a ruse.

The clouds surrounding Sherwood’s death became even darker recently when I read the contents of a memo from the upper echelons of the British government. The memo reiterates the fact that our administration had every intention of invading Iraq in the summer of 2002. The White House needed only to sell the idea to the American people.

Prior to Congressional approval, prior to saying, “War is the last resort,” the decision had been made to go to war regardless of legal justification or the problems associated with the aftermath of an invasion. The most telling quote in this memo reads, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Read the memo: http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memo.html .

My brother died scouring the Iraqi countryside not to protect his country, but to satisfy the Bush administration’s public relations agenda.

The leaders of our country politicized intelligence to satisfy an ideology. My brother and more than 1,700 other soldiers have been killed as a result. Yet I have to sift through the papers and the news channels to find even a pulse of concern. In the wake of such disturbing revelations, a majority of our press and populace resoundingly choose to be silent.

Overwhelmingly, Americans have ceased to care about how and why we went war. Apathy, in the face of our soldiers’ sacrifice, seems more convenient.

We cannot allow our government to simply replace the motivations for war midstream and expect an entire nation and all its allies to succumb to selective memory. Yet that is exactly what has happened.

The poet Archibald MacLeish, who also lost a brother in war, wrote:

They say
We leave you our deaths
Give them their meaning.

If we are to give meaning to the deaths in Iraq, we must be willing to engage in truthful dialogue about the pretenses of war. Acquiescing to the lure of silence and ignorance is an affront to the families and memories of all who have fallen. It is a prescription for unending violence and suffering.

Are we so ashamed of what our soldiers have and continue to do in Iraq that we can’t even talk about how they got there? Or, are we simply ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen?

We must each confront ourselves over the failures in Iraq. For that failure is not simply the fault of our leaders misusing suspect intelligence. Our course as a country, ultimately, stems from the individual conclusion of all of us to be either complicit or resistant to war.

The government’s failure in Iraq becomes our own failure when we substitute political rhetoric or blanket ideology for reason. It becomes our fault when we are recklessly arrogant and willfully deaf.

Our responsibility as citizens is to acknowledge and embrace the whole truth about the Iraq War. We must look past partisanship and hold ourselves and our leaders to the high standards of integrity that citizenship demands. When we fail to honor that responsibility, we fail to honor the sacrifices of our soldiers.

Dante Zappala is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (online www.fpif.org) and a member of Gold Star Families for Peace www.gsfp.org, and Military Families Speak Out www.mfso.org. He lives in Philadelphia.


Web location:
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2005/0506silence.html

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Casualties of the oil stampede
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1506665,00.ht…

Those behind human rights abuses and an alleged safety cover-up around the Caspian pipeline must be held to account
Michael Meacher
Wednesday June 15, 2005

Guardian
A huge new oil pipeline, opened a week ago but not fully operational till August, is set to become an environmental, political and economic timebomb. Over 1,000 miles long, it is a classic example of pretensions to corporate social responsibility claimed by the BP consortium being trampled all over by the stampede for oil.

The new Great Game is the competition for control of the world`s few remaining big oilfields. Global oil production will probably peak in 2010-15, and for the last 40 years new annual discoveries of oil have been far short of the increase in annual demand. The end of Big Oil is in sight, and with it the oil-powered civilisation we`ve all grown accustomed to. The struggle to dominate remaining supplies is intense, nowhere more so than in the Caspian basin, with probably the largest remaining oil deposits after the Middle East.

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, bordering the Caspian, together hold oil reserves three times the size of America`s. The route most favoured by the west to transport the oil out of the Caspian goes from Baku in Azerbaijan via Tbilisi in Georgia to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey. This BTC project costs around £2.4bn, with BP leading a consortium of 11 companies. Almost three-quarters of the funding comes from bank loans, with public bodies such as the World Bank providing £350m, including £56m from the British Export Credits Guarantee Department.

BP trumpeted that they had "established a new international benchmark in human rights and environmental standards". Perhaps, but not quite as they intended. The Georgian group Green Alternative has compiled a 220-page dossier alleging the project breaches World Bank guidelines on 173 counts, including failure to consider the danger of earthquakes. Georgia`s environment minister said BP also forced his government to violate its own legislation and route the pipeline close to mineral springs in a national park. Human-rights cases related to the pipeline have been taken against the Turkish government to the European court of justice and European court of human rights. Other cases reported by NGOs include peasants being misinformed by the authorities about their legal rights - for example that if they went to court they would receive no compensation or that they could not challenge the compensation paid. Many other cases are reported of farmers receiving far less compensation than promised, and being threatened with violence if they refused to accept what was offered. Ferhat Kaya, a lawyer, was badly beaten in police custody, he believes, for trying to inform peasant landowners of their rights.

According to the NGO coalition Baku-Ceyhan Campaign, there are serious allegations of malfeasance by the authorities in the acquisition of land along the route, in particular the expropriation of land before compensation has been agreed - a violation of the rules of the International Finance Corporation (one of the main bank lenders). And when construction damaged many roads, drainage and irrigation systems, the Georgian government stopped the work, but then backed down after a meeting between the new pro-western president and Donald Rumsfeld.

However, redress is virtually impossible because the BTC consortium had already concluded an unprecedented agreement with the Turkish government that, according to Amnesty International, grants them a power over the corridor overriding all environmental, social, human rights or other laws. In effect it strips local people and workers of all civil rights - a frightening exclusion when Turkey lies in an earthquake zone or if the pipeline were attacked by terrorists.

BP is also now facing accusations of covering up safety problems that threaten a major spill. The 160,000 joints need to be coated to stop water getting in, or the pipes will corrode, leak and may even explode in sub-zero temperatures underground. Yet BP chose an untried coating for the joints that cracks when cold and does not stick to the plaster jacket of the steel pipeline. It is alleged that BP was aware the coating would not work because its own consultant, Derek Mortimore, told it so in November 2002. Instead of heeding his report, BP pressed ahead and, it is claimed, did not pass on Mortimore`s warnings to the international funding bodies; it sacked him in January 2003.

The joints duly cracked in November 2003, and at least a quarter of the coated joints in the Georgian section alone have to be replaced. This issue is now subject to legal action - BP blames the contractors, who claim BP forced them to use a coating with no track record. BP suspended work on the project for 10 weeks, again without informing the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or ECGD of their problems before accepting the $2.6bn loan, which seems a violation of the loan agreement. BP refuses to release the results of its investigation into the procurement fraud allegations, which it says exonerates all those involved.

It is clear that the ECGD and other lenders did not undertake any extra due diligence to ensure the project`s safety. The ECGD minister, on defective advice, told parliament in June 2004 that the problematic coating had been used on major pipelines. In fact it has no track record on plastic-coated pipelines such as the one in the BTC project.

The lessons of this appalling saga are many. First, we need an immediate independent audit of the BTC pipeline set up by the lenders` group. Second, a judicial inquiry is needed into the funders` supervision of the project. Third, we need two reforms to ensure multinational companies can be held to account over their disregard for environmental, social, civil and legal rights: they should be legally responsible for the actions of their agents or subsidiaries abroad, and action against a UK company abroad should be enforceable in UK courts. Where the government will not act, NGOs should be able to take proceedings to enforce rights and legal agreements, funded by the public purse where an overriding public interest warrants it.

· Michael Meacher is the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton; he was environment minister from 1997 to 2003.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Guerrillas Kill 29 Iraqis Tuesday, Wound over 100 in North

3 US Servicemen Dead

Kurds Abducting Arabs, Turkmen in Kirkuk

The Associated Press reports


"And an American soldier was killed when a roadside bomb hit his convoy in southern Baghdad, the military said, adding that two other soldiers assigned to a Marine unit died in a similar attack Monday in Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital."




A suicide bomber killed 23 persons and wounded nearly 100 when he detonated his payload outside a bank in Kirkuk as seniors stood in line to cash their pension checks.

In Kan`an, a half-hour drive north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber targeted an Iraqi military checkpoint, killing 5 troops and wounding 2.

Hospitals in Baghdad received the macabre shipment of 24 corpses of men who had been ambushed by guerrillas in the west of Iraq.

In Ramadi, a suicide bomber attacked a military checkpoint and killed one Iraqi soldier. In the aftermath, US Marines and Iraqi soldiers opened fire on civilians in cars behind the suicide bomber, killing 5 civilians. AP implies that they were in fact innocent civilians.

[urlSteve Fainaru and Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post siehe #29186]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401828.html[/url] report that the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan have used their police and security units in Kirkuk to kidnap hundreds of Arabs and Turkmen in the city. They have been held in prisons outside any legal framework, and some have been tortured. The two intrepid reporters have gotten hold of a US State Department memo on the issue:

`A confidential State Department cable, obtained by The Washington Post and addressed to the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the "extra-judicial detentions" were part of a "concerted and widespread initiative" by Kurdish political parties "to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner." `



Kirkuk is a powderkeg. AFter the fall of Saddam, the city of about 1 million was estimated to be about 1/3 each Turkmen, Arab and Kurdish. But many Arabs have been chased out, and many Kurds have come into the city (in many cases returning to a place from which Saddam had expelled them). Fainaru and Shadid now seem to suggest that the Kurds are about 48 percent of the population, with Turkmen and Arabs a quarter each.

The kidnapping tactics extend to Mosul and perhaps to Tel Afar.

Arab on Kurdish violence could provoke a civil war. Kurdish on Turkmen violence could bring Turkey into northern Iraq, since Ankara sees itself as a protector of Iraq`s 750,000 Turkmen.

US military and Kurdish officials denied the abductions or said they had ended, but obviously the State Department does not agree, and Fainaru and Shadid find plenty of evidence that they are continuing.

[urlEd Wong of the New York Times writes,]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/middleeast/15iraq.html?oref=login[/url] ` Joost R. Hiltermann, director of the Middle East office of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization, said in a recent interview that the White House should ensure that the national Iraqi government administer Kirkuk rather than the Kurds. Otherwise, he said, the potential for large-scale civil conflict will increase. `

[urlHamza Hendawi]http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20050614-1252-iraq-politicalstalemate.html[/url] reports that Sunni Arab demands that they have 25 representatives on the constitution drafting committee in parliament probably spring from an over-estimation of their proportion of the population. The Shiites won`t give them more than 15, the same as the Kurds, on the grounds that both minorities are about 20 percent of the population. The Sunni Arabs often maintain that they are a majority. They are a small minority, however, and I personally suspect they are a samller proportion of the population than 20. (5 percent of Iraqis are Christians, Turkmen and other smaller minorities, and about 62 percent are Shiites. That only leaves 33 percent for the Kurds to split with the Sunnis).

Wrangling about the composition of the constitution drafting committee has held up its work, to the point where President Bush phoned Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq, on Monday to urge him to find a compromise so that the constitution could get written. Talabani, however, probably isn`t seen by the Sunni Arabs as an honest broker (see above).

[urlThe Shiite dominated government]http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-iraq-government,0,2009201.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines[/url] of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari received a vote of confidence from the Shiite dominated parliament.

[urlReuters reports]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/ce1768991d85c98bb4db68cdf5a7b1a4.htm[/url] that a new radio station focusing on women`s issues has begun broadcasting in Baghdad.

posted by Juan @ [url6/15/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/guerrillas-kill-29-iraqis-tuesday.html[/url]

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washingtonpost.com
Bush Meets Dissidents In Campaign For Rights
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; A01

At the end of a private Oval Office meeting this week, President Bush asked a North Korean defector to autograph his book recounting a decade in a North Korean prison camp.

"If Kim Jong Il knew I met you," Bush then asked, referring to the North Korean leader, "don`t you think he`d hate this?"

"The people in the concentration camps will applaud,"(Gitmo?) the defector, Kang Chol Hwan, responded, according to two people in the room.

Bush lately has begun meeting personally with prominent dissidents to highlight human rights abuses in select countries, a powerfully symbolic yet potentially risky approach modeled on Ronald Reagan`s sessions with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War([urlRumsfeld: Detention Center Still Necessary]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061400959.html[/url]). Besides Kang, Bush played host to a top government foe from Venezuela at the White House and met Russian human rights activists during a trip to Moscow last month. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met opposition leaders from the former Soviet republic of Belarus.

The sessions -- which come at a time when the Bush administration has itself come under international criticism for abuses at the prison facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere -- represent a personal follow-through on Bush`s inaugural address in January, when he vowed to activists around the world that "we will stand with you" in battles against repression.

"He likes to talk to people who have experienced these things firsthand," said Michael J. Gerson, Bush`s strategic policy adviser, who sat in on the Kang meeting Monday. "But there clearly is a signal here and a symbol that human rights is central to our approach, that there is a kind of moral concern."

As Bush himself acknowledged to Kang, such meetings, although heartening to activists, will surely aggravate the leaders of repressive countries. In the North Korean case, it could complicate or even derail the latest attempts to coax Kim back to multinational negotiations over his nuclear weapons program. So far, Bush has focused his attentions largely on activists from countries with which he is already openly hostile, while those from allies such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have not won Oval Office invitations.

A test of the extent of Bush`s commitment to this hands-on approach could come in the next two weeks when Mohammed Salih, chairman of the Democratic Erk Party of Uzbekistan, a leading opponent of the Central Asian government, visits Washington. The Bush administration has been torn over how forcefully to respond to the recent massacre of hundreds of protesters in the Uzbek city of Andijan, with the State Department pushing for a firm repudiation and the Pentagon resisting for fear of jeopardizing its base there.

Salih, who received a U.S. visa on Monday and will be in the United States from June 27 to June 30, hopes to meet with senior Bush administration officials and to describe the situation in Uzbekistan, where President Islam Karimov has banned genuine opposition parties and independent media and imprisoned thousands of government critics.

"We have calls out to everybody, and, right now, we don`t have a yes or no from anybody," said Frank Howard, a media liaison for Erk. A high-level meeting, he added, "has not only symbolic importance, it has potential real importance."

Karimov`s government has curtailed U.S. military flights at the Uzbek base in response to the Bush administration criticism, but Rice promised rights groups yesterday not to ease up on calls for an international investigation of the Andijan massacre.

"I told her that the State Department approach was absolutely right, but they`re being completely undercut by the Pentagon, and the Uzbeks are playing them," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch. "She looked me in the eye and said, `We will not let Karimov play us.` "

The recent Bush and Rice meetings have won applause from organizations seeking to highlight despotism around the globe. "These meetings send a signal so that it`s not only the government that`s on the agenda of the [U.S.] leadership but the people who are on the forefront of fighting for change," said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, which promotes liberty abroad.

Windsor, Malinowski and other activists gave Rice a list of imprisoned political activists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They recommended that she press the governments there about their fates during her upcoming trip to the Middle East, much as Reagan did with the Soviet government. Windsor said she also urged Rice to meet with the demonstrators who were beaten by pro-government mobs in Egypt. Rice encouraged the activists to also focus on North Korea and Venezuela.

Bush rarely met with dissidents during his first term, but he appears to be more eager to do so in his second. After reading former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky`s book extolling democracy late last year, Bush invited him to the White House for a meeting. He similarly became interested in Kang after former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger recommended the North Korean`s book two months ago.

"I thought the book gave a good description of life in North Korea," Kissinger explained in an interview yesterday. Bush`s meeting with Kang "signals that the president of the United States is concerned about their fate, and not just their individual fates, but the conditions that made their fates possible."

Bush plowed through the book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag," and then began urging advisers such as Rice and Gerson to read it as well. During their 40-minute meeting Monday, also attended by Vice President Cheney, Bush asked Kang to describe life in the prison camp, where he was forced to perform hard labor starting at age 9.

According to an account published by Kang in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo -- and confirmed by Gerson -- he urged the president to make it his priority to free those held in North Korea`s prison camps. "For North Koreans," Kang said he told Bush, "human rights issues are more desperate than nuclear issues."

Bush, according to Kang, said he thought that the human rights situation in North Korea was serious but that others often did not understand it. He told Kang that "it breaks my heart" to learn of pregnant women and children starving in North Korea. Kang told him that the North Korean military often takes donated international food for itself. Bush said that if Pyongyang makes fundamental changes, "the U.S. will deliver a lot of food and funds to North Korea," Kang recalled.

Bush`s meetings with such figures can carry unintended consequences. Bush met May 31 with Maria Corina Machado, founder of a Venezuelan civil society group called Sumate and a leading critic of President Hugo Chavez. Machado faces a possible prison sentence after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy.

In an interview from Caracas, Venezuela, yesterday, Machado said the meeting with Bush stretched from a scheduled 15 minutes to 50 minutes and was a "recognition and signal that the world does care about what is happening" in her country. She added that it has inspired people who face intimidation by the government. But she also said that the government has reacted negatively to the meeting, with its allies in the news media and the legislature threatening to revoke her citizenship.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 1895 , US: 1708 , June05: 43


Iraker: Civilian: 242 Police/Mil: 118 Total: 360

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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June 14, 2005
Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful)
By JASON DePARLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14heritage.html

WASHINGTON, June 13 - They are young and bright and ardently right. They tack Ronald Reagan calendars on their cubicle walls and devote brown bag lunches to the free market theories of Friedrich von Hayek. They come from 51 colleges and 28 states, calling for low taxes, strong defense and dorm rooms with a view.

And let`s get one thing straight: they`re not here to run the copying machine.

The summer interns of the Heritage Foundation have arrived, forming an elite corps inside the capital`s premier conservative research group. The 64 interns are each paid a 10-week stipend of $2,500, and about half are housed in a subsidized dorm at the group`s headquarters, complete with a fitness room.

Unusual in its size (and in its walk-in closets), the program, on which Heritage spends $570,000 a year, is both a coveted spot on the young conservative circuit and an example of the care the movement takes to cultivate its young.

Scott Hurff, a senior at Wake Forest University, wanted the internship so badly that he filed three applications. Rachael Seidenschnur had set her eyes on Heritage since her youth in Little Rock, Ark., where she revived the teenage Republicans club at Central High School.

Kenneth Cribb came with family ties and a book by the conservative author Russell Kirk, which he said "sends chills up my spine." Daren Stanaway and Brian Christiansen welcomed Heritage as an escape from the liberal orthodoxies they said they experienced at Harvard and Yale.

"In the face of derogation, many intelligent young conservatives have simply responded by hiding their beliefs or going with the crowd," Ms. Stanaway wrote in an application essay. "I refuse to be one of them."

Like all Heritage applicants, she also answered a 12-item questionnaire designed to ferret out latent liberalism with questions about guns, abortion, welfare and missile defense. (If you agree with the statement that "tax increases are the most appropriate way to balance the budget," this is probably not the internship for you.)

Sitting in his supersized office atop the organization he has spent three decades building, Edwin J. Feulner, the longtime president at Heritage, cited the sign over a Heritage auditorium - "Building for the Next Generation" - as evidence of how central to his mission leadership development is.

"If we can get young people involved, they will continue to support Heritage, our idea and our causes," Mr. Feulner said. "We almost think of ourselves as a college."

Arguing that liberals dominate most campuses, Mr. Feulner said, "We`ve had to cultivate our alternative."

It is an alternative with few rivals. The Brookings Institution, a centrist group more than 50 years older than Heritage, has no paid interns. Neither does the Progressive Policy Institute, which promotes a centrist version of liberalism. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a premier antipoverty group, has 10 paid interns. People for the American Way, a bulwark of Beltway liberalism, has 40 - but no dorm.

"There`s no question that the right wing over the last 25 years did a much better job of creating a farm system," said Ralph G. Neas, the president of People for the American Way. Like many other liberal groups, his has recently expanded its campus outreach activities in an effort to keep pace with the right.

"They invested in young people," Mr. Neas said. "We`re trying to catch up."

While the prestige of Heritage is part of the appeal, so is the work, which rarely involves making coffee or copies. Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks. That is a task for which he may be especially well suited: after spending three summers working in a Kentucky state park, he published a paper this year denouncing "the inefficiencies of a government-run park system."

When Mr. Peyton`s application reached the desk of Ronald D. Utt, a Heritage senior fellow, Mr. Utt said, "Get this guy." An expert in privatization, Mr. Utt had been wanting to make the same arguments about the National Park Service, which he called "the world`s largest lawn care and janitorial service."

Mr. Peyton will spend the summer outside Mr. Utt`s office, helping to make the case.

Heritage has had interns, in ones and twos, ever since its founding in 1973. But it intensified its effort about 15 years ago, hiring a full-time intern coordinator. Another leap forward occurred in 1999, when a supporter, Tom Johnson, offered to donate an adjacent building. Mr. Feulner embarked on a $12 million fund-raising drive to renovate it and carved out space for 30 dorm rooms. For $10,000, donors could have their names in bronze on a dorm room door.

Dr. C. N. Papadopoulos underwrote two rooms, in honor of his mother and his mother-in-law. Dr. Papadopoulos, a Greek immigrant now in Houston, left his work as an anesthesiologist for ventures in banking and real estate, and became a Heritage donor a decade ago after a direct-mail solicitation appealed to his belief in free enterprise.

Dr. Papadopoulos said he helped finance the dorms because he wanted "these young folks to go to Washington and find out what this country is all about."

"This is the land of opportunity," Dr. Papadopoulos said, "and it always will be as long as the you don`t depend on the federal government to do everything."

Katherine Rogers, a junior at Georgetown, is spending the summer in the Keith and Lois Mitchell room, on the Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Smyth floor, just upstairs from the Norma Zindahl Intern Lounge, which is adjacent to the William J. Lehrfeld Intern Center. Ms. Rogers`s father is a longtime Heritage donor, and she is working in donor relations, which she thinks will be useful in her intended career as a pharmaceutical lobbyist.

"It`s all about forging one-to-one relationships," Ms. Rogers said. "That`s where business starts."

Among notable former Heritage interns are Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, and Thad T. Viers, elected at 24 to the South Carolina Legislature. Now a 27-year-old law student as well as a lawmaker, Mr. Viers described Heritage as a prized stop on a journey that stretched from a childhood in a single-wide trailer through college at the Citadel and into political life.

"It`s always a card I have in my arsenal if anybody wants to challenge my conservative credentials," Mr. Viers said. "It`s a trump card, too." Other former interns hold posts on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Mr. Lowry theorizes that young conservatives are especially interested in the ideas undergirding their politics, often having come from liberal campuses where they have had to defend themselves. That theory finds support among the current interns, who often talk of being outnumbered by left-leaning peers.

Among the perks of the summer program is a lunch series in which interns make their way through the conservative canon. "Being raised a Christian, with family values, I want to make sure I have a solid philosophical footing," said Mr. Hurff, 21, the Wake Forest senior.

Mr. Cribb, whose uncle, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., was a Reagan aide and a Heritage fellow, said that the internship offered a chance "to study the fundamental ideas of conservatism." Last week, speakers at Heritage events included Edwin Meese, the former attorney general, and the historian David McCullough.

Ms. Seidenschnur, 21, a senior at Washington and Lee, found herself in a political minority as early as high school as she worked in three Republican clubs.

"I was sick of being ridiculed by my teachers for being a Republican: `Oh, here comes the Republican,` " she said. A veteran intern, she has worked on Capitol Hill (for former Senator Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas), in the White House (for the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) and at a fund-raising organization (the National Republican Congressional Committee).

"Most of my internships were more on the campaign and active side of politics," Ms. Seidenschnur said. "I wanted to come to Heritage to see more of the intellectual side of politics and the conservative thought movement. When I analyzed my résumé, I realized that was greatly missing."

Oh, and the internship held one other appeal.

"I have a balcony," she said. "It`s just magical."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Why are the Democrats such weenies?
- Jon Carroll
Monday, June 13, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%…

Why are the Democrats such weenies? Howard Dean makes the unremarkable statement that the GOP is the party of white Christians, and other Democrats run and flee and say, "Oh no, oh no!" And a Republican yahoo accuses Dean of "political hate speech." Neither "white" nor "Christian" is an epithet. A glance at the videotape from last year`s Republican convention indicates that both characterizations are entirely fair.

And yet some Democrats think Dean is being too confrontational. We should be nice to the lying liars or people will think we`re, gasp, partisan. "Partisan" is a good thing; it`s what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The problem comes when one party stays very partisan and the other party starts modifying and mollifying and trying to find some mythical friendly center. I loved Mister Rogers, but I never thought he`d make a good chairman of the Democratic Party.

So maybe lunatic liberals should keep a few things in mind. First, the Bush administration is increasingly unpopular. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll reveals that 52 percent of the American people disapprove of the way Bush is running the country. Ask specifically about Iraq, and the numbers climb -- 58 percent disapprove of his handling of the war.

Which means, according to Eric Alterman, "George W. Bush`s approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton`s was on the day he was impeached." I believe the American people want a party that will express their displeasure at the elitist and corrupt Bush administration in strong and vigorous terms.

People should stop believing the bullfluff that Fox News represents some significant percentage of the populace. The latest Nielsen ratings show that the Fox News Channel has 1,758,000 viewers in prime time, with only 416,000 falling into the 25-54 demographic. This is in a nation of 300 million people. However much noise it makes and however much room it takes up in the brains of media people, Fox is a very small muffin in a very large bakery -- a small, wizened, bitter muffin. Ignore it; everyone else does.

Elitist? Since February, the U.S. Army has missed its recruiting goals every month, sometimes by as much as 40 percent. People do not like the war, and they do not want their sons and daughters dying in the cause of ... whatever the cause is. You`d think that Bushies would support the beleaguered military by enrolling high-profile Republican scions in the Army -- both Bush daughters are eligible to sign up -- but it`s not happening. Sacrifice does not play well in the "go back to sleep" Bush propaganda parameters. Nah, they make the wars -- let someone else fight them.

Corrupt? You bet. I think we have scandal fatigue, because some of the newer ones are just not getting any play at all. A senior Air Force procurement officer, Darleen Druyun, made a deal to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite Pentagon studies showing that the tankers were unnecessary. Then Druyun quit the government and joined Boeing. Such a coincidence. Two years later, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nine months in the federal pen.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has ignited a trade war with Europe over "illegal subsidies" to Airbus because the alleged subsidies hurt the trade position of, yes, Boeing. We`d never give illegal subsidies to Boeing, oh my no.

This is just one example of the malign effects of the revolving door between big business and the Bush administration. There`s the case of Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist who signed on as the chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (!!). According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Cooney "repeatedly" edited official documents to eliminate or downplay the now widely accepted links between greenhouse gases and global warming.

The White House is still taking the position that global warming is a liberal conspiracy. The liberals` ability to cause a drought in Australia has amazed many.

This is merely the latest in a long series of incidents, from "abstinence only" sex education campaigns to downplayed links between smoking and heart disease, in which the administration has adjusted the facts to fit its conclusions -- and to please its corporate donors and its ultraconservative base.

Most Americans are neither ultraconservative nor superrich, and they are interested in hearing the truth. The Democrats should be interested in telling the truth, and telling it in a strong and convincing manner. They cannot flinch when the White House does one of its "gay marriage booga booga" dances. Be not afraid, Democrats. This is not an occasion in which the meek will inherit the earth. Speak for the people, because the people need you to end the madness.
Here`s the amazing thing:

A whole column, and not one use of the word "Halliburton," even though it would be entirely appropriate. I think people have Halliburton fatigue.

I don`t apologize. Not me. Instead, I say I never said the things I said, nor did the things some people saw me do, when confronted by [e-mail].

Page D - 10
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
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Democrats, don`t put muzzle on Dean
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050614/opcom14.…

By DeWayne Wickham

Instead of muzzling Howard Dean, Democrats should give him a bullhorn. Rather than urging him to retreat from his attack on Republicans, party leaders ought to send him off to a political war college — preferably the one the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater attended.

As chairman of the Democratic Party, which is teetering between political renewal and functional extinction, Dean should be making war, not peace. But that`s exactly what his critics within the party seemed to be suggesting last week when they admonished him for his tough talk about Republicans.

“The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They`re a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same, and they all look the same,” he said days earlier. He also said the GOP is “pretty much a white, Christian party” and Republicans “never made an honest living in their lives.”

Understandably, Dean`s verbal barrage drew a return salvo from Republicans, who accused him of hitting below the belt. Surprisingly, it also sparked friendly fire from some Democrats, who worried aloud that he was unnecessarily alienating Republicans.

While, in fact, what he said about the GOP stretches the truth, it also rallies the Democratic troops, something the party has had difficulty doing since Bill Clinton left the White House.

Ironically, Dean`s negative talk is something Atwater, who managed the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, turned into an art form. When the story broke that Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer, raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison, Atwater went on the attack. He vowed to link Horton so closely to Bush`s opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, that people would think the career criminal was the Democratic candidate`s running mate.

Republican leaders, eager to extend their party`s control of the White House beyond the eight years of Ronald Reagan`s presidency, didn`t chastise Atwater for playing to racial fears and stereotypes in linking Horton to Dukakis. Instead, they made him party chairman.

Not long after he assumed that post, Atwater put his crosshairs on then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a Democrat he correctly feared might keep Bush from winning re-election. Atwater plotted to use allegations of drug abuse and womanizing to derail Clinton`s political career. “We may or may not win, but we`ll bust him up so bad he won`t be able to run again for years,” Atwater said, according to The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a 2000 book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.

Despite expressing his regret for these actions shortly before his untimely death in 1991, Atwater`s go-for-the-jugular brand of politics has become a lethal weapon in the Republicans` arsenal. It is what motivates GOP operatives to quickly label Democrats as liberal — and to treat liberalism as a dirty word.

To his credit, Dean has broken ranks with those Democrats who think the best defense is to seek cover and then throw themselves on the mercy of voters on Election Day. The time has come for Democrats to fight back. They should explain what it means to be a liberal, not allow Republicans to define them. They should answer hyperbolic attacks with exaggerated speech of their own, if that`s what it takes to stave off political annihilation.

For much of this decade, right-wing Republicans have dominated the public square, shouting down some on their political left and drowning out others who have tried to counter their bombast with civil responses. The time has come for Democrats to give as good as they get.

Americans, for the most part, love politicians who fight for what they believe — and they abhor political wimps. Dean is a fighter, albeit one who needs to learn that in an ideological spat, a well-placed jab often can do more damage than a barrage of roundhouse punches.

But he can`t learn that lesson if Democrats won`t let him take the fight to the GOP.

DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.




Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050614/opcom14.a…

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Das Ende der Bush-Regierung naht mit großen Schritten:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britmemo…

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Downfall (Der Untergang) läuft in der 17.Woche in den USA und hat $5,501,940 eingespielt. Augenblicklich wird er noch in 23 Kinos gezeigt.

Of course, Bush`s life story gives us the initial clues and probable cause for assessing his psyche and behavior. The grandson of a US senator, the son of one of the most accomplished (to the extent cumulated titles count, at least) figures in post-war American political history, he is himself a screw-up underachiever, who drifts from clown, to cheerleader, to drunkard, to business failure, to Rove-the-ventriloquist`s dummy-politician.

Hier ein Bericht der WAPost über Bush und Familie von 99. Zuerst sein schulischer Werdegang. Das Beste waren seine Leistungen als Cheerleader.
[urlBush: So-So Student but a Campus Mover]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072799.htm[/url]
Die ganze Serie:
[urlBush: The Making of a Candidate]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bushmain072599.htm[/url]


Published on Tuesday, June 14, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
In the American Bunker
by David Michael Green
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0614-31.htm

I saw a movie last night that was excellent. It was also awful.

The film was "The Downfall", the reputedly historically accurate depiction of the end of the Third Reich, showing Hitler and his crew holed up in their Berlin bunker, awaiting their appointment with the Russian Army.

It was excellent in that it portrayed this scene so vividly, and it was awful because of the scene it so vividly portrayed.

In the film, we see what happened when Germany allowed an emotionally ravenous psychopath to sate the voracious demands of his personal insecurities upon the world`s stage. Fifty million deaths later, here is this frustrated painter, delusional and embittered, putting the final touches on his masterpiece with a revolver and cyanide.

The German people, including the children now sent out to defend the Reich literally down to the last block, are worthy only of the contempt of Hitler and the equally sick Goebbels, at his side till the end. Since they did not bring him victory and thus glory, these expendable cannon fodder who followed him into Hell, after first themselves creating it, are transformed into cowards and traitors in the warped visage of the physically and mentally deteriorating Fuhrer.

The most chilling portrayal within the film is that of a handful of Kool-Aid besotted true believers, exemplified by Mrs. Goebbels, who can neither imagine nor bear the concept of life without Hitler and national socialism. She falls to her knees at Hitler`s feet, sobs, and begs him not to take his own life. Not much later, of course, she murders her six children before committing suicide with her husband, so traumatized is she at the thought of a world without Nazism.

As I returned from the theater I was thinking, as I often do, about what it is that inspires such mindless suspension of critical faculties, of logic and empirical analysis, and ultimately of the very self, which is entailed in nationalist fervor. What is it that compels people, by the millions, to doggedly follow those often shallowest and neediest of humans who don the mantle of leadership and take them over the cliffs of hatred and militarism, crashing into great piles of mass carnage on the beach below?

In my studies of this topic, the most compelling answer I`ve found is that nationalism addresses a profound existential fear that many people seem to feel in the face of the seemingly meaningless and insignificant lives they lead within a vast and indifferent universe. Like religion, though less challenged during the period of modernity by contradictory scientific findings, nationalism allows its subscribers to feel that they are part of a larger and more significant story, one with a grand historical arc leading to a rendezvous with destiny, and one which brings to their lives otherwise absent meaning and purpose.

All this, of course, inevitably had me thinking of America in 2005. Comparisons to Hitler and the Third Reich are nearly always - almost by definition - hyperbolic. With the partial exception of some of the exploits of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Nixon, nothing since 1945 has even come close. Such comparisons are - also, therefore, by definition - overused, as a hysterical Rick Santorum most recently demonstrated by equating Democratic attempts to retain judicial filibuster rights to Hitler`s occupation of Paris.

For precisely these reasons, I have resisted the use of the f-word these last years, despite believing that America has crept far more precipitously close to the edge of fascism under George Bush than the vast bulk of Americans realize. We forget that Hitler was originally brought to power by means of democratic institutions, before he then proceeded to dismantle them. We assume that a bid for fascism in American, should it come, would be delivered in one large, recognizable package, which we could all rise up to collectively defeat, rather than an incessant series of a thousand cuts, most justified by the threat of internal and external enemies and a permanent `war on terrorism`. But the parallels are powerful, and they became all the more compelling returning from "The Downfall" to find a reprint of an amazing article (which somehow escaped me and most of the rest of America in the original) posted on the AfterDowningStreet.org website. As the Downing Street Memo`s evidence of wholesale lies finally starts gaining traction in an America finally beginning to sour on the Iraq war, another piece of the puzzle is (re-)fitted into place with Russ Baker`s jaw-dropping account of conversations journalist Mickey Herskowitz had with candidate Bush in 1999.

I have felt from the beginnings of the Bush administration that his presidency is best understood at the level of psychology, not policy or ideology, and that the insecurities of the president himself (and, I think, to a large degree his supporters) were as palpable as they are crucial to animating his policy choices, his public persona, and his demeanor.

Of course, Bush`s life story gives us the initial clues and probable cause for assessing his psyche and behavior. The grandson of a US senator, the son of one of the most accomplished (to the extent cumulated titles count, at least) figures in post-war American political history, he is himself a screw-up underachiever, who drifts from clown, to cheerleader, to drunkard, to business failure, to Rove-the-ventriloquist`s dummy-politician. It would be harder to imagine that young Bush would not be massively insecure under these conditions than that he would, particularly with a younger brother long seen as the rising star, and George the Bush clan failure.

But you could also see it in his presidency, in some of the characteristics and occasional revealing insights unintentionally glimpsed within this tightest and most successful propaganda machine in American history. Bush`s deep insecurities are there in the swagger and the macho language. They`re there in the choice of sycophant advisors, in the off-message information never allowed to reach the president (he doesn`t read newspapers, and he only allows pre-screened supporters at public appearances), and in the rigid, Manichean definitions of a world in which there exists only black and white, good and evil. And these insecurities are there in the language used, particularly Bush`s preference for the self-reaffirming "I" he favors instead of "we", or "my administration" instead of "this administration". This represents a substantial deviation from the more humble style employed by every president in my lifetime.

Another revealing example of such unintended linguistic insights can be found in the self-centered construction Bush uses to announce the invasion of Afghanistan: "Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan." Then the same again, when he launches the Iraq war: "On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein`s ability to wage war."

But my personal favorite among unwitting revelations of the president`s powerful insecurities was always this snippet from Bob Woodward`s Bush At War: "I`m the commander - see, I don`t need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That`s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don`t feel like I owe anybody an explanation." To my mind, this one small and inadvertent window on Bush`s psyche speaks volumes as to his precarious self-esteem, and requires little further elaboration.

On top of these insights, plus those from the Paul O`Neill (Suskind) and Richard Clarke books, and from the Downing Street Memo, now comes the startling (re)revelations Herskowitz captures from his interviews for the book which would become (but only after Herskowitz, a Bush family friend before and after, was replaced by Karen Hughes because his drafts weren`t flattering enough) Bush`s silly and inflated autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House".

The Baker article confirms the inferiority complex which drives this president`s policies: In it, Bush admits to Herskowitz that he never fulfilled his National Guard duties during the Vietnam era, and that his business ventures were "floundering". More importantly, "Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father`s shadow".

It confirms that Bush had planned to invade Iraq well before 9/11, and indeed before his presidency even began: "`He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,` said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. `It was on his mind. He said to me: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief." And he said, "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it." He said, "If I have a chance to invade..if I had that much capital, I`m not going to waste it. I`m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I`m going to have a successful presidency."`"

This is, in retrospect, horrific stuff. But then it gets worse. Herskowitz tells Baker "Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.

"According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush`s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. `Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.`

"Bush`s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: `They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.`

"Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter`s political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush`s father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically."

Oh, and one other thing we might note. "He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader." At the end of "The Downfall", the real-life, now-elderly Traudl Junge, Hitler`s secretary upon whose recollections the film is based, talks of her horror at learning after the war about the Holocaust and Germany`s other crimes, and concludes that `We [the German people] could have known about these things and stopped them, but we didn`t`.

What of Americans? Are we to be the Nazis of the 21st century? The imperialist power which invades Iraq - instead of Poland - on flimsy pretexts? The purveyors of "the gulag of our time"? Or have we learned about these things and stopped them, as Junge wishes she had in her day?

There are reasons for both hope and despair. Hope, because `only` two some years into Bush`s Iraq adventure, the American public is now showing clear signs of disdain for both the war and its architects. This despite the absence of a draft, war taxes, civil unrest at home, or serious coverage of the war bringing even a hint of its real human consequences into people`s living rooms. And this before the Downing Street Memo and like revelations have begun to gain traction in America`s political discourse about the war, showing the lies behind it.

But despair, also, because this is a war which transparently should never have occurred. Hitler said "What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think". Americans, despite believing they long ago understood the dangers of totalitarianism, and despite the more recent scar of Vietnam to remind them of the consequences of leaders lying them into war, still have taken far too long to get to where they now barely are in opposing the war. And, what is worse, it seems clear that any real mass public distaste for the war reflects neither morality nor concern for others. Indeed, had the war been the cakewalk the White House evidently expected, Bush would likely be a hero amongst Americans today, emboldened to launch another `small war`, not the bum to which he is instead coming to be seen.

Despair, also, because we have so little excuse, in a historically relative sense. At least Germans were hurting bad at the time of Hitler`s rise to power, and can legitimately account for some of their monumental folly by reference to the desperation of their times, driven by the toxic cocktail of WWI humiliation, onerous war reparations, political chaos under the stability-averse Weimar Republic, and crushing economic depression. We Americans? We`re the richest country in the world, the unchallenged superpower, and - 9/11 notwithstanding - highly secure from any real military threat on our shores. How will we answer history when it asks what was our excuse?

In his New York Times review of "The Downfall", A.O. Scott writes "But of course, millions of Germans - most of them ordinary and, in their own minds, decent people - loved Hitler, and it is that fact that most urgently needs to be understood, and that most challenges our own complacency."

Indeed it does. I have been shocked and awed in recent years by the desperate rigidity of many of the president`s supporters in clinging to their conclusions about national and international affairs, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. I have had multiple conversations with such individuals which were abruptly truncated when solid evidence was placed on the table, as if they were simply psychologically unprepared to go where such facts inevitably led.

In my judgment, these Americans have entered into a post-empirical era of policy `analysis` and political `discussion`, a time in which politics has become for them a faith-based enterprise. They believe what they believe, and there is neither need, nor desire, nor tolerance of dissenting information or opinion.

Polling data suggests to me that there is a very large core of perhaps 40 percent of the American public who fall into this category, including - most surprisingly - people like those described in Thomas Frank`s "What`s The Matter With Kansas?", for whom Bush`s economic policies are particularly and personally ruinous. Whatever antidote it will take to shake this very large contingent of Americans from their Bush-induced and Limbaugh-nourished hallucinations has evidently not yet been discovered. v And, at the end of the day, there may be no such item or even catalog of items, just as there was not for Magda Goebbels. So far, at least, neither the pre-9/11 security failures of the Bush administration, the tragedy of the Iraq quagmire, the drunken-sailor spending binge of the national treasury, the wholesale exportation of jobs, the thrashing of international law, alliances, treaties and morality, nor the disgust and anger of the rest of the world at American behavior abroad appears to be sufficient.

Rather, put more accurately, it is likely that the awareness of the very existence of such maladies is only dimly perceived by the bulk of these Americans. For the Bush team has well understood the central lesson of Magda`s husband, the 20th century`s master propagandist: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

But there is more to the story than the diabolically clever and largely successful efforts of the Bush team, and the movement of regressive politics they lead, to stifle, intimidate, ignore, end-run and replace a free press, as well as the constitutionally guaranteed rights to meaningful free assembly or redress of government.

We must ask what, at a psychological level, drives the nationalist and religious imperatives - both needs, along with a passion to be led, requited in spades by the Bush presidency - haunting so much of middle America in a time of general peace and prosperity.

I don`t pretend to have the answer to this question. Indeed, I would be skeptical that there even exists a single answer to the question.

But if I had to hazard a guess, my intuition suggests to me that we may now be paying the price for the human commodification and atomization that has been a product of the hyper-capitalism which has proliferated here in recent decades.

During this period, the incredibly rich have gotten incredibly richer, while the basic web of economic security which once provided a safety net to middle-class Americans is being systematically dismantled from every angle, whether that takes the form of good jobs being automated or leaving the country, college tuition becoming prohibitive in cost, private healthcare and pension plans retracting or disappearing, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs under assault and retrenching, tightening of the bankruptcy noose, the decaying of organized labor`s bargaining power, and/or stagnant wages matched by rising costs and skyrocketing personal debt.

Anyway you slice it, the message of the cosmos is quite clear to those spiritually underprivileged bipeds inhabiting this bit of planet Earth at the rise of the third millennium: "You`re on your own, pal!". If there`s a better recipe for existential angst, I`m hard pressed to imagine it. And if there`s a better way to drive people, during a time of relative peace and prosperity, into a feverishly-maintained, logically-unsustainable, but nevertheless emotionally-satisfying politics, I can`t think of that either.

Is this too simple a solution to the puzzle of what lurks in the American heart, circa 2005? Probably.

But this much I think we can say, for sure. Progressivism will never again succeed in America until we begin to understand Americans at the level of their psychological functions, and start addressing not just their rational, material and moral needs, but their deeper emotional requisites, as well.

Bush, and his movement of the American bunker, understand this well. Indeed, they must, for they cannot deliver at any other level, and they can only pretend to even deliver at the emotional level by creating conditions of heightened fear and focused rage which barely cover their myriad policy failures. Troubled by your slipping standard of living? Forget that. Homosexuals now want to legally marry each other! But Bush is more than a successful politician able to be skillfully marketed, like so many detergent flakes, by the evil Dr. Rove. He is certainly all that, but he is also, regrettably, a mirror reflecting the troubled psyche of the American superpower, and a window into its anxious, selfish and fearful soul. Progressives must find ways to speak this same language of emotion and soul, but not falsely, and not for ill, but instead to better our country and our world. It can be done.

Finally, a program note.

Somewhere in America, on the highest perches of a tall mountain, a small rock has begun its descent, bringing others down with it. This rock was loosed by the release of a secret memo far across the Atlantic, but its path has been prepared by years of political deceit, arrogance, and aggression at home and abroad. The avalanche it has precipitated is at this moment gaining mass and velocity at a fast-growing rate. Its ultimate destination is Pennsylvania Avenue, in the American capital, though it remains unclear whether it possesses sufficient energy to carry that far.

While the vast bulk of Americans haven`t yet a clue of what lurks on the horizon (because their media persists in not telling them), there is in fact more than a whiff of regime change in the air as a potential Washington Spring of our time gains momentum.

Consider. On Memorial Day, a major metropolitan newspaper called the US president a liar who has abused his most sacred trust as commander in chief. No, it wasn`t Le Monde or The Guardian. It was the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, crying out from the American Heartland. Then, yesterday, from next door in Wisconsin, came passage of a resolution at the state Democratic Party convention, calling on Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against America`s president, vice-president and secretary of defense. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of major newspapers across the country are editorializing angrily on the Downing Street Memo, even while their front pages so far remain bizarrely and unaccountably (in both senses of the word) silent.

Before the war, Bush once dropped in on Condoleezza Rice`s office and said to three startled senators visiting there, "Fuck Saddam. We`re taking him out." But it now appears at least as likely that the opposite will be true. Saddam may well be returning the favor. It is no longer inconceivable or even broadly improbable that the Bush junta will fall, and that America and the world will breathe free once again. This may be particularly likely after a new Congress is seated in January 2007, with quite possibly a substantially different complexion from the current one, and also quite possibly Nancy Pelosi, rather than Dennis Hastert, as third in line of presidential succession.

All of which makes the hearts of progressives leap with a joy they`ve not felt for a very long time. But, given what has been discussed above, we would do well to also consider the dangers inherent in our looming possible success. If nothing else, the last decade has taught us that the regressive right will do anything to obtain and retain power, whether that means stealing elections, judicial coups, impeachment for minor personal offenses, rewriting centuries-old Senate rules, or smearing war heroes like Max Cleland or the Johns, Kerry and McCain.

Given such a pattern, this also makes it not unlikely that a congressionally unseated Bush and Cheney might simply decide not to go, plunging the republic into the second worst constitutional crisis in its history. Meanwhile, egged on by the Fox/Limbaugh/et al. propaganda circuit, the forty percent of Americans described above might line-up behind the president-cum-dictator accordingly, no doubt convinced that impeachment was illegitimate partisan revenge for Clinton.

Now is not yet the moment to get too explicitly engrossed in the details of what may yet turn out to be a far-flung and wildly improbable scenario. And yet, which part of the formulation so far seems patently ridiculous? The chicken-hawk Bush (so anxious to send, so careful not to be sent) is caught lying to the American public about the bloodbath into which he`s plunged the country`s youth, and they therefore angrily demand his scalp? Especially after Congress changes hands because of a landslide anti-Republican vote in 2006?

Or an entrenched, power-obsessed administration, backed by the rude screeches of right-wing media and the enraged forty percent of the American public they`ve mobilized, refusing to yield the keys to the government?

So, what then? While I wouldn`t bet on this scenario (yet), neither does it strike me as wildly improbable. It is therefore not too early to consider how such a political drama might then play out, and what assets each side might bring to the conflict.

Generally, which way the military goes is determinative in civil contests of this sort. And, generally, the American military is certainly not known for its progressive political tendencies. However, the leadership may decide that duty, honor and country require that they place the Constitution over and above ideological commitments. Or, given what we now know about the Air Force Academy, they may not. On the other hand, we may also entertain the hope that increasing numbers of military personnel will recognize that the Vietnam War-avoider Bush has been a complete disaster for America`s over-strained volunteer military.

We must, in short, think strategically and long-term if we are to have a hope of rescuing this country from its present peril. At a minimum, it would be wise for progressives to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam-era protest in attacking the soldiers who are sometimes every bit as much the victims of this war as are Iraqi civilians. More broadly, if we are to avoid a complete constitutional meltdown, we progressives may wish to start building bridges today to key constituencies which will prove crucial in eventualities like those described above.

Conditions look better in America today than they have for a long and dark time now. Still, there is much work to be done to survive the disaster of the radical right`s capture of American government. Not only the nightmare of these last years, but also its unraveling, will prove to be very dangerous waters to navigate.

David Michael Green ([e-mail]) is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

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DSM hat ein Eigenleben bekommen. Heute die LATimes.
Es ist sozusagen der Nachweis einer Theorie.

THE WORLD
New Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq
British officials believed the U.S. favored military force a year before the war, documents show.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-britmem…

By John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writer

June 15, 2005

LONDON — In March 2002, the Bush administration had just begun to publicly raise the possibility of confronting Iraq. But behind the scenes, officials already were deeply engaged in seeking ways to justify an invasion, newly revealed British memos indicate.

Foreshadowing developments in the year before the war started, British officials emphasized the importance of U.N. diplomacy, which they said might force Saddam Hussein into a misstep. They also suggested that confronting the Iraqi leader be cast as an effort to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists.

The documents help flesh out the background to the formerly top-secret "Downing Street memo" published in the Sunday Times of London last month, which said that top British officials were told eight months before the war began that military action was "seen as inevitable." President Bush and his main ally in the war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have long maintained that they had not made up their minds to go to war at that stage.

"Nothing could be farther from the truth," Bush said last week, responding to a question about the July 23, 2002, memo. "Both of us didn`t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It`s the last option."

Publication of the Downing Street memo at the height of Britain`s election campaign at first garnered little notice in U.S. media or other British newspapers. But in the weeks that followed, anger has grown among war critics, who contend that the document proves the Bush administration had already decided on military action, even while U.S. officials were saying that war was a last resort.

The new documents indicate that top British officials believed that by March 2002, Washington was already leaning heavily toward toppling Hussein by military force. Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of State who was then Bush`s national security advisor, was described as enthusiastic about "regime change."

Although British officials said in the documents that they did not think Iraq`s weapons programs posed an immediate threat and that they were dubious of any claimed links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda, they indicated that they were willing to join in a campaign to topple Hussein as long as the plan would succeed and was handled with political and legal care.

The documents contain little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. The focus instead is on how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the United Nations so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law.

Michael Smith, the defense writer for the Times of London who revealed the Downing Street minutes in a story May 1, provided a full text of the six new documents to the Los Angeles Times.

Portions of the new documents, all labeled "secret" or "confidential," have appeared previously in two British newspapers, the Times of London and the Telegraph. Blair`s government has not challenged their authenticity.

They cover a period when reports had begun appearing that the Bush administration was forming plans to go after Hussein in the next phase of its "war on terrorism." A Feb. 10, 2002, article in the Los Angeles Times, for instance, said that the U.S. was considering action against Hussein that might require a massive number of U.S. troops.

Published accounts, including those by the Washington Post`s Bob Woodward and former U.S. counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, said that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began focusing on Iraq soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

In his Jan. 29, 2002, State of the Union address, Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil."

The documents present a picture of a U.S. government fed up with the policy of containing Iraq, skeptical of the U.N. and focused on ousting Hussein.

Blair`s advisors were weighing how Britain could participate in a war. The need to establish a policy on Iraq led to a flurry of meetings between senior U.S. and British officials and internal British government memos in advance of a Bush-Blair summit in April 2002 at the president`s ranch near Crawford, Texas. (According to one of the subsequent documents that has been leaked, a British Cabinet briefing paper written in July 2002, Blair gave Bush a conditional commitment at the Texas summit to support military action to remove Hussein.)

In one memorandum, dated March 14, 2002, and labeled "secret — strictly personal," Blair`s chief foreign policy advisor, David Manning, described to the prime minister a dinner he had had with Rice.

"We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq," wrote Manning, now the British ambassador to the U.S. "It is clear that Bush is grateful for your [Blair`s] support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was different from anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."

The memo went on to say:

"Condi`s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks…. From what she said, Bush has yet to find answers to the big questions:

• How to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified;

• What value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition;

• How to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any);

• What happens the morning after?"

Manning told Blair that given Bush`s eagerness for British backing, the prime minister would have "real influence" on the public relations strategy, on the issue of encouraging the United States to go first to the United Nations and on any U.S. military planning.

Manning said it could prove helpful if Hussein refused to allow renewed U.N. weapons inspections.

"The issue of weapons inspectors must be handled in a way that would persuade Europe and wider opinion that the U.S. was conscious of the international framework, and the insistence of many countries on the need for a legal basis. Renewed refusal by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful argument," Manning wrote Blair.

Four days after the Manning memo, Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador in Washington, wrote to Manning about a lunch he had with Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense and a leading proponent in the administration of confronting Hussein. Meyer said in the memo that he had told Wolfowitz that U.N. pressure and weapons inspections could be used to trip up Hussein.

"We backed regime change," he wrote, "but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe."

Meyer wrote that he had argued that Washington could go it alone if it wanted to. "But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrong-foot Saddam on the inspectors and the [U.N. Security Council resolutions] and the critical importance of the [Middle East peace process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. If all this could be accomplished skillfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries would come on board."

Another memo, from British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on March 22, 2002, bluntly stated that the case against Hussein was weak because the Iraqi leader was not accelerating his weapons programs and there was scant proof of links to Al Qaeda.

"What has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein`s WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," Ricketts wrote. "Attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase skepticism about our case….

"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing," he said.

Ricketts said that other countries such as Iran appeared closer to getting nuclear weapons, and that arguing for regime change in Iraq alone "does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam." That was why the issue of weapons of mass destruction was vital, he said.

"Much better, as you [Straw] have suggested, to make the objective ending the threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD before Saddam uses it or gives it to terrorists," he said. A U.N. Security Council resolution demanding renewal of weapons inspections, he says, would be a "win/win."

"Either [Hussein] against all the odds allows Inspectors to operate freely, in which case we can further hobble his WMD programs, or he blocks/hinders, and we are on stronger grounds for switching to other methods," he wrote.

The arguments that Iraq had illegal, hidden weapons of mass destruction, programs to develop more of them, and that it might give them to terrorists were to become some of the Bush administration`s chief reasons for the war. When no weapons were found, the administration blamed faulty intelligence and said the war still was justified because it ended Hussein`s brutal dictatorship and allowed an emerging democratic government.

In November 2002, the U.S. and Britain managed to get a toughly worded resolution through the Security Council that reintroduced arms inspectors into Iraq for the first time since 1998. However, it fell short of authorizing the use of force against Hussein`s government.

Straw, writing to Blair on March 25, 2002, expressed concern about a lack of support among members of Parliament from the governing Labor Party.

"Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad," he wrote. "But we have a long way to go to convince them as to: The scale of the threat from Iraq, and why this has got worse recently; what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that of e.g. Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action; the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and whether the consequences really would be a compliant, law-abiding replacement government.

"Regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal," he said. "Elimination of Iraq`s WMD capacity has to be the goal."

The new documents also include an earlier 10-page options paper, dated March 8, 2002, from the overseas and defense secretariat of the Cabinet Office, sketching out options for dealing with Iraq. The thrust of the memo was that the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War were likely to fail, and that, in any case, the U.S. had already given up on them.

"The U.S. has lost confidence in containment," the document said. "Some in government want Saddam removed. The success of Operation Enduring Freedom [the military code name for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan], distrust of U.N. sanctions and inspection regimes, and unfinished business from 1991 are all factors.

"Washington believes the legal basis for an attack already exists. Nor will it necessarily be governed by wider political factors. The U.S. may be willing to work with a smaller coalition than we think desirable," it said.

The paper said the British view was that any invasion for the purpose of regime change "has no basis under international law."

The best way to justify military action, it said, would be to convince the Security Council that Iraq was in breach of its post-Gulf War obligations to eliminate its store of weapons of mass destruction.

The document appeared to rule out any action in Iraq short of an invasion.

"In sum, despite the considerable difficulties, the use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option that we can be confident will remove Saddam and bring Iraq back into the international community," it said.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Bush Team Debates Guantanamo`s Fate
Some think the prison for suspected terrorists is hurting America`s image and should be shut. But others say no good alternative exists.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-gitm…
By Mark Mazzetti and John Hendren
Times Staff Writer

June 15, 2005

WASHINGTON — Even as Bush administration officials defend the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concern is growing internally that it has blighted America`s image abroad, and officials are reconsidering options for the offshore detention compound built after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Top administration officials continue to publicly support the prison as necessary for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a broad defense of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the treatment detainees received at the hands of U.S. forces.

"The United States government, let alone the U.S. military, does not want to be in the position of holding suspected terrorists any longer than is absolutely necessary," Rumsfeld said. "But as long as there remains a need to keep terrorists from striking again, a facility will continue to be needed."

Within the Pentagon and State Department, however, there is a widening internal debate about whether the prison is hindering the larger U.S. effort to combat Islamic extremism worldwide.

"From a public diplomacy standpoint, most people want to [close] it," said one senior Pentagon official involved in the debate.

But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue`s sensitivity, pointed out that no decision about the prison`s future was imminent — in part because no one had proposed a good alternative.

The prison is at a U.S. naval base built on land leased more than a century ago from Cuba. Although the facility is outside U.S. territory, the Supreme Court ruled last year that U.S. laws applied to it and to the detainees.

On Tuesday, Rumsfeld briefed Cabinet-level officials in what Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita described as an update on detainee operations. DiRita said he had not heard "serious debate" within the Pentagon about shutting Guantanamo down.

"We`ve raised the questions: `If we didn`t have a facility like Guantanamo, where would we be able to do this kind of interrogation?` " DiRita said. "We`ve raised those issues over time and have always come back to the conclusion that if it wasn`t Guantanamo, it would have to look a lot like Guantanamo. I mean, we`ve put $300 million into that place."

Other officials think that the controversies — including a recent Pentagon report detailing instances of desecration of the Koran by U.S. troops — have developed into a significant diplomatic problem for the United States.

"Internationally, we have a perception problem as to what we`re trying to do and why, and Guantanamo has become a symbol of that problem," said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

U.S. embassies continue to receive complaints and criticism, including from various European parliaments, with "people asking us: `What is happening there? Are people being tortured?` " the official said.

The State Department recognizes the need to deal with the security issues posed by the Al Qaeda detainees, the official said.

"We have to deal with the war on terror," he said. "But we also have to deal with the image problem that derives from Guantanamo itself."

However, he said, shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison was "easier said than done."

"The question is not only what to do with current detainees, but how to handle terrorism suspects who will be captured abroad in the future," he said.

The Bush administration is hoping to accelerate the repatriation of detainees to their home countries, which could slash hundreds from the prison`s roster of 520 inmates.

More than two years have passed since the United States began sending terrorist suspects rounded up in Afghanistan to the island prison, and some inside the Pentagon say the most valuable intelligence has been gleaned from the inmates.

The Pentagon is holding detainees from about 40 nations at the prison, but the process of sending many of them home has been held up for a variety of reasons.

Nations such as Afghanistan do not have adequate detention facilities to accommodate its nationals in U.S. custody.

A second group of nations, including European countries such as Britain and Spain, have told the Pentagon they have no authority under domestic laws to detain the prisoners if the United States turns them over.

Officials said a third group of nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China, could not give the U.S. government sufficient assurances that repatriated prisoners would not be abused after they were handed over.

The repatriation of nearly two dozen ethnic Uighurs from China detained at Guantanamo Bay has been held up because of State Department concerns that the Uighurs might be tortured or killed after being turned over to Chinese custody.

"Nobody has come up with a brilliant answer to how to deal with these problems," said the senior Pentagon official, who added that closing the prison was an option.

Last week, President Bush told the Fox News Channel that the United States was "exploring all alternatives" on the prison`s future, but stopped short of saying the administration was seriously considering closing the facility.

Relocating the prisoners to U.S. military complexes such as Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., also presents problems, and Rumsfeld said Tuesday that no other U.S. facility had the infrastructure to deal with an influx of terrorist suspects.

Last year, the Pentagon briefly considered relocating detainees to U.S. military prisons after a Supreme Court ruling said that Guantanamo Bay`s detainees were entitled to legal due process.

That plan was scrapped and the Defense Department instead established tribunals to review the case of each prisoner and determine whether he deserved "enemy combatant" status.

After completing 558 "combatant status review tribunals," the Pentagon determined that 38 of the prisoners were no longer enemy combatants.

Critics of the Guantanamo Bay prison have become increasingly vocal. Amnesty International issued a report last month calling the prison a gulag, and former President Carter said last week that the facility should be closed.

Several prominent Republicans have joined the critics.

Last week, Sens. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) urged the Pentagon to close the prison. On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) acknowledged that Guantanamo Bay posed an image problem for the United States.

McCain stopped short of calling for the Pentagon to shut the prison, but he said he wrote a letter to Rumsfeld in 2003 saying the Pentagon ought to hold trials for every detainee or release them.

"I don`t think it has to do with the facility itself; it has to do with the disposition of the people held there," McCain said.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) staunchly defended keeping the prison open.

"I believe absolutely that we should not shut it down," said Frist, appearing at a news conference with McCain.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans hearings today to focus in part on the legal status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Given last year`s Supreme Court ruling, some legal analysts and lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay said there was no longer a compelling reason — avoiding the scrutiny of U.S. courts — to keep the prisoners at the facility, commonly known as Gitmo.

"The real rationale for [the prison at] Gitmo wasn`t because the military liked the weather in Cuba. It was to avoid judicial review," said Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, who has served as legal counsel for terrorism suspect Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of being Osama bin Laden`s bodyguard.

"But the Supreme Court recognized that people at Gitmo have a right to go into a federal court and claim judicial review, just as if they were on a base at Leavenworth, Kan., or Charleston, S.C."

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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[urlSenate offices intentionally]http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/06/senate-offices-intentionally-lying.html lying about Lynching Vote last night,
Senate offices intentionally lying about [urlLynching Vote last night,]http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/06/senate-offices-intentionally-lying.html
Dean blasts [urlGOP over voting rights]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0506130160jun13,1,6181033.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
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Der Governator setzt auf direkte Demokratie
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Gov. Schwarzenegger`s call for a Nov. 8
special election presents him with the kind
of challenge he has rarely confronted: keep
the fickle public`s attention, and the media
spotlight, focused on him for months at a time.
An analysis.
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[urlANALYSIS: Governor is hoping to keep public interested in him]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/14/MNGEUD88GP1.DTL[/url]

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Jun 16, 2005

The coming trade war and global depression
By Henry C K Liu
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GF16Dj01.html

Many historians have suggested that the 1929 stock market crash was not the cause of the Great Depression. If anything, the 1929 crash was the technical reflection of the inevitable fate of an overblown bubble economy. Yet stock market crashes can recover within a relatively short time with the help of effective government monetary measures, as demonstrated by the crashes of 1987 (23% drop, recovered in nine months), 1998 (36% drop, recovered in three months) and 2002 (37% drop, recovered in two months).

Structurally, the real cause of the Great Depression, which lasted more than a decade, from 1929 until the US entry to World War II in 1941, was the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that put world trade into a tailspin from which it did not recover until the war began. While the US economy finally recovered through war mobilization after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, most of the world`s market economies sank deeper into war-torn distress and did not fully recover until the Korean War boom in 1951.

Barely five years into the 21st century, with a globalized neo-liberal trade regime firmly in place in a world where market economy has become the norm, trade protectionism appears to be fast re-emerging and developing into a new global trade war of complex dimensions. The irony is that this new trade war is being launched not by the poor economies that have been receiving the short end of the trade stick, but by the US, which has been winning more than it has been losing on all counts from globalized neo-liberal trade, with the European Union following suit in lockstep. Japan, of course, has never let up on protectionism and never taken competition policy seriously. The rich nations need to recognize that their efforts to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of already unfair trade will only plunge the world into deep depression. History has shown that while the poor suffer more in economic depressions, the rich, even as they are financially cushioned by their wealth, are hurt by political repercussions in the form of either war or revolution, or both.

Cold War and moral imperative
During the Cold War, there was no international free trade. The economies of the two contending ideology blocs were completely disconnected. Within each bloc, economies interacted through foreign aid and memorandum trade from their respective superpowers. The competition was not for profit but for the hearts and minds of the people in the two opposing blocs, as well as those in the non-aligned nations in the Third World. The competition between the two superpowers was to give rather than to take from their separate fraternal economies.

The population of the superpowers worked hard to help the poorer people within their separate blocs, and convergence toward equality was the policy aim even if not always the practice. The Cold War era of foreign aid and memorandum trade had a better record of poverty reduction in both camps than post-Cold War globalized neo-liberal trade dominated by one single superpower. The aim was not only to raise income and increase wealth, but also to close income and wealth disparity between and within economies. Today, income and wealth disparity is rationalized as a necessity for capital formation. The New York Times reports that from 1980 to 2002, the total income earned by the top 0.1% of earners in the United States more than doubled, while the share earned by everyone else in the top 10% rose far less and the share of the bottom 90% declined.

For all its ill effects, the Cold War achieved two formidable ends: it prevented nuclear war and it introduced development as a moral imperative into superpower geopolitical competition with rising economic equality within each bloc. In the years since the end of the Cold War, nuclear terrorism has emerged as a serious threat and domestic development is preempted by global trade, even in the rich economies, while income and wealth disparity has widened everywhere.

Since the end of the Cold War some 15 years ago, world economic growth has shifted to rely exclusively on globalized neo-liberal trade engineered and led by the US as the sole remaining superpower, financed with the US dollar as the main reserve currency for trade and anchored by the huge US consumer market made possible by the high wages of US workers. This growth has been sustained by knocking down national tariffs everywhere around the world through supranational institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and financed by a deregulated foreign-exchange market working in concert with a global central-banking regime independent of local political pressure, lorded over by the supranational Bank of International Settlement (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Redefining humanist morality, the United States asserts that world trade is a moral imperative and as such trade promotes democracy, political freedom and respect for human rights in trade participating nations. Unfortunately, income and wealth equality is not among the benefits promoted by trade. Even if the validity of this twisted ideological assertion is not questioned, it clearly contradicts the US practice of trade embargo against countries Washington deems undemocratic, lacking in political freedom and deficient in respect for human rights. If trade promotes such desirable conditions, the practice of linking trade to freedom is tantamount to denying medicine to the sick.

US President George W Bush defends his free-trade agenda in moralistic terms. "Open trade is not just an economic opportunity, it is a moral imperative," he declared in a May 7, 2001, speech. "Trade creates jobs for the unemployed. When we negotiate for open markets, we`re providing new hope for the world`s poor. And when we promote open trade, we are promoting political freedom." Such claims remain highly controversial when tested by actual data.

Phyllis Schlafly, a syndicated conservative columnist, responded three weeks later in an article "Free trade is an economic issue, not a moral one". In it, she noted that while conservatives should be happy finally to have a president who added a moral dimension to his actions, "the Bible does not instruct us on free trade and it`s not one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus did not tell us to follow Him along the road to free trade ... Nor is there anything in the US constitution that requires us to support free trade and to abhor protectionism. In fact, protectionism was the economic system believed in and practiced by the framers of our constitution. Protective tariffs were the principal source of revenue for our federal government from its beginning in 1789 until the passage of the 16th Amendment, which created the federal income tax, in 1913. Were all those public officials during those hundred-plus years remiss in not adhering to a "moral obligation" of free trade?" Hardly, argued Schlafly, whose views are noteworthy because US politics is currently enmeshed in a struggle between strict-constructionist paleo-conservatives and moral-imperialist neo-conservatives. Despite the ascendance of neo-imperialism in US foreign policy, protectionism remains strong in US political culture, particularly among conservatives and in the labor movement.

Bush also said China, which reached a trade agreement with the United States at the close of the administration of his predecessor Bill Clinton, and became a member of the WTO in late 2001, would benefit from political changes as a result of liberalized trade policies. This pronouncement gives clear evidence to those in China who see foreign trade as part of an anti-China "peaceful evolution" strategy first envisaged by John Forster Dulles, US secretary of state under president Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. It is a strategy of inducing through peaceful trade the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reform itself out of power and to eliminate the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of bourgeois liberalization. Almost four decades later, Deng Xiaoping criticized CCP chairman Hu Yaobang and premier Zhao Ziyang for having failed to contain bourgeois liberalization in their implementation of China`s modernization policy. Deng warned in November 1989, five months after the Tiananmen incident: "The Western imperialist countries are staging a third world war without guns. They want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism." Deng`s handling of the Tiananmen incident prevented China from going the catastrophic route of the USSR, which dissolved in 1991.

Hostility in the name of `freedom`
Yet it is clear that political freedom is often the first casualty of a garrison-state mentality and such mentality inevitably results from hostile economic and security policy toward any country the US deems as not free. Whenever the US pronounces a nation to be not free, that nation will become less free as a result of US policy. This has been repeatedly evident in China and elsewhere in the Third World. Whenever US policy toward China turns hostile, as it currently appears to be heading, political and press freedoms inevitably face stricter curbs. For trade mutually and truly to benefit the trading economies, three conditions are necessary: 1) the de-linking of trade from ideological/political objectives, 2) maintenance of equality in the terms of trade and 3) recognition that global full employment at rising, living wages is the prerequisite for true comparative advantage in global trade.

The developing rupture between the sole superpower and its traditionally deferential allies lies in mounting trade conflicts. The United States has benefited from an international financial architecture that gives the US economy a structural monetary advantage over those of the EU and Japan, not to mention the rest of the world. Trade issues range from government-subsidy disputes between Airbus and Boeing to those regarding bananas, sugar, beef, oranges and steel, as well as disputes over fair competition associated with mergers and acquisition and financial services. If either government is found to be in breach of WTO rules when these disputes wind through long processes of judgment, the other will be authorized to retaliate. The US could put tariffs on other European goods if the WTO rules against Airbus and vice versa. So if both governments are found in breach, both could retaliate, leading to a cycle of offensive protectionism. When the US was ruled to have unfairly supported its steel industry, tariffs were slapped by the EU on Florida oranges to make a political point in a politically important state in US politics.

Trade competition between the EU and the US is spilling over into security areas, allowing economic interests to conflict with ideological sympathy. Both of these production engines, saddled with serious overcapacity, are desperately seeking new markets, which inevitably leads them to Asia in general and China in particular, with its phenomenal growth rate and its 1.2 billion eager consumers bulging with rapidly rising disposable income. The growth of the Chinese economy will lift all other economies in Asia, including Australia, which has only recently begun to understand that its future cannot be separated from its geographic location and that its prosperity is interdependent with those of other Asia-Pacific economies. Australian iron ore and beef and dairy products are destined for China, not the British Isles. The EU is eager to lift its 15-year-old arms embargo on China, much to the displeasure of the US. Israel, with its close relations with the US, faces a similar dilemma on military sales to China.

Even the US defense establishment has largely come around to the view that the US arms industry must export, even to China, to remain on top. It was reported recently that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to sell to Thailand F-16 warplanes capable of firing advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles two days after he lashed out in Singapore at China for upgrading its own military when no neighboring nations are threatening it (see Rumsfeld pitches in for F-16s, June 9). The sales pitch was in competition with Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30s and Swedish JAS-39s. The open competition in arms export had been spelled out for the US Congress years earlier by Donald Hicks, a leading Pentagon technologist in the administration of president Ronald Reagan. "Globalization is not a policy option, but a fact to which policymakers must adapt," he said. "The emerging reality is that all nations` militaries are sharing essentially the same global commercial-defense industrial base." The boots and uniforms worn by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq were made in China.

The widening wealth gap
The WTO is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade among its 148 member nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, known as the multilateral trading system, negotiated and signed by the majority of the world`s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The stated goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters and importers conduct their business, with the dubious assumption that trade automatically brings equal benefits to all participants. The welfare of the people is viewed only as a collateral aim based on the doctrinal fantasy that "balanced" trade inevitably brings prosperity equally to all, a claim that has been contradicted by facts produced by the very terms of trade promoted by the WTO itself.

Two decades of neo-liberal globalized trade have widened income and wealth disparity within and between nations. Free trade has turned out not to be the win-win game promised by neo-liberals. It is very much a win-lose game, with heads, the rich economies win, and tails, the poor economies lose. Domestic development has been marginalized as a hapless victim of foreign trade, dependent on trade surplus for capital. Foreign trade and foreign investment have become the prerequisite engines for domestic development. This trade model condemns those economies with trade deficits to perpetual underdevelopment. Because of dollar hegemony, all foreign investment goes only to the export sector where US dollars can be earned. Even the economies with trade surpluses cannot use their dollar trade earnings for domestic development, as they are forced to hold huge dollar reserves to support the exchange rate of their currencies.

In the fifth WTO ministerial conference held in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003, the richer countries rejected the demands of poorer nations for radical reform of agricultural subsidies that have decimated Third World agriculture. Failure to get the Doha Round back on track after the collapse of Cancun runs the danger of a global resurgence of protectionism, with the US leading the way. Larry Elliott reported on October 13, 2003, in The Guardian on the failed 2003 Cancun ministerial meeting: "The language of globalization is all about democracy, free trade and sharing the benefits of technological advance. The reality is about rule by elites, mercantilism and selfishness." Elliot noted that the process is full of paradoxes: why is it that in a world where human capital is supposed to be the new wealth of nations, labor is treated with such contempt?

Sam Mpasu, Malawi`s commerce and industry minister, asked at Cancun for his comments about the benefits of trade liberalization, replied dryly: "We have opened our economy. That`s why we are flat on our back." Mpasu`s comments summarized the wide chasm that divides the perspectives of those who write the rules of globalization and those who are powerless to resist them.
Exports of manufactures by low-wage developing countries have increased rapidly over the past three decades due in part to falling tariffs and declining transport costs that enable outsourcing based on wage arbitrage. It grew from 25% in 1965 to nearly 75% over three decades, while agriculture`s share of developing-country exports has fallen from 50% to less than 10%. Many developing countries have gained relatively little from increased manufactures trade, with most of the profit going to foreign capital. Market access for their most competitive manufactured export, such as textiles and apparel, remains highly restricted, and recent trade disputes threaten further restrictions. Still, the key cause of unemployment in all developing economies is the trade-related collapse of agriculture, exacerbated by the massive government subsidies provided to farmers in rich economies. Many poor economies are predominantly agriculturally based and a collapse of agriculture means a general collapse of the whole economy.

The Doha Development Agenda negotiations, sponsored by the WTO, collapsed in Cancun over the question of government support for agriculture in rich economies and its potential impacts on causing more poverty in developing countries. Negotiations since Cancun have focused on the need to understand better the linkages between trade policies, particularly those of the rich economies, and poverty in the developing world. While poverty reduction is now more widely accepted by establishment economists as a necessary central focus for development efforts and has become the main mission of the World Bank and other development institutions, very few effective measures have been forthcoming.

The UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) commit the international community to halving world poverty by 2015, a decade from now. With current trends, that goal is likely to be achievable only through the death of half of the poor by starvation, disease and local conflicts. The UN Development Program warns that 3 million children will die in sub-Saharan Africa alone by 2015 if the world continues on its current path of failing to meet the UNMDG agreed to in 2000. Several key avenues to this goal supposedly lie in international trade, but the record of poverty reduction has been exceedingly poor, if not outright negative. The fundamental question whether trade can replace or even augment socio-economic development remains unasked, let alone answered. Until such issues are earnestly addressed, protectionism will re-emerge in the poor countries. Under such conditions, if democracy expresses the will of the people, democracy will demand protectionism more than government by elite.

While tariffs in the past decade have been coming down like leaves in autumn, flexible exchange rates have become a form of virtual countervailing tariff. In the current globalized neo-liberal trade regime operating in a deregulated global foreign-exchange market, the exchanged value of a currency is regularly used to balance trade through government intervention in currency-market fluctuations against the world`s main reserve currency - the US dollar, as the head of the international monetary snake.

Purchasing power parity (PPP) measures the disconnection between exchange rates and local prices. PPP contrasts with the interest rate parity (IRP) theory, which assumes that the actions of investors, whose transactions are recorded on the capital account, induce changes in the exchange rate. For a dollar investor to earn the same interest rate in a foreign economy with a PPP of four times, such as the purchasing power parity between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan, local wages would have to be at least four times (75%) lower than US wages. PPP theory is based on an extension and variation of the "law of one price" as applied to the aggregate economy.

The law of one price says that identical goods should sell for the same price in two separate markets when there are no transportation costs and no differential taxes applied in the two markets. But the law of one price does not apply to the price of labor. Price arbitrage is the opposite of wage arbitrage in that producers seek to make their goods in the lowest wage locations and to sell their goods in the highest price markets. This is the incentive for outsourcing, which never seeks to sell products locally at prices that reflect PPP differentials. What is not generally noticed is that price deflation in an economy increases its PPP, in that the same local currency buys more. But the cross-border one-price phenomenon applies only to certain products, such as oil, thus for a PPP of four times, a rise in oil prices will cost the Chinese economy four times the equivalent in other goods, or wages, than in the US. The larger the purchasing power parity between a local currency and the dollar, the more severe is the tyranny of dollar hegemony on forcing down wage differentials.

The origins and effects of dollar hegemony
Ever since 1971, when US president Richard Nixon, under pressure from persistent fiscal and trade deficits that drained US gold reserves, took the dollar off the gold standard (at US$35 per ounce), the dollar has been a fiat currency of a country of little fiscal or monetary discipline. The Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II established the dollar, a solid currency backed by gold, as a benchmark currency for financing international trade, with all other currencies pegged to it at fixed rates that changed only infrequently. The fixed-exchange-rate regime was designed to keep trading nations honest and prevent them from running perpetual trade deficits. It was not expected to dictate the living standards of trading economies, which were measured by many other factors besides exchange rates. Bretton Woods was conceived when conventional wisdom in international economics did not consider cross-border flow of funds necessary or desirable for financing world trade, precisely for this reason. Since 1971, the dollar has changed from a gold-backed currency to a global reserve monetary instrument that the US, and only the US, can produce by fiat. At the same time, the US has continued to incur both current-account and fiscal deficits.

That was the beginning of dollar hegemony. With deregulation of foreign-exchange and financial markets, many currencies began to free-float against the dollar, not in response to market forces but to maintain export competitiveness. Government interventions in foreign-exchange markets became a regular last-resort option for many trading economies for preserving their export competitiveness and for resisting the effect of dollar hegemony on domestic living standards.

World trade under dollar hegemony is a game in which the US produces paper dollars and the rest of the world produces real things that paper dollars can buy. The world`s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies in foreign-exchange markets. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies in deregulated markets, the world`s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to market pressure on their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces all central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This anomalous phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The denomination of oil in dollars and the recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in dollar-denominated assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. A strong-dollar policy is in the US national interest because it keeps US inflation low through low-cost imports and it makes US assets denominated in dollars expensive for foreign investors. This arrangement, which Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan proudly calls US financial hegemony in congressional testimony, has kept the US economy booming in the face of recurrent financial crises in the rest of the world. It has distorted globalization into a "race to the bottom" process of exploiting the lowest labor costs and the highest environmental abuse worldwide to produce items and produce for export to US markets in a quest for the almighty dollar, which has not been backed by gold since 1971, nor by economic fundamentals for more than a decade. The adverse effects of this type of globalization on the developing economies are obvious. It robs them of the meager fruits of their exports and keeps their domestic economies starved for capital, as all surplus dollars must be reinvested in US treasuries to prevent the collapse of their own domestic currencies.

The adverse effect of this type of globalization on the US economy is also becoming clear. In order to act as consumer of last resort for the whole world, the US economy has been pushed into a debt bubble that thrives on conspicuous consumption and fraudulent accounting. The unsustainable and irrational rise of US equity and real-estate prices, unsupported by revenue or profit, has meant a de facto devaluation of the dollar. Ironically, the recent fall in US equity prices from their 2004 peak and the anticipated fall in real-estate prices reflect a trend to an even stronger dollar, as the same amount of dollars can buy more deflated shares and properties. The rise in the purchasing power of the dollar inside the United States impacts its purchasing-power disparity with other currencies unevenly, causing sharp price instability in the economies with freely exchangeable currencies and fixed exchange rates, such as Hong Kong and until recently Argentina. For the US, a falling exchange rate of the dollar actually causes asset prices to rise. Thus with a debt bubble in the US economy, a strong dollar is not in the US national interest. Debt has turned US policy on the dollar on its head.

The setting of exchange values of currencies is practiced not only by sovereign governments on their own currencies as a sovereign right. The US, exploiting dollar hegemony, usurps the privilege of dictating the exchange value of all foreign currencies to support its own economic nationalism in the name of global free trade. And the US position on exchange rates has not been consistent. When the dollar was rising, as it did in the 1980s, the US, to protect its export trade, hailed the stabilizing wisdom of fixed exchange rates. When the dollar falls as it has been in recent years, the US, to deflect blame for its trade deficit, attacks fixed exchange rates as currency manipulation, as it now targets China`s currency, which has been pegged to the dollar for more than a decade. How can a nation manipulate the exchange value of its currency when it is pegged to the dollar at the same rate over long periods? Any manipulation came from the dollar, not the yuan.

Economic nationalism
The recent rise of the euro against the dollar, the first appreciation wave since its introduction on January 1, 2002, is the result of an EU version of the 1985 Plaza Accord on the Japanese yen, albeit without a formal accord. The strategic purpose is more than merely moderating the US trade deficit. The record shows that even with a 30% drop of the dollar against the euro, the US trade deficit continued to climb. The strategic purpose of driving up the euro is to reduce it to the status of the yen, as a subordinated currency to dollar hegemony. The real effect of the Plaza Accord was to shift the cost of support for the dollar-denominated US trade deficit, and the socio-economic pain associated with that support, from the United States to Japan. What is happening to the euro now is far from being the beginning of the demise of the dollar. Rather, it is the beginning of the reduction of the euro into a subservient currency to the dollar to support the US debt bubble.

Six and a half years since the launch of the European Monetary Union, the eurozone is trapped in an environment in which monetary policy of sound money has in effect become destructive and supply-side fiscal policy unsustainable. National economies are beginning to refuse to bear the pain needed for adjustment to globalization or the EU`s ambitious enlargement. The European nations are beginning to resist the US strategy to make the euro economy a captive supporter of a rising or falling dollar as such movements fit the shifting needs of US economic nationalism.

It is the modern-day monetary equivalent of the brilliant Roman strategy of making a dissident Jew a Christian god to preempt Judaism`s rising cultural domination over Roman civilization. Roman law, the foundation of the Roman Empire, gained in sophistication from being influenced by, if not directly derived from, Jewish Talmudic law, particularly on the concept of equity - an eye for an eye. The Jews had devised a legal system based on the dignity of the individual and equality before the law four centuries before Christ. There was no written Roman law until two centuries before Christ. The Roman law of obligatio was not conducive to finance as it held that all indebtedness was personal, without institutional status. A creditor could not sell a note of indebtedness to another party and a debtor did not have to pay anyone except the original creditor. Talmudic law, on the other hand, recognized impersonal credit, and a debt had to be paid to whoever presented the demand note. This was a key development of modern finance. With the Talmud, the Jews under the Diaspora had an international law that spanned three continents and many cultures.

The Romans were faced with a dilemma. Secular Jewish ideas and values were permeating Roman society, but Judaism was an exclusive religion that the Romans were not permitted to join. The Romans could not assimilate the Jews as they did the Greeks. Early Christianity also kept its exclusionary trait until Paul, who opened Christianity to all. Historian Edward Gibbon (1737-94) noted that Rome recognized the Jews as a nation who as such were entitled to religious peculiarities. The Christians, on the other hand, were a sect and, being without a nation, subverted other nations. The Roman Jews were active in government and, when not resisting Rome against social injustice, fought side by side with Roman legionnaires to preserve the empire. Roman Jews were good Roman citizens. By contrast, the early Christians were social dropouts, refused responsibility in government and civic affairs and were conscientious objectors and pacifists in a militant culture. Gibbon noted that Rome felt that the crime of a Christian was not in what he did, but in being who he was.

Christianity gained control of Roman culture and society long before Constantine, who in AD 324 sanctioned it with political legitimacy and power after recognizing its power in helping to win wars against pagans, as pope Urban II in 1095 used the Crusade to prolong papal temporal power. When early Christianity, a secular Jewish dissident sect, began to move up from the lower strata of Roman society and began to find converts in the upper echelons, the Roman polity adopted Christianity, the least objectionable of all Jewish sects, as a state religion. Gibbon estimated that Christians killed more of their own members over religious disputes in the three centuries after coming to secular power than did the Romans in three previous centuries. Persecution of the Jews began in Christianized Rome. The disdain held by early Christianity for centralized government gave rise to monasticism and contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

By allowing a trade surplus denominated in dollars to be accumulated by non-dollar economies such as the yen, euro, or now the Chinese yuan, the cost of supporting the appropriate value of the US dollar to sustain perpetual economic growth in the dollar economy is then shifted to these non-dollar economies, which manifest themselves in perpetual relative low wages and weak domestic consumption. For the already high-wage EU and Japan, the penalty is the reduction of social-welfare benefits and job security traditional to these economies. China, now the world`s second-largest creditor nation, it is reduced to having to ask the US, the world`s largest debtor nation, for capital denominated in dollars the US can print at will to finance its export trade to a US running recurring trade deficits.

Market impotence against trade imbalance
The IMF, which has been ferocious in imposing draconian fiscal and monetary "conditionalities" on all debtor nations everywhere in the decade after the Cold War, is nowhere to be seen on the scene in the world`s most fragrantly irresponsible debtor nation. This is because the US can print dollars at will and with immunity. The dollar is a fiat currency not backed by gold, not backed by US productivity, not backed by US export prowess, but backed by US military power. The US military budget request for Fiscal Year 2005 is $420.7 billion. For Fiscal Year 2004, it was $399.1 billion; for 2003, $396.1 billion; for 2002, $343.2 billion; and for 2001, $310 billion. In the first term of George W Bush`s presidency, the US spent $1.5 trillion on its military. That is more than the entire gross domestic product of China in 2004. The US trade deficit is about 6% of its GDP, while it military budget is about 4%. In other words, the trading partners of the US are paying for one and a half times the cost of a military that can some day be used against any one of them for any number of reasons, including trade disputes. The anti-dollar crowd has nothing to celebrate about the recurring US trade deficit.

It is pathetic that Rumsfeld tries to persuade the world that China`s military budget, which is less that one-tenth of that of the United States, is a threat to Asia, even when he is forced to acknowledge that Chinese military modernization is mostly focused on defending its coastal territories, not on force projection for distant conflicts, as is US military doctrine. While Rumsfeld urges more political freedom in China, his militant posture toward China is directly counterproductive toward that goal. Ironically, Rumsfeld chose to make his case about political freedom in Singapore, the bastion of Confucian authoritarianism.

Normally, according to free-trade theory, trade can only stay unbalanced temporarily before equilibrium is re-established or free trade would simply stop. When bilateral trade is temporarily unbalanced, it is generally because one trade partner has become temporarily uncompetitive, inefficient or unproductive. The partner with the trade deficit receives more goods and services from the partner with the trade surplus than it can offer in return and thus pays the difference with its currency that someday can buy foods produced by the deficit trade partner to re-established balance of payments. This temporary trade imbalance can be due to a number of socio-economic factors, such as terms of trade, wage levels, return on investment, regulatory regimes, shortages in labor or material or energy, trade-supporting infrastructure adequacy, purchasing power disparity, etc. A trading partner that runs a recurring trade deficit earns the reputation of being what banks call a habitual borrower, ie, a bad credit risk, one that habitually lives beyond its means. If the trade deficit is paid with its currency, a downward pressure results in the exchange rate. A flexible exchange rate seeks to remove or moderate a temporary trade imbalance while the productivity disparities between trading partners are being addressed fundamentally.

Dollar hegemony prevents US trade imbalance from returning to equilibrium through market forces. It allows a US trade deficit to persist based on monetary prowess. This translates over time into a falling exchange rate for the dollar even as dollar hegemony keeps the fall at a slow pace. But a below-par exchange rate over a long period can run the risk of turning the temporary imbalance in productivity into a permanent one. A continuously weakening currency condemns the issuing economy into a downward economic spiral. This has happened to the United States in the past decade. To make matters worse, with globalization of deregulated markets, the recurring US trade deficit is accompanied by an escalating loss of jobs in sectors sensitive to cross-border wage arbitrage, with the job-loss escalation climbing up the skill ladder. Discriminatory US immigration policies also prevent the retention of low-paying jobs within the US and exacerbate the illegal-immigration problem.

Regional wage arbitrage within the US in past decades kept its economy lean and productive internationally. Labor-intensive US industries relocated to the low-wage south of the country through regional wage arbitrage, and despite temporary adjustment pains from the loss of textile mills, the northern economies managed to upgrade their productivity, technology level, financial sophistication and output quality. The economies in the southern US also managed to upgrade these factors of production and in time managed to narrow the wage disparity within the national economy. This happened because the jobs stayed within the nation. With globalization, it is another story. Jobs are leaving the United States mercilessly. According to free-trade theory, the US trade deficit is supposed to cause the dollar to fall temporarily against the currencies of its trading partners, causing export competitiveness to rebalance, thereby removing or reducing the US trade deficit. Jobs that have been lost temporarily are then supposed to return to the US.

But the persistent US trade deficit defies trade theory because of dollar hegemony. The broad trade-weighted dollar index stays in an upward trend, despite selective appreciation of some strong currencies, as highly indebted emerging market economies attempt to extricate themselves from dollar-denominated debt through the devaluation of their currencies. While the aim is to subsidize exports, this ironically makes dollar debts more expensive in local-currency terms. The moderating impact on US price inflation also amplifies the upward trend of the trade-weighted dollar index despite persistent US expansion of monetary aggregates, also known as monetary easing or money printing.

Adjusting for this debt-driven increase in the exchange value of dollars, the import volume into the US can be estimated in relationship to expanding monetary aggregates. The annual growth of the volume of goods shipped to the United States has remained around 15% for most of the 1990s, more than five times the average annual GDP growth. The US enjoyed a booming economy when the dollar was gaining ground, and this occurred at a time when interest rates in the US were higher than those in its creditor nations. This led to the odd effect that raising interest rates actually prolonged the boom in the US rather than threatened it, because it caused massive inflows of liquidity into the US financial system, lowered import-price inflation, increased apparent productivity and prompted further spending by American consumers enriched by the wealth effect despite a slowing of wage increases. Returns on dollar assets stayed high in foreign-currency terms.

This was precisely what Greenspan did in the 1990s in the name of preemptive measures against inflation. Dollar hegemony enabled the US to print money to fight inflation, causing a debt bubble of asset appreciation. These data substantiated the view of the US as Rome in a New Roman Empire with an unending stream of imports as the free tribute from conquered lands. This was what Greenspan meant by US "financial hegemony".

The Fed Funds Rate (FFR)target has been lifted eight times in steps of 25 basis points from 1% in mid-2004 to 3% on May 3, 2005. If the same pattern of "measured pace" continues, the FFR target would be at 4.25% by the end of 2005. Despite Fed rhetoric, the lifting of dollar interest rates has more to do with preventing foreign central banks from selling dollar-denominated assets, such as US Treasuries, than with fighting inflation. In a debt-driven economy, high interest rates are themselves inflationary. Raising interest rates to fight inflation could become the monetary dog chasing its own interest-rate tail, with rising rates adding to rising inflation, which then requires more interest-rate hikes. Still, interest-rate policy is a double edged sword: it keeps funds from leaving the debt bubble, but it can also puncture the debt bubble by making the servicing of debt prohibitively expensive.

To prevent this last adverse effect, the Fed adds to the money supply, creating an unnatural condition of abundant liquidity with rising short-term interest rates, resulting in a narrowing of interest spread between short-term and long-term debts, a leading indication for inevitable recession down the road. The problem of adding to the money supply is what John Maynard Keynes called the liquidity trap, that is, an absolute preference for liquidity even at near-zero interest-rate levels. Keynes argued that either a liquidity trap or interest-insensitive investment draft could render monetary expansion ineffective in a recession. It is what is popularly called pushing on a credit string, where ample money cannot find creditworthy willing borrowers. Much of the new low-cost money tends to go to refinancing existing debt taken out at previously higher interest rates. Rising short-term interest rates, particularly at a measured pace, would not remove the liquidity trap while long-term rates stay flat because of excess liquidity.

The debt bubble in the US is clearly having problems, as evident in the bond market. With just 14 deals worth $2.9 billion, May 2005 was the slowest month for high-yield bond issuance since October 2002. The late-April downgrades of the debt of General Motors and Ford Motor to junk status roiled the bond markets. The number of high-yield, or junk-bond, deals fell 55% in the March-to-May 2005 period compared with the same three months in 2004. They were also down 45% from the December-through-February period. In dollar value, junk-bond deals totaled $17.6 billion in the March-to-May 2005 period, compared with $39.5 billion during the same three months in 2004 and $36 billion from December 2004 through February 2005. There were 407 deals of investment-grade bond underwriting during the March-to-May 2005 period, compared with 522 in the same period 2004 - a decline of 22%. In dollar volume, some $153.9 billion of high-grade bonds were underwritten from March to May 2005, compared with $165.5 billion in the same period in 2004 - a 7% decline.

Oil at $50 a barrel, along with astronomical asset-price appreciation, particularly in real estate, is giving the debt bubble additional borrowed time. But this game cannot go on forever and the end will likely be triggered by a new trade war`s effect on reduced trade volume. The price of a reduced US trade deficit is the bursting of the US debt bubble, which could plunge the world economy into a new depression. Given such options, the United States has no choice but to ride the trade-deficit train for as long as the traffic will bear, which may not be too long, particularly if protectionism begins to gather force.

The transition to offshore outsourced production has been the source of the productivity boom of the "New Economy" in the US in the past decade. The productivity increase not attributable to the importing of other nations` productivity is much less impressive. While published government figures of the productivity index show a rise of nearly 70% since 1974, the actual rise is between zero and 10% in many sectors if the effect of imports is removed from the equation. The lower productivity values are consistent with the real-life experience of members of the blue-collar working class and the white-collar middle class who have been spending the equity cash-outs from the appreciated market value of their homes. World trade has become a network of cross-border arbitrage on differentials in labor availability, wages, interest rates, exchange rates, prices, saving rates, productive capacities, liquidity conditions and debt levels. In some of these areas, the US is becoming an underdeveloped economy.

The Bush administration continues to assure the US public that the state of the economy is sound while in reality the country has been losing entire sectors of its economy, such as manufacturing and information technology, to foreign producers, while at the same time selling off part of the nation to finance its rising and unending trade deficit. Usually, when unjustified confidence crosses over to fantasized hubris on the part of policymakers, disaster is not far ahead.

The Clinton legacy
To be fair, the problems of the US economy started before the administration of George W Bush. The Clinton administration`s annual economic report for 2000 claimed that the longest economic expansion in US history could continue "indefinitely" as long as "we stick to sound policy", according to chairman Martin Baily of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) as reported in the Wall Street Journal. A New York Times report differed somewhat by quoting Baily as saying: "stick to fiscal policy." Putting the two newspaper reports together, one got the sense that the Clinton administration thought its fiscal policy was the sound policy needed to put an end to the business cycle. Economics high priests in government, unlike the rest of us mortals who are unfortunate enough to have to float in the daily turbulence of the market, can afford to focus aloofly on long-term trends and their structural congruence to macro-economic theories. Yet outside of macro-economics, "long-term" is increasingly being redefined in the real world. In the technology and communication sectors, "long-term" evokes periods lasting less than five years. For hedge funds and quant shops, long-term can mean a matter of weeks.

Two factors were identified by the Clinton CEA Year 2000 economic report as contributing to the "good" news - technology-driven productivity and neo-liberal trade globalization. Even with somewhat slower productivity and spending growth, the CEA believed the economy could continue to expand perpetually. As for the huge and growing trade deficit, the CEA expected global recovery to boost demand for US exports, not withstanding the fact that most US exports are increasingly composed of imported parts.

Yet the United States has long officially pursued a strong-dollar policy that weakens world demand for US exports. The high expectation on e-commerce was a big part of optimism, which had yet to be substantiated by data. In 2000, the CEA expected the business to business (B2B) portion of e-commerce to rise to $1.3 trillion by 2003 from $43 billion in 1998. Goldman Sachs claimed in 1999 that B2B e-commerce would reach $1.5 trillion by 2004, twice the size of the combined 1998 revenues of the US auto industry and the US telecom sector. Others were more cautious. Jupiter Research projected that companies around the globe would increase their spending on B2B e-marketplaces from US$2.6 billion in 2000 to only $137.2 billion by 2005 and spending in North America alone would grow from $2.1 billion to only $80.9 billion. North American companies accounted for 81% of the total spending in 1998, but by 2005, that figure was expected to drop to 60% of the total. The fact of the matter is that Asia and Europe are now faster growth markets for communication and technology.
Reality proved disappointing. A 2004 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report said that in the United States, e-commerce between enterprises, which in 2002 represented almost 93% of all e-commerce, accounted for 16.28% of all commercial transactions between enterprises. While overall transactions between enterprises (e-commerce and non e-commerce) fell in 2002, e-commerce B2B grew at an annual rate of 6.1%. As for business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, UNCTAD reported that sales in the first quarter of 2004 amounted to 1.9% of total retail sales, a proportion nearly twice as large as that recorded in 2001. The annual rate of growth of retail e-commerce in the US in the year to the end of the first quarter of 2004 was 28.1%, while the growth of total retail in the same period was only 8.8%. Dow Jones reported on May 20, 2005, that first-quarter retail e-commerce sales in the US rose 23.8% compared with the year-ago period to $19.8 billion from $16 billion, according to preliminary numbers released by the Department of Commerce. E-commerce sales during the first quarter rose 6.4% from the fourth quarter, when they were $18.6 billion. Sales for all periods are on an adjusted basis, meaning the Commerce Department adjusts them for seasonal variations and holiday and trading-day differences but not for price changes.

E-commerce sales accounted for 2.2% of total retail sales in the first quarter of 2005, when those sales were an estimated $916.9 billion, according to the Commerce Department. Wal-Mart, the low-priced retailer that imports outsourced goods from overseas, grew only 2%, indicating spending fatigue on the part of low-income US consumers, while Target Stores, the upscale retailer that also imports outsourced goods, continued to grow at 7%, indicating the effects of rising income disparity.

The CEA 2000 report did not address the question of whether e-commerce was merely a shift of commerce or a real growth. The possibility exists for the new technology to generate negative growth. It happened to IBM - the increased efficiency (lower unit cost of calculation power) of IBM big frames actually reduced overall IBM sales, and most of the profit and growth in personal computers went to Microsoft, the software company that grew on business that IBM, a self-professed hardware manufacturer, did not consider worthy of keeping for itself. The same thing happened to Intel, where in 1965 company co-founder Gordon Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue the doubling of transistors every couple of years. But what this so-called Moore`s Law did not predict was that this growth of computing power per dollar would cut into company profitability. As the market price of computer power continues to fall, the cost to producers to achieve Moore`s Law has followed the opposite trend: research and development, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. As the fixed cost of semiconductor production continues to increase, manufacturers must sell larger and larger quantities of chips to remain profitable. In recent years, analysts have observed a decline in the number of "design starts" at advanced process nodes. While these observations were made in the period after the year 2000 economic downturn, the decline may be evidence that the long-term global market cannot economically sustain Moore`s Law. Is the Google bubble a replay of the AOL fiasco?

Joseph Alois Schumepter`s creative destruction theory, while revitalizing the macro-economy with technological obsolescence in the long run, leaves real corporate bodies in its path, not just obsolete theoretical concepts. Financial intermediaries and stock exchanges face challenges from electronic communication networks (ECNs), which may well turn the likes of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) into sunset industries. ECNs are electronic marketplaces that bring buy/sell orders together and match them in virtual space. Today, ECNs handle roughly 25% of the volume in Nasdaq stocks. The NYSE and the Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx) announced on April 20 that they had entered a definitive merger agreement that will lead to a combined entity, NYSE Group Inc, becoming a publicly held company. If approved by regulators, NYSE members and Archipelago shareholders, the merger will represent the largest-ever among securities exchanges and combine the world`s leading equities market with the most successful totally open, fully electronic exchange. Through Archipelago, the NYSE will compete for the first time in the trading of Nasdaq -listed stocks; it will be able to indirectly capture listings business that otherwise would not qualify to list on the NYSE. Archipelago lists stocks of companies that do not meet the NYSE`s listing standards.

On fiscal policy, US government spending, including social programs and defense, declined as a share of the economy during the eight years of the Clinton watch. This in no small way contributed to a polarization of both income and wealth, with visible distortions in both the demand and supply sides of the economy. This was the opposite of the Roosevelt administration`s record of increasing income and wealth equality by policy. The wealth effect tied to bloated equity and real-estate markets could reverse suddenly and did in 2000, bailed out only by the Bush tax cut and the deficit spending on the "war on terrorism" after 2001. Private debt kept hitting all-time highs throughout the 1990s and was celebrated by neo-liberal economists as a positive factor. Household spending was heavily based on expected rising future earnings or paper profits, both of which might and did vanish on short notice. By election time in November 1999, the Clinton economic miracle was fizzling. The business cycle had not ended after all, and certainly not by self-aggrandizing government policies. It merely got postponed for a more severe crash later. The idea of ending the business cycle in a market economy was as much a fantasy as the assertion by the current vice president, Richard Cheney, in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 26, 2002, that "the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy ..."

In their 1991 populist campaign for the White House, Bill Clinton and Al Gore repeatedly pointed out the obscenity of the top 1% of Americans owning 40% of the country`s wealth. They also said that if you eliminated home ownership and only counted businesses, factories and offices, then the top 1% owned 90% of all commercial wealth. And the top 10%, they said, owned 99%. It was a situation they pledged to change if elected. But once in office, president Clinton and vice president Gore did nothing to redistribute wealth more equally - despite the fact that their two terms in office spanned the economic joyride of the 1990s that would eventually hurt the poor much more severely than the rich. On the contrary, economic inequality only continued to grow under the Democrats. Reagan spread the national debt equally among the people while Clinton gave all the wealth to the rich.

Rising resistance to globalization
Geopolitically, trade globalization was beginning to face complex resistance worldwide by the second term of the Clinton presidency. The momentum of resistance after Clinton would either slow further globalization or force the terms of trade to be revised. The Asian financial crises of 1997 revived economic nationalism around the world against US-led neo-liberal globalization, while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 revived militarism in the EU. Market fundamentalism as espoused by the United States, far from being a valid science universally, was increasingly viewed by the rest of the world as merely US national ideology, unsupported even by US historical conditions. Just as anti-Napoleonic internationalism was in essence anti-French, anti-globalization and anti-moral-imperialism are in essence anti-US. US unilateralism and exceptionalism became the midwife for a new revival of political and economic nationalism everywhere. The Bush Doctrine of monopolistic nuclear posture, preemptive wars, "either with us or against us" extremism, and no compromise with states that allegedly support terrorism pours gasoline on the smoldering fire of defensive nationalism everywhere.

Alan Greenspan in his October 29, 1997, congressional testimony on "Turbulence in World Financial Markets" before the Joint Economic Committee said that "it is quite conceivable that a few years hence we will look back at this episode [Asian financial crisis of 1997] ... as a salutary event in terms of its implications for the macro-economy". When one is focused only on the big picture, details do not make much of a difference: the Earth always appears more or less round from space, despite that some people on it spend their whole lives starving and cities get destroyed by war or natural disasters. That is the problem with macro-economics. As Greenspan spoke, many around the world were waking up to the realization that the turbulence in their own financial markets was viewed by the US central banker as having a "salutary effect" on the US macro-economy. Greenspan gave anti-US sentiments and monetary trade protectionism held by participants in these financial markets a solid basis and they were no longer accused of being mere paranoia.

Ironically, after the end of the Cold War, market capitalism has emerged as the most fervent force for revolutionary change. Finance capitalism became inherently democratic once the bulk of capital began to come from the pension assets of workers, despite widening income and wealth disparity. The monetary value of US pension funds is more than $15 trillion, the bulk of which belongs to average workers. A new form of social capitalism emerged that would gladly eliminate the worker`s job in order to give him or her a higher return on his or her pension account. The capitalist in the individual is exploiting the worker in the same individual. A conflict of interest arises between a worker`s savings and his or her earnings. As Pogo used to say: "The enemy: they are us." This social capitalism, by favoring return on capital over compensation for labor, produces overinvestment, resulting in overcapacity. But the problem of overcapacity can only be solved by high-income consumers. Unemployment and underemployment in an economy of overcapacity decrease demand, leading to financial collapse. The world economy needs low wages the way the cattle business needs foot-and-mouth disease.

The nomenclature of neo-classical economics reflects, and in turn dictates, the warped logic of the economic system it produces. Terms such as money, capital, labor, debt, interest, profits, employment, market, etc have been conceptualized to describe synthetic components of an artificial material system created by the power politics of greed. It is the capitalist greed in the worker that causes the loss of his or her job to lower-wage earners overseas. The concept of the economic man who presumably always acts in his self-interest is a gross abstraction based on the flawed assumption of market participants acting with perfect and equal information and clear understanding of the implication of his actions. The pervasive use of these terms over time disguises the artificial system as the logical product of natural laws, rather than the conceptual components of the power politics of greed.

Just as monarchism first emerged as a progressive force against feudalism by rationalizing itself as a natural law of politics and eventually brought about its own demise by betraying its progressive mandate, social capitalism today places return on capital above not only the worker but also the welfare of the owner of capital. The class struggle has been internalized within each worker. As people facing the hard choice of survival in the present versus well-being in the future, they will always choose survival, and social capitalism will inevitably go the way of absolute monarchism, and make way for humanist socialism.

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

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Porn queen gets date with Dubya
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[url]http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44763
Neocon Porn Star Mary Carey
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Full Apologies To Mister Ed and Wilbur.

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John Chuckman: `All Bush, all the time, for the rest of your life`
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21536&mode=nest…

Posted on Wednesday, June 15 @ 10:22:42 EDT


A group of Republican legislators proposes to rescind the 22ndAmendment to the American Constitution. This is the Amendment, passed after four terms of Franklin Roosevelt scared the bejesus out of Republicans, limiting a President to two terms in office. The legislators apparently believe that with continued Republican gains in Congress, they may be in a position to change the Constitution by 2006, in time to extend Bush`s benevolent work.

Of course, Bush must actually be re-elected in 2008, but that represents a mere technicality. Bush was appointed in 2000 by a Supreme Court whose capacity for critical thinking already resembled that of senior judges in the early Reich. By 2008, Bush will have loaded the Court with creatures who might have made splendid careers in the Holy Inquisition under Torquemada.
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The Republican fallback plan for 2008 is to repeat the election of 2004, in which heavy vote fraud in places like Ohio gave Republicans their revenge for Democrats` vote fraud in 1960. Republicans used to be more straitlaced about things like vote fraud. It was only the old Democratic political machines of the nation`s cities that supposedly practiced it with any regularity. But with the rise in political influence of America`s fundamentalists and neo-cons, Republicans have embraced vote fraud wholeheartedly. Fundamentalist pitchmen provided the party a splendid example of the advantages of fleecing their flocks. America`s neo-cons have decades of experience posing as disinterested academics advocating human slaughter as policy. If you really think about it, the plan seems sound, and the timing seems right. Its prospects look quite good.

It has my full support, simply because I believe America needs a belly full of Bush before the world can expect any relief from the country`s lunatic course. I know through long experience that what happens to the rest of the world carries little weight with most Americans. Since 9/11, America has been turning itself into a gated community, bristling with ferocious weapons, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and the truth is we don`t hear much outrage about it from America herself.

Americans are stubborn people, convinced of the virtue of whatever they do - even today you`d be hard put to convince many that cremating, poisoning, and blowing apart three million Vietnamese was anything other than heroic self-sacrifice in the name of freedom - so it takes a long time to alter course in America. Steering one of those gigantic super-tankers where you have to anticipate your turn miles ahead is almost child`s play by comparison.

Lies have always been used to promote wars, and America`s wars, despite the nation`s ongoing flirtation with democracy, have been absolutely no different in character to those of despots over the centuries. We could say that it will be the test of democratic maturity when the American people are consulted and told honestly why they are being asked to start a war, but that seems unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

Apart from the ugly lies before wars, remember that America`s most weighty contribution to world culture is exceedingly refined techniques of marketing, a smarmy art developed in the course of the nation`s historic, headlong rush to get rich. So many things in American life - goods, services, religion, and even elections - have more marketing in them than content. Much of American life has about it the quality of "Have a nice day!" from a computerized phone system.

So I don`t understand why any Americans are surprised at Bush`s shameless lies. He`s almost turned lying into a form of stand-up comedy. As soon as one lie`s usefulness is ended, he smirkingly substitutes another, without pausing to consider any need for continuity between the two. It is hilarious to watch the leader of a great nation doing this, at least so long as you are not one of his victims.

The real puzzle is why Americans keep buying tickets to his act. Perhaps, with American media always larded with subtle to blatant lies for commercial marketing and politics, responses to other, greater lies are numbed. Perhaps, America really just doesn`t much care.

Orwell was wrong in 1984 putting forward the idea of the Party`s gradually eliminating words to control people`s ability to think and speak critically. He was of course parodying the Soviet Union which to some extent did follow the practice. But the repressive old Soviet Union is gone while America thrives, constantly inventing new words - marketing gibberish, psycho-babble, political rubbish, science-fiction religion - which strives to puff up nothing into something. In America, you can literally fill a small library with books and magazines on any number of subjects from education to health that contain nothing genuinely furthering human understanding.

Marketing turns out to work better than repression over the long term, although the forces of repression are always there in America to offer assistance in dark corners. Hitler himself could not have asked for a set of laws more devious than the Patriot Act. Its continued existence stands as a monument to American political dull-wittedness. Just as bestial torture cages abroad demonstrate the nation`s lack of interest in anything thought not to affect America.

But as the best evidence of America`s unhealthy condition, I give you People`s Exhibit Number One, the fact that Bush is in office and his polls are still not as low as the nation`s ever-hopeful, hopeless liberals would like to believe. After all, vote fraud doesn`t work where the vote wasn`t already close.

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Hijacking Catastrophe

9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6895.htm

Hijacking Catastrophe is powerful, understated, straightforward and educational. In a single meticulously organized hour of evidence and analysis, viewers are treated to a thoughtful explanation of modern American empire, neo-conservatism as a driving force for the current Bush administration.
Video:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/hijacking_ca…

The Fix is In: Why the Downing Street Memo Matters

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9131.htm

Video:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/smokinggun.rm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/smokinggun.rm

Hijacking Catastrophe

- by Karen Kwiatkowski (Lt. Col. USAF retired)

Better than anyone to date, the Media Education Foundation has quietly and accurately documented the most important history of 21st century thus far in their recent video and DVD release, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire.

Hijacking Catastrophe is powerful, understated, straightforward and educational. In a single meticulously organized hour of evidence and analysis, viewers are treated to a thoughtful explanation of modern American empire, neo-conservatism as a driving force for the current Bush administration, and something I have not seen before, a real economic analysis of what is driving some of our current "global war on terror."

The film examines the Bush Administration’s investment in neo-conservatism, and the early, and already horrific, results. While past performance is no guarantee of future earnings, Hijacking Catastrophe shows exactly why America’s "new conservatism" is a pyramid scheme of inhumane proportions.

The film examines eight aspects of the current situation of American foreign policy. The film provides an explanation for the obvious continuity between Cold War policies and those of the present. It examines long-term neoconservative thinking and how this peculiar version of Jacobin utopianism ascended from its rather inauspicious political roots. The film explores the dangerous territory of how the post 9-11 national shock was carefully cultivated by neoconservatives in Washington to support their own long-held objectives in the Middle East.

Hijacking Catastrophe then documents the Pentagon and White House process of disinformation, exaggeration, and media-supported propaganda between 9-11 and America’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq. It describes the neoconservative vision of military dominance over a supine, energy-rich Middle East, not only for its own sake, but as a warning to other potential international rivals.

Hijacking Catastrophe describes the cost of empire in a way so comprehensive that it becomes clear that neo-conservatism, as a foreign policy guide, comes with a very real moral, political and financial garnishment of every American, and of American children yet unborn. The cost is shown not only as a current financial outlay or in lives unlived on the part of soldiers and marines, but in terms of an alarming debt burden, loss of domestic freedom, the growing and invasive state, a permanent tattering of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Harter Stoff der Titel sagt viel: [urlEnabling Evil: Bush`s Willing Executioners]http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06142005.html[/url]

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[url]http://www.hillcity-comics.com/movies/movie_poster2.htm

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Monster Movie Posters (E-Mark) I can`t seem to get enough of these cheesy monster posters.

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Published on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Sin Verguensas
by Dra. Rosa María Pegueros
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0615-23.htm

Spanish philosopher George Santayana said that “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If only it were so. In my experience, we resolutely ignore the past as we lurch along from one mistake to another.

History is in the national spotlight this week as a number of our past atrocities are highlighted. In the United States Senate, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) has led her colleagues to pass a non-binding resolution apologizing for having failed to enact a federal anti-lynching law. The lynching of blacks, primarily but not limited to men, is one of the great scandals of American history, second only to their enslavement. Even though hundreds of anti-lynching bills were introduced into Congress during the first half of the twentieth century, only three were passed by the House. The Senate remained silent on the subject. Our shining example of a model legislature did not make a peep as almost 5000 of its citizens, mostly black men, were murdered.

Even as this small victory is making its way through the Senate, another drama is taking place in Mississippi. Emmett Till, a 14 year-old black boy, a child, who was lynched for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white woman in 1955, has been exhumed in preparation to try new suspects for his murder. Two men were earlier tried and acquitted but they later admitted their roles in the crime. By then, double jeopardy had attached and the men could not be re-tried. Anyone who is familiar with the civil rights struggle remembers Emmett Till’s funeral. His courageous mother demanded that his casket remain open during the funeral because she wanted the world to see the brutal death her son suffered while it stood by. I hope that she is still alive to see justice done.

In what has been characterized by Susan M. Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi as further evidence of the maturing of the South, the case of the 1964 KKK killing of three young civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner is being reopened.

On June 14, 2005, a memorial was dedicated to the Native Americans who endured what has come to be called The Long Walk. In 1863, the United States Army forced 10,000 Navajos and Apaches to march from their native lands near Ft. Defiance, Arizona to an isolated location 450 miles away called Bosque Redondo. More than a third died of exposure, hunger or disease, or they were shot en route for failing to keep up with the group. The fact that the memorial in New Mexico was funded primarily by the U.S. Army cannot make up for the generations lost to the Navajo and Apache peoples when 2380 of their numbers perished because the misguided Gen. James Henry Carleton aimed to fix “the Navajo problem,” as he called it, once and for all.

While all this airing of dirty laundry is going on, the Republicans are strong-arming the Democrats to bring John Bolton’s nomination to a vote; and President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld blithely justify the existence of the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

What does it matter? In 75 or 100 years when all of us will be dead including George, Dick, and Rummy, the descendents of the prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib will lead a movement for reparations for the abuses of the nefarious rule of this administration. Since, most likely, Congress will be as tight-fisted as ever when it comes to giving money to anyone except wealthy white men, it will take them another fifty years to pass another gutless resolution that calls no one to account and cannot rectify the past.

What new Pinochet will we assist in maintaining a murderous regime? Who will we deprive of their lives and property in a future Manzanar? Will Guantanamo still hold unnamed suspects who are kept in outside pens like monkeys in a zoo? I shudder to think what terrible abuses our government will be commit even as it apologizes for something long past and then yawns. Sin verguensas. They have no shame.

Dr. Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women`s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. To reach her, write to [e-mail]

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Tomorrow`s Woodwards And Bernsteins
Russ Baker
June 13, 2005
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050613/tomorrows_woodward…


Well, wasn’t that some excitement over the unmasking of Deep Throat? Besides resolving a long-standing mystery, the revelation came at an especially auspicious moment. Investigative journalism desperately needs a boost right about now.

With W. Mark Felt’s confession, we now know that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were not making it up. They had a real, knowledgeable flesh-and-blood insider feeding them information about dark doings in the Republic that proved completely reliable, whatever the motives of the informant. They actually did hold covert meetings in underground parking structures and engage in all manner of classic derring-do. The goings-on came to define the very essence of investigative reporting. A generation of young journalists were thus inspired, and investigative reporting grew and thrived.

But that Golden Age is gone, and we need to figure out why, and what can be done to revive it.

To what extent has investigative reporting dried up? Today, many news organizations have disbanded their investigative units altogether. Others have turned investigative teams into “projects” units that tend more toward unmasking consumer scams, relatively narrow acts of wrongdoing, or perennial injustices than digging for revelations that affront our very notion of how democracy ought to function.

The absence of the latter type of reporting was even apparent at last weekend’s Investigative Reporters and Editors’ annual convention in Denver. The award for best reporting by a large newspaper went to The New York Times for a series exposing how the railroad industry, with government acquiescence, shirks its responsibility for fatal accidents, which rose to 369 at railroad crossings last year. This story, which also won the Pulitzer Prize, was extremely well done and deserving of recognition, as were stories about racial profiling, shoddy highway construction and more. But too few winning entries spotlight the uniquely dangerous violations of the public trust that define the current administration.

True, IRE did honor Ron Suskind for his book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O`Neill, and the Center for Public Integrity forOutsourcing the Pentagon, an exhaustive study of no-bid contracting. But Suskind is a solo reporter and the CPI is a nonprofit. Where are the news organizations? There is an immediate need for more resources devoted to exploring and exposing what may prove to be one of the most corrupt, dishonest administrations in American history. Far more important, there is a long-term need for the kind of rigorous journalistic oversight that is the handmaiden to democracy.

The obstacles to serious investigative reporting are many:

Financial: Today, with ownership of the media increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, everything is about generating larger and larger profit margins and better quarterly corporate reports. Putting a reporter on a six-month project with no guaranteed outcome is less “cost-effective” than having that person crank out a new article every day. Quality and quantity are often natural enemies.

Conflicting Interests : The large media corporations are often part of larger conglomerates with a strong interest in obscuring the most crucial revelations. Obviously NBC, a small unit within the huge military contractor GE, has a hard time doing stories about military contractors who dominate Washington decision-making, help promote unnecessary wars and waste a fortune in taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, the media corporations increasingly find themselves with pending business before the very same administration they ought to be giving fits to—such as when the FCC is considering changes in ownership rules that will benefit the company.

Intimidation: Years of criticism from the right-wing "noise machine" has made news organizations wary of tough, original reporting that could bring accusations of a liberal bias. In addition, this administration has masterfully played up mini-scandals about reporting techniques (including the "60 Minutes" use of improperly-authenticated documents about Bush’s National Guard service, and Newsweek’s reporting on allegations that U.S. interrogators threw copies of the Quran into the toilet.) These small tempests have served to distract the public from the larger questions about official wrongdoing: on the one hand Bush’s dereliction of military duty, and on the other the horrific mismanagement of prisons in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.

They’ve also intimidated news decision-makers. Tales of pulled punches and initiatives not pursued continue to leak out of this country’s newsrooms. And we’ve seen an unfortunate increase in news executives’ zeal for prematurely confessing error and professing eagerness for self-reform.

Against this backdrop, old-fashioned muckraking appears doomed unless concerned individuals and institutions take bold action.

Here are a few ideas:

1) Mount a public education effort to teach the public about the importance of investigative journalism. Stress the differences between public issue investigations and gossipy exposes—a difference the public seems increasingly unable to comprehend.

2) Protect whistleblowers so that those with the inside information can come forward without imperiling themselves, their families and their careers. Acknowledge the indispensability of anonymous sources (but only real Deep Throats, not “senior government officials” who use the cloak of anonymity to float material sanctioned by their bosses.)

3) Recognize that good journalism and high profits just aren’t a viable fit. Investigative journalism is too essential, too elemental to freedom and self-governance to be left to the vagaries of Wall Street.

4) Support efforts to acknowledge the crucial role of journalism in a free society by finding alternative ways of paying for it.

At a time when public funding of journalism is retrenching—witness the crisis at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—we will almost certainly need to ask foundations and visionary individuals of means to step up to the plate. Thus far, such largesse has been minimal. But it’s getting too late in the day to hold back investing in the truth. The time is now for a Herculean commitment.

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startribune.com

Why are we in Iraq? It begs for an answer
Steve Berg
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5457220.html?SID=oqrj…

Star Tribune
Published June 15, 2005

As a former Washington reporter I`ve got a question that gnaws at me night and day, and, were I still occasionally hanging around the White House press room, I`d be eager to ask it. It`s quite a simple question, really, but no one seems to be asking it and no one`s quite sure what the answer might be. So, here goes:

Why are we in Iraq?

It kind of hangs in the air, doesn`t it? But every time another American kid gets killed or another 20 Iraqis get shredded into bloody pieces, the question returns with a bit more urgency.

It revisited Washington last week, but only briefly. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were asked about the Downing Street memo`s revelation that Bush had decided eight months before the invasion to use phony evidence as justification to attack Iraq. Neither man explained how or why the head of British intelligence was wrong on that point. Neither man has commented on another secret British memo from the same period, July 2002, which said it would be "necessary to create the conditions" to make the invasion legal.

But even acknowledging that Bush probably lied about his reasons for war leaves unanswered the critical question of why we really invaded, especially the part about why the administration, just as U.S. forces in Afghanistan were in hot pursuit of the terrorists responsible for 9/11, abruptly changed its focus to Iraq.

Despite the apparent lack of curiosity from the press and public on this question, I thought it might be helpful to assemble a list of 15 possible answers.

Q. So, why are we there?

A. To remove the chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was about to hand over to the terrorists, posing an imminent threat to U.S. security.

A. To sever the link between the 9/11 terrorists and the Iraqi dictator.

A. To remove a brutal and despotic menace to stability in the Middle East.

A. To establish an Iraqi democracy as a model for change in the Islamic world.

A. To make the world safer.

A. To "finish the job" that Bush`s father started in the Gulf War, and to avenge Saddam`s apparent attempt to assassinate the elder Bush.

A. To secure Iraq`s oil supply, thus perpetuating America`s dependence on petroleum rather than launching a major drive toward energy independence.

A. To divert attention from the fact that we were unlikely to find Osama bin Laden and to concentrate instead on an enemy we could easily defeat on the open battlefield.

A. To attract terrorists from around the world to fight a consolidated war against the United States at a remote site, far from American soil.

A. To create a bigger, more telegenic war than the one in Afghanistan in order to appeal to the rising conservative tide at home -- especially after 9/11 -- and to win back the Senate for Republicans.

A. To slap down a dictator that the United States had helped in the past, especially in his war against Iran, but who then turned on his American benefactors.

A. To launch a latter-day crusade against Islam.

A. To do a favor for Israel.

A. To demonstrate that the United States is the world`s only superpower and that it`s willing to act in defiance of allies and apart from the United Nations.

A. None, some or all of the above.

The first two possibilities -- the one about weapons of mass destruction and the one about a Saddam-Al Qaida alliance -- have been pretty much disproved. As for the others, who knows? As I said, the question hangs in the air.

The related question about why we must remain in Iraq is easier to answer, and that`s that things would be even worse if we left. But that fails to address the original question about why we invaded in the first place and leaves the mystery dangling. Years from now the history books may tell us the answers, but I`m hoping to find out sooner.

Steve Berg is at [e-mail].
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Bei all diesen Berichten muß man bedenken, dass die `embedded` Reporter nur das sehen, was sie sehen sollen. Sonst kommt niemand von der ausländischen Presse ohne Lebensgefahr in diese Regionen. 

Und Berichte der Einheimischen werden wegen Unglaubwürdigkeit abgelehnt.

Es wird wieder mal so sein, dass wenn eines Tages die Wahrheit rauskommt, und sie wird rauskommen, wir uns ungläubig die Augen reiben werden und uns fragen werden, wie solche Taten im Namen von Demokratie und Gerechtigkeit begangen werden konnten, denn das was bisher schon bekannt geworden ist, läßt, wie z.B in Falluja, das Schlimmste befürchten.

[urlInteractiv Feature: Retaking Tal Afar]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/15/international/20050616_TALAFAR_FEATURE.html[/url]

June 16, 2005
Magnet for Iraq Insurgents Is a Crucial Test of New U.S. Strategy
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/international/middleeast/1…

TAL AFAR, Iraq, June 15 - Nine months ago the American military laid siege to this city in northwestern Iraq and proclaimed it freed from the grip of insurgents. Last month, the Americans returned in force - to reclaim it once again.

After the battle here in September the military left behind fewer than 500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from nearby Syria - and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school.
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It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north of Baghdad, where the insurgency`s roots run deepest.

"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. "But if you pull out of an area and don`t leave security forces in it, all you`re going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven`t been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we`ve cleared the insurgents out."

While officials in Washington say the military has all the troops it needs, on-the-ground battle commanders in the most violent parts of Iraq - in cities like Ramadi, Mosul and Mahmudiya - have said privately that they need more manpower to pacify their areas and keep them that way.

Now, with the pace of insurgent attacks rising across Iraq and scores being killed daily in bombings and mass executions, Tal Afar and the surrounding area is becoming something of a test case for a strategy to try to break the cycle: using battle-hardened American forces working in conjunction with tribal leaders to clear out the insurgents and then leaving behind Iraqi forces to try to keep the peace.

Many tribal sheiks here say they favor an all-out assault to rout the city`s insurgents, but American commanders say a major attack like the one that leveled Falluja last November is to be avoided almost at all costs. The bloodshed, destruction of property and alienation of the Iraqi public is too high a price to pay, they say.

A political solution is best, the Americans said, but fiendishly difficult, given the tangle of insurgent pressures and tribal loyalties and divisions.

"If you take all the complexities of Iraq and compressed it into one city, it is Tal Afar," said the regiment`s commander, Col. H. R. McMaster.

The military`s decision to reassign the regiment from the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad to the region around Tal Afar was an implicit acknowledgement that it had lost control of the area. The first troops began arriving in April, and nearly 4,000 were in place by mid-May.
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In Tal Afar, family members weep just after the man who heads the household was detained in a raid.
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A Place Frozen in Fear

On arrival here, commanders found a town that was, for all practical purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in their thrall. "Anyone not helping the terrorists can`t leave their homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand money or weapons or make them join them to kill people," said Hikmat Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar`s 82 tribes, who said most of the city is controlled by insurgents. "If they refuse they will chop their heads off."

Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes Tal Afar, concurred. "There is no life in Tal Afar," he said in an interview a week ago. "It is like Mosul a few months ago - a ghost town." There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and they project a level of fear and intimidation across the city far in excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.

In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now home-schools her six children, after a flier posted at their school warned: "If you love your children, you won`t send them to school here because we will kill them." A neighbor, Muhammad Ameen, will not let his kids play outside. "Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.

Tribes sympathetic to the new Iraqi government have suffered constant assaults at the hands of insurgents and rival tribes. More than 500 mortars have struck lands belonging to the Al-Sada al-Mousawiyah tribe since September, said the tribe`s leader, Sheik Sayed Abdullah Sayed Wahab. "All of my tribe are prisoners in their own homes," he says. "We can`t even take our people to the hospital."

At least 40 members of two predominantly Shiite tribes of Turkomen, the Sada and Jolak, were killed in two car bombings in May. The perpetrators are believed by American officers to be members of the predominantly Sunni Arab Qarabash tribe, which they say has strong ties to Syrian fighters and links to the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq. "I need someone to hear my cries for help because we are in a bad situation," said Sheik Wali al-Jolak in an interview at his compound in southwest Tal Afar, only a few blocks from the Qarabash neighborhood. He lost 28 tribe members in the two attacks.

The Tal Afar police force disintegrated last fall, and the few who remain stay in an ancient hilltop castle, afraid to venture out. Commanders here caution troops to assume that anyone on the street dressed as a policeman is an impostor. Insurgents wearing police uniforms shoot at American helicopters and threaten residents.

Even with the new regiment, the military still lacks troops to completely patrol the outlying desert and grazing lands, where insurgents had taken over remote villages, providing sanctuary a short distance from Mosul, the country`s dominant northern city and an active insurgent hub. Insurgents use irrigation canals to elude American forces chasing them in armored vehicles that cannot cross the waterways. Smugglers drive through holes cut in the large berm that guards the Syrian border. Remote cinderblock farmhouses serve as safe havens.

At the Rabia border crossing into Syria, several hundred American soldiers arrived three weeks ago and say they have disrupted the smuggling of weapons and money. But they doubt there has been any curtailment yet in the infiltration of foreign fighters. "As far as foreign fighters coming in from the border control point, I can`t say we`ve had any impact on that," said Capt. Jason Whitten, the company commander at Rabia. Commanders say new technology will be installed at the border crossing shortly to help track travelers and detect false identification materials.

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In its first weeks here, the regiment has pressed sweeps deep into desert areas that had not seen a large American presence since the 101st Airborne Division left in early 2004. Instead, many areas had witnessed, at best, only sporadic patrols that had done little to deter insurgents, commanders say. "Resources are everything in combat, and when you don`t have enough manpower to move around, you have to pick the places," said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.

Two weeks ago more than 1,000 troops from the new regiment poured into Biaj, a town of 15,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Tal Afar, where insurgents had destroyed the police station, and the mayor and the police fled last fall. Soldiers eventually searched every house in the town, capturing more than a dozen suspected insurgents without a shot being fired.

Biaj faces a severe water shortage and trash and sewage fill the streets. But the markets and neighborhoods teem with children who give passing American patrols waves and a thumbs-up. Indeed, the town appears to show what happens if there are enough troops to pacify an area and police it effectively afterward. But commanders plan to withdraw all but 150 American troops and leave a battalion of about 500 Iraqi soldiers and 200 police officers in Biaj.

Taking Back Tal Afar

In Tal Afar, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, commander of Sabre Squadron, which is equipped with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters, moved quickly to reassert control of strategic sites. Soldiers drove out insurgents who had taken control of the area around the hospital, and turned over security there to Iraqi troops.

Similarly, soldiers cleared the main east-west highway, which had been made impassable by improvised explosive devices. An Iraqi battalion now patrols the route, and Colonel Hickey is spearheading an effort to rebuild the police with recruits drawn from tribes and trained in Jordan.

Insurgents waged heavy assaults against the squadron in the first few weeks after it arrived but suffered heavy losses while having little impact on the American troops. Those attacks have declined while violence against townspeople has increased, Colonel Hickey said. "We`ve disrupted the terrorists` network," he said. "But what I have to overcome is a population too scared to open their stores or step out on the street."

Tal Afar has little municipal leadership to speak of. American commanders say the mayor, a Sunni Arab, may have ties to the insurgency. The police chief - a Shiite dismissed a few days ago for the second time in as many months - may have been involved in the abuse or torture of suspects, they say.

Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military presence here, some sheiks have become outspoken critics of the insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60 attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here. To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not treat terror suspects roughly enough.

Other sheiks said it was better to pursue a political solution. But sheiks from each point of view accused one another of being unwilling to identify suspected insurgents. American commanders had planned to circulate a list of 1,400 people thought to have potential insurgent connections, seeking verification - or denials - from the sheiks. But they decided against it because few sheiks would openly affirm or deny the status of insurgent suspects in front of other Iraqis, Colonel Hickey said.

Tal Afar`s tribes have to bury old grudges for the city to be at peace, says Brig. Gen. Mohsen Doski, a Kurd who commands a brigade of 2,000 Iraqi troops garrisoned here. "If we continue talking about the past or what this certain person did or this tribe did, we will stay in a closed circle," he said. If the city`s problems cannot be solved politically, he said, "We have to do in Tal Afar the same as in Falluja."

The American regiment`s commander, Colonel McMaster, warned the sheiks at the close of the day-long conference that the insurgents cannot be defeated unless the tribes work together better. "To an outsider, it seems there is not a lot of power because there are divisions. That`s exactly what the terrorists want," he said.

In an interview, the colonel said the violence "isn`t intertribal" but a mixture of foreign fighters, Zarqawi loyalists and others working "to incite chaos, breed fear and set conditions for them to continue to operate out of Tal Afar." With the regiment now in place, he added, "Tal Afar is clearly contested, where before it wasn`t."

An Iraqi Fighting Force?

One week ago Tuesday, 1,000 American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi troops swept into the insurgency`s principal safe haven in Tal Afar, the Sariya neighborhood, detaining 34 suspected insurgent leaders and fighters and killing as many as 10 fighters.

Relying on Iraqi troops proved a miserable failure 13 months ago in Falluja, where Iraqis were put in charge only to see the city come rapidly under the sway of a Taliban-style terrorist theocracy that had to be rooted out six months later by the Marines. But American commanders now maintain that in some places, like Haifa Street, a former insurgent stronghold in the heart of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers are improving.

In Tal Afar, commanders say the new Iraqi troops they work with - two predominantly Kurdish battalions and one mainly of Shiites from Basra - have helped immeasurably in identifying insurgents. Capt. Greg Mitchell, a company commander with Sabre Squadron, said his troops could not have apprehended so many suspects on Tuesday had Iraqis not been involved. "They have a much more discerning eye" for clues about suspicious Iraqis, he said.

Yet American troops also remain wary of Iraqis` tendencies to respond to an attack by shooting wildly in all directions - a "death blossom," as the troops here call it. "They keep their fingers on the trigger and they`ll just shoot without aiming," Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Horsley warned during the operation Tuesday, as fire rang out.

Last Tuesday, an insurgent gunman wounded an American officer as he walked through an alley accompanied by Iraqi troops. When the shooting started, the Iraqis ran back to the street as the gunman continued to fire at the wounded officer, said Capt. Jesse Sellars, a company commander here. An American sergeant had to cajole a handful of Iraqis to return fire in an effort to rescue the officer, who later died.

"They`re new soldiers," Major Wilwerding, of Sabre Squadron, said of the Iraqis who fled. "They`re not conditioned yet. They`ll get better."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2005
Lawyer Says Military Tried to Coerce Detainee`s Plea
By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/politics/16detain.html

WASHINGTON, June 15 - A military defense lawyer told a Senate hearing on Wednesday that when military authorities first asked him to represent a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he was instructed that he could negotiate only a guilty plea.

The lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Charles D. Swift of the Navy, who represents a Yemeni, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, said that he regarded the effort, in December 2003, "as a clear attempt to coerce to Mr. Hamdan into pleading guilty."

Commander Swift testified that when he visited Mr. Hamdan, he discovered that the prisoner did not want to plead guilty, as the authorities had apparently believed from their earlier interrogation of him, conducted without a lawyer.

So, instead of negotiating a guilty plea, Commander Swift began a spirited defense, according to his testimony. He filed motions to ensure that he be entitled to represent Mr. Hamdan and demanded that his client be given a health examination.

The account of Mr. Hamdan`s case, given at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, provides a fresh illustration of how the military`s initial expectations for war crimes trials at Guantánamo went unfulfilled.

The events surrounding the case were described at a hearing on legal procedures at the military-run prison, which was opened in early 2002 and houses about 525 prisoners from more than 40 countries who are suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The prison has long been the subject of complaints about abuse and of criticism that detainees have been held for long periods without being charged with crimes.

After the prison opened, senior military officers said that they planned that the first detainees to go before a military commission would be those who would plead guilty. They said at the time that starting with a few guilty pleas would lend legitimacy to the process and to the evidence used as a basis for imprisoning and charging the prisoners.

At the hearing, Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania who is the committee`s chairman, said that court decisions relating to the military commissions had created "a crazy quilt" of rules relating to the detainees, but he seemed careful to avoid criticism of the Bush administration.

Democrats criticized the government`s approach to the Guantánamo prison. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel`s top Democrat, said the Bush administration had failed to follow the law. "What has become clear over the past three years is that the administration`s policies were poorly reasoned and extremely shortsighted," he said.

At Wednesday`s hearing, Lt. Gen. Thomas Hemingway of the Air Force, the legal adviser to the military authority that runs the commissions, told the committee there was never any threat of coercion in Mr. Hamdan`s case.

The authorities eventually charged Mr. Hamdan with crimes involving terrorism, asserting that he was a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. A federal judge halted his trial, saying the military commissions were unconstitutional. The government has appealed.

Commander Swift read a letter in which the chief prosecutor, Col. Fred Borch of the Army, wrote that he would ensure that a defense lawyer be given access to Mr. Hamdan and that "such access shall continue so long as we are engaged in pretrial negotiations."

Commander Swift said, "I was deeply troubled that to ensure that Mr. Hamdan would plead guilty as planned, the chief prosecutor`s request came with a critical condition that the defense counsel was for the limited purpose of `negotiating a guilty plea` to an unspecified offense and that Mr. Hamdan`s access to counsel was conditioned on his willingness to negotiate such a plea."

General Hemingway testified that Commander Swift was mistaken and that, "in the first place, the chief defense counsel is the individual who appointed Lt. Cmdr. Swift to defend Mr. Hamdan, not the prosecutor."

The future of Guantánamo has stirred a broad debate in recent days. In Brussels on Wednesday, speaking to reporters after a meeting of European Union officials, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said that the detention center would be shut down eventually, but he offered no timetable and indicated that the decision would be up to the president.

Justice Department officials said that Mr. Gonzales did not intend to signal any shift in the Bush administration`s thinking about the Cuban detention center.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2005
`Exit Strategy` Is More Than a Whisper in Washington, With Lawmakers Speaking Out
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/politics/16exit.html

WASHINGTON, June 15 - Celeste Zappala, whose son died in Iraq, visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to demand "a very quick exit strategy." Her timing was perfect.

With opinion polls showing a drop in support for the war, and a British memo asserting that the Bush administration had intended to go to war as early as the summer of 2002, the words "exit strategy" are being uttered by both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The flurry began over the weekend, when Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, a conservative Republican, called for the Bush administration to set specific goals for leaving Iraq. That came from the man who was once so upset about French opposition to the war that he insisted that House cafeterias change the name "French fries" to "freedom fries."

But it does not end there.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, has introduced in the Senate a measure similar to the nonbinding resolution that Mr. Jones is offering. In the House, the International Relations Committee last week voted overwhelmingly, 32 to 9, to call on the White House to develop and submit a plan to Congress for establishing a stable government and military in Iraq that would "permit a decreased U.S. presence" there.

On Thursday, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, will convene a forum on the so-called Downing Street Memo, a leaked document that appeared to suggest the White House had made a decision to go to war in the summer of 2002. Next week, Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, is planning to read on the House floor the names of approximately 1,700 Americans who have died in the war.

Though most Republicans are steering clear of the exit strategy discussion, a handful are joining in. One, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a longtime opponent of the war, has signed onto Mr. Jones`s resolution and will join him in meeting reporters on Thursday. Another, Representative Howard Coble of North Carolina, is considering it.

"I`m not suggesting pulling out tomorrow or next month," Mr. Coble, who favored going to war, said Wednesday, "but I want that to be an option. I don`t want us to spend an eternity in Iraq. So conceptually, I`m inclined to embrace Walter Jones`s proposal."

Such comments by Republicans would have been heresy before last November`s election, because no one in the party wanted to weaken President Bush. But now, with 2006 midterm elections approaching, members of Congress are hearing from constituents who are growing uneasy about the war. So a nascent discussion is emerging in Congress about America`s involvement in Iraq and whether it is time for re-evaluation.

"Certainly, people are breaking ranks, and saying, `You know what, things are not hunky-dory,` " said Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, who sponsored the measure that passed the International Relations Committee last week. Much to Mr. Crowley`s surprise, it drew support from the panel`s chairman, Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, and 12 other Republicans.

Many Republicans - and a number of Democrats, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader - oppose setting a specific timetable for troop withdrawal, saying that to do so would only embolden insurgents. But lawmakers are keeping an eye on the polls, which reflect growing discontent with the war.

In a recent Gallup poll, 6 in 10 Americans who responded said the United States should withdraw all or some of its troops from Iraq. In another poll, by ABC News and The Washington Post, two-thirds of those questioned said the American military had gotten bogged down in Iraq. That is a welcome development for people like Ms. Zappala.

Her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, a National Guard reservist who in his civilian life was a social worker for mentally retarded adults, was killed last year after just six weeks in Iraq. He was assigned to the team looking for unconventional weapons, said his mother, who is director of the commission on aging for the city of Philadelphia and a co-founder of Gold Star Families of Peace, which represents relatives of fallen soldiers.

On Wednesday, the group met with Mr. Jones. "We actually gave him a little certificate for his courage," Ms. Zappala said. Though she said she was under no illusions that American troops would withdraw from Iraq any time soon, "that the conversation is happening," she said, "is very, very important."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 16, 2005
Kurds Are Illegally Jailing Arabs and Others, U.S. Says
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/politics/16kirkuk.html

WASHINGTON, June 15 - Kurdish security forces have seized scores of minority Arabs and Turkmens in the restive city of Kirkuk and secretly transferred them in violation of Iraqi law to prisons in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq, American officials said Wednesday.

The prisoners have been captured in operations by Kurdish intelligence agents and a Kurdish-led unit of the Kirkuk Police Department, sometimes with the support of American forces in the region, the officials said. The Kurds maintain broad autonomy in northern Iraq, and their intelligence agents are fiercely independent of Iraq`s fledgling national intelligence service.

But American military and State Department officials condemned the transfers and said that American troops had not been involved with them, and when made aware of the practice, had sought to stop it.

"We have had serious and credible information about allegations of extrajudicial conduct, both arrests and detentions of individuals in the northern areas of Iraq," a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said Wednesday at the department`s daily news briefing.

"Our coalition forces, according to every report that I have, not only were not involved in these activities, but in fact raised their concerns about the fact that they had serious and credible reports that those activities were taking place."

The allegations are contained in a confidential nine-page State Department cable, dated June 5, that was first reported Wednesday by The Washington Post. Mr. McCormack confirmed the existence of the report and its major conclusions, but declined to provide any details.

Kirkuk, at the center of some of Iraq`s richest oilfields, has emerged as a tinderbox for the country`s major ethnic and sectarian groups, and is considered the most politically volatile city in Iraq.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds have wrested control from Sunni Arabs and Turkmens of virtually every major government institution in Kirkuk, including the police. They have further consolidated their power by getting a huge turnout in the area during the elections and securing almost two-thirds of the seats in the provincial council.

Minority politicians have accused Kurdish leaders of using intimidation to exercise their authority.

About a week ago, Kurdish officials began saying the Interior Ministry in Baghdad had issued an order dismissing 2,500 Kurdish police officers in Kirkuk, telling them to return to Iraqi Kurdistan. But the Kurdish authorities balked, and Iraqi officials in Baghdad appeared to back away from their edict.

That incident reflected the power struggle between the Arab-dominated national government and the Kurd-dominated local government and police force in Kirkuk, and underscored a rift that American officials fear could intensify into broader violence in the city, which has nearly a million residents.

"The issues that we were talking about did concern the city of Kirkuk and surrounding areas in northern Iraq, and I did talk about the importance of protection of minority rights," said Mr. McCormack. "These allegations and these reports are of very serious concern to us, and we have raised our concerns in a forthright way with the authorities involved, or who we believe to be involved. There`s no excuse for going outside the rule of law to try to resolve any of these pre-existing tensions."

The secret transfers of prisoners pose a potential political problem for the Bush administration, which is perceived inside Iraq to be a strong supporter of the Kurdish leaders and their political parties. Some detainees have complained they were tortured or held for months.

Just this week, President Bush telephoned the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, to congratulate him and the Kurdish people on the formation of a unified regional government.

"There`s a long-simmering problem we have with the Kurds, and the embassy is working hard to address it," said an American official who has read the cable and who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

Independent Iraq specialists said the seizures were indicative of the growing ethnic and sectarian tensions around Kirkuk.

"It`s hard to know what`s really going on," Joost R. Hiltermann, director of the Middle East office of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization, said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan.

"The Kurds are very well organized and have security forces of their own," he said. "They arrest people, detain them and interrogate them. Some may have been involved in attacks. But the perception among minorities is that the Kurds are taking people off the street to intimidate other Arabs and extend their control."

The United States military has been aware of allegations of the secret transfers since early this year after family members complained that their relatives had been abducted, said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for the military`s 42nd Infantry Division, which has responsibility for much of northern Iraq.

Major Goldenberg acknowledged that some prisoners had been transferred by Kurdish police or security forces to jails outside Kirkuk without proper judicial oversight, in some cases because of overcrowding in the Kirkuk jails.

But he said officers of the Idaho Army National Guard`s 116th Combat Brigade, which has specific responsibility for Kirkuk, had intervened with Kurdish authorities to end the practice whenever they learned of it. American officials in Washington said they were aware of about 180 cases of secret transfers, although Sunni Arab and Turkmen politicians have said the number is much higher.

"When they observe things that are less than ideal, soldiers in units like the 116th make every effort to show Iraqis what the right model should be," Major Goldenberg said in a telephone interview from Tikrit.

He said that while American forces had worked closely with Iraqi security forces, including the Kurdish-led Emergency Services Unit, an antiterrorism squad within the Kirkuk Police Department, "the Americans did not have oversight over the judicial process once the prisoners were handed over to Kurdish authorities."

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Basra, Iraq, for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Iraq Expert Marr: `Long, Slow, Struggle` Ahead in Iraq
http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=8184#
Phebe Marr, the author of The Modern History of Iraq, has just returned from a trip to Basra and Baghdad, where she was struck by the "genuine and very lively political process" taking place in preparation for the drafting of the new constitution. But the downside, she says, is that the government is ineffective and not yet able to move decisively against the insurgency.

Overall, she foresees a prolonged struggle to defeat the insurgents. "I see this as a long, slow struggle, which we will gradually win," says Marr, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "Forces that we are training will get better. The government and the situation will improve slowly so that people will have something legitimate and better to look forward to. But, I think we have to prepare ourselves for a rather long process here."

Marr was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 13, 2005.
Other Interviews

You`ve recently returned from a trip to Baghdad and Basra. What is your overall impression about what you saw in Iraq?

Well, it`s a mixed picture. In Baghdad itself, I think, there is a very genuine and very lively political process going on. The members of the temporary National Assembly were meeting, they were interacting, and there was intense dialogue. There are certainly attempts to compromise, because they`re forming a constitutional committee and so on. One of my positive impressions was that there was a real and genuine political process going on in Baghdad, which is almost unique for the region. They`re really arguing and struggling over legitimate and very difficult problems.

And the downside?

Yes, of course, there is a downside. If democracy is really going to take hold and people are actually going to discuss these issues, they may have to forgo some efficiency and decisiveness. These things are going to take time. It`s going to take time to make the decisions, and governments that are deeply involved in these kinds of negotiations can`t also be efficient in getting electricity flowing, in getting the oil running, and so on. That`s one issue.

The second issue is that I`m not sure how much of this intense political activity in Baghdad is getting out to the provinces. And that`s one of the things the insurgency is preventing. It really is tending to cut off Baghdad from the surrounding area and to cut off the country, to a certain extent, from outside ties. So, a second impression I have is that Baghdad may be increasingly isolated from the rest of Iraq and that the rest of Iraq, the provinces, particularly the north and the south, may be left to go on their own a lot more. That`s clear with the Kurds. Of course, we know they have a government up there and so on. But down in Basra and the south, I also found people interested in moving ahead on their own, with their own interests and so on, without waiting for Baghdad.

Some people have been theorizing that the idea of the Iraqi nation is artificial and that the country will naturally breakdown along Shiite/Sunni/Kurdish lines. You have traditionally felt there was an Iraqi identity. Is that identity withering because of the insurgency?

It`s getting weaker, that`s for sure. I don`t think any country`s borders are natural. There`s no such thing as a natural country. Everywhere, borders are drawn, somewhere, some time, and the population shares resources and a government. There`s hardly a single country in the world that isn`t somehow multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian. So the question is: How do they see their common interests, or do they not see their common interests? Do they see themselves coming together?

Now, with Iraq, I go back to the monarchy, not just Saddam Hussein. Iraq was artificial, it was created in 1920. But in the course of about the first three-quarters of the century, the people who lived there did come to share not simply ideas, but resources. They came to live together, they felt comfortable with this. I think in urban areas, among the educated class, the sense of ethnic separatism and, certainly, sectarian separatism was greatly reduced. Now, what`s happened with all the upheaval and turmoil, beginning with Saddam and what he did to the country, and through the occupation and the insurgency, there has been a great surge of what I`d call identity politics. That includes ethnic and sectarian politics. It`s very clear to everybody. It`s as sharp as I can ever remember in Iraq. However, it`s not clear to me that Iraq is irreparably broken down, or that it can be clearly broken down into these three different units, although the Kurds are furthest along in this effort.

What needs to be done? Right now, there`s politicking going on--the Sunnis want a certain number of seats on the constitutional commission and the Shiites are struggling to limit that. Do you think it`s feasible for the Iraqis to meet the August 15 deadline to draft a constitution, or should they ask for an extra six-month delay as outlined in the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL)?

It`s going to be very hard [to meet the deadline], it seems to me, but they keep saying they`re going to try to do it. But let me try to parse some of the parts of this, including the time issue. The people in power--Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and others--are saying there should be about 15 seats for the Sunnis. That seems about right, to me. The real issue here is: Who are the Sunnis? Which Sunnis? In fact, there are a number of Sunnis the government could pick. But the problem is that the Sunnis who are really most opposed to this process, the rejectionists--I`m leaving aside the hardcore terrorists and ex-Baathists, who are probably incorrigible--understand that we and the Iraqi government have to bring in a portion of the Sunnis to give them some stake in this regime. But which ones are they going to be, what is the price, what do they want? Who`s going to pick these Sunnis? Are they going to be--as the Sunnis might say--tame Sunnis that the Shiites can get along with, or are they going to be real representatives of the Sunnis who come forward in this process, many of whom still seem to be true rejectionists? And we have to remember that these Sunnis did not run in the election. And that`s what`s at stake here: Are you going to rely on a process of violence, and so on, to get what you want?

I think they will certainly find some Sunnis to put on this commission--they will go forward with it. Whether they can meet this deadline, however, is a big question. One of the ways in which you can meet this deadline is this: You can rely heavily on the TAL, the Transitional Administrative Law that they`re operating under now, and modify it and change it in certain ways that wouldn`t involve too much work. There are a lot of people who think that`s not too good of a way to go. The second thing is, you can probably move ahead on this constitution if you got a group of people together, sat them behind closed doors, and got the experts to make clear where the compromises have to be made. If the process indeed went on behind closed doors, this kind of swapping and consensus and compromise might lead to something in August. But what is going to be sacrificed here is the democratic aspect of this. The TAL itself requires outreach. It requires that the population be educated on this, that TV, radio, and newspapers educate the population so that on [constitutional] referendum day [currently scheduled for October 15] they`re not shown a sheet of paper and asked to vote it up or down when they haven`t read it. So if things happen too quickly, that will sacrifice some of the legitimacy, the outreach, and so on, which will be necessary to get a population that understands what the constitution is and has bought into it.

Are there are some significant individuals who are showing leadership right now?

Here are some of the tentative conclusions I`ve come to: There are two or three different kinds of groups. The Kurds themselves. As you know they came in with a very strong alliance and they got 26 percent of the seats [in the National Assembly]. They have the most experienced, skilled political leadership in Iraq today. That`s not an accident, because, of course, they`ve been governing themselves up in the north [since the early 1990s]. They have had to deal with the outside world, so they`ve learned. They`re pragmatic, they`re skilled, and they`re going to be very hard bargainers. Some of the most experienced people are among them: Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, just to mention a few, really do look very competent. Among the Shiites, the Shiite alliance that came in, many of these leaders are new. Bayan Jabr, the new minister of interior, and Abdul Mehdi, one of the deputy prime ministers, are people who have had some experience in the Iraq Governing Council [which was disbanded in June 2004] or the previous cabinets, but essentially this Shiite leadership is very new.

Most of their careers have been spent underground in opposition to the regime, with many of them in Iran, some of them in Europe, and all of a sudden, they find themselves in charge of this important oil state. So, I think we have to recognize that they have to get their feet on the ground and shift gears. They themselves have a very complex alliance to negotiate and have to keep their own constituents in line and so on. So I don`t expect these new Shiite leaders to be very decisive, because I don`t think they can be. They`re learning the ropes. I think they`ve been extremely pragmatic. I think they`ve done a reasonable job, but as I said at the start, you`re not going to get a strongman leader. First of all, they don`t really want that, nobody really wants that. It would be nice to have decisiveness and a military army that could do something about the insurgency, but they`re not in that position. I would give them reasonable marks on dealing with an extremely difficult situation and becoming more experienced and pragmatic. But we have to have our expectations down at a reasonable level.

What about former Prime Minister (Ayad) Allawi? Where does he stand in all of this?

Well, I think, that`s going to be interesting, and let me raise a question here to which I don`t have the answer. The government currently consists largely of two giant blocs: the Kurdish bloc in the north and this diverse Shiite coalition [the United Iraqi Alliance], which runs kind of a gamut and includes some hand-picked Sunnis who perhaps don`t represent the "real" Sunni community. Allawi and his group have stood aside from the government. They`ve been asked to come in and join this big umbrella compromise, and they`ve decided it would dilute their message.

Now, what is their message, and how do they sound? When I talked to those delegates, I got the impression they represent what`s left of the old middle class, which has the Iraqi identity, state-oriented and non-sectarian. And as you know, Allawi was a former member of the Baath regime. So they`re kind of state-oriented. They got, all told, maybe 14 percent of the vote, which is quite small, but they do represent a third [political] force there. And I`m told that this group is going to try very hard to develop a stronger alliance in the next election, and everybody is focused on the next election already. That alliance could include some secular Shiites, who might not like the religious tendencies of this coalition. It could certainly include some Sunnis who might feel comfortable. Maybe they could get together with the Kurds, who feel more comfortable with a secular group. So there are interesting permutations and commutations, and it`s possible that we might find in Allawi the bones of a kind of legal opposition.

The next election, theoretically, would be either in December--if the constitution is completed and ratified by October--or in mid-2006 if the constitution is delayed.

That`s correct. The constitution has to be ratified before the election. But even if [the election] comes in December or January, that`s pretty close. And even if it comes sometime next year, that`s still a pretty close time. And needless to say, all of these parties and groups are jockeying for position. Those that won the election last time want to make sure they win it again, and those that didn`t get in, want to this time.

I would like to mention something here that I think is worth looking at, and that`s the election law. It`s one of the trends that I see developing in the provinces. For example, Basra is interested in developing local government. That might be a good idea. But the problem is that this portends an ethnic and sectarian trend that seems to be splitting Iraq. One way in which that could be mitigated would be to take a look at the election law and this single list, proportional representation system. Remember, parties run on a single list for the entire country. And the votes don`t get re-divided after the election. If some way could be found to moderate that somewhat--I don`t think you can throw that out--but if you could move toward a district-oriented election in which individuals, and different kinds of parties could run, the voter would know the individual, and the individual would have a big stake in looking after his constituents. That would tend to reflect the diversity of Iraq, I think, much more and perhaps move people a little bit away from this extraordinary identification with ethnic-sectarian identity.

As the constitution is framed, how critical will the issue of sharia (Islamic law) be?

That`s a very important issue. I`m less worried about it than a lot of other people because my own sense is, frankly, that Iraq, like many other countries in the region, has really gone in a much more religious direction in the last decade or two. You see women in hijab [veils], you see much more orientation towards religion, and many of the Shiite leaders that I talked to, including some of the Sunnis as well, really want to see Iraq have an Islamic identity--not Shiite, Kurd, Sunni, or Arab--but an Islamic identity. Now that`s, of course, moving away from secularism. They don`t want to have a state dominated by clergy. They certainly don`t want to go the Iranian way. But they want to infuse society with Islamic mores. That will have an impact on women and so on. And certainly, they want to enshrine sharia in some way in the constitution. So they`re going to fight over this issue. I doubt that they could get away with putting that in--there`s too much opposition to that. They could say it is a source of law or that the laws in the constitution shouldn`t contradict the sharia. But I predict they`re going to find some language to compromise that.

A third of the delegates in the assembly are women, so they must have a strong voice. Are many of those women very conservative, as I`ve read?

Yes. This shows you that you can`t just label groups of people. Just because you are a woman doesn`t mean you`re going to hold a certain point of view. Now, some of the women who were elected--this is particularly true of the Kurds, but some others as well--are very strong advocates of women`s rights. I don`t want to say secular, but many of the things we stand for in the West, they would espouse. But a great number of these women were put there because the constitution and the TAL required it. So the political parties, especially the religious parties, went out, they found women willing and able to stand, and needless to say, those women are just as conservative as the political parties and the parties made absolutely sure that was the case. Moreover, many of them are newcomers. They`ve never been in politics before and they`re unused to it and they`re likely to be dominated by the men. So, you need to be careful because a number of them, by our standards here in the West, are conservative. Some of them are even, for example, acquiescing [on the issue of] polygamy and so on. Don`t just think that because women are there that they`re going to be all in favor of the same secular trends that we are [in favor of] in the West.

Let`s talk about the insurgency. Is it going to die on its own?

The insurgency is the one thing I`m not terribly optimistic about. I`m kind of optimistic about the political process. I think it`s going to be slow, but it`s moving in the right direction. But the insurgency--we`re having a hard time getting a grip on it. Of course, it may be that they`ll shoot their wad and their money will run out. But it doesn`t look that way to me. I think there`s only one answer to the insurgency, and that`s to get enough Sunnis--and let`s face it, this is a Sunni operation--it`s to get the Sunni community to turn against them.

I don`t think the Americans are going to flood more troops in there--and we all know we`re not going to do that--and that`s one of the problems as well. So it`s going to be a process of getting the Sunnis so sick of it, so tired of it that they`re going to turn against it. And I think this is happening, but it`s very slow. I see this as a long, slow struggle, which we will gradually win. People will get tired of it. Forces that we are training will get better. The government and the situation will improve slowly so that people will have something legitimate and better to look forward to. But I think we have to prepare ourselves for a rather long process here. I`m sorry to have to say that, and I hope I`m wrong. But that`s the way it looks to me from Baghdad.

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House Votes To Curb Patriot Act
FBI`s Power to Seize Library Records Would Be Halted
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 16, 2005; A01

The House handed President Bush the first defeat in his effort to preserve the broad powers of the USA Patriot Act, voting yesterday to curtail the FBI`s ability to seize library and bookstore records for terrorism investigations.

Bush has threatened to veto any measure that weakens those powers. The surprise 238 to 187 rebuke to the White House was produced when a handful of conservative Republicans, worried about government intrusion, joined with Democrats who are concerned about personal privacy.

One provision of the Patriot Act makes it possible for the FBI to obtain a wide variety of personal records about a suspected terrorist -- including library transactions -- with an order from a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where the government must meet a lower threshold of proof than in criminal courts.

Under the House change, officials would have to get search warrants from a judge or subpoenas from a grand jury to seize records about a suspect`s reading habits.

Some libraries have said they are disposing of patrons` records more quickly because of the provision, which opponents view as a license for fishing expeditions.

House Administration Committee Chairman Robert W. Ney (Ohio), one of three House Republicans who opposed the Patriot Act when it was enacted in 2001, voted yesterday to curtail agents` power to seize the records.

"Everybody`s against terrorism, but there has to be reason in the way that we fight it," Ney said. "The government doesn`t need to be sifting through library records. I talked to my libraries, and they felt very strongly about this."

The Justice Department said in a letter to Congress this week that the provision has been used only 35 times and has never been used to obtain bookstore, library, medical or gun-sale records. It has been used to obtain records of hotel stays, driver`s licenses, apartment leases and credit cards, the letter said.

"Bookstores and libraries should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies, who have, in fact, used public libraries to do research and communicate with their co-conspirators," Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in the letter.

The vote -- on an amendment to limit spending in a huge bill covering appropriations for science as well as the departments of Justice, State and Commerce -- came as Bush is traveling the country to build support for reauthorizing 15 provisions of the Patriot Act that are scheduled to expire at year`s end.

House Republican leadership aides said they plan to have the provision removed when a conference committee meets to work out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. "The administration has threatened to veto the bill over this extraneous rider, and there are too many important initiatives in the bill for that to happen," said Appropriations Committee spokesman John Scofield.

Last year, the House leadership barely staved off the amendment with a 210 to 210 tie, engineered by holding the vote open to pressure some Republicans to switch their votes.

Democrats contend that the reversal is the first sign of growing wariness about some of the more intrusive elements of the Patriot Act, which was passed just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The American Civil Liberties Union called the vote a rare victory for civil liberties.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a leader in the drive to curtail the act`s reach, said in an interview that the original measure had passed "in an atmosphere of panic" and that a wide spectrum of lawmakers is beginning to conclude it went too far.

"If some terrorist checks out a book about how to make an atomic bomb, that might be legitimate for the government to know, and they can get a search warrant or a subpoena the way we`ve done it throughout American history," Nadler said. "Otherwise, what you`re reading is none of the government`s business."

House Republican leaders are not accustomed to losing, and they did not hide their anger about the result. One aide to a House leader referred to the victorious coalition as "the crazies on the left and the crazies on the right, meeting in the middle."

Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden issued a statement reiterating the administration`s insistence that the provision is vital. The statement said the section "provides national security investigators with an important tool for investigating and intercepting terrorism while at the same time establishing robust safeguards to protect law-abiding Americans."

The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Bernard Sanders (Vt.), a socialist who is the chamber`s lone independent. He said the measure, which he originally introduced as the Freedom to Read Protection Act, "simply restores the checks and balances that protect innocent Americans under the Constitution."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the amendment a "message to the world." Only one voting Democrat, Rep. Dan Boren (Okla.), opposed it.

The measure was supported by 38 Republicans and opposed by 186. Among the Republicans who voted for it were Reps. Jack Kingston (Ga.), Ron Paul (Tex.), C.L. "Butch" Otter (Idaho) and Ray LaHood (Ill.).
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Let`s Go to the Memo
What`s really in the Downing Street memos?
By Fred Kaplan
http://slate.msn.com/id/2120886/

Updated Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 3:00 PM PT

Is there anything important in the Downing Street memo? This is the now-notorious secret transcript of a British ministerial meeting on July 23, 2002—obtained and published by the Sunday Times of London just this past May Day—which seems to suggest that, nine months before the war in Iraq got started, the Bush administration a) knew Saddam Hussein didn`t pose a threat; b) decided to overthrow him by force anyway; and c) was "fixing" intelligence to sell the impending invasion to a duped American public.

Many critics see the memo as the ultimate proof of Bush`s duplicity—and, given that no U.S. newspaper picked up the story for two weeks (and then buried it deep inside), as further evidence of the mainstream media`s cravenness. Others, and not just Bush apologists, see the affair as overblown and the document`s contents as no big deal.

So, let`s go to the memo. Actually, let`s go to seven memos: [urlthe famous minutes;]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html[/url] a secret [urlCabinet Office report]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html[/url] written two days before the ministers` meeting (published last weekend by the Sunday Times and the Washington Post); and [urlfive eyes-only memos,]http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=1078[/url] written around the same time, about various official British meetings with President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. (These memos, described in today`s Los Angeles Times, have been available in full for some time now on the Think Progress Web site.)

What in these documents is new and significant? What`s old hat or trivial? What do they say—and not say—about the Bush administration`s prevarications? And should the mainstream media be pardoned or lashed for selling the story so short?

The "killer quote" in the original Sunday Times story is this passage from the July 23 ministers` meeting:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

"C" is the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. His "recent talks in Washington" would almost certainly have been with his counterpart, George Tenet, then-director of the CIA. Tenet would have told him about the "perceptible shift in attitude." What accounts for it? "Bush wants to remove Saddam through military action."

This is about as solid as the evidence gets on these matters: By mid-summer 2002—at a time when Bush was still assuring the American public that he regarded war as a "last resort"—the president had in fact put it on his front burners.

Some who have read the memo shrug. Even former Slate Editor [urlMichael Kinsley]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/AR2005061001705.html[/url] wonders what`s new here. After all, we`ve read over and over that Bush was hellbent on war even earlier than this. The point has been made in Bob Woodward`s Plan of Attack, Richard Clarke`s Against All Enemies, and Ron Suskind`s The Price of Loyalty, as well as in articles by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post.

True, but let`s get serious. When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they`ll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history`s first draft.

In other respects, though, the memo doesn`t make as strong a case against Bush as some have claimed. Read in conjunction with the six other British documents, the case weakens further. The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims.

For instance, at one point during the July 23 meeting, the British ministers are discussing some of the risks of going to war. Saddam might "use his WMD on Kuwait," one official cautions. "Or on Israel," adds the defense secretary.

An Iraq [url"options paper,"]http://thinkprogress.org/wp-images/upload/iraqoptionspaper.pdf[/url] dated March 8, 2002, states: "Despite sanctions, Iraq continues to develop WMD" (though it adds that intelligence on the matter is "poor").

The July 21 Cabinet Office report published by the Sunday Times last weekend—titled "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action"—raises an intriguing strategic concern: that a post-Saddam government might still want weapons of mass destruction. "Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD," the memo warns, "it is certainly not a sufficient one." The "options paper" makes the same point: "Even a representative [Iraqi] government could seek to acquire WMD … as long as Iran and Israel retain their WMD."

In a personal message to Blair, dated March 22, 2002, political director [urlPeter Ricketts]http://thinkprogress.org/wp-images/upload/rickettsmemo.pdf[/url] writes that, although Iraq`s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs "have not, as far as we know, been stepped up," they "are extremely worrying." What has changed, he emphasizes, "is not so much the pace of Saddam Hussein`s WMD programmes but our tolerance of them post-11 September."

The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time.

What of the second half of the key quote from the Downing Street Memo of July 23—that Bush wanted war, justified by WMD and terrorism, but "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy"? It`s worth noting that "fixed around" is not synonymous with "fixed." To say that Bush and his aides "fixed" intelligence—as [urlsome Web sites]http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=1078[/url] claim the memo shows—would mean that they distorted or falsified it. To say "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" means that they were viewing, sifting, and interpreting intelligence in a way that would strengthen the case for their policy, for going to war.

Either way—"fixed" or "fixed around"—Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence.

But that doesn`t necessarily mean they thought their claims were false. Murray Kempton, the late great New York newspaper columnist, once strolled out of a federal courtroom where some mobster was on trial and chortled to a colleague, "They`re framing a guilty man in there." Something similar was probably happening with the Bush administration`s case for war in Iraq. They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn`t quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close. The problem was, their man wasn`t guilty, at least on the charges of indictment. (For more on this view of intelligence errors, click )[urlhere.]http://www.slate.com/id/2084988/[/url]

Does this distinction matter? If all you want to know is whether Bush was deceptive, no; he was deceptive. If you want to know how government works, how officials make bad mistakes, yes; it matters a lot.

Reading the seven British memos, you see the Blair government wrestling with serious dilemmas. In a memo to the prime minister on March 14, 2002, [urlDavid Manning,]http://thinkprogress.org/wp-images/upload/manningmemo.pdf[/url] then Blair`s foreign-policy adviser, lists some of the concerns: "how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition … what happens the morning after?"

The tragedy embedded in these memos is that the Brits were mistaken in their two most basic premises: first, that Saddam Hussein really had WMD and really posed a threat; second, that just because Bush needed Blair`s support, Blair could somehow influence him.

Their first mistake would be revealed after the war was over. The second should have been clear before it began. Manning`s memo recounts raising some issues about political support, international law, postwar stability, and so forth at a recent dinner with Rice. "Condi`s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed," he reports, adding, "From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions." Two months later, the July 21 Cabinet Office report cited the same worry: "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. … U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

At least the Brits clearly saw the difficulties ahead and tried to engage Bush on their implications. Had he listened, our biggest problems in Iraq today might be a great deal smaller. This is another lesson to be gleaned from the Downing Street memos.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2120886/

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Wednesday, June 15, 2005
THIS JUST IN…
http://billfisher.blogspot.com/2005/06/this-just-in.html

By William Fisher

Oppressed Christians: Looking for a five-star holiday?

Have we got a deal for you!

GITMO-By-The-Sea.

Don’t laugh, folks. Our Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could just be poised to become the country’s hottest tourist destination for folks of faith.

It’s hard to see how it could lose, since it’s being promoted by America’s hottest new tourism entrepreneurs -- Alabama’s Senator Jeff Sessions and California congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee. It’s got a business plan, a high-profile Board of Directors, and all the other bells and whistles of a venture capitalist’s dream.

And Sessions and Hunter and their colleagues aren’t being a bit bashful about selling the idea – with taxpayers’ money.

Senator Sessions made his first pitch during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The Navy’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he gushed, is ideally placed, “overlooking the water…It would make a beautiful resort.” Obviously looking for endorsements from influential opinion leaders, he urged his fellow senators to be sure to pay a visit soon, courtesy of the Defense Department.

A day earlier, in a U.S. Capitol meeting room, Sen. Sessions’ partner, Rep. Hunter, gave the press a peek at GITMO’s five-star cuisine: Lemon fish, two types of fruit, two types of vegetables. "This is lemon fish,” he told a press conference. “And this is what the 20th hijacker [of the September 11th attacks] and Osama bin Laden`s bodyguards will be eating this week in Guantanamo," he added.

And, as if the idyllic Caribbean views and all this healthy grub wasn’t enough, we learn from Rep. Hunter that the management is throwing in invaluable incentives: A Qoran in every bed table (guaranteed dry), oil, beads, slippers, and five supervised prayer services daily (rugs included).

But that ain’t all! For every carefree night you while away at GITMO, you earn points on your FAP program. FAP is GITMO’s Frequent Abuse Program. This qualifies you for free upgrades on the CIA Gulfstream to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other popular ‘rendition’ destinations, and deep-discount trips to Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base.

Seeking to dispel what may be GITMO’s few remaining negative images, Rep. Hunter assures us there is no real abuse "unless you consider eating chicken three times a week real torture."

Other members of the resort’s new Board of Directors are also weighing in. At a news briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boasted that "at Guantanamo, the military spends more per meal for detainees" than it does on rations for U.S. troops. Rummie assures us that this level of extravagance will continue.

Then there are the spiritual benefits. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh paints the detention center as the picture of religious freedom that "may be a great vacation spot for oppressed Christians in the United States."

So who could resist? It may take a tad longer to get rid of GITMO’s present tenants, but trust me, it’ll be well worth the wait.

Finally, all you B-School types need to know about the most fun part of the business plan. Sessions and Hunter are thinking about franchising their GITMO-By-The-Sea idea to rich Middle East business tycoons as a way to spread democracy and market-based capitalism in the Muslim world.

posted by BILL @ Wednesday, June 15, 2005

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Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3475

Welcome to Iraq… but call it Vietnam.

If we haven`t all gone down the rabbit hole in Baghdad and come out in the Saigon of another era, you can`t prove it by recent news from catastrophic Iraq. Eerie doesn`t do it justice it. In Washington, our leaders plead for patience; they insist, as they`ve been doing for a year or more, as the President has done recently, that this -- the latest bad news, whatever it may be, from the urban battlefields and bomb-implanted highways of Iraq -- is "progress." They swear that the most recent upsurge in violence and death (49 dead American soldiers in the first 14 days of this month and scores upon scores of dead Iraqis) represents, in Dick Cheney`s recent phrase, "the last throes" of the insurgency which will, the Vice President predicted, end within the President`s second term in office.

Think "light at the end of the tunnel." Think the era of Lyndon Johnson. Think of that flood of positive numbers -- the "metrics" of victory -- that came pouring out of Vietnam and now, in the form of numbers of troops armed and trained for the new Iraqi Army, police, and security forces, is flooding out of Iraq. Top generals back in Washington all lend a helpful hand. (Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers: "Well, first of all, the number of incidents is actually down 25 percent since the highs of last November, during the election period. So, overall, numbers of incidents are down. Lethality, as you mentioned, is up. . . . I think what`s causing it is a realization that Iraq is marching inevitably toward democracy.") Hang in there, Condoleezza Rice similarly assured Charlie Rose just the other night, it`s like the period after World War II when we occupied Germany and Japan; it takes patience and time to implant democracy in a defeated country. The growing strength of the insurgency, Washington officialdom has been officially saying this last month in all sorts of ways, is but proof of the progress we`re making. It`s just the "last gasp" of a dying movement.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the American officers fighting the war and their troops tell another story to reporters. Senior officials now claim not-so-privately "that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years." Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, commented to reporter Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, "I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations." Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, told Lasseter (a fine reporter, by the way) that "the insurgency doesn`t seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting. `We can`t kill them all,` Wellman said. `When I kill one I create three.`" Gen. George W. Casey, top U.S. commander in Iraq, "called the military`s efforts ‘the Pillsbury Doughboy idea` -- pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere.

Down even closer to the ground, American soldiers are blunter yet:

  "`I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period,` said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y… ‘But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won`t be ready before I leave. And I know I`ll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don`t think they`ll be ready then.`"



    "`I just wish (the Iraqi troops would) start to pull their own weight without us having to come out and baby-sit them all the time,` said Sgt. Joshua Lower, a scout in the Third Brigade of the First Armored Division who has worked with the Iraqis. ‘Some Iraqi special forces really know what they are doing, but there are some units that scatter like cockroaches with the lights on when there`s an attack.`"

And in the meantime, in the opinion polls, slowly but inexorably, public support for the war continues to erode. As Susan Page of USA Today reports in a piece ominously headlined, Poll: USA Is Losing Patience on Iraq, "Nearly six in 10 Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, a new Gallup Poll finds, the most downbeat view of the war since it began in 2003."

Does no one remember when this was the story of Vietnam? The desperately rosy statements from top officials, military and civilian, in Washington; the grim, earthy statements from U.S. officers and troops in the field in Vietnam; the eroding public support at home; the growth of the famed "credibility gap" between what the government claimed and what was increasingly obvious to all; the first hints of changing minds and mounting opposition to the war in Congress and the first calls for timetables for withdrawal?

Excuse me if I`m confused, but didn`t the men (and one key woman) of the Bush administration pride themselves in having learned "the lessons of Vietnam" (which, as it happens, they played like an opposites game until the pressure began to build when they suddenly began acting and sounding just like Vietnam clones)? Isn`t our President the very son of the man who, when himself President and involved in another war in the Gulf, claimed exuberantly, "By God, we`ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all"? Well, here`s a news flash then. In Washington today, they`re mainlining Vietnam.

Maybe we should really be examining the later history of the Vietnam War for hints of what to expect next? Certainly, as in Vietnam, we can look forward to withdrawal strategies that don`t actually involve leaving Iraq. In Vietnam, "withdrawal" involved endless departure-like maneuvers that only intensified the war -- bombing "pauses" that led to fiercer bombing campaigns, negotiation offers never meant to be taken up. Or how about ever more intense and fear-inducing discussions of the bloodbaths to come in Iraq, should we ever leave? For years in Vietnam, the bloodbath that was Vietnam was partly supplanted by a "bloodbath" the enemy was certain to commence upon as soon as the United States withdrew. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts as an explanation for why the United States couldn`t consider leaving. In public discourse, this not-yet-atrocity often superseded the only real bloodbath and was an obsessive focus of attention even for some of the war`s opponents. In the meantime, the bloodbath that was Vietnam continued week after week, month after month, year after year in all its gore. Or how about the development of right-wing theories that the war in Iraq was won on the battlefield but lost on the home front; that, as in Vietnam, we were militarily victorious but betrayed by a weak American public and stabbed in the back by the liberal media? Watch for all of these, they`re soon to come to your TV set.

Oh, and speaking about Vietnam-era parallels, how about this one: It turns out there are two different races of Iraqis. There are their Iraqis -- jihadis, Baathist bitter-enders, terrorists, Sunni fanatics, and even, as Major General Joseph Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division, admitted the other day, "good, honest" Iraqis, "offended by our presence." The thing about all of them is, without thousands of foreign military advisors, or a $5.7 billion American-financed program to train and equip their forces, or endless time to get up to speed, they take their rocket-propelled grenades, their IEDs, their mortars, their bomb-laden cars, and they fight. Regularly, fiercely, often well, and no less often to the death. They aren`t known for running away, except in the way that guerrillas, faced with overwhelming force, disband and slip off to fight another day.

American military men, whatever they call these insurgents, have a sneaking respect for them. You can hear it in many of the reports from Iraq. They are -- a typical word used by military officers there -- "resilient." No matter what we throw at them, they come back again. All on their own they develop sophisticated new tactics. Facing terrible odds, when it comes to firepower, they are clever, dangerous, resourceful opponents. The adjectives, even when they go with labels like "terrorists," are strangely respectful.

Then there`s this other race of Iraqis, as if from another planet -- our Iraqis, the ones who scatter "like cockroaches." They are, as several recent articles on the desperately disappointing experience of training an Iraqi Army reveal, not resilient, not resourceful, not up to snuff, not willing to fight, all too ready to flee, and, in the eyes of American military men on the scene, frustrating, cowardly, child-like, and contemptible.

Compare that, for instance, to the following comment on the enemy: "The ability of the [insurgents] to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war… Not only do [their] units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale." Oh sorry, that wasn`t Iraq at all. That was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor, American ambassador to South Vietnam, in November 1964.

Let`s face it. This is déjà vu all over again. In Vietnam, their Vietnamese regularly proved so much more admirable -- in the eyes of American military officers -- than ours. America`s Vietnamese often seemed like the sorts of thugs white adventurers in Hollywood films had once defeated single-handedly. They were corrupt, cowardly, greedy, and rapacious in relation to their own people, and regularly amazingly unwilling to fight their own war. The enemy, on the other hand, often seemed like "our kind of people." They were courageous, disciplined, willing to endure terrible hardships, and capable of mobilizing genuine support among other Vietnamese. Major Charles Beckwith, the chief American adviser to the Special Forces camp at Plei Me, was not atypical in his reported comment after a siege of the camp was broken, "I`d give anything to have two hundred VC [Vietcong] under my command. They`re the finest, most dedicated soldiers I`ve ever seen… I`d rather not comment on the performance of my Vietnamese forces."

Below, Jonathan Schell takes a single, remarkable news article, Building Iraq`s Army: Mission Improbable by the Washington Post`s Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru on the disastrous state of our effort to create an Iraqi military and follows it where it leads -- to the catastrophic endpoint we can all see coming somewhere, sometime down the line. As Schell in his reporting from Vietnam and his more recent writings -- including his insightful book about our violent last three centuries, The Unconquerable World -- has made so clear, there was really only one lesson, only one genuine lesson anyway, to be learned from Vietnam: Don`t do it. Tom

The Exception Is the Rule
By Jonathan Schell

Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems to me, with the recent story in the Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq`s Army: Mission Improbable." Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: spend several days with a unit of Iraq`s new, American-trained forces. (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:

We have lived in humiliation since you left
We had hoped to spend our life with you

The American press often discusses the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent that this is the case -- or that these forces are otherwise opposed to the occupation -- the United States, far from improving "security," is now training the future resistance to itself. Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company told Shadid and Fainaru that seventeen of them had quit in recent days. They added that every one of them planned to do the same as soon as possible. Their reasons were simple. They were bitter at the United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis," one soldier remarked. "The people have been destroyed." When asked by whom, he answered, "Them" -- and pointed to the Americans leading the patrol. The Iraqis had enlisted in the new army only for the salary -- $340 per month, an enviable sum in today`s ruined Iraq. But the money had come at the price of self-respect. The new recruits had been bought off and hated themselves for it. One said that after they had all quit, "We`ll live by God, but we`ll have our respect."

One might wonder whether the reporters had deliberately or unknowingly picked an exceptionally rebellious unit. But in fact, Charlie Company was selected by the U.S. Army itself, presumably eager to put its best foot forward.

The American officers` response to their sullen recruits is of a piece with the entire American effort in Iraq. The officers treat their charges as if, owing to certain mysterious personal defects, they somehow are not quite up to the job they have been given. After a typical episode in which the unit was attacked and ran away (four hailed taxis to make their escape), Sgt. Rick McGovern, who leads the unit, dressed them down. "You are all cowards," he informed them. He went on, "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom." The tongue-lashing assumed that the Iraqis and the American shared a cause that, as the story shows, was actually 100 percent missing. Iraqi men who hate the American occupation are not cowards if they decline to shoot other men who are fighting the occupation. On the contrary, the more courage they had, the less they would engage in such a fight. The men of Charlie Company do indeed lack courage -- courage to turn down the money they accept for pretending to fight for a cause they despise. Their most cowardly moment, given their beliefs, was when they sat still while Sergeant McGovern called them cowards. One soldier, Amar Mana, explained the situation in the clearest terms: "We don`t want to take responsibility," he said. "The way the situation is, we wouldn`t be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."

And so the Americans and the Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United States and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on the one side and by bribery and compulsion on the other, to play roles in a script that has little or nothing to do with the situation they are actually in. In this situation, it is not necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie. Use of single words or phrases -- "Iraqi sovereignty," "freedom," "election," "security," "democracy," "anti-Iraqi forces," even "courage" and "cowardice" -- involve the speaker in deception, for they are the constitutive elements of a framework of thought and belief that is itself a fabrication.

The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is Stalin`s Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing communism." The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to lead nowhere.

Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our President has promised an "end to tyranny." (It`s apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)

But a moment comes -- perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru`s -- when the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left face to face with the factual truth. All the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect to Iraq, America`s grotesque misadventure there -- born of lies, sustained by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues -- will be brought to a close.

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute`s Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.

Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Nation Magazine.


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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 15, 2005

June05: 49



Iraker: Civilian: 254 Police/Mil: 157 Total: 411

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Zeitschriften aus allen Herren Länder:
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

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Randolph T. Holhut: `Why do conservatives hate freedom of thought?`
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21552&mode=nest…
Posted on Thursday, June 16 @ 10:27:14 EDT
By Randolph T. Holhut

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The conservative magazine Human Events recently compiled a list of what it considers the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

The 10 books that their group of conservative intellectuals picked are the ones you might expect conservatives to pick. They are:

1. "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels.

2. "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler.

3. "Quotations from Chairman Mao" by Mao Zedong.

4. "Sexual Response in the Human Male" by Alfred Kinsey.

5. "Democracy and Education" by John Dewey.

6. "Capital" by Karl Marx.

7. "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan.

8. "The Course of Positive Philosophy" by Auguste Comte.

9. "Beyond Good and Evil" by Freidrich Nietzche.

10. "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" by John Maynard Keynes.

Then there were the books that were picked as honorable mention selections, which gives us an even clearer look at what the people who compiled this list are thinking:

- "The Population Bomb" by Paul Erlich.

- "What Is To Be Done" by V.I. Lenin.

- "Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno.

- "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill.

- "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" by B.F. Skinner.

- "Reflections on Violence" by Georges Sorel.

- "The Promise of American Life" by Herbert Croly.

- "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man" by Charles Darwin.

- "Madness and Civilization" by Michel Foucault.

- "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization" by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

- "Coming of Age in Samoa" by Margaret Mead.

- "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.

- "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir.

- "Prison Notebooks" by Antonio Gramsci.

- "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson.

- "Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon.

- "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" by Sigmund Freud.

- "The Greening of America" by Charles Reich.

- "The Limits to Growth" by the Club of Rome.

You would expect that any books from authors writing favorably about Marxism, socialism and communism would end up a list like this. But the Human Events panel also doesn`t think much of feminism, evolution, progressive education, psychoanalysis, consumer protection, environmentalism or democracy in general.

In other words, most of the ideas and movements that have fueled human progress in the past 150 years are deemed "harmful" in the eyes of conservatives.

I won`t get into a debate over the politics of Marx and Engels, but you can argue that, in "The Communist Manifesto," they accurately foresaw the economic force now known as globalization - a seamlessly integrated world where everything is for sale and everything is subject to the pressure of free market competition. And the panel`s summation of "Capital," in which they write that Marx portrays capitalists as "inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits," sounds like a spot-on description of globalization.

As for "Mein Kampf," this is the only selection on the top 10 that isn`t subject to debate. But you can just as easily plug "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" into this spot. That book, rather than "Mein Kampf," fueled the murderous anti-Semitism that Hitler exploited. And even though it was exposed long ago as a forgery, to this day "Protocols" is still a big favorite with Jew-haters around the world.

And how did Mao make the list at No. 3? The hybrid communist/capitalist society that exists in China today would never happened without the radical social and economic transformations that took place under Mao. In any event, Mao`s work is mostly Marx with a Chinese spin on it and seems redundant if you already list Marx and Engels.

Conservatives hate the idea of people enjoying sex, so naturally Kinsey would be high up on the list. What the Human Events panel called "the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy" would be to most Americans an admission that sex exists and people like it. Why else would there be a multi-billion dollar porn industry?

Dewey makes the list simply because conservatives hate free thought almost as much as they hate sex. Instead of using education as a means of social control, Dewey advocated its use to develop critical thinking skills. But of course, people who can think critically aren`t likely to become conservatives.

Conservatives have hated Friedan`s book ever since it came out in 1963. Challenging the idea of patriarchy is almost as offensive as suggesting sex is pleasurable or that people should think for themselves. It`s telling how much the panel hates Friedan when it trots out the old accusations by David Horowitz of Friedan being a "Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America`s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley`s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."

Red-baiting never goes out of style with this crowd.

Comte is probably the most obscure author on this list, but he shares space with the better known Nietzsche for their rejection of God and religion - another taboo to conservatives.

Keynes makes the list simply because of the heretical (to conservatives) idea that government could spur economic growth in slack times through deficit spending. Never mind that Ronald Reagan was perhaps the ultimate Keynesian in his tripling of the national debt through tax cuts and exorbitant military spending. That brand of Keynesian economics is OK. It`s spending for the public good, which Franklin Roosevelt raised to an art form in the 1930s, that upsets conservatives. Deficits are only acceptable if conservatives get wealthy as a result.

In this one little list, you see conservative thought in a nutshell. Any list that would consider Keynes, Darwin, Dewey and Mill as harmful is a list written by idiots. Likewise for people who think "Silent Spring" and "Unsafe at Any Speed" are harmful, unless they truly believe in the freedom to ingest DDT and drive around in unsafe cars is important. And to mention Friedan in the same breath as Marx, Mao and Hitler is breathtakingly stupid.

Kevin Drum had the best response to the list in his blog on the Washington Monthly`s Web site. He too picked 10 "books we hate/beg to differ with" and used the same time period the Human Events panel used, but decided to not pick books from Nazis or communists because they "are already well represented on the Human Events list and I just figured it would be more fun to try to come up with ten completely different books."

His picks by chronological order:

- "Social Statics," 1851, by Herbert Spencer, the man who invented "Social Darwinism" and who believed that the state`s only legitimate roles are internal policing and foreign protection.

- "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races," 1853, by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who promoted "scientific racism" and argued that the success of a civilization was in direct proportion to how much "Caucasian blood" they contained.

- "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," 1905, by the Russian secret police, which I`ve already discussed.

- "The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan," 1905, by Thomas Dixon and Arthur I. Keller, the book that inspired D.W. Griffith`s 1915 film "Birth of a Nation" and rekindled interest in the Klan in the early 20th century.

- "The Road to Serfdom," 1944, by Freidrich Hayek, a book that did Spencer one better by declaring that all government intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, leads to totalitarianism. It is among the most influential books in the conservative canon of the last six decades.

- "Witness," 1952, by Whittaker Chambers, the former communist turned red-baiter whose book set the tone for the worst excesses of the McCarthy era.

- "Atlas Shrugged," 1957, by Ayn Rand, a book which has long served as the manifesto for hard-core libertarians. Judging from the responses on Drum`s blog, she was the most disliked author and most frequently nominated for the "harmful books by conservatives" list.

- "Capitalism and Freedom," 1962, by Milton Friedman, who did more to promote the glories of unrestrained free market capitalism than anyone in the past 50 years. The Reagan revolution would have been impossible without him.

- "Milestones," 1964, by Sayyid Qutb. You could call this book the "Mein Kampf" of militant Islam. Tortured in Egyptian prisons for 10 years, Qutb wrote this book, which provided in the intellectual underpinning for the brand of Islamic extremism that has swept the Arab world in the past four decades.

- "The Late Great Planet Earth," 1970, by Hal Lindsey, probably the weakest pick on Drum`s list. But the book was a huge best seller in the 1970s and the inspiration for the evangelical Christian apocalypse industry epitomized by the "Left Behind" series which has sold more than 50 million copies in the past decade. I would have substituted "The Turner Diaries" by William Pierce - the book that was a big favorite of Timothy McVeigh and many other white supremacists - but it came out after the 1975 cutoff date that Drum used for his list

Lists like Drum`s and the Human Events` panel are meant to spur discussion, because ideas, as the conservatives like to say, have consequences. The ideas represented in Drum`s list, one can argue, have caused more harm to the world than the Human Events list. But how far a stretch is it to go from listing harmful books to calling for their destruction?

I believe in a world where one can read "Mein Kampf" or "The Turner Diaries" as well as "The Feminine Mystique" or "On Liberty." Education, rather than censorship, is always the best antidote for dealing with bad ideas.

It is not books or ideas that are harmful. Books don`t cause genocide. People do, especially people who aren`t educated to read critically and question the ideas that are presented to them.<

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at [e-mail].

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DEFENDING GUANTANAMO: SECRETARY RUMSFELD RELEASES INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF OF AMERICAN HOSPITALITY AT CAMP DELTA
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[urlStatement by the Defense Secretary]http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2005/061205.asp[/url]

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Folks, I`m going to keep this as short and sweet as a Tootsie Pop. Recently, I`ve been hearing a whole lot of nincompoop foreigners – and even a few American nincompoops – talking a whole lot of don`t-know-diddly-squat about what it`s like for those Muslamian loonybirds who are LUCKY enough to be at Camp Delta – snuggling in the warm pink bosom of American hospitality. Now sure, we may have had a teensy-weensy problem or two elsewhere, but [urlwe took care of that]http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2004/051504.asp[/url]. And so today, I`m offering a little newsflash from someone who does know diddly: Everything down at Gitmo is absolutely, postively, wholly-jamoley peachy-keen!

And if you don`t believe me, then I would suggest you carefully scrutinize the official review recently completed by the non-partisan Center for American Military-Industrial Carte Blanche (below). Thank you.

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02:30 PM EDT
2:00 (est.) LIVE
Forum
Downing Street Minutes and Pre-War Intelligence
U.S. House of Representatives, Conyers, J. (D-MI)
John Conyers Jr., D-MI
Joseph Wilson , United States
The beginning and end of this live program may be earlier or later than the scheduled times.
Seite:
http://www.c-span.org/watch/cspan3_rm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS3
Live Stream. C-SPAN3:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=cspan/g2cspan/live/cspan3-g2.rm

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Published on Thursday, June 16, 2005 by The Progressive
Bush Runs Stop Signs
by Matthew Rothschild
http://63.247.66.90/%7Eprogress/?q=mag_wx061505

Bush`s approval rating is now down to 43 percent, which is much lower than Reagan`s or Clinton`s at a comparable point in their second terms.

In fact, it`s just a tad higher than Richard Nixon`s, who was feeling the heat of Watergate.

Bush has only himself to blame. His assault on Social Security, his opposition to stem cell research, his padding of the wallets of his corporate cronies all have shown him to be out of step with the American people.

But it`s the Iraq War that is taking a daily toll on his popularity. Vice President Cheney can prattle on about how the insurgency is in its "last throes," but the American people can see with their own eyes that this is not the case.

Every day, there`s a brutal suicide bombing or two.

Every day, a U.S. soldier or two or three is being killed over there.

And the Iraqi government shows no signs of being able to put the country back together.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have no answer, either.

But the U.S. commanders know the score.

"This insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brigadier General Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said in early June, according to Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder. "It`s going to be settled in the political process."

"General George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, expressed similar sentiments, calling the military`s efforts ‘the Pillsbury Doughboy idea’—pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere," Lasseter reported.

Or, as Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Wellman told him, "We can`t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three."

Mired in Iraq, stalemated at least somewhat in Congress, Bush is now playing the blame game, saying Democrats have the "philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock."

But a stop sign and a roadblock are not such bad things to have when there`s a reckless driver behind the wheel and when the pavement ends just a few hundred yards down.

Bush might want to start obeying that stop sign instead of running it.

He might want to break for that roadblock instead of blowing through it.

He`s run enough stop signs, he`s blown through enough roadblocks already.

© 2005 The Progressive

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Seymour Hersh : The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison.
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The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."


Video der Rede über Real Player:
http://stream.realimpact.net/?file=clients/aclu/conf2004/200…

07/14/04
Seymour Hersh`s ACLU Keynote Speech Transcribed
Transcript by http://www.pastpeak.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.pastpeak.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.pastpeak.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.pastpeak.com/

On July 8, Seymour Hersh addressed the ACLU`s 2004 Membership Conference.

Introduction [1:07:40]

… The truth is, it`s so ironic… the best information we may get about this election may come from a combination of The Control Room, Fahrenheit 9/11, John Sayles, the nightly news from Jon Stewart if some of you watch that. At the height of the prisoner abuse stories, [Jon Stewart] had one of his mock news broadcasters say very seriously to the camera, on the Stewart show, he said, "The important thing is not that we commit torture and abuses, it`s that we`re a country that doesn`t condone torture and abuses" [laughter] — that`s a wonderful line.

And so, you start talking about failures of communication, I don`t know where we`re going to go with this, I can`t make you feel happy about where we are. We`ve got a very important election coming up, probably the most important since, what, 1860. I think it is, and there`s nothing I can say to you about any of that. …

So here we are. The bottom line is, by the way, I`m in a tough position because I`m not done reporting on all of this. … It`s a tough position because there is more to the story. …

Standards for Government Ethics [1:10:25]

I guess the way to describe how you look at things is, I don’t know about you, but I have a wife and children, and one of the things that makes life livable is trusting in my partner, never lying to my children and never wanting my children — with the exception of teenage girls [laughter] — to lie to me about anything. …

But basically you know what I’m talking about, the core of how we exist. The way we live — not us, there’s nothing special about us, everybody in the world — we all live, the most important thing in our life is our family structure and the integrity with which we live, and the honesty with which we conduct our life, and the trust with which we have people [sic].

And if you think about it, you begin to understand the bad bargain we have [now]. It’s, it`s, it`s a condition, a requirement, one that we so desperately live with our own families with that we don’t even begin to levy on the President of the United States and the National Security Advisor. It’s not even a requirement [for them]. We don’t even have any expectation that they’re going to have the same trust and integrity in conducting their affairs as we do in our own personal life.

It’s a bad bargain for us in the commonweal. We don’t even begin — we understand what they are. You heard talking about Henry Kissinger, who, for all of his genius, lied like most of us breathe. And when you’re in a situation like that — is that partisan or non-partisan, I don`t know [referring to the ACLU`s need to remain non-partisan].

But it’s really a bad bargain. And we live with it pretty happily, we go along, ok another President, another National Security Advisor, Condi Rice in this case — and we know we don’t get the story, and what do they have the right to do? They have the right to send our children, men and women now, in the name of democracy to go kill people and be killed and torture and perhaps be tortured in return, which is always going to be the end result of torture. And so, I think there’s nothing wrong with holding these people to the highest possible standards. It doesn’t happen enough. But that’s what we have to do.

Scope of the Crimes of Torture [1:12:50]

We don’t know — I’ll tell you right now, the reason I’m saying all that — is what happened at Abu Ghraib, I can just tell you this, and I have to do the reporting on this and you have to wait for me to do it — but it’s not about an academic debate in long essays between the Justice Department and the White House, legal essays about where the Geneva Convention ends and the Presidential prerogative begins.

What we had was a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the President and the Vice President, by this administration anyway, I can say that, I can’t say who did it.

The only way to look at this is as war crimes. What happened are war crimes. I’m not saying it’s there yet. It’s not there yet. But that’s where it has to go. We have to stop looking at it as some sort of academic debate about Geneva Conventions and really begin to look at it in terms of: Who did what? Who died? Why did he die? Are there people missing? Are we doing what the Brazilians and Argentineans did back two or three decades ago and actually into this decade? Are we disappearing people? Are there people being tortured knowingly in advance that the torture was going to put their lives in peril and is nothing being done to relieve their suffering to the point that they die?

Is there mens rea? Is there guilty knowledge? Is it a crime? And we’re going to get there, because I think that’s where it’s sort of ineluctably going, you can just see on and on and on, and we’re not there yet. I’m not telling you I can take it there, I’m just telling you that that’s the way you have to look at it.

Repercussions in the Arab World [1:14:25]

I’ll tell you what an Israeli told me. And the Israelis as you know — a very tough, hard-nosed Israeli told me at one point, about all this — he said, you know, we hate the Arabs. This is a guy who spent his career in the intelligence service and, you know, his hands are bloody. He said, we hate the Arabs, and the Arabs hate us, and before 1948, we’ve been killing Arabs, and they’ve been killing us. But I have to tell you something, he said. We know somewhere down the line, we’re going to have to live with these people, much as we can’t stand them, they’re going to have to be our neighbors. And if we had done in our prisons to the Arabs what you have done to the Arabs in your prisons, we couldn’t live that way.

And so the bottom line is we have started something that we don’t know [what] the end, the bottom line, is of this treatment, as more details come out.

And I can tell you it was much worse, and the government knows it`s much worse, than they’ve even told you. There are worse photos, worse videotapes, worse events. To The New Yorker’s credit we decided, not for censorship, but just how much can you, how much can you levy on Arab manhood, in public?

But Arabs, I will tell you, it’s not just the radicals — and we all know how this policy, this administration’s policies, in Afghanistan, too, and also of course in Iraq, has really done exactly the contrary of what they said they were going to do. They haven`t ended the war of terrorism — they’ve expanded it — that’s nothing obvious [sic], that’s totally clear.

But Arabs now, moderate Arabs, Arabs that normally would be doing the kind of — as you know, the overwhelming, the vastly overwhelming percentage of moderate Arabs deplored what happened to this country on 9/11, as much as anybody here — but those Arabs we’ve lost. They see us as a sexually perverse society. The sexual stuff we did to them is seen as just perversion. And I think we’re going to have consequences for a long time to come. There’s an awful lot of respect in the Arab world for Americans, I travel there all the time, and American Jews even, it’s not, nobody’s going to — I wouldn’t walk around Baghdad — but most of the world is very safe. We have a lot of problems.

The Neocon Cult [1:16:47]

So, rather than deal with the obvious stuff about Bush and this election and what it means, I think the real question we have to answer, and this is the question I`m inchoate about, I don`t have an answer …

The question we have to say to ourselves is, ok, so here’s what happens, a bunch of guys, 8 or 9 neoconservatives, cultists — not Charles Manson cultists, but cultists — get in and it`s not, with all due respect to Michael Moore, and you’ll read it, his movie’s fine, but it’s not about oil, it’s not even about protecting Israel, it’s about a Utopia they have, it’s about an idea they have. Not only about — democracy can be spread — in a sense, I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time, he believes in permanent revolution, and in the Middle East to begin, needless to say.

And so you have a bunch of people who`ve been for 10, 12 years have been fantasizing since the 1991 Gulf War on the way to resolve problems. And of course Israel will be a beneficiary and etc. etc., but the world in their eyes — this was Utopia. And so they got together, this small group of cultists, and how did they do it? They did do it. They’ve taken the government over. And what’s amazing to me, and what really is troubling, is how fragile our democracy is. Look what happened to us.

[In the press, there is] self-censorship, which is the beacon word for me, you know I always think it comes more, you know there is a corporate mentality out there, but there’s also a tremendous amount of self-censorship among the press. It’s like a disease.

But also — they not only — they took away the edge from the press, they also muzzled the bureaucracy, they muzzled the military, they muzzled the Congress, and it’s an amazing feat. We’re supposed to be a democratic society, and all of those areas of our democracy bowed and scraped to this group of neocons who advocated a policy.

General Shinseki [1:19:05]

You know, we all know the story of how mad they got at General Shinseki, who I think is going to run for the Senate in Hawaii and should, for Inouye’s seat, he’s a great general. The important thing about Shinseki for me, and this is just heuristic, I don’t know this, the important thing about Shinseki is this. He testifies before the Gulf War we’re going to need a couple hundred thousand troops and everybody, Wolfowitz and the others — I count Wolfowitz, I lead with him, because he’s sort of the, he’s the genius in the background, he’s the man, very articulate, very persuasive — and so Shinseki testifies we need a couple hundred thousand and everybody’s mad at him, it`s about two weeks before the war, and it made sense, everybody said, they were mad because he`s talking about numbers these guys say you won’t need. They`re going to go invade Iraq and you know the story, they were going to be greeted with flowers and all that stuff, we all know that story.

But it wasn’t that. Their complaint with Shinseki was really much more interesting. It was: didn’t he get it? Didn’t he know what we’ve been talking about, in the tank with the JCS and the generals — didn’t he get it? We could do it with five thousand troops, we have to make these bargains with these crazy Clinton-ized generals — I’m talking like Rummy, like Rumsfeld would talk — literally, unfortunately — these soft generals, these Clinton-ized generals — didn’t Shinseki get it? Didn’t he understand what we’re doing here? We did it in Afghanistan, we’re going to do it in Iraq. Some Special Forces, some bombing, we’re going to take it over. It’s going to be like this. He didn’t get it, that was the problem, that’s why they had to read him out. He wasn’t on the team.

And so you have a government that basically has been operating since 9/11 very successfully on the principle that if you’re with us you’re a genius, if you’re against us you’re not just somebody [in the] loyal opposition, you’re a traitor. They can’t deal with you. I’m exaggerating very slightly.

Pentagon in Disarray [1:21:00]

So what does that mean? That means no dissent. Somebody I know recently was working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a budget issue. The budget’s in incredible chaos, the Defense Department budget. Don’t hold me to this, because, you know The New Yorker has this great fact-checking system, this is just something I’ve heard, but among the problems they have, they can’t find something like one billion dollars in cash that was known to be in Iraq, they just can’t find it. And you know we’re talking with the b-word there, you known one billion.

And so they’ve got huge problems that they’re spending and the Joint Chiefs, this was in big league meetings, and then this gentleman has to go and brief his findings. He’s an outside expert, he’s done an investigation, he has to brief Rumsfeld, and one of the senior generals who happens to be a very good guy — not General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who’s know to many generals as “hear no evil, see no evil”, you know we have that incredible sort of problem — I wish, this is a digression, I wish they had more guts, the two, three, and four stars. I shouldn’t say that because I’m obviously a beneficiary, you know, indirectly, I’m the beneficiary for their thoughts in some cases, but it is sort of sad that none of them have come forward and really blasted away, because I can tell you right now, the disaffection inside the Pentagon is really extremely acute, there’s never been anything like it, and they feel that this government doesn’t care about — you know a good officer, and I could tell you right now, don’t make the mistake of thinking that they’re not good people, they are, and in the intelligence service too, they’re people like everybody else. They want to do their job right, they want to do it with as much honor as they can. And this is something that I feel — I know these guys, and they do care. But they also, the good ones, also they’re in loco parentis. One of the things they take very seriously, particularly, you known I`m a Marine, you know what I’m talking about, you give your children to them, they take of you. They can’t do that now in Iraq. They really don’t think we care, and they don` think, they certainly don’t think people in the White House care. …

Rumsfeld Refuses to Listen [1:23:10]

So one of the good generals, one of the good guys goes in for a meeting with Rumsfeld, and the person I’m talking about is describing the condition that he’s discovered of the budget planning. We’re talking about lots of billions of dollars, this war is going to probably end up being the trillion dollar war that nobody — you can’t even begin to estimate the cost.

When you see the Moore movie, and in [The] Control Room, when you see those movies, the photographs that are the most gripping are the photographs of Baghdad before the war. And look, I know he`s a bad guy, etc., etc., etc., Saddam, but still, and the rebuilding —

Anyway, the point is that my friend, this person told Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rumsfeld of course said, oh my God, that’s absolutely wrong, he said, there’s nothing like that, there’s no problem with the budget and he turned to this ranking general and said, isn’t that right? And this general, in front of this outsider, said yes sir, you’re right. And that’s what happens, that’s what you have now, and to me, there’s nothing more scary. That the Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear. And he’s not the ideologue that Wolfowitz is. You couple that with an ideologue, and I don’t know what we can do. I don’t know what any of us can do to stop it.

Transfer of Iraqi “Sovereignty” [1:24:50]

I think what’s going to happen is the President’s — my guess is, first of all, again, the idea that three networks — or at least two of them — I think all three sent their anchormen through Baghdad on the 30th for this transfer of sovereignty and I just wonder, I mean, how out of touch are they? What sovereignty? What sovereignty do we have to give? There’s no phones, there’s no electricity [laughter] — no, this is a sad fact. There is no sovereignty, there’s no army. It’s a Potemkin village maybe, yes, so they’re going to go inside the CPA where the grass is green and the air-conditioning works and they’re going to have a change of command with the press monitoring it and they had all three anchors there. I thought to myself, wow, it’s really scary. We’re getting into — we’re making the pictures and we’re believing them now, more than ever. So it doesn’t have much reality.

So the President’s, I would guess the President’s policy is — he’s got no, he doesn’t have a policy behind the new government, the Allawi government, which is basically a bunch of outsiders taking control, and everybody’s got their hands in certain — there’s no way this government’s going to be acceptable to anybody except a very small minority of people. It’s not going to work, it’s not going to stop the insurgency.

What’s Next in Iraq [1:26:10]

I think you’re going to see a lot of efforts to try to paint the insurgency in the next month as increasingly being outsiders. I’ve seen already the first “showdown” between al Qaeda and the United States. “Al Qaeda’s taken over the insurgency” — I don’t think that’s true at all. And I can tell you right now — this I`m telling you I know — a year ago, a year and a half ago, there was total panic inside, because the opposition, the insurgency, was operating in 1, 2, and 3 man cells and we knew nothing about them. I can tell you right now, they`re operating in 10 and 15 man cells right now and we still know nothing about them. The interrogations haven’t worked, no matter how much pressure they put on people. We have no tactical information of any use whatsoever.

And if you go to Europe and talk to some of the intelligence people there and some of the people in the Middle East who are our friends — we have many friends, who are very sad about what’s happened to America, are praying for the next election — they will tell you even the stuff you’re hearing about Zarqawi — Zarqawi, excuse me, Zarqawi is mister everybody, he’s never liked bin Laden, and it’s not clear that the person that we claim responsible for all those acts is he. Some of the people who know the Arab world very well and very carefully and listen to his statements. He’s a Jordanian, and many of the comments that have been alleged to have been in his name are not made by him. In other words, the suggestion is that he’s a composite figure. He’s very convenient.

I don’t want to suggest to you that we’ve ever been propagandized by our government [laughter], but it’s very convenient. It’s very convenient to keep on telling the press that Zarqawi’s — my favorite one is that nice kid that was beheaded, remember. The guy that beheaded him had a hood over him. He was described very confidently by the American establishment government as Zarqawi. Well, if they can see through hoods. Anyway —

So, I think the policy’s going to be, we’ve got this guy Allawi and this government, let’s stand him up and see if he can past the election, and let’s just escalate, and bomb, and bomb, and bomb. And the only answer for these guys is going to be more pressure, more military force. We accept as commonplace, every day now, we’re emulating Israel in [their] missile attacks, and it’s a daily occurrence. We keep on bombing places in Fallujah, claiming we’ve gotten rid of Zarqawi, who keeps on not showing up anyway, whoever he is.

We don’t have much intelligence, and we’re escalating a war. Bombing, missile attacks, much more violence, it’s come, crept up on us, you know little cat paw, and we’re there. We’re there in a full-scale, increasingly intense military activity, more bombing, more air force planes, more ordnance, more shelling, what we call force protection — that is, you’re not going to send troops somewhere where you can just fire a lot of missiles [instead], which means of course more collateral damage, more civilians, which means of course more opposition, more insurgency.

Torture: Worse Revelations to Come [1:29:08]

What they did at Abu Ghraib and other places was, the people they would get, they would torture. And sometimes, for an Arab man, being photographed without clothes on — in the Koran, you’re not allowed, this front [motioning to his body] cannot be exposed — and to be exposed that way and to be forced to simulate sexual activity with other males and have women give the thumbs-up sign is the ultimate degradation. It’s literally — any classic definition of — it’s torture. Torture isn’t always physical. It’s a torturous process.

And the purpose of it, of course, is to generate information. So what do you get? You get people that know nothing. The ICRC, the international Red Cross, estimated in the prison population at Abu Ghraib at the time of the worst abuses, they estimated that upwards of 90% had no bearing at all on anthing anti-American, or any activity that had anything to do with the insurgency. This wonderful general, Antonio Taguba, the report that I got, this guy Taguba`s report estimated that 60% had nothing to do [with it].

So you take these people, you expose them to the ridicule and physical torture that you can, and they end up telling you. Yes, they`ll give you the names of people in their neighborhood that are al Qaeda, or terrorists, insurgency, and they give you names. And of course they`re just names, they`re just doing it, and then you arrest those people, and bring them in, and you start the process. And the circle gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

And I would — debating about it [long pause]. Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at [Abu Ghraib], which is about 30 miles from Baghdad — 30 kilometers, maybe, just 20 miles, I`m not sure whether it`s — anyway. The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there.

When I did My Lai, I was very troubled, like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened, and I ended up in something I wrote saying, in the end, I said, the people that did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed, because of the scars they had.

I can tell you some of the personal stories of some of the people who were in these units who witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers. And so we’re dealing with an enormous, massive amount of criminal wrong-doing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher. And we have to get to it, and we will. And we will, I mean, you know, there’s enough out there, they can`t — [applause]

So — so, it’s going to be an interesting election year, it is. It’s going to be Bush vs. Bush, I think, largely, in my view, not that the Democrats, or Ralph Nader, won’t have something to do with it, but it’s really going to be, it’s Bush running against Bush.

The Justice Department [1:33:05]

And, I don’t know where we’re going to come out. And, I guess, I guess the only thing I can say is that above and beyond that, all of you know because all of you care about the Constitutional rights and what’s going on in the government, the issues that many in [the ACLU] are deeply involved in, one of the other great shocking examples of self-censorship, or just sheer cowardness, or what you will, is just the inability of the press corps to deal with the Justice Department and what’s happened there.

It’s one of the great failings — I can tell you the degradation of that place has been so total, and there are people, again, there are many people in those places that really care about human rights. I was getting emails on September the 12th, 2001, from people the inside the FBI saying we are in real trouble with this guy Ashcroft. So there are people there that care, they fight, as hard as they can. It’s not as if — when you have the kind of leadership we have, I don’t know where we go. I just wish I could tell you — I am telling you — go back, do what you can, … you’re going to say to yourself, as many people have said to me, I’d better do more. But also be terribly aware, that we are so disconnected with this leadership that it’s not necessarily clear that what you do is going to impact on them.

Because these are people that are really out there. We have really been — you know, as I say, it’s not the Manson clan — but we really have been taken over, and we have to do something to stop it, and let’s hope we can do it electorally.

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A broken body
Under DeLay`s leadership, the work of the House has become trivial, and corruption cannot be investigated, much less rebuked.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/06/16/house_ant…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/06/16/house_ant…

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By Sidney Blumenthal


June 16, 2005 | The House of Representatives of the 109th Congress suffers the classic symptoms of a decadent ancien régime. It seems an eon ago that the Republicans swept into power in 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, on a "Contract With America" whose preamble promised: "To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace."

Day by day, week by week, spectacles unfold in its august chambers revealing new incidents of corruption, unaccountability and chaos. The Republican clamor for "democratic deliberation" faded long ago, even as a distant echo, as the screws of centralized power constantly tightened. The Democrats have been prevented from debating legislation, attaching amendments and participating in conferences. Any gesture at dissent is gaveled out of order. Republican members too have been relegated to the sidelines, rubber-stamping what the leadership dictates.

"Gutless chicken shit," Tom DeLay shouted seven years ago at questions about his ethics violations. Today, the Republican majority leader frantically maneuvers to quash any investigation by the House ethics committee into three foreign trips paid for by his close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is himself under a Department of Justice probe for fleecing Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars. (It is illegal for members of Congress to accept foreign trips from lobbyists.)

Since the House has been in session this year, the ethics committee has met for exactly one day. On that day, in May, it decided under intense public pressure to reverse its fail-safe scheme to thwart any investigation of DeLay. The committee had announced rules by which a deadlock would lead to dismissal of any charge. Because the committee is the only one equally divided between majority and minority members, a deadlock was guaranteed, and so therefore was DeLay`s escape.

But last week DeLay designed a new device to frustrate an investigation. The rules of the committee stipulate that its staff must be nonpartisan. However, another rule allows the chairman and the ranking minority member to each appoint a staff member without the other`s approval. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., the chairman, seized upon that rule to name his longtime chief of staff as director of the committee. With that he succeeded in throwing a monkey wrench into the works. Predictably, the Democrats protested, the process ground to a halt, and unless it is somehow unstuck, the investigation of DeLay has been stalled indefinitely.

Although it is DeLay`s tactics that have paralyzed the ethics committee, he blames the Democrats for the consequences of his own actions. "They don`t want an ethics committee," DeLay complained. "They would like to drag this out and have me and others before the ethics committee in an election year." Hastings, for his part, has been exposed as having his own web of relationships with Abramoff, who boasted to a client that his ties to Hastings were "excellent."

So long as the ethics committee is in effect defunct, it cannot investigate any new cases, such as that involving Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., which emerged in the last week. Cunningham, an influential member of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, has helped a certain defense contractor named Mitchell Wade and his company, MZM Inc., win tens of millions of dollars in contracts. In 2003, Wade paid Cunningham $1.67 million for his house in Del Mar, Calif. Wade resold it for a price that was $700,000 less than he paid Cunningham. The discrepancy suggested a neat and deliberate overpayment, having the appearance of a bribe. The real estate agent, however, stated that $1.67 million was a fair price. But then it developed that she and two of her family members had made 18 financial contributions to Cunningham`s campaigns, totaling $11,500 since 1997. Under usual circumstances in the past, Cunningham`s gamey situation would have been taken up by the ethics committee. But for all intents and purposes there is no ethics committee. Corruption cannot be acknowledged, much less investigated and rebuked.

While DeLay was orchestrating the latest plot turn in the ethics committee, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., continued his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee as circus act. On June 10, he presided over a morning`s hearing on the PATRIOT Act of witnesses invited by the Democratic minority. It was the one occasion the Democrats were allowed under the rules to give critics an official forum on the bill up for renewal. Sensenbrenner, whose routine demeanor is peeved and bilious, was on a hair trigger. He did not permit the ranking Democrat, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to finish his opening statement. He refused to recognize Democrats on their points of order. Finally, he declared the hearings over. "Much of what has been stated is not irrelevant," he announced. "Point of order," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. "No, I will not yield," said Sensenbrenner. He cut off the microphones of Democrats as their words hung in the air: "Will the gentleman yield?" and "Point of order, Mr. Chairman." Sensenbrenner stormed out the door.

Sensenbrenner`s highhandedness was hardly exceptional. This spring he barred Democrats from consultation on legislation that made drivers` licenses national identification cards -- in effect backdoor immigration legislation that could lead to sweeps against illegal immigrants with licenses. Indeed, no hearings whatsoever were held before the bill`s passage.

At the same time, in April, Sensenbrenner rammed through a bill called the Child Interstate Notification Act, which applies federal criminal penalties to adults aiding and abetting minors who leave a state that imposes parental notification laws to get an abortion in another state. When Democrats on the Judiciary Committee submitted amendments, Sensenbrenner and his staff rewrote their captions in the official record without informing them. In every case, Sensenbrenner`s language presented Democrats as defending "sexual predators." One caption of an amendment by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., for example, read: "Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor."

Right-wing Republicans like to posture as middle-class populists who are only reacting to the intrusions on individual liberty by liberal elites. But Sensenbrenner, poster child for Republican arrogance, is the pampered heir to the Kotex fortune, whose sense of entitlement is exceeded only by his rancor.

DeLay`s system of centralization has Washington in its grip. Republican House members are factotums of the leadership group he dominates. The regular operation of House committees has been overthrown. Decisions are handed down by DeLay and his lieutenants. Lobbyists are convened in private to write legislation. What`s more, lobbying firms are ordered to kick in campaign contributions and are under threat of losing preference if they hire Democrats. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, DeLay`s sock puppet, opened the 109th Congress by declaring that legislation had to meet the approval of "the majority of the majority" -- DeLay`s rule for right-wing control.

On about 80 percent of the bills before the House, amendments are prohibited as a result of what are called "closed rules." By manipulation of so-called suspension bills -- for example, those that name federal buildings and praise civic groups -- the business of the House has become a playpen of trivialities. Instead of substantive debate, two-thirds of all the time on the House floor is devoted to these meaningless measures. By this means, the leadership concentrates power and frustrates the House from acting as deliberative body. The schedule of the House has been reduced to something like that of a small state legislature of the 19th century, with many of its lollygagging members turning up for work on Tuesday and leaving on Thursday.

The efforts to suppress the proper workings of the House on inquiries of corruption and to quell uneasy questions about legislation from Democrats are only increasing the public pressure on the Republican leadership. Ever more rigid control is producing sharper and deeper fissures in its façade. The desperation for order fosters greater disorder. Such is the state of democracy in America that the rest of the world is encouraged to emulate.


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About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

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[urlPast Peak
Cause for Alarm
]http://www.pastpeak.com/[/url]

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[url]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/16/politics/20050617_POLL_RESULTS.html[/url]
Complete Results:
The New York Times Poll
June 17, 2005
Bush`s Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll
By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/politics/17poll.html?hp&ex…

Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush`s plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Forty-two percent of the people responding to the poll said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job, a marked decline from his 51 percent rating after of the November election, when he embarked on an ambitious second term agenda led by the overhaul of Social Security. Sixteen months before the midterm elections, Congress fared even worse in the survey, with the approval of just 33 percent of the respondents, and 19 percent saying Congress shared their priorities.
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Despite months of presidential effort, the nationwide poll found the public is not rallying toward Mr. Bush`s vision of a new Social Security that would allow younger workers to put part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts. Two-thirds said they were uneasy about Mr. Bush`s ability to make sound decisions on Social Security. Only 25 percent said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling Social Security, down slightly from what the poll found in March.

Moreover, 45 percent said the more they heard about the Bush plan, the less they liked it. The survey also found the public shared the growing skepticism in Washington about Mr. Bush`s prospects for success on Social Security, with most saying they did not think Mr. Bush would succeed.

Still, Mr. Bush continued to have majority support for his handling of the war on terrorism - 52 percent - one of his strengths throughout his 2004 re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush`s approval rating is below the historical pattern for June in the first year of a second term: President Clinton`s stood at 60 percent and President Reagan`s at 59 percent. But that could reflect, in part, the much greater partisan polarization in modern politics, underscored by the 71 percentage point gap between Mr. Bush`s approval rating from Democrats and Republicans in the recent poll. Nicolle Devenish, White House communications director, dismissed the significance of the poll, saying Mr. Bush believes that following polls is equivalent to a dog chasing its tail. "We have advanced a broad agenda, and will continue to advocate the people`s priorities," she said.

On Iraq, months of continued turmoil, insurgent attacks and casualties appear to have taken a further toll on public attitudes. Looking back, 51 percent said they thought the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, while 45 percent said military action was the right thing to do. That reflects only a slight erosion from findings by CBS News throughout the spring, but a marked turnaround from 2004, when pluralities tended to think it was still the right thing to do.

Moreover, only 37 percent said they approved of Mr. Bush`s handling of the situation in Iraq, down from 45 percent in February. A strong majority of Americans now say the effort by the United States to bring stability and order to Iraq is going badly - 60 percent, up from 47 percent in February.

The latest poll was conducted by telephone June 10 through Wednesday with 1,111 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

In general, the survey found Americans in a darker mood. In one key measure, only 33 percent said they thought the country was on the right track, while 61 percent said it had gone off in the wrong direction. Similar results were found by CBS News in April and May, but that measure of national optimism was markedly better last November. There was little change in the way Americans rate the current condition of the American economy - 54 percent say it is very or fairly good. But the number of Americans who say the economy is getting worse is growing, to 36 percent from 30 percent in February.

When asked an open-ended question about the most important problems facing the nation, Americans cited the economy and jobs, war and terrorism at the top of the list. Social Security, which has consumed an enormous amount of political energy this spring, did not make the top six, suggesting voters have a different view of political priorities than the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House.

The public`s view of Congress dropped sharply earlier this year, and has hovered at unusually low levels since March, according to CBS News Polls.
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The sharpest drop in Congressional approval in recent months occurred among Republicans. In February, 54 percent of Republicans said they approved of the way Congress was doing its job; in the most recent poll, that had dropped to 40 percent. Some analysts suggest that Congress is paying the price for months of intense partisan struggle over judicial nominations and the decision to intervene in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

Christine Weisman, a 54-year-old Republican homemaker in Reading, Pa., said in a follow-up interview, "They`re not getting anything done. They don`t seem to be able to come together on anything." She added, "It`s all a political thing and they`re forgetting the basic needs of the people."

Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, "The American people know instinctively that we have major problems and we`ve got a Congress that is not attending or dealing with them." As the party in control, Republicans should be held responsible, Mr. Emanuel said, although he added that the 2006 midterms were far too distant for predictions.

Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the old truism still held: "People are not enamored, maybe, of the institution of Congress, but they love their congressman." He added, "My advice to the policy makers around Congress is to continue to get the work done, and make sure that as we get the work done, people know about it."

Mr. Bush faces a very resistant public when it comes to his Social Security proposals. He recently embraced a solvency plan that would cushion the lowest income workers from any benefit cuts, but a majority in the survey said they still believed Mr. Bush`s general plan would most benefit high income people.

He has spent months trying to explain the virtues of private investment accounts, but public opinion on them remains very divided. Forty-five percent said those accounts were a good idea, 50 percent a bad idea, the same breakdown found in the survey in January.

People like the idea that the accounts could be inherited and that they could result in more money for retirement; both arguments boost support for the accounts. But the idea that these accounts could lead to huge amounts of government borrowing - to finance the transition costs - resulted in a very negative response, as did the idea that the accounts would be accompanied by a cut in the guaranteed government benefit.

Americans also recognized that Mr. Bush has a Social Security plan and the Democrats in Congress do not. A majority said they would like to see the Democrats offer a plan and not simply oppose Mr. Bush`s.

But most said they did not think Mr. Bush`s plan for private accounts would do anything for the system`s long-term solvency.

Mr. Bush`s approval rating in the Times/CBS Survey is one of a series of recent national polls that registered difficulties for Mr. Bush. The Associated Press-Ipsos Poll found Mr. Bush with a 43 percent approval rating; Gallup with 47 percent, and the Washington Post/ABC News Poll at 48 percent.

Fred Backus contributed reporting for this article.


* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 17, 2005
What`s the Matter With Ohio?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17krugman.html?

The Toledo Blade`s reports on Coingate - the unfolding tale of how Ohio`s Bureau of Workers` Compensation misused funds - deserve much more national attention than they have received so far. For one thing, it`s an entertaining story that seems to get weirder by the week. More important, it`s an object lesson in what happens when you have one-party rule untrammeled by any quaint notions of independent oversight.

In April, The Blade reported that the bureau, which provides financial support for workers injured on the job, had invested $50 million in Capital Coin, a rare-coin trading operation run by Tom Noe, an influential Republican fund-raiser.

At first, state officials angrily insisted that this unusual use of state funds was a good investment that had nothing to do with Mr. Noe`s political connections. An accounting investigation revealed, however, that Mr. Noe`s claims to be running a profitable business were fictitious: he had lost millions, and 121 valuable coins were missing.

On June 3, police raided the Colorado home of Michael Storeim, Mr. Noe`s business associate, and seized hundreds of rare coins. After changing the locks, they left 3,500 bottles of wine, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, in the home`s basement.

On Monday, Mr. Storeim told police that someone had broken into his house over the weekend and stolen much of the wine, along with artwork, guns, jewelry and cars. As I said, this story keeps getting weirder.

Meanwhile, The Blade uncovered an even bigger story: the Bureau of Workers` Compensation invested $225 million in a hedge fund managed by MDL Capital, whose chairman had strong political connections. When this investment started to go sour, the bureau`s chief financial officer told another top agency official that he had been told to "give MDL a break."

By October 2004, state officials knew that MDL had lost almost the entire investment, but they kept the loss hidden until this month.

How could such things happen? The answer, it has become clear, lies in a web of financial connections between state officials and the businessmen who got to play with state funds.

We`re not just talking about campaign contributions, although Mr. Noe`s contributions ranged so widely that five of the state`s seven Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from cases associated with the scandal. (He`s also under suspicion of using intermediaries to contribute large sums, illegally, to the Bush campaign.) We`re talking about personal payoffs: bargain vacations for the governor`s chief of staff at Mr. Noe`s Florida home, the fact that MDL Capital employs the daughter of one of the members of the workers` compensation oversight board, and more.

Now, politicians and businessmen are always in a position to do each other lucrative favors. Government is relatively clean when politicians are sufficiently afraid of scandal to resist temptation. But when a political machine controls all branches of government, and those officials charged with oversight are also reliably partisan, politicians feel safe from investigation. Their inhibitions dissolve, and they take full advantage of their position, until the scandals become too big to hide.

In other words, Ohio`s state government today is a lot like Boss Tweed`s New York. Unfortunately, a lot of other state governments look similar - and so does Washington.

Since their 1994 takeover of Congress, and even more so since the 2000 election, Republican leaders have sought to make their political dominance permanent. They redistricted Texas to lock in their control of the House. Through the "K Street Project" they have put lobbying firms under partisan control, starving the Democrats of campaign funds. And they are, of course, trying to pack the courts with partisan loyalists.

In effect, they`re trying to turn America into a giant version of the elder Richard Daley`s Chicago.

These efforts have already created an environment in which politicians from the right party and businessmen with the right connections believe, with good reason, that they have immunity.

And politicians who feel that they can exploit their position tend to do just that. It`s a likely bet that the scandals we already know about, from Coingate to Tom DeLay`s dealings with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The message from Ohio is that long-term dominance by a political machine leads to corruption, regardless of the policies that machine follows or the ideology it claims to represent.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Bush policies blocked as US mood on Iraq sours
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

17 June 2005

As American and Iraqi casualties on the ground mount relentlessly, President George Bush is in growing political trouble, with Republicans as well as Democrats questioning his handling of a war that has never been less popular here.

In the most visible protest, the veteran Democratic congressman John Conyers organised a forum on the so-called "Downing Street Memo", the July 2002 British Government document indicating that the Bush administration had already made up its mind to invade Iraq, and that intelligence was being "fixed" to fit that policy.

Six weeks after it was leaked in the British press, the memo has belatedly become a hot topic in Washington. Mr Conyers was to present a petition from more than 100 of his Democratic colleagues in the House, signed by 500,000 people, demanding that Mr Bush explain himself.

The White House has haughtily brushed aside this criticism, saying the memo contains nothing new, and again dismissing charges that the intelligence process was politically manipulated. But the administration may find it more difficult to deal with bipartisan demands for an exit timetable for the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.

One of the sponsors of the congressional resolution is Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat and staunch opponent of the war, who ran for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. More worrying for the White House, another sponsor is the North Carolina Republican Walter Jones, a strong backer of the invasion (and an author of the 2003 "freedom fries" campaign against France in Capitol Hill cafeterias).

"I just feel the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that`s all been proven it was never there," Mr Jones said. "I feel that we`ve done about as much as we can do."

The day before, six more US servicemen died in Iraq, bringing the combat casualty total to at least 1,706, with 12,000 wounded. And countless thousands of Iraqis have been killed or wounded in daily suicide bombings.

There is an increasingly sour mood in America, much disillusioned with Mr Bush, and inclined to share Mr Conyers` belief that "we got into a secret war we hadn`t planned, and now we`re in it we can`t get out".

In June 2002, a month before the British memo was written, 61 per cent of Americans favoured the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein, as the next stage of Mr Bush`s "war on terror". Today, polls show that only 42 per cent say the war was worthwhile.

Mr Bush`s approval ratings have tumbled further, to just 41 per cent, the lowest level of his presidency. One reason is dissatisfaction with the economy, most notably the soaring cost of petrol. But the biggest reason is Iraq, which threatens to undermine his second-term strategy.

The White House had hoped that Iraq would fade as an issue after January`s elections. This, it believed, would allow it to focus on Mr Bush`s domestic goals of social security and tax reform.

But in the past month alone, 80 US soldiers and more than 700 Iraqis have died and the Pentagon admits that the violence is as bad as a year ago. Even some of its allies blame the White House for not telling the truth about the extent of the insurgency. "We always accentuated the positive and never prepared the public for the worst," Senator Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said.

The President`s signature policy - the campaign to part-privatise social security - has hit a brick wall. "Exit Policy on Social Security is Sought," was a Washington Post headline, above a report explaining how senior Republicans were urging the White House to quietly drop the measure, since it had no hope of passing.

Other Bush policies are also under attack. In a rare act of defiance, the Republican-led House voted by 238 to 187 to scrap a provision of the Patriot Act, which allows the FBI to check library and bookstore records in anti-terrorism inquiries. The President vows to veto any such change, just as he promises to "stay the course" on Iraq, and to press ahead with social security reform. But the line is growing more difficult to hold.

Last night, Senate Democrats planned to block for a second time a floor vote to confirm John Bolton as the next US ambassador to the United Nations, until the White House releases more information on its embattled nominee.Other Republicans are demanding closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, although the White House says it is vital for security.


17 June 2005 09:49

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=64…

17 June 2005

American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.

Yesterday`s disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets "away from civilian targets", he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets.

Britain, which has no stockpiles of the weapons, ratified the convention, but the US did not.

The confirmation that US officials misled British ministers led to new questions last night about the value of the latest assurances by the US. Mr Cohen said there were rumours that the firebombs were used in the US assault on the insurgent stronghold in Fallujah last year, claims denied by the US. He is tabling more questions seeking assurances that the weapons were not used against civilians.

Mr Ingram did not explain why the US officials had misled him, but the US and British governments were accused of a cover-up. The Iraq Analysis Group, which campaigned against the war, said the US authorities only admitted the use of the weapons after the evidence from reporters had become irrefutable.

Mike Lewis, a spokesman for the group, said: "The US has used internationally reviled weapons that the UK refuses to use, and has then apparently lied to UK officials, showing how little weight the UK carries in influencing American policy."

He added: "Evidence that Mr Ingram had given false information to Parliament was publicly available months ago. He has waited until after the election to admit to it - a clear sign of the Government`s embarrassment that they are doing nothing to restrain their own coalition partner in Iraq."

The US State Department website admitted in the run-up to the election that US forces had used MK77s in Iraq. Protests were made by MPs, but it was only this week that Mr Ingram confirmed the reports were true.

Mike Moore, the Liberal Democrat defence spokes-man, said: "It is very serious that this type of weapon was used in Iraq, but this shows the US has not been completely open with the UK. We are supposed to have a special relationship.

"It has also taken two months for the minister to clear this up. This is welcome candour, but it will raise fresh questions about how open the Government wished to be... before the election."

The MK77 bombs, an evolution of the napalm used in Vietnam and Korea, carry kerosene-based jet fuel and polystyrene so that, like napalm, the gel sticks to structures and to its victims. The bombs lack stabilising fins, making them far from precise.


17 June 2005 15:51


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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[urlSection front from today`s newspaper]http://www.latimes.com/includes/sectionfronts/A1.pdf[/url]
Es ist das erste Mal, dass unter Bush eine Stimmung gegen ihn zu spüren ist. Seine Umfragewerte liegen bei ähnlichen Werten wie bei Nixon vor dem Rücktritt.

War Criticism and Concerns Both Growing
A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to see a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. A general cites the need to gain more public support.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-usiraq1…

By John Hendren and Cynthia H. Cho
Times Staff Writers

June 17, 2005

WASHINGTON — Apprehension over the war in Iraq surged Thursday as a group of lawmakers demanded that President Bush develop plans to withdraw troops and a top Pentagon official expressed concern about sagging public support for the U.S. military effort.

After a deadly increase in violence in Iraq, congressional critics of the war grew more vocal in demanding a change in policy, and antiwar activists staged a rally near the White House.

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Antiwar activists march in front of the White House. Protesters urged President Bush to respond to British government
documents that foreshadowed U.S. military action against Iraq.
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The White House said Bush planned to deliver a speech this month on the importance of the U.S. mission, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledged to work harder to explain the administration`s objectives.

"I`m going to, like I think all members of the administration, perhaps try to do more to get out to the public to talk about what it is we are trying to achieve and what it is we are achieving," Rice said at a news conference. "So I would say this is not going to be an American enterprise for the long term."

The setbacks have triggered growing concern at the Pentagon, where a senior general said he was worried about declining public support.

"It is concerning that our public isn`t as supportive as perhaps they once were," said Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Pentagon`s Joint Staff. "We`d like, I believe, to try to reverse those figures and start the trend back the other direction. Because it`s extremely important to the soldier and the Marine, the airman and the sailor over there, to know that their country`s behind them."

Conway alluded to the precedent of Vietnam, in which plummeting public support for the war was blamed for undercutting the U.S. effort.

A Gallup poll this week found that about 6 in 10 Americans advocated a partial or full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. This month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 41% of Americans approved of how Bush was handling Iraq, the president`s worst grade to date.

Insurgent attacks have claimed the lives of hundreds of Iraqi civilians in recent weeks. Eighty-eight U.S. troops died in May and 45 were killed in the first half of June, the highest level since 126 troops were slain in January, before the Iraqi election. As of Thursday, at least 1,713 U.S. troops had been killed since the start of the war.

Drawing a parallel with Vietnam, Conway recounted the story of a Marine colonel negotiating the U.S. withdrawal with his Vietnamese counterpart in 1975.

"And the Marine said to him, `We beat you every time on the battlefield,` " Conway said. "And the Vietnamese colonel said, `That is true, but it`s also irrelevant.`

"And the fact is, they realized what I think our contemporary enemy realizes — that American public opinion is the center of gravity," Conway said. "That a democracy can`t do certain things if, in fact, the citizens don`t support it."

Conway said U.S. commanders in Iraq were against an "artificially imposed deadline" for a withdrawal of troops — a subject debated Thursday on Capitol Hill.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a resolution that would require Bush to submit a plan for troop withdrawal by the end of the year and to begin the pullout by October 2006.

"After 2 1/2 years, it`s right to take a fresh look. We have a right to ask, `What are the goals?` " said Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, one of the Republican sponsors of the measure.

"It`s time to get serious about an exit strategy," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, a Democratic sponsor.

Other sponsors of the resolution include Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) and Lynn C. Woolsey (D-Petaluma).

Although the administration opposes any requirement for withdrawals or timetables, Jones, a conservative Republican, said the measure would provide a way for Americans to "debate and discuss" the issue.

"If we didn`t do this today, we may be here in 10 years," Jones said.

Conway said a deadline would embolden Iraqi insurgents to continue daily attacks and bide their time until U.S. troops left.

The insurgents "know our history, just like we study them," Conway said. "And they see where we have withdrawn previously — in Vietnam, in Beirut, in Somalia. And nothing would make them happier, I suppose, than to think that there is a deadline out there."

Separately, House members Thursday debated a Democratic amendment to the 2006 defense spending measure that would require Bush to tell Congress within 30 days what his criteria would be for bringing troops home.

Unlike the resolution by Jones and others, the amendment — by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — did not specify a timetable for withdrawal.

The White House said Bush shared the desire of many Americans to see U.S. military personnel return from Iraq as soon as possible, but rejected establishing a deadline for withdrawal.

"It would be absolutely the wrong message to send to set some sort of artificial timetable," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "Our troops understand the importance of completing the mission."

McClellan said Bush would make the case for his Iraq policy in a series of public remarks in which he would focus on the importance of Iraq to the war on terrorism.

"He will be continuing to update the American people about the progress that we are making, the difficulties and dangers that remain, and the strategy we have for succeeding," McClellan said.

The communication campaign includes a speech June 28, the one-year anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-led coalition to the Iraqi people.

In addition, the White House said Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari would meet with Bush at the White House next Friday.

The White House rejected requests by lawmakers and antiwar groups that Bush respond to the "Downing Street memo" and other prewar British government documents that foreshadowed U.S. military action against Iraq.

The Downing Street memo reported minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisors indicating that the U.S. considered an attack on Iraq to be inevitable eight months before the war began.

More than 30 members of Congress attended a meeting Thursday called by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, to discuss the British documents. The meeting was not an official hearing of Conyers` committee and was held in a room in the basement of the Capitol.

John C. Bonifaz, one of four witnesses invited to meet with lawmakers and the cofounder of an organization called AfterDowningStreet.com, said that if the documents were proven to be true, the president may have violated a federal law against misleading Congress, and his actions would be grounds for impeachment.

"The American people deserve to know if the president lied," Bonifaz said.

Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in action April 4, 2004, told lawmakers the Downing Street memo confirmed what she had already suspected: "The leadership of this country rushed us into an illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry-picked intelligence."

Sheehan is the cofounder of Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization whose members have lost a relative in combat and who oppose the war.

Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who traveled to Niger to investigate the alleged sale of processed uranium ore from the country to Iraq, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA official, also met with Conyers and other lawmakers.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) was one of more than 30 lawmakers who announced the formation of an "Out of Iraq" congressional caucus.

After the hearing, Conyers and other lawmakers went to Lafayette Park across from the White House for a rally organized by AfterDowningStreet.com. Kevin Zeese, director of Democracy Rising, urged protesters to "give a shout out if you think we were misled." He was greeted by cheers from the hundreds of demonstrators.

Some members of the crowd broke into chants of "Bring them home now!" and "End this war!" and carried banners calling for Bush`s impeachment. The rally brought out young and old, Washington residents and people who had traveled from across the country.

"Bush should be impeached for lying to Congress and then prosecuted for war crimes," said Carol Moore, a 57-year-old writer and resident of Washington. "Impeached and prosecuted."

A small group of counter-protesters demanded support for U.S. troops.

Conyers and others sought to enter the White House gates to deliver petitions gathered by an anti-Bush group, MoveOn.Org, and others demanding that the president respond to the British documents. The crowd chanted "Let Conyers in!" and the congressman eventually was allowed through the gates.

Analysts said the antiwar rhetoric on display Thursday marked a reversal from recent months. The Iraqi election Jan. 30 boosted hopes for progress, experts said, but the situation has since deteriorated.

"Now you`ve got a combination of a lot of death, a lot of violence, things getting worse and no real convincing argument from the president as to why," said Michael O`Hanlon, a military analyst for the Brookings Institution, a Washington political think tank. "It was almost unnatural that there was such a long hiatus in antiwar activity."

The antiwar movement has reappeared in part because lawmakers — especially Democrats — have avoided rhetoric that could be perceived as critical of troops but keep hearing differently from constituents, activists said.

"We see this as the beginning of the end," said Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine who is executive director of the antiwar group Win Without War. "It`s the very beginning of a new wave of activism on this war. There`s a real sense that something is beginning to move."

Times staff writers Mary Curtius, Tyler Marshall, Mark Mazzetti and Warren Vieth contributed to this report.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Friday, June 17, 2005
War News for Friday, June 17, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Twenty-six Iraqi soldiers killed by suicide bomber near Khalis.

Bring `em on: Five US Marines killed by roadside bomb near Ramadi.

Bring `em on: Eight Iraqi policemen killed, 25 wounded by car bomb on Baghdad airport road.

Bring `em on: Iraqi woman killed by mortar fire near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: One US sailor killed by small arms fire near Ramadi.

Bring `em on: Iraqi judge assassinated in Mosul.

Bring `em on: Five Iraqi soldiers wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Seven Iraqis killed, 15 wounded by mortar fire in Tal Afar.

Bring `em on: Heavy fighting reported near Qaim.

Bring `em on: Seven Iraqi civilians killed in fighting near Qaim.

Bring `em on: Pirates attack supertanker off Basra.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqis killed by roadside bomb near Baquba.

Ramadi. "Insurgents have taken over much of the Iraqi city of Ramadi and used it to launch attacks against US forces while terrorising the population with public beheadings. A huge bomb killed five American marines yesterday and showered body parts on to rooftops, fuelling suspicion that armour-piercing technology is being developed and tested in Ramadi. US troops recovered the remains and withdrew to their base outside the Arab Sunni stronghold, leaving masked gunmen to erect checkpoints and carry out what residents said was the latest of many executions. A man described as an Egyptian spy was beheaded and his body dumped on a busy shopping street. Warned by the killers to leave it for five days, shoppers pretended not to notice the figure in the brown robe, its head resting on its back. Four days ago two suspected Shia militiamen were beheaded in the marketplace in full view of traders, said a senior police officer who asked not to be identified. Two boys played football with one of the heads, he added."

More progress. "The United Nations World Food Programme, which monitors the distribution of rations, recently reported `significant countrywide shortfalls in rice, sugar, milk and infant formula`. Families in Baghdad have received no sugar or baby milk since January. Newspapers have also begun reporting that the tea and flour hand-outs contain metal filings and that people have fallen ill after consuming food rations."

Operation Spear. "The U.S. military launched a major combat operation with 1,000 Marines and Iraqi soldiers in northwestern Iraq on Friday, officials said. Operation Spear started in the pre-dawn hours in restive Anbar province. The soldiers will hunt for insurgents and foreign fighters. The province, which straddles the Syrian border, is where the military said it killed about 40 militants in airstrikes on June 11."

Fragging. "Martinez, of Troy, N.Y., is thought to have used some kind of explosive device, possibly a grenade, military officials said on condition of anonymity because the matter was under investigation. Martinez was charged with two counts of premeditated murder, said a statement by the Multinational Task Force in Iraq. Martinez is at a military detention facility in Kuwait. His motive was unclear, military officials said."

Ethnic cleansing. "Kurdish security forces have seized scores of minority Arabs and Turkmens in Kirkuk and secretly transferred them in violation of Iraqi law to prisons in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq, US officials said on Wednesday. The prisoners have been captured in operations by Kurdish intelligence agents and a Kurdish-led unit of the Kirkuk Police Department, sometimes with the support of US forces in the region, the officials said. The Kurds maintain broad autonomy in northern Iraq, and their intelligence agents are fiercely independent of Iraq`s fledgling national intelligence service. US military and State Department officials, while condemning the transfers, said US troops had not been involved with them, and when made aware of the practice, had sought to stop it."

Commentary

Editorial:

The president`s assessment represents either ignorance or optimism — perhaps both. But it is hardly helpful to recite yet again, more than two years after the war began, the sorry litany of the Bush administration`s failures in Iraq. What`s needed is a clear timetable of goals and a specific set of consequences.

The Bush administration should publicly set a target for the number of Iraqi soldiers and police who will be trained, equipped and capable of defending their country by July 1, 2006. That means troops able to protect their positions and go on the offensive against their enemies, with enough guns, bullets and tanks to do the job. If the objective is not reached, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should be fired, along with the top U.S. military commanders in Iraq.

No one has been held accountable for the blunders, from the bad intelligence before the war to the failure to provide sufficient troops during the conflict and since. Fixing responsibility is long overdue.

This is preferable to a precise timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, as two Republicans and three Democrats in the House called for in a resolution introduced Thursday. That could encourage the insurgents simply to wait it out. And definite, public targets allow for more accountability than the current strategy, which amounts to "when they`re ready, we`ll come home." The quote is from Bush, and the "they" he is referring to is the Iraqi army.


Editorial:

Among the rationalizations for the Iraq invasion that Bush had to gin up after no weapons of mass destruction were found was that a free and democratic Iraq would make Americans safer. But more than half of Americans (52 percent) polled don`t believe the war in Iraq has contributed to the long-term security of the United States. That`s a significant drop from the 62 percent surveyed in 2003 who said the war would increase homeland security.

Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that the invasion of Iraq has increased America`s vulnerability. The occupation is clearly a galvanizing force in the recruitment of terrorists worldwide, as well as for the internal insurgency in Iraq. Outright hatred of the United States has never been higher in the Arab world and is reinforced with every revelation of prisoner abuse or inadvertent killing of Iraqi civilians.

As far as global security is concerned, the United States has 17 brigades tied down in Iraq. If another conflict erupted - with Iran, North Korea or even China over Taiwan - the U.S. military would be dangerously over-stretched.

Of more immediate concern is the disastrous impact the Iraq war is having on military recruitment. The Army has failed to meet its recruiting quotas since February. In May, it fell 25 percent short of a goal it had already reduced from 8,050 to 6,700.

The National Guard and Reserve, which provide more than 40 percent of the Army forces in Iraq, are doing even worse. The National Guard has reached only 76 percent of its recruiting quotas for the first five months of 2005.
Bush`s response to all this? "Timetables send the wrong message." The United States will "finish the mission" and remain in Iraq "as long as necessary."

That open-ended dismissal isn`t working for the American people any more. It`s an especially inadequate response to the concerns being expressed by more and more families of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

The failure of the president`s policies in Iraq are great enough on their own that it isn`t necessary to invoke British memos or conjure up plots in order to demand that he commit to a timetable for troop withdrawal. If Bush, who is famously incapable of admitting mistakes, continues to stubbornly stay the course, Congress must find the courage to save him from himself.


Analysis:

For an administration that places great emphasis, at least rhetorically, on listening to the opinions of the military leadership, the George W Bush administration appears remarkably tone deaf when it comes to Iraq.

Some high-ranking officers in the past were quite critical of both the decision to go to war - Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, retired, former commander in chief, US Central Command - and how the war was conducted - former army chief of staff Erik Shinseiki, who famously estimated in 2003 that a postwar occupation force would likely need to be several hundred thousand troops in size.

Zinni was retired when he made his criticism and Shinseiki was forced to retire not long after making his remarks; a move that did not go unnoted in the officer corps. That would explain why active-duty military personnel have been fairly restrained in their public comments on the outlook for the war as the insurgency in Iraq has gained strength since the end of major combat operations in 2003. "Nobody likes to be forced to fall on their sword," according to Colonel Dan Smith, US Army, retired, fellow on military affairs for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. "If you are going to speak your mind you want to stay in the service to fight another day."

But in recent months that self-restraint has eroded as American soldiers continue to be steadily killed and strains in the military establishment become ever more obvious.

This goes beyond controversies over issues such as insufficiently armored vehicles to protect soldiers against improvised explosive devices or problems with private contractors. Military officers are speaking up more because of "what Iraq is doing to the military" said Smith. For them, the "metrics" on Iraq, to use a word favored by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are increasingly negative.

Excuse me if I`m confused, but didn`t the men (and one key woman) of the Bush administration pride themselves in having learned "the lessons of Vietnam" (which, as it happens, they played like an opposites game until the pressure began to build when they suddenly began acting and sounding just like Vietnam clones)? Isn`t our president the very son of the man who, when himself president and involved in another war in the Gulf, claimed exuberantly, "By God, we`ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." Well, here`s a news flash then. In Washington today, they`re mainlining Vietnam.


Opinion:

Maybe we should really be examining the later history of the Vietnam War for hints of what to expect next. Certainly, as in Vietnam, we can look forward to withdrawal strategies that don`t actually involve leaving Iraq. In Vietnam, "withdrawal" involved endless departure-like maneuvers that only intensified the war - bombing "pauses" that led to fiercer bombing campaigns, negotiation offers never meant to be taken up. Or how about ever more intense and fear-inducing discussions of the bloodbaths to come in Iraq, should we ever leave?

For years in Vietnam, the bloodbath that was Vietnam was partly supplanted by a "bloodbath" the enemy was certain to commence as soon as the United States withdrew. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts as an explanation for why the United States couldn`t consider leaving. In public discourse, this not-yet-atrocity often superseded the only real bloodbath and was an obsessive focus of attention even for some of the war`s opponents. In the meantime, the bloodbath that was Vietnam continued week after week, month after month, year after year in all its gore. Or how about the development of right-wing theories that the war in Iraq was won on the battlefield but lost on the home front; that, as in Vietnam, we were militarily victorious but betrayed by a weak American public and stabbed in the back by the liberal media? Watch for all of these, they`re soon to come to your TV set.


Opinion:

Our most recent exercise in hubris is by far the worst, the most irresponsible, the most appropriate to indict those responsible as war criminals. We could knock over Saddam Hussein with a small army, the locals would dance in the street and strew flowers on our tanks. Secretary Rumsfeld, the Robert McNamara of our day, repealed the Powell Doctrine that we should attack only with overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy. Colin Powell must have known that this was folly but, good soldier that he is, he did not resign or become the Deep Throat of the present administration. However, good soldiers can also be war criminals. Both Rumsfeld and Powell were criminally negligent in their failure to consider the obvious possibilities for catastrophe after a quick and easy military victory.

The president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the coterie of "neocon" intellectuals around them, desperately wanted a war with Iraq even before the World Trade Center attack. The neocons whispered that the way to Jerusalem was through Baghdad, never thinking that suicide bombings could migrate from Jerusalem to Baghdad. None of these wise men bothered to worry about the aftermath of the war. The president is a risk-taker, we are told now, as he battles for his harebrained plan to reform social security. The invasion of Iraq was a risk, a big risk the potential costs of which were never seriously estimated. That`s what happens when you have a reckless Clint Eastwood type for president. Are not the president and his immediate advisers war criminals for rashly plunging the country into the Big Muddy once again?

John F. Harris in his book Survivor describes in detail President Clinton`s agonizing reluctance to engage in military action overseas. There were so many contingencies, so many things that might go wrong. The current administration has never worried about such problems. Convinced of our indomitable might, ignorant of the lessons of history, unconcerned about what might go wrong, it plunged blithely into the Bid Muddy. The rationalizations of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam`s involvement in the World Trade Center attack were false.

Now the president, dismissing the revelations about the weapons of mass destruction (the vice president apparently still believes them) is content to say that he still thinks the United States has done "the right thing." However, the majority of Americans and even some Republicans want the United States out of Iraq. The military says it will take four years to train an effective Iraqi army. The Big Muddy gets deeper.


NYT Letters to the Editor.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two Ohio soldiers killed in Iraq.

Local story: Two Texas Marines killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Kentucky Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: South Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Nevada Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Nevada soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Mississippi Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Rant of the Day

I didn`t post yesterday. Sometimes, I just have to walk away from it, especially when I read blather like this from Tom Friedman:

Ever since Iraq`s remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don`t want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don`t want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don`t want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

Well, we need to talk about Iraq. This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.


I once took a course on Greek mythology. I was always amazed that the Greek gods were a bunch of petty, vindictive, deceitful, adulterous, childish, immature and power-mad bastards. "They`re just like some people I know," I thought to myself. "Really rotten people."

Cassandra was a beautiful Trojan woman, the daughter of King Priam. Apollo, struck by her beauty, promised to give her the gift of prophesy in exchange for sexual favors. When she rejected him, Apollo gave her the ability to see the future together with the curse that nobody would believe her. Until I started this blog, I never realized what a monstrous piece of fuckery Apollo inflicted on Cassandra.

Tom Friedman was one of the media celebrities who supported this war. It`s impossible to read his stuff today without remembering that we who opposed the war desperately tried to talk about Iraq before the war started. We asked for a debate, we wrote letters to newspapers, we demonstrated, and our voices were stifled by media celebrities like Friedman.

It`s not like there wasn`t anything to debate before the war started. There was plenty of evidence to indicate the Bush administration fabricating intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq. Flag officers, active and retired, sounded off. Diplomats resigned in protest. Intelligence analysts complained of high-level pressure to find non-existent Iraqi links to Al Qaida and WMD stockpiles. We knew about PNAC and their crazy schemes.

We didn`t get to talk about Iraq before the war. People who questioned the war were shouted down by the Bush administration. We were called "unpatriotic" and worse. Media enablers like Tom Friedman helped stifle discussion and pushed Bush administration distortions and falsehoods.

The Iraq War isn`t "winnable" (whatever that means - the administration has never provided a specific set of war aims.) The Iraq War is lost, and the incompetent, arrogant bunglers who rushed us into this war are the same people who lost it. Every prediction made by those of us who opposed this war has happened, which is why I feel such sympathy for Cassandra, and every prediction made by Friedman and his ilk has failed to materialize.

I resent the accusation that deep down, I don`t the Bushies to succeed. I don`t want my country to fail at any endeavor. But the fact of the matter is that the Bushies have established a pattern of failure at every undertaking. The administration`s long chronicle of miserable failure is too extensive to review here, but it`s important to note that nobody in the administration has ever been held accountable, the worst bunglers have been rewarded, and the administration itself is incapable of recognizing their own failures. Under these circumstances, Friedman is simply delusional if he expects the administration to succeed at anything.

We don`t need to talk about Iraq because the time for that discussion has long since passed.

This is the time to talk about accountability. We need to talk about how we got into this mess. We need to discuss responsibility. But most of all we need to talk about culpability. We need a thorough examination of the circumstances of how the Bush administration pushed America into an unjustified, aggressive war of conquest, and then brought misery and death to hundreds of thousands of people by bungling the aftermath.

And we need to hold the war-mongers, the torturers, the incompetents and the greedy accountable for their actions.

We won`t get that discussion from Friedman. I kinda feel sorry for him, though. I suspect Friedman`s actually a decent man who is having a real hard time getting his mind wrapped around the fact that he bears responsibility - and culpability - for the consequences of his actions. There will be a reckoning for the disaster in Iraq, and that notion may be finally penetrating Friedman`s thoughts. I certainly hope so because that would mean the man has a conscience.

Some days I look at this blog like Sisyphus looks at his rock. But unlike Sisyphus, I can walk away and take a break. I want to thank all the readers who post links in comments when I don`t turn up. You all are great.

Thanks,

YD
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The Best of Tomdispatch: Arlie Hochschild
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3356

Long before our bookstores were packed with copies of What`s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank`s provocative look at how the right-wing wages its political wars against a fantasy "liberal power elite" and wins elections, over a year before George Bush was reelected by slipping the war and terror cards out from under the American deck, in a period when those color-coded alerts were just beginning to pour out, Arlie Hochschild wrote a prescient piece for Tomdispatch, posted on October 2, 2003, entitled "Let Them Eat War." She suggested then that the President, strutting the flight deck of American politics while flexing his G.I. Joe-style muscles, could win the blue-collar vote, and so the election of 2004, simply by feeding the heart of American darkness and a complex set of white, male, blue-collar fears.

I wrote by way of introduction at the time:

Here`s one of the great unspoken questions of 2000, not to say 2003. Why do people support George Bush? Why, in particular, do significant numbers of working people support him when it seems so self-evident that he doesn`t represent their economic interests? The strange thing -- to me at least -- is that, while questions like these are bound to be on the minds of all those who oppose the Bush administration, its policies, and its president, they are not questions often raised in public, no less publicly explored. So -- call it a conversation starter -- today`s Tomgram considers the question of blue-collar support for Bush.

Hochschild`s then novel piece touched a nerve. Letters poured in -- anxious, supportive, outraged -- not least from blue-collar guys. Of course, we know more now than we knew then about the way the Bush campaign fed American fears. Right now, we have, for instance, the British "smoking gun memo" (and the assorted supporting memos that have tumbled out after it) which convincingly showed that, before July of 2002, the Bush administration, amid a smokescreen of lies, had already irrevocably decided upon an invasion of Iraq and was only casting around for how to present that war and then use it for its own purposes at home and abroad. An even more recent British bombshell indicates that British Prime Minister Tony Blair met George Bush at his Crawford ranch in April 2003 and agreed at that time to support an invasion of Iraq. In that same period, we know, for instance, that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (and, undoubtedly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who would soon be putting imaginary Iraqi mushroom clouds over American cities in her public pronouncements, surely Vice President Dick Cheney, and probably the President himself) didn`t take the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction explanation especially seriously. It was, as Wolfowitz admitted at the time, simply the lowest bureaucratic common denominator -- "…we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." -- for explaining a desperately desired war. We know as well that within a day of the September 11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld was already calling on his aides to round-up the usual suspects in considering where to strike back.

And now we know, as Russ Baker reports, that George Bush had been considering playing the Iraqi War card not just in April or July 2002, or even right after September 11th, 2001, but way back in 1999. It was then that Mickey Herskowitz, a ghost writer signed on to do George`s official autobiography (the two were to split the profits), met privately about 20 times with the then-governor of Texas to discuss his thoughts.

 "`He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,` said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. ‘It was on his mind. He said to me: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief." And he said, "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it." He said, "If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I`m not going to waste it. I`m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I`m going to have a successful presidency"... According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars."

"A successful if modest war": Keep that phrase – or perhaps "Let them eat a successful if modest war" -- in mind as our position in Iraq goes from terrible to worse.

Looking back on her piece of 2003, Arlie Hochschild comments:

 Why do those who stand to gain the least from virtually every policy of George W. Bush, support him the most? This was the question I wrestled with in "Let Them Eat War." The response I got was nothing short of deafening. E-letters poured in from sympathetic readers who felt I had hit the nail on the head, and outraged readers who were offended (some by the very term "blue collar") and felt I missed the mark entirely. One way or another, I felt I had hit a nerve.



    I`m continually appalled by the Bush administration. But I`m also an optimist. The whole mess we`re in -- the trade of butter for guns, clear skies for soot, good will for Abu Ghraib, an open society for a closed one, live soldiers for dead ones -- this whole mess could be reversed. It would only take a change of heart among just a few percent of blue-collar voters the next time around. But the change of heart depends on understanding and exposing a certain underlying logic of our present situation -- that Bush is manipulating feelings of anguish, fear, anger (especially among those faced with job loss and lower wages) with one hand, while pursuing policies that exacerbate exactly those situations with the other. In my next piece, I`ll be continuing to chip away at that underlying logic, the one I first tried to lay out in "Let Them Eat War" with a modest faith that, at the end of the day, reason will win out.

In the meantime, in this pre-electoral moment, has anyone wondered where all those fearsome color-coded warnings went? Not a yellow or orange flashing light in sight these last months. Is it possible that al-Qaeda was just so discouraged by George Bush`s election (even though he`s doing them the favor of the century in Iraq) that it stopped trying to harm us? And has no one noticed that Osama Bin Laden (Wanted, Dead or Alive!) has seemingly disappeared down the memory hole as well, not to speak of the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar -- who even remembers him? -- though he is evidently still directing the modestly resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. In fact, has anyone noticed that the very centerpiece of Bush administration policies leading up to the election -- the Global War on Terror, or GWOC, or World War IV, or the Long War, or any of its other cousins (all so beloved by various neocons) -- has dipped below the administration and media horizon as well, and we`re left with little but the supposed global "spread" of democracy and the black hole of Iraq.

In this strange, silent moment, when the President`s polls are eroding drastically and events often seem to be running away from the Bush administration, let`s not forget how quickly the terror and war cards can be plunked on the table face-up again; how alerts can begin to flow; how fear can be fed; and let`s not forget either, how not just blue-collar voters, but the whole of our political class and most of the media were driven before the Bush administration by the terror and war cards; or how far the "center" has shifted rightward in these last years so that today it is considered a centrist "triumph" when not quite every extremist judge is voted into office (by, let`s note, every -- or almost every -- Republican senator); let`s not forget the way the Democratic Party has crumbled and dissolved while most of its parts have moved endlessly rightward, creating by abdication the conditions for a de facto one-party state.

In the meantime, Arlie Hochschild, continues to consider blue-collar support for Bush. She will return to the subject in a piece that Tomdispatch will release on June 26th (and that will appear in print in the American Prospect magazine). Look for it. Tom.

Let Them Eat War
By Arlie Hochschild

George W. Bush is sinking in the polls, but a few beats on the war drum could reverse that trend and re-elect him in 2004. Ironically, the sector of American society now poised to keep him in the White House is the one which stands to lose the most from virtually all of his policies -- blue-collar men. A full 49% of them and 38% percent of blue-collar women told a January 2003 Roper poll they would vote for Bush in 2004. (1)

In fact, blue-collar workers were more pro-Bush than professionals and managers among whom only 40% of men and 32% of women, when polled, favor him; that is, people who reported to Roper such occupations as painter, furniture mover, waitress, and sewer repairman were more likely to be for our pro-big business president than people with occupations like doctor, attorney, CPA or property manager. High-school graduates and dropouts were more pro-Bush (41%) than people with graduate degrees (36%). And people with family incomes of $30,000 or less were no more opposed to Bush than those with incomes of $75,000 or more. (2)

We should think about this. The blue-collar vote is huge. Skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs are on the decline, of course, but if we count as blue-collar those workers without a college degree, as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers do in their book Why the White Working Class Still Matters, then blue-collar voters represent 55% of all voters. They are, the authors note, the real swing vote in America. "Their loyalties shift the most from election to election and in so doing determine the winners in American politics."(3)

This fact has not been lost on Republican strategists who are now targeting right-leaning blue-collar men, or as they call them, "Nascar Dads." These are, reporter Liz Clarke of the Washington Post tells us, "lower or middle-class men who once voted Democratic but who now favor Republicans."(4) Nascar Dads, commentator Bill Decker adds, are likely to be racing-car fans, live in rural areas, and have voted for Bush in 2000. Bush is giving special attention to steelworkers, autoworkers, carpenters and other building-trades workers, according to Richard Dunham and Aaron Bernstein of Business Week, and finding common cause on such issues as placing tariffs on imported steel and offering tax breaks on pensions.

We can certainly understand why Bush wants blue-collar voters. But why would a near majority of blue-collar voters still want Bush? Millionaires, billionaires for Bush, well, sure; he`s their man. But why pipe fitters and cafeteria workers? Some are drawn to his pro-marriage, pro-church, pro-gun stands, but could those issues override a voter`s economic self-interest?

Let`s consider the situation. Since Bush took office in 2000, the U.S. has lost 4.9 million jobs, (2.5 million net), the vast majority of them in manufacturing. (5) While this cannot be blamed entirely on Bush, his bleed-`em-dry approach to the non-Pentagon parts of the government has led him to do nothing to help blue-collar workers learn new trades, find affordable housing, or help their children go to college. The loosening of Occupational Health and Safety Administration regulations has made plants less safe. Bush`s agricultural policies favor agribusiness and have put many small and medium-sized farms into bankruptcy. His tax cuts are creating state budget shortfalls, which will hit the public schools blue-collar children go to, and erode what services they now get. He has put industrialists in his environmental posts, so that the air and water will grow dirtier. His administration`s disregard for the severe understaffing of America`s nursing homes means worse care for the elderly parents of the Nascar Dad as they live out their last days. His invasion of Iraq has sent blue-collar children and relatives to the front. Indeed, his entire tap-the-hornets`-nest foreign policy has made the U.S. arguably less secure than it was before he took office. Indeed, a recent series of polls revealed that most people around the world believe him to be a greater danger than Osama Bin Laden. Many blue-collar voters know at least some of this already. So why are so many of them pro-Bush anyway?

Wondering about the Nascar Dad

Among blue-collar voters, more men than women favor Bush, so we can ask what`s going on with the men. It might seem that their pocketbooks say one thing, their votes another, but could it be that, by some good fortune, blue-collar men are actually better off than we imagine? No, that can`t be it. About a fifth of them had household incomes of $30,000 or less; 4 in 10 between $30,000 and $75, 000; and 4 in 10 $75,000 or more. Among the poorest blue-collar families (with household incomes of $30,000 or less) a full 44 % were pro-Bush. Perhaps even more strikingly, $75,000-plus Nascar Dads are more likely to favor Bush than their income-counterparts who hold professional and managerial jobs.

Even if poor blue-collar men were pro-Bush in general, we might at least assume that they would oppose Bush`s massive program of tax cuts if they thought it favored the rich? If we did, then we`d be wrong again. "Do you think this tax plan benefits mainly the rich or benefits everyone?" Roper interviewers asked. Among blue-collar men who answered, "Yes, it benefits mainly the rich," 56% percent nonetheless favored the plan. (6) Among blue-collar men with $30,000 or less who answered "yes" and who believed that yes, this tax cut "benefits mainly the rich," a full 53 % favored it. This far exceeds the 35% of people who make $75,000 or more, knew the tax cut favored the rich, and still supported it.

So, what`s going on? Should we throw out the classic Clinton-era explanation for how we all vote: "It`s the economy, stupid"? (7) Not right away. Maybe the blue-collar man who favors that tax cut is thinking "the economy stupid" but only in the short term. He badly needs even the small amounts of money he`ll get from a tax cut to repair his car or contribute to the rent. But then many working-class men labor decade after decade at difficult jobs to secure a future for their children. So if they think long term as a way of life, why are they thinking short-term when it comes to their vote?

One possibility is that the Nascar Dad is not well informed; that indeed, like the rest of us, he`s been duped. For example, he may have fallen for the Karl Rove-inspired bandwagon effect. "Bush is unbeatable," he hears, or "Bush has a $200,000,000 re-election fund. Get with the winner." It makes you a winner too, he feels. This might account for some blue-collar Bush support, but it doesn`t explain why the Nascar Dad would be more likely to be taken in by the bandwagon effect than the professional or managerial dad. Anyway, most blue-collar men would seem to be no less likely than anyone else to vote their conscience, regardless of whom they think will win, and that`s not even counting those who root for the underdog as a matter of principle.

But another kind of manipulation could be going on. A certain amount of crucial information has gone missing in the Bush years. As has recently become clear, information that would be of great interest to the Nascar Dad has been withheld. With jobs disappearing at a staggering rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ended its Mass Layoff Tracking Study on Christmas Eve of 2002, thanks to this administration. And although Congressional Democrats managed to get funding for the study restored in February of 2003, the loss of 614,167 jobs in those two months was unannounced.(8)

Conveying the truth in a misleading manner is, of course, another way of manipulating people. As the linguist George Lakoff astutely observes, the term "tax relief" slyly invites us to imagine taxes as an affliction and those who propose them as villains. If we add in such distortions to the suppression of vital information, the Nascar Dad who listens to Rush Limbaugh on the commute home, turns on Fox News at dinner, and is too tired after working overtime to catch more than the headlines is perhaps a man being exposed to only one side of the political story.

But then Nascar Dad could always turn the radio dial. He could do a google search on job loss on his kid`s computer. He could talk to his union buddies -- if he`s one of the 12% who are still unionized -- or to his slightly more liberal wife. It could be he knows perfectly well that he`s being lied to, but believes people are usually being lied to, and that Bush is, in this respect, still the better of two evils. But how could that be?

Maybe it`s because Bush fits an underlying recipe for the kind of confident, authoritative father figure such dads believe should run the ship of state as they believe a man should run a family. Republican rhetoric may appeal to the blue-collar man, Lakoff suggests, because we tend to match our view of good politics with our image of a good family. The appeal of any political leader, he believes, lies in the way he matches our images of the father in the ideal family.(9) There are two main pictures of such an ideal American family, Lakoff argues. According to a "strict father family" model, dad should provide for the family, control mom, and use discipline to teach his children how to survive in a competitive and hostile world. Those who advocate the strict father model, Lakoff reasons, favor a "strict father" kind of government. If an administration fits this model, it supports the family (by maximizing overall wealth). It protects the family from harm (by building up the military). It raises the children to be self-reliant and obedient (by fostering citizens who ask for little and speak when spoken to). The match-up here is, of course, to Bush Republicans.

Then there is the "nurturing parent family" model in which parents don`t simply control their children but encourage their development. The government equivalent would be offering services to the citizenry, funding education, health, and welfare, and emphasizing diplomacy on a global stage.) The core values here are empathy and responsibility, not control and discipline and the match up is to the pro-public sector Dean/Kucinich Democrats. Studies have shown that blue-collar ideals are closer to the strict father than to the nurturing parent model. But that`s been true for a very long time, while the blue-collar vote sometimes goes left as in the l930s, and sometimes goes right as it`s doing now. So we can`t simply pin the pro-Bush Nascar Dad vote on a sudden change in blue-collar family ideals.

Appealing to the "forgotten American"

Maybe, however, something deeper is going on, which has so far permitted Bush`s flag-waving and cowboy-boot-strutting to trump issues of job security, wages, safety, and health -- and even, in the case of Bush`s threats of further war -- life itself. In an essay, "The White Man Unburdened," in a recent New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer recently argued that the war in Iraq returned to white males a lost sense of mastery, offering them a feeling of revenge for imagined wrongs, and a sense of psychic rejuvenation."(10) In the last thirty years, white men have taken a drubbing, he notes, especially the three quarters of them who lack college degrees. Between l979 and l999, for example, real wages for male high-school graduates dropped 24%. In addition, Mailer notes, white working class men have lost white champs in football, basketball and boxing. (A lot of white men cheer black athletes, of course, whomever they vote for.) But the war in Iraq, Mailer notes, gave white men white heroes. By climbing into his jumpsuit, stepping out of an S-3B Viking jet onto the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush posed as -- one could say impersonated -- such a hero.

Mailer is talking here about white men and support for the war in Iraq. But we`re talking about something that cuts deeper into emotional life, and stretches farther back into the twin histories of American labor and Republican presidencies. For Republicans have been capturing blue-collar hearts for some time now. In the summer of l971, Jefferson Cowie tells us in a recent essay, Richard Nixon worked out a semi-clandestine "blue-collar strategy." Nixon instructed Jerome Rosow of the Department of Labor to draw up a confidential report, only 25 copies of which were circulated. One of them got into the hands of a Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed it under the banner, "Secret Report Tells Nixon How to Help White Workingmen and Win Their Votes."

As the article noted, "President Nixon has before him a confidential blueprint designed to help him capture the hearts and votes of the nation`s white working men -- the traditionally Democratic `forgotten Americans` that the Administration believes are ripe for political plucking." (11) According to close advisor, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon`s plan was to maintain an image as "a tough, courageous, masculine leader." The never-ending Nixon tapes actually catch Nixon talking with aides Haldeman and Ehlichman about an episode in the popular television show "All in the Family" in which the working-class Archie Bunker confronts an old buddy, a former football player who has just come out of the closet as gay. Nixon then recounts on tape how civilizations decline when homosexuality rises, and concludes, "We have to stand up to this." Nixon sought to appeal to the blue-collar man`s straightness (at least he still had that), his superiority over women (that, too), and his native-born whiteness (and that). As Cowie sums it up, "It was neither the entire working class nor its material grievances on which the administration would focus; rather it was the `feeling of being forgotten` among white male workers that Nixon and his advisors would seek to tap." (12)

Until Nixon, Republicans had for a century written off the blue-collar voter. But turning Marx on his head, Nixon appealed not to a desire for real economic change but to the distress caused by the absence of it. And it worked as it`s doing again now. In the l972 contest between Nixon and McGovern, 57% of the manual worker vote and 54% of the union vote went to Nixon. (This meant 22 and 25-point gains for Nixon over his l968 presidential run.) After Nixon, other Republican presidents -- Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. -- followed in the same footsteps, although not always so cleverly.

Now George Bush Jr. is pursuing a sequel strategy by again appealing to the emotions of male blue-collar voters. Only he`s added a new element to the mix. Instead of appealing, as Nixon did, to anger at economic decline, Bush is appealing to fear of economic displacement, and offering the Nascar Dad a set of villains to blame, and a hero to thank -- George W. Bush.

Let`s begin by re-imagining the blue-collar man, for we do not normally think of him as a fearful man. The very term "Nascar Dad" like the earlier term "Joe Six Pack" suggests, somewhat dismissively, an "I`m-alright-Jack" kind of guy. We imagine him with his son, some money in his pocket, in the stands with the other guys rooting for his favorite driver and car. The term doesn`t call to mind a restless house-husband or a despondent divorcee living back in his parents` house and seeing his kids every other weekend. In other words, the very image we start with may lead us away from clues to his worldview, his feelings, his politics and the links between these.

Since the l970s, the blue-collar man has taken a lot of economic hits. The buying power of his paycheck, the size of his benefits, the security of his job -- all these have diminished. As Ed Landry, a 62 year-old-machinist interviewed by Paul Solman on the Lehrer News Hour said, "We went to lunch and our jobs went to China." He searched for another job and couldn`t find one. He was even turned down for a job as a grocery bagger. "I was told that we`d get back to you." "Did they?" Solman asked. "No. I couldn`t believe it myself. I couldn`t get the job." In today`s jobless recovery, the average jobless stint for a man like Landry is now 19 weeks, the longest since l983. Jobs that don`t even exist at present may eventually open up, experts reassure us, but they aren`t opening up yet. In the meantime, three out of every four available jobs are low-level service jobs. A lot of workers like Ed Landry, cast out of one economic sector, have been unable to land a job even at the bottom of another.(13)

For anyone who stakes his pride on earning an honest day`s pay, this economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear. How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious, humiliated and, as who wouldn`t be, fearful. But in cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn`t supposed to feel afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans explained about his co-workers, "They felt that everyone else -- women, kids, minorities -- were all moving up, and they felt like they were moving down. Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up, while he and his job, were on the way down. And he`s angry."

Strutting the political flight deck

But is that anger directed downward -- at "welfare cheats," women, gays, blacks, and immigrants -- or is it aimed up at job exporters and rich tax dodgers? Or out at alien enemies? The answer is likely to depend on the political turn of the screw. The Republicans are clearly doing all they can to aim that anger down or out, but in any case away from the rich beneficiaries of Bush`s tax cut. Unhinging the personal from the political, playing on identity politics, Republican strategists have offered the blue-collar voter a Faustian bargain: We`ll lift your self-respect by putting down women, minorities, immigrants, even those spotted owls. We`ll honor the manly fortitude you`ve shown in taking bad news. But (and this is implicit) don`t ask us to do anything to change that bad news. Instead of Marie Antoinette`s "let them eat cake," we have -- and this is Bush`s twist on the old Nixonian strategy -- "let them eat war."

Paired with this is an aggressive right-wing attempt to mobilize blue-collar fear, resentment and a sense of being lost -- and attach it to the fear of American vulnerability, American loss. By doing so, Bush aims to win the blue-collar man`s identification with big business, empire, and himself. The resentment anyone might feel at the personnel officer who didn`t have the courtesy to call him back and tell him he didn`t have the job, Bush now redirects toward the target of Osama bin Laden, and when we can`t find him, Saddam Hussein and when we can`t find him... And these enemies are now so intimate that we see them close up on the small screen in our bedrooms and call them by their first names.

Whether strutting across a flight deck or mocking the enemy, Bush with his seemingly fearless bravado -- ironically born of class entitlement -- offers an aura of confidence. And this confidence dampens, even if temporarily, the feelings of insecurity and fear exacerbated by virtually every major domestic and foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration. Maybe it comes down to this: George W. Bush is deregulating American global capitalism with one hand while regulating the feelings it produces with the other. Or, to put it another way, he is doing nothing to change the causes of fear and everything to channel the feeling and expression of it. He speaks to a working man`s lost pride and his fear of the future by offering an image of fearlessness. He poses here in his union jacket, there in his pilot`s jumpsuit, taunting the Iraqis to "bring ‘em on" – all of it meant to feed something in the heart of a frightened man. In this light, even Bush`s "bad boy" past is a plus. He steals a wreath off a Macy`s door for his Yale fraternity and careens around drunk in Daddy`s car. But in the politics of anger and fear, the Republican politics of feelings, this is a plus.

There is a paradox here. While Nixon was born into a lower-middle-class family, his distrustful personality ensured that his embrace of the blue-collar voter would prove to be wary and distrustful. Paradoxically, Bush, who was born to wealth, seems really to like being the top gun talking to "regular guys." In this way, Bush adds to Nixon`s strategy his lone-range machismo.

More important, Nixon came into power already saddled with an unpopular war. Bush has taken a single horrific set of attacks on September 11, 2001 and mobilized his supporters and their feelings around them. Unlike Nixon, Bush created his own war, declared it ongoing but triumphant, and fed it to his potential supporters. His policy -- and this his political advisor Karl Rove has carefully calibrated -- is something like the old bait-and-switch. He continues to take the steaks out of the blue-collar refrigerator and to declare instead, "let them eat war." He has been, in effect, strip-mining the emotional responses of blue-collar men to the problems his own administration is so intent on causing.

But there is a chance this won`t work. For one thing, the war may turn out to have been a bad idea, Bush`s equivalent of a runaway plant. For another thing, working men may smell a skunk. Many of them may resent those they think have emerged from the pack behind them and are now getting ahead, and they may fear for their future. But they may also come to question whether they`ve been offered Osama bin Laden as a stand-in for the many unfixed problems they face. They may wonder whether their own emotions aren`t just one more natural resource the Republicans are exploiting for their profit. What we urgently need now, of course, is a presidential candidate who addresses the root causes of blue-collar anger and fear and who actually tackles the problems before us all, instead of pandering to the emotions bad times evoke.

Notes:

(1) According to Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, white working-class voters (male and female) made up 55% of voters in 2000. If we define "working class" as people without a college degree, then three-quarters of Americans are working class. Three-fourths of the population is also white, so white working class voters make up 55% of those casting votes. See Why the White Working Class Still Matters, New York: Basic Books, 2000.

(2) I got these figures by reanalyzing a January 2003 national poll conducted by Roper and sponsored by NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

(3) Teixeira and Rogers, p. 16.

(4) Bill Decker, "Will `Nascar dad` set the pace in 2004 election?" Internet posting, August 2l, 2004 ([e-mail]). According to Matt Stearns, the term, NASCAR dad" was coined by Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, and described small-town and rural voters, especially white men in the South who switched from Democrat to Republican. I use the term to refer to men in blue-collar jobs in any region of the country. Matt Stearns, "NASCAR Dads` are latest hot political demographic," Sept 29, 2003.

(5) David Sanger, "Bush Defends Tax Cuts and Announces Jobs Post," the New York Times, September 2, 2003, p. A20.

(6) The Roper poll classified people into three groups: $30,000 and less annual household income, $30,000 to $75,000, and $75,000 and higher.

(7) In Michigan, Bush got a 63% favorable rating from white union members according to a May 2003 poll. (See "The Bad News for Big Labor: Blue Collars Love This Blueblood," Business Week, June 30, 2003.) As Thomas Edsall points out, "As recently as the l988 contest between Michael S. Dukakis and George Bush, voters making more than $50,000 a year voted for the Republican by a 25 percentage point margin, 62 percent to 37 percent. By the 2000 election, the spread in the $50,000-plus bracket fell to 7 percentage points." ("Voter Values Determine Political Affiliation," Washington Post, March 26, 2001, p. A1.) A poll by Stanley Greenberg for the Institute for America`s Future also showed that whites without college degrees were significantly more inclined toward the Republican than the Democratic Party. See Dennis Farney, "Great Divides: Scenes from the Politics of American Culture," Wall St. Journal, l994, Dec 14, p. A1; John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, "Why democrats must be populists and what populist-phobes don`t understand about America," the American Prospect, Sept 9, 2002, p. 25.

(8) Tom Dickinson, "Where the Sun Don`t Shine," Mother Jones, September-October 2003, p. 19. The Times reports a loss of 2.5 million jobs (Sept 2, 2003, pA20. but does not reference the mass layoff study.

(9) George Lakoff, "Framing the Dems," the American Prospect, September 2003, p. 32.

(10) Norman Mailer, "The White Man Unburdened," the New York Review of Books, July 17, 2003, p. 4.

(11) Jefferson Cowie, "Nixon`s class struggle: romancing the New Right worker, l969-l973," Labor History, August 2002, p. 257.

(12) Cowie, ibid. p 260, p 279.

(13) The Jobless Recovery, June 23, 2003, Lehrer News Hour on-line, Interviewer Paul Solman.

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has written two classic studies about the pressures women experience at home and at work, The Second Shift and The Time Bind as well as a recent collection of essays The Commercialization of Intimate Life.

Copyright 2003 Arlie Hochschild


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Questions, Bitterness and Exile for Queens Girl in Terror Case
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Tamana Hayder, age 10, in the bedroom she shared with her sister, Tashnuba, 16, who was in federal detention. Tashnuba`s prayer rug is
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/nyregion/17suicide.html
DHAKA, Bangladesh - Slumped at the edge of the bed she would have to share with four relatives that night, the 16-year-old girl from Queens looked stunned.

On the hot, dusty road from the airport, she had watched rickshaws surge past women sweeping the streets, bone-thin in their bright saris. Now, in a language she barely understood, unfamiliar aunts and uncles lamented her fate: to be forced to leave the United States, her home since kindergarten, because the F.B.I. had mysteriously identified her as a potential suicide bomber.

"I feel like I`m on a different planet," the girl, Tashnuba Hayder, said. "It just hit me. How everything happened - it`s like, `Oh, my God.` "

The story of how it happened - how Tashnuba, the pious, headstrong daughter of Muslim immigrants living in a neighborhood of tidy lawns and American flags, was labeled an imminent threat to national security - is still shrouded in government secrecy. After nearly seven weeks in detention, she was released in May on the condition that she leave the country immediately. Only immigration charges were brought against her and another 16-year-old New York girl, who was detained and released. Federal officials will not discuss the matter.

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The Hayder family house, right,
is on 216th Street in Queens Village.
The sisters, their mother and a
brother are back in Bangladesh.
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But as the first terror investigation in the United States known to involve minors, the case reveals how deeply concerned the government is that a teenager might become a terrorist, and the lengths to which federal agents will go if they get even a whiff of that possibility. And it has drawn widespread attention, stoking the debate over the right balance between government vigilance and the protection of individual freedoms.

It is not known what prompted the authorities to investigate Tashnuba, who says the accusations are false. But in a series of interviews - her first - she said the government had apparently discovered her visits to an Internet chat room where she took notes on sermons by a charismatic Islamic cleric in London, a sheik who has long been accused of encouraging suicide bombings.

An F.B.I. agent, posing as a youth counselor, first confronted Tashnuba in her bedroom, going through her school papers and questioning everything from her views on jihad to her posterless walls, she said. Sent to a center for delinquents in Pennsylvania, Tashnuba said she was interrogated without a lawyer or parent present, about her beliefs and those of her friends, mainly American girls she had met at city mosques.

As suicide bombings mount overseas, with teenage girls among the perpetrators, there is no doubt that the government`s intelligence efforts are spurred by legitimate fears. The agent leading this investigation was a Muslim woman born in Britain who has voiced strong concern about radical clerics` influence on young immigrants there. And in Tashnuba, who wore a veil and talks of an ideal Islamic state, she met unsettling opinions and teenage defiance.

But Tashnuba says that she opposes suicide bombing, that her interest in the cleric was casual, and that the government treated her like a criminal simply for exercising the freedoms of speech and religion that America had taught her.

As she tells it, F.B.I. agents tried to twist mundane details of her life to fit the profile of a terrorist recruit, and when they could not make a case, covered their tracks by getting her out of the country. In fact, the court order of "voluntary departure" that let her leave requires a finding that the person is not deportable for endangering national security.

Tashnuba said she believed she was singled out precisely because she is a noncitizen - allowing investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing the familiar limits of criminal and juvenile proceedings.

"That gave them the green light to get me out of my family," Tashnuba said during her long journey with her mother and siblings to this teeming city where she was born.

This account is, in large part, her version of events. Some of it is supported by documents and other interviews, but it cannot all be corroborated because a court has sealed the case record at the F.B.I.`s request and barred participants from disclosing government information. The government has declined repeated requests to present its side.

`Alarm Bells` for F.B.I.

Two former F.B.I. agents, presented with the known details of the case, declined to discuss it specifically, but spoke of the pressures and practices that shape such investigations today.

Pasquale J. D`Amuro, who headed the New York F.B.I. office until April, said that since 9/11, agents have had to err on the side of suspicion. More potential threats are being reported, he said, and every one must be thoroughly investigated through whatever avenues are legally available, including enlisting immigration authorities as soon as a noncitizen is under scrutiny.

"The alarm bells are going off," said Mr. D`Amuro, now the chief executive of Giuliani Security and Safety, a consulting company. "And we have each and every time to run those threats to the ground, whether it ends up to be a bogus threat or proceeds to some type of prosecutorial action."

Some cases are never resolved, he added. Even when suspicions prove unfounded, he said, any visa violations are already in the hands of immigration authorities, who have to bring them "to some type of closure."

But Mike German, who left the bureau a year ago after a long career chasing homegrown terror suspects, said that the agency`s new emphasis on collecting intelligence rather than criminal evidence has opened the door to more investigations that go "in the wrong direction."

"If all these chat rooms are being monitored, and we`re running down all these people because of what they`re saying in chat rooms, then these are resources we`re not using on real threats," said Mr. German, who has publicly complained that F.B.I. management problems impeded terror investigations after 9/11.

The stress on intelligence increases the agency`s demands for secrecy, to protect its sources. And secrecy, he said, leads to abuses of power.

"Perhaps the government has some incredibly incriminating piece of information and saved us from a terrible act of violence; it would make everybody feel better to know it," he said. "Conversely, if they did something wrong, the public needs to know that."

From the beginning, the government framed this case as purely an immigration matter. When a dozen federal agents plucked the girl from her home in a dawn raid on March 24, they cited only the expiration of her mother`s immigration papers, telling the family that Tashnuba would probably be returned the next day.

Instead, after two weeks of frantic inquiries by her parents, The New York Times learned that Tashnuba was one of two girls being held, officially on their parents` immigration violations, but actually for questioning by F.B.I.`s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

According to a government document provided to The Times by a federal official, the F.B.I. asserted that the girls presented "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." The document cited no evidence. And in background interviews, federal officials were quick to play down the case as soon as reporters called, characterizing the investigation as a pre-emptive move against potential candidates for recruitment, not the disruption of a plot.

By then agents had seized Tashnuba`s diary, schoolwork and phone book - and the computer she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed. From her account of the agents` questions, and comments by a government official who reviewed a report about the F.B.I.`s grounds for suspicion, it appears that Tashnuba`s interest in the speeches became the lens that colored everything else about her life.

Veering between "nice and awful," she said, up to three agents at a time pressed her about possible terrorist ties among her friends, and what they saw as suspicious tendencies in her schoolwork, like class notes about suicide. She said they even criticized the austere décor of the bedroom she shared with her 10-year-old sister.

"The F.B.I. tried to say I didn`t have a life - like, I wasn`t the typical teenager," Tashnuba said bitterly, fingering her long Muslim dress. "They thought I was anti-American because I didn`t want to compromise, but in my high-school ethics class we had Communists, Democrats, Republicans, Gothics - all types. In all our classes, we were told, `You speak up, you give your opinion, and you defend it.` "

The lesson backfired, she said, when she found herself stubbornly debating the Koran`s definitions of jihad with the lead F.B.I. agent: Foria Younis, a Muslim immigrant of a much more secular stripe.

"It got personal," Tashnuba said.

Behind the Veil

She is a made-in-Queens mix of devotion and defiance, this slim, dark-eyed adolescent who arrived in Astoria with her family at age 5. In her round schoolgirl handwriting, she has compiled lists of favorite prayers and pious resolutions, like "practice lowering gaze to fullest" and "be xtra nice to parents." But when she recalls how F.B.I. agents questioned her religious lifestyle, her voice drips typical teenage scorn: "Like, I`m supposed to live for you guys?"

From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day - and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil.

In part, she was emulating her closest friend, Shahela, an American citizen who, in an interview, described veiling as a way to oppose "the degrading treatment of women`s bodies as commodities" and "to hold on to my faith after 9/11." It also provided Tashnuba a refuge from her parents` marital rifts and fragile reconciliations. Soon, the two friends were conducting religious classes for other girls at city mosques.

"This is what gives me an identity," Tashnuba said of her religion.

It also estranged her from the raunchy banter at her Manhattan high school. And when Shahela opted for accelerated home schooling, Tashnuba wanted to do likewise. Her parents resisted, and rejected her alternate escape plan: an arranged marriage to an American Muslim man from Michigan named Latif, whom Tashnuba had met only fleetingly. He was not a Bangladeshi, but a blue-eyed, 21-year-old salesman of Italian, Brazilian and German descent.

What she calls "a rough time in my life" reached a crisis last October. The family had just moved to Queens Village, leaving her friends behind. When Latif suggested an elopement to Michigan, Tashnuba impulsively agreed. A few hours from New York, they heard that her father had gone to the police, and quickly drove back. The police report would come back to haunt Tashnuba.

For now, her parents agreed to home schooling, through a correspondence course. But she still had time for PalTalk, a popular Web service where she found Sheik Omar`s nightly London broadcasts carried live at 2 p.m.

"It was a casual thing," she said. "I would have it on for a few minutes, then I would be going to CVS for my mom, whatever."

Parts of the broadcasts have long alarmed counterterrorism investigators, who say the Syrian-born Sheik Omar urges young Muslim men worldwide to support the Iraq insurgency on the front line of "the global jihad," and praises the 9/11 hijackers and suicide bombings. In a chilling exchange reported by The Times of London in January, a female listener asked whether "sisters are allowed to do suicide bombings if the intentions are correct." The newspaper reported that the sheik replied: "This is no problem; there is no restriction."

But in a telephone interview, the sheik denied recruiting anyone. "Nobody said to women that they should become a suicide bomber," he said.

Tashnuba said the topic never came up while she listened. What she recalled was talk of a utopian Islamic state that would follow God`s will, not human desires. "You don`t pay for water in an Islamic state, you don`t pay for transport," she said. "There are certain rights that can`t be taken away."

The Student and the Agent

At 9, an age when Tashnuba was turning to prayer, Foria Younis was beating boys at soccer in a Pakistani neighborhood in east London. Now 37, this former prosecutor is a 5-foot-2, "gun-toting, door-kicking member of the F.B.I.`s counterterrorist squad" who has hunted terrorists on three continents, according to a long profile last year in The Daily Telegraph of London.

Though Ms. Younis would not agree to an interview for this article, she did not quarrel with The Telegraph`s depiction.

But on March 4, when she knocked at the Hayder family`s door, Ms. Younis and her partner did not reveal that they were F.B.I. agents, said Tashnuba`s mother, Ishrat Jahan Hayder. They claimed to be from a youth center, following up on the police report filed five months earlier when the girl tried to elope. Mrs. Hayder readily sent the woman upstairs to her daughter`s bedroom. "I trusted her," she said.

From the moment she walked in, as Tashnuba tells it, Ms. Younis started paging through her papers. "She was like, `Can I look at this?` Not waiting for an answer."

What mainly drew the agent`s eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word "suicide" - her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said.

Soon, she said, Ms. Younis was dropping comments like "So, I see you`re interested in suicide," and "So, you like staying all by yourself in your room. Are you a loner?"

Tashnuba, who had many friends, was immediately nervous and defensive. "No, I`m just in my room," she said she protested. "I saw where they were going."

Three weeks later - two days after Ms. Younis wrote a secret declaration about Tashnuba, court documents show - immigration agents raided the house. As an immigration matter, that was highly unusual; there was no active proceeding against her mother or father, whose separate, long-pending applications for political asylum had lapsed without action in the late 1990`s.

But Tashnuba said the agents told her, "Your mom just admitted you`re not here legally and we have to take you, or else take everybody." At immigration headquarters in Manhattan, the F.B.I. was waiting, along with the other girl, Adama Bah, a native of Guinea whom Tashnuba said she knew slightly from a Manhattan mosque. Ms. Bah was of less interest to the authorities than Tashnuba, according to the government official who reviewed F.B.I. reports.

At day`s end, the girls were driven to a maximum-security juvenile detention center in rural Berks County, Pa. Suddenly they were among delinquent girls accused of drug crimes and assaults. Tashnuba was required to wear a sweat suit, march at attention and submit to strip-searches, she said. And the questioning began in earnest.

"They tried to twist my mind," Tashnuba said. "They had their little tactics - start with nice questions, try to get more severe. In the end, when I did cry they were, like, mocking me."

A government psychiatrist concluded that she was neither suicidal nor homicidal, and recommended her release. But the agents, Tashnuba said, kept "trying to link me to the psychological state." They zeroed in on the single artificial rose in her bedroom (her little sister`s); a psychology course (required by her correspondence program), and an essay she wrote about the Department of Homeland Security (assigned as a writing evaluation by her tutor).

The tutor, Asmaa Samad, recalled the essay as innocuous: "It said nothing derogative, nothing unpatriotic." Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. "I wrote, `I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they`re being outcasted more.`"

But instead of backing away from opinions that the agents seemed to find alarming, Tashnuba said she dug in her heels, especially on her belief in jihad. "If Islam is threatened, you have a right to fight back," Tashnuba declared, citing Koran verses.

The questioning went on, she said, from March 24 to April 7 - the day the first article about the case appeared.

As the news spread, an advocacy group arranged a lawyer for her. The Bangladeshi general consul in New York pressed the government for an explanation, and Homeland Security replied: The sole reason Tashnuba was being held was her "unlawful presence" in the United States.

The other girl was allowed to return to her East Harlem high school in early May, under strict conditions including an order not to discuss the case. But for Tashnuba, there was no prospect of release, her lawyer, Troy Mattes, said he was told.

Broke and distraught, Tashnuba`s mother asked to take "voluntary departure" with her daughter, rather than fight. The government agreed, and an immigration judge issued the necessary order.

Arriving in Dhaka on May 12, Tashnuba walked into her new life and burst into tears. "I want to go back," she cried.

Her father and 14-year-old brother had stayed in hiding in New York, hoping to avoid deportation while the boy finished school. With no money for a home, Tashnuba and her mother, baby brother and little sister, Tamana, were to share an aunt`s bed at her grandmother`s apartment, now occupied by nine people.

For Tashnuba and Tamana, an American citizen who speaks only English, more education may be unaffordable, her mother said. Even Tashnuba`s piety was challenged. Veiling is taboo among her relatives, and few Dhaka mosques allow women.

At one point in the journey, she had wished she had never gone to America, raging, "I see now you have no privacy, no liberty." But now she longed for even one more day in New York, "to say goodbye."

Fighting tears, she fell silent, staring at the shelf of souvenirs her family had sent back over the years: a big apple, a snow globe of the twin towers, a Statue of Liberty.

William K. Rashbaum, in New York, and Souad Mekhennet, in Frankfurt, contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Chris Floyd: `Inside joke: The wicked wit of the clown from Crawford`
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/17/120.htm…

Posted on Friday, June 17 @ 10:11:48 EDT
Moscow Times

As we all know, President George W. Bush is the most morally upright individual ever to set foot in the White House: a sober, righteous man of God. Yet this very rectitude obscures the fact that he is also one of the great wits of our time, a subtle and sophisticated ironist who has turned the dull business of governance into a highly refined comedic art.

With Shavian brio, Bush sends up the bourgeois pretension that words have meanings and actions have consequences. His specialty is the ironic reversal, known by old-time vaudeville gagsters as the "Orwell Twist." For example, you take a man who concocts justifications for torture, kidnapping and the exaltation of presidential authority beyond the reach of law -- and you make him the chief law enforcement officer of the land! It might look easy, but try doing it with a straight face, the way Bush introduced his criminal accomplice Alberto Gonzales as the new Attorney General. It takes real talent to pull off that kind of deadpan.

Or how about this gem? You steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the public treasury to secretly prepare for a war you`ve been planning for many years; you tell your closest ally months in advance that the invasion is on, come hell or high water; you unleash a massive bombing campaign against the target months before the war; you deceitfully manufacture and massage evidence to build a bogus case for launching an unprovoked act of aggression against an opponent who has already met all your demands -- and then you tell the world that you only wanted peace! What yocks, eh? Not even Groucho Marx could match such comic subversion.

The list -- and the Twist -- goes on and on: fostering a "culture of life" through capital punishment, gulag murders and "extrajudicial killings" by presidential fiat; spreading "compassionate conservatism" by gutting aid for the poor, the sick, the weak and the old; naming corporate polluters as environmental guardians; promoting "democracy" by coddling despots; "fighting terrorism" by spawning more terrorists -- it`s a comedy cornucopia!

But Bush`s satiric masterpiece, equal to "Annie Hall," "The Philadelphia Story" or even "Herbie Goes Bananas," might well be his appointment of nuclear war advocates to oversee -- wait for it -- arms control! Ain`t that a hoot? Looney-fringe types who oppose arms treaties, want to build more nukes and use them "pre-emptively," even in "non-nuclear combat scenarios," are put in charge of all the pacts and programs to control and eliminate nuclear weapons! Thus "arms control" becomes "Armageddon" in the wacky jargon of Bush-speak. We haven`t seen this kind of witty wordplay since the old "Arbeit Macht Frei" gag that the Bush Family`s business partners pulled at Auschwitz back in the day.

But we said Bush was subtle. Almost no one has noticed his June 1 appointment of Robert Joseph as the new undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. Joseph takes the place of John Bolton, the warmongering blowhard and serial fabricator whom Bush has chosen to be the United States` walrus-moustachioed face to the world at the UN. (Yet another masterstroke of wit from the Maestro: Bolton is copiously on record as despising the UN.) Although Joseph is cut from grayer cloth -- while still sporting plenty of nasal foliage, which is obviously a requirement for this baggy-pants role -- he is probably even more dangerous than his tempestuous predecessor, as Tom Barry of the International Relations Center reports.

Joseph has been a key player in the "nuke `em all and let God sort `em out" school of international diplomacy since his early minioning days in the diseased bowels of the Reagan administration. He came into his own after the Crawford clown-master seized power in 2000, serving as a "special assistant" to the president, in charge of destroying the ABM treaty, that 30-year bulwark against nuclear conflict. He was also instrumental in fashioning Bush`s maniacal "Nuclear Posture Review," which calls for the production of "low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons" that can actually be used in combat, or in "pre-emptive" strikes at, well, basically anybody the president decides might pose a vague threat against "American interests" somewhere down the line.

But increasing the risk of global nuclear annihilation isn`t enough for jolly old Joseph; he also has a fondness for biological and chemical weapons. Along with nukes, they make up a Holy Trinity of WMD that "have substantial utility" in the "international environment," he writes. And he doesn`t just want user-friendly WMD to be "a permanent feature" of life on earth; he`s keen on militarizing the heavens as well -- pre-emptively and unilaterally, natch. And it goes without saying that he opposes any attempts to place limits on U.S. testing and deployment of mass-death weapons.

That`s "arms control," Bush-style, for you: a perfect joke. Yet Joseph`s merry pranks don`t stop there; he was also responsible for pushing one of the many big lies -- sorry, funny stories -- in Bush`s pre-invasion propaganda blitzkrieg: the pure hokum about Saddam`s nonexistent search for African uranium to fuel his nonexistent nuclear program. As with so many others, Joseph`s egregious intelligence "failure" has been rewarded with honors and promotion. Because of course it was no failure at all; it was a well-played pantomime, faithfully following the script of Bush`s war-crimes comedy.

Lurking behind all this cynical katzenjammer is the grinning skull of the Bush death-cult: a mad but all-too-plausible dream of conquest, loot and unlimited dominion. For this dream, the cultists have already murdered countless thousands and are gambling with the very life of the world itself. With these comedians, the joke is always on us.

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JONATHAN CHAIT
Was Enron Just a Dream?
Cox will return the SEC to its lax old ways.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait17…

Jonathan Chait

June 17, 2005

Remember Enron? In calendar years, the scandal occurred just three years ago, but in political time it`s been eons. Back then, in the wake of news reports showing how Enron had fleeced its investors and put its employees at risk, the public was up in arms.

"Suddenly there may be a political price to pay for not acting," the New York Times reported. President Bush professed "outrage" over the scandal and declared support for reforms.

Those days are long over. Today, all the pressure comes from business lobbyists who chafe at tough new restrictions and the Securities and Exchange Commission breathing down their necks. They yearn for the good old lax pre-Enron days. And Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), Bush`s nominee to head the SEC, is just the man to give it to them.

Bush`s taste in SEC chairmen was best reflected by Harvey Pitt, his first appointee in 2001. Before his nomination, Pitt spent most of his career representing the industries that the SEC regulates. He began his SEC tenure by replacing career staffers with fellow industry representatives, declaring an amnesty against previous violators and promising, "We aren`t going to play `gotcha.` " Most notoriously, he called for "a kinder, gentler" SEC.

This suited Bush just fine until Enron broke the next year. At that point, having an obvious industry lap dog as SEC chairman proved to be too much of a liability. Bush had to replace Pitt with William Donaldson, an old-line Republican (which is to say, a Republican who occasionally disagreed with the business lobby). Donaldson, a longtime Bush family friend, had a reputation for integrity, but he was not expected to make waves.

Instead, he proved unexpectedly tough. Businesses howled, and now that everybody has completely forgotten about Enron, Bush feels free to force out Donaldson and replace him with the distinctly Pitt-like Cox.

Cox`s defenders offer two rationales. The first, and most obviously hilarious, is "consensus."

As Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told the New York Times, "I have long thought that the lack of consensus on a number of big issues was very troubling, with 3-to-2 votes, and especially with a Republican chairman slipping from the other two Republicans on several big votes. Under Chris Cox, you are probably not going to have much of that." No, you`re probably going to have 3-to-2 votes going the other way. How will this produce consensus? I`m not sure, but I believe it would work something like Bush`s 2000 campaign promise to end partisan acrimony in Washington.

The second rationale, offered with a somewhat straighter face, is that Cox is (in Bush`s words) "a champion of the free-enterprise system." This description reflects a common confusion between support for free enterprise and slavish espousal of anything businesses desire, which may or may not have anything to do with free markets.

Cox endeared himself to the business lobby not only through his general pro-business views but specifically with his long-standing crusade to let businesses disguise the cost of stock options. Stock options are a perfectly fine way for businesses to compensate their employees and give them an incentive to participate in the company`s growth. The trouble is that corporations can treat them as a cost in their tax statements, without disclosing the cost in their financial statements. In other words, they make themselves look poor to the IRS and rich to their stockholders. Government regulators and reformers in Congress have tried to end this double standard — claiming support from such capitalist icons as Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett — but corporate lobbyists have squelched them for years, with Cox as their chief water carrier.

How does it help the "free market" to let companies deceive their shareholders? It doesn`t. Economists understand that markets are inefficient when one party has reason to believe that the other is withholding crucial information. (That`s why many car buyers steer clear of the used car market.) The same problem applies to capital markets when investors can`t be sure that management is leveling with them.

Bush, apparently, doesn`t see it that way. In fact, according to his former Treasury secretary, Paul O`Neill, Bush asserted in one meeting that post-Enron uncertainty in the markets was caused by "SEC overreach."

So, in Bush`s way of thinking, the problem wasn`t that executives were getting away with too much, it was that they were getting away with too little. If that is indeed what`s ailing the economy, then the appointment of Cox is an excellent cure.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Democracy Hypocrisy

Iraq In The Name Of Freedom

Warning

Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war and should be viewed by a mature audience.

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Jun 18, 2005

The making of a terrorist
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GF18Df03.html

KARACHI - Two and a half years ago, Pakistan`s most-wanted person, Asif Ramzi, was found dead, along with five others, following an explosion in a bombing-making factory in Korangi, a satellite district of the southern port city of Karachi.

Ramzi was wanted in connection with the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the June 2002 bombing of the US consulate in Karachi.

This incident alerted the security agencies of both the US and Pakistan to the emergence of Korangi, as well as neighboring Landhi, as a new breeding ground for the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, and consequently a new target in the "war on terror". The Landhi-Korangi area already had notoriety as a "no-go area".

The Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is the militant offshoot of the banned Sunni sectarian group Sepah-i-Sahabah, which although not directly affiliated with al-Qaeda, its members have a kinship, as many of them trained together in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban in that country.

A road to terror
From the bustling artery of Sharah-i-Faisal in Karachi, when a car turns at Gora Qabrustan (a Christian Cemetery of British India times) toward Korangi Road, the driver breathes a sigh of relief as a smooth, broad road offers a swift drive to the expressway that connects the southern districts to the central and eastern parts of the city.

However, this is just 15-minute ride. Before the expressway, one turns off into Korangi, a veritable ghetto where one can almost smell the fear and tension. By the time the sun goes down, gangs of armed youths have taken to the streets, where they rule until dawn - frequently letting off shots into the air to announce their presence and authority to officials, and the local population.

Welcome to the hunting grounds of Korangi and Landhi.

The discovery of Ramzi`s bomb-making factory in Korangi in December 2002 has been followed by dozens of arrests of members of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi with connections to the area. In the most recent incident, a man identified as Tehseen was arrested in connection with a suicide attack on a Shi`ite mosque in Karachi in which several people were killed, including two of the attackers. Tehseen was injured when guards at the mosque fired at him. He is from an extremely poor family in Korangi.

Rooted in depravation
Korangi and Landhi were established in the early 1960s for displaced families that had come from British India after the partition of 1947, and which were living in squatter settlements near founding-father Muhammad Ali Jinnah`s mausoleum in the heart of the city.

Bureaucrats at the time were well versed in British ways - they knew the art to building colonies. Small housing units were set along a network of broad roads, complemented with schools, dispensaries, basic health units and playgrounds. The generation raised in the early 1960s in Korangi and Landhi was ambitious, and despite their poor background, many reached the top ladders of the corporate, social and sporting worlds, while others established themselves at lower and middle levels in government offices.

By the 1980s, though, Korangi and Landhi had changed. As people prospered, they shifted to better neighborhoods, and their cheap houses were filled by an altogether different community, including Bangladeshis, people from Myanmar and a huge Pashtun population. The latter worked as unskilled laborers in the industrial areas that had sprung up in the vicinity.

However, displaced families from India still made up the largest and most dominant component of Korangi and Landhi, which became the strongest pillar of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) when it was launched in 1985 in Karachi. The MQM was a national movement created to protect the rights of displaced families from India.

The MQM`s militant wing established arms dumps, torture chambers and training centers in Landhi. This area was inaccessible to police and very well guarded by armed youths. No strangers were allowed in the area, which was called Mohajir Khail. (Mohajir means immigrant, from British India, and Khail is a Pashtun word which shows that, like the North West Frontier province`s tribal areas, Mohajir Khail was also inaccessible to law-enforcing agencies.)

The MQM used Mohajir Khail to torture their political opponents belonging to the Pakistan Peoples` Party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, and other ethnic groups, such as the Pashtuns and Sindhis.

The Mohajir Khail was destroyed in 1993 by the Pakistani army, which also engineered a split in the MQM, leading to the formation of a faction led by Afaq Ahmed (now in jail). Subsequently, an army operation was conducted in the whole of Karachi, including Landhi and Korangi. The army arrested members of the MQM led by Altaf Hussain (who later went into exile in London to escape cases against him) and posted rangers in the area, but at the same time, the men in uniform patronized the faction of Ahmed. The cases against Hussain included killings, abductions, extortion, and burning the national flag. Now his party - renamed the Muttahida Quami Movement - is part of coalition governments in federal and provincial administrations.

As a result of the army action, the area became the hotbed of gang wars, where guns ruled and outsiders dared not enter. Every day, two or three bullet-riddled bodies would be found in gunny bags.

Religion, the poor man`s addiction
The mid-1990s saw severe economic depression in Landhi and Korangi, with markets closed for five days of the week. In job advertisements, companies clearly stated that candidates from Landhi and Korangi need not apply as they knew that because of the chaotic conditions in these areas workers would never be punctual. Schools and stadiums were occupied by the Pakistan Rangers, who often remained silent spectators as the gangs fought each other.

When the Taliban movement emerged in the mid-1990s, men from the Bangladeshi and Myanmarese populations in the area responded enthusiastically, as the clerics in their mosques were mostly pro-Taliban. Within a year, many men from both factions of the MQM joined different militant organizations, top of which was the Sepah-i-Sahabah. Thus, an already heavily militarized area due to its gang politics became a paradise for jihadis as well.

The banned Sepah-i-Sahabah was an anti-Shi`ite organization founded by Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. It has been renamed Millat-i-Islamia. Sepah-i-Sahabah sermonized against the beliefs of Shi`ites but did not call for their massacre. However, when many Sepah-i-Sahabah heads were killed by Shi`ites (this still goes on - the most recent was Maulana Azam Tariq, a member of the National Assembly and a pro-President General Pervez Musharraf person) a breakaway faction called Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, which believes in the killing of Shi`ites, was formed by Riaz Basra. Basra was rounded up by Pakistani security agencies when he tried to enter Pakistan after the Taliban retreated in 2001. After an unannounced detention, he died in what is believed to be a stage-managed encounter with the authorities.

Since the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi was banned and most of its members were wanted, they left Pakistan and took refuge in Afghanistan during the Taliban`s time. There they interacted with Arab Afghans. When the Taliban fell, they returned to Pakistan, bringing with them many Arab friends to whom they gave shelter and sanctuary. Later, they carried out several joint terror actions in Pakistan.

Amjad Farooqui, who was involved along with al-Qaeda`s Abu Faraj al-Libbi in assassination attempts against Musharraf, was a leader in the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, as was Ramzi. Invariably, they all took sanctuary in the thickly populated areas of Korangi and Landhi.

US outsmarts all
Since September 11, 2001, the US has invested millions of dollars in Pakistan to help track down al-Qaeda members and other terror suspects. Some of this money has gone to the Pakistani police, and some has been invested in a network of informers called Spider. But as long as no-go areas such as Landhi and Korangi existed, where police and rangers could not go freely, success was limited.

So US intelligence came up with a plan. It used the Altaf Hussain group`s network in the MQM to counter jihadis and militants, leading to the arrest of many wanted people, to the extent that many militants have been rooted out from the area.

A case study
This correspondent has interacted with many people from the Landhi and Korangi area, and one in particular stands out. Let`s call him Akhtar, a man in his late 20s. He is not a militant, although circumstances conspired to push him in that direction, just like many who did turn out to be militants.

When Akhtar started going to his nearby mosque in Korangi four years ago, everybody in his family was happy that he had separated himself from the drug addicts and goons of the neighborhood, as well as from the ethnocentric parties of the area known for their terror, militancy and extortion. They were satisfied that Akhtar was now on the right path and would lead a straight life.

Akhtar grew a beard and insisted that he interact with all religious circles in the mosques. He was a tolerant human being, searching for pearls of virtue wherever he could find them.

However, after four years, during which time Akhtar`s personality was molded and he became known for his piety and his tabiligi (preaching) activities, a police unit came looking for him, not to hear his wisdom, but to inform his family to hand over the "sectarian criminal" in a few days, or face the music. Akhtar happened to be out of town preaching at the time.

Akhtar met this correspondent through a friend, as he believed that newspapers were his last hope.

"Yes, Korangi and Landhi are two points where many suicide bombers and members of the Laskhar-i-Jhangvi stay, but you cannot write a story in isolation or without enumerating the causes which made this area with its destitute population a breeding ground for terror groups," Akhtar said.

"Our misfortune starts from our birth place, that is Landhi and Korangi, which became the nucleus of crime from the mid-1980s. Armed youths roamed around freely. Two military operations were conducted in the area, which gave a free hand to the police to rough up the whole population. They used to arrest criminals, but also innocent suspects, which they only let go after their poor families paid a bribe.

"That was the environment in which I grew up. My friends were either members of ethnocentric parties, as one could not survive without their association, or those who fell into drug addiction," said Akhtar. "The first time when I was picked up, I happened to have associated with members of a breakaway faction of the MQM, that is, the Afaq group. During interrogation, I was badly tortured. Later, the Afaq group`s leaders secured my bail and I came out of jail. Now I was `member` of the Afaq group.

"That is exactly the time when police and rangers were playing a game of hide and seek in Landhi and Korangi. Youths were put in police lockups without their cases being registered, and they were badly tortured. There was a time when the government crushed one faction of the MQM and patronized the other faction, and then the other way around. The youths changed their loyalties accordingly. In such an environment, two prominent groups emerged and attracted hundreds of youths who were tired of arrests and tortures. One is the banned Sepah-i-Sahab, and the other was the Jaish-i-Mohammed.

"Maulana Masood Azhar [chief of the now banned Jaish-i-Mohammed] quite often came to our neighborhood, with over a dozen armed guards. His speeches were truly impressive, but more impressive was his protocol and police security. Many disgruntled youths joined Jaish-i-Mohammed, and many joined Sepah-i-Sahabah. Some were inspired by their teaching, and some came in search of protection from police raids.

"I was neither in the Sepah-i-Sahabah nor in the Jaish. I was a peaceful talibligi [Muslim preacher]. However, since the leaders of these groups were regular visitors to the mosques in the area, I was a regular listener of their lectures, and in that way I was part of their circle and kept friendly ties and social interaction, but not as a member.

"After 9-11, the situation changed. All ethnocentric groups, which previously had been under official scrutiny, were given a respite, and organizations like the Sepah-i-Sahaban and the Jaish-i-Mohammed came under fire and were banned.

"Instead of neighborhoods, mosques and seminaries were the target, where police and intelligence officials carried out daily raids. As a result, all members of those banned organization went underground. Many stopped their activities, but several joined militancy in the name of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi.

"The police game of extortion and bribery, played with members of the ethnocentric parties in the past, was now played with members of sectarian and jihadi organizations. In the past, all Mohajirs [immigrants from India] were culprits, whether they belonged to any party or not, but now all mosque-goers were guilty of terror.

"The law-enforcing agencies created a hellish situation. Many people who did not have the money to bribe their way out of trouble knew that they could be killed in a fake encounter [police have a reputation for extra-judiciary killings in which suspects are shot in what is officially termed as `retaliatory fire`.] Therefore, many choose to become suicide bombers, because they know that either way their fate is death.

"There are people like myself who are suspects and who were given an option list by the police, including `gentle` arrest and then freedom after paying a bribe - or else be ready for a `fake encounter`. I am again standing at a crossroads, like I was some years back when I was detained as a suspect by the police and then my release was secured by an ethnocentric party. But in return I became a member. Now I have to either collect money to bribe corrupt police, or join a sectarian group to get a safe sanctuary to hide and then make myself mentally ready to be killed in police encounter, or in a suicide attack."

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail]

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

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U.S. planes drop 500 lb bombs in Iraq operation
Fri Jun 17, 2005 6:50 PM BST
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=worldN…

By Luke Baker

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. F-16 fighter planes dropped a series of 500 lb (220 kg) bombs on insurgent targets in western Iraq overnight as the U.S. military launched a heavy offensive against rebels near the Syrian border.

Nine of the powerful bombs were dropped, the U.S. military said, two of them targeting suspected rebel safe houses near the town of Qaim, an insurgent stronghold on the Euphrates river about 20 km (12 miles) east of Iraq`s border with Syria.

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Four more were aimed at rebels as they fired mortars and assault rifles at U.S. ground forces near Qaim, and a further three were used to hit suspected weapons caches in the area.

The air power was in support of Operation Spear, the third major offensive U.S. forces have launched in western Iraq in the past six weeks with the aim of crushing insurgent activity in the Euphrates valley which stretches northwest to Syria.

"Operation Spear ... began in the early morning hours with the objectives of rooting out insurgents and foreign fighters and disrupting insurgent support systems in and around Karabila," Captain Jeffrey Pool of the U.S. Marines said in a statement from Ramadi, capital of the surrounding Anbar region.

Iraqi troops and U.S. tank and amphibious assault units were involved, he added. About 1,000 troops were taking part in all.

Residents in Karabila, a suburb of Qaim where the suspected weapons caches were targeted, said fierce gunbattles broke out overnight and continued. U.S. forces said air strikes killed about 40 rebels near there on June 11.

The leader in Qaim of the Muslim Clerics Association, a leading voice for the once-dominant Sunni Arab minority, said he was calling for businesses to remain closed and residents to stay in their homes after weekly Friday prayers in protest at U.S. action he said was endangering civilians.

"The U.S. forces are escalating the situation and we will declare a general strike after Friday prayers," the Association`s Mudhafar al-Ani said.

The chief doctor at Qaim hospital, Hamdi al-Alusi, said six bodies had been brought to the morgue on Friday, including one of a woman. The identities of the five men were unclear.

It was unclear how much resistance U.S. forces were meeting, but a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter made an "unscheduled landing" near Qusayba, 20 km (12 miles) west of Qaim, the military said. Pool said it was not shot down.

AMERICAN DISQUIET

The western, desert regions of Iraq provide strongholds for Sunni insurgents battling U.S. forces and the new, Shi`ite-led government. Iraqi and U.S. officials say Arab foreign fighters have been entering from Syria, although Damascus rejects accusations of helping them do that.

It is also believed to be the main hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose al Qaeda-linked group has carried out many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq and who U.S. forces believe is behind a recent surge in violence.

Since late April, more than 1,000 Iraqis and 120 U.S. troops have died in rebel attacks. That may help explain a declining approval rating for President George W. Bush at home. Two U.S. Marines were killed in a roadside bomb blast in fighting near Ramadi on Thursday, the U.S. military said on Friday.

A CBS/New York Times poll released on Thursday said 60 percent of Americans thought things were going badly for the United States in Iraq. Fifty-one percent now think Washington should have stayed out of Iraq.

In Baghdad, a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle as an Iraqi security patrol was passing a Shi`ite mosque, wounding four people and causing a fuel truck to explode, police said.

Another car exploded near the convoy of an Iraqi general in Falluja, killing two civilians and wounding 11, officials said.

Tensions have been high between the minority Sunni Arabs, from where the insurgency draws support, and the dominant Shi`ite sect since the government was formed in late April.

Despite tensions, Sunni Arab and Shi`ite leaders managed to strike a compromise on Thursday over the makeup of a committee charged with drafting a new constitution, removing a barrier to drawing up the document before a mid-August deadline.

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Interactive Feature:
[urlUnrest in Uzbekistan]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/05/30/international/20050530_UZBEK_FEATURE.html[/url]

June 18, 2005
Uzbek Ministries in Crackdown Received U.S. Aid
By C. J. CHIVERS and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/18/international/asia/18uzbek…

MOSCOW, June 17 - Uzbek law enforcement and security ministries implicated by witnesses in the deadly crackdown in the city of Andijon last month have for years received training and equipment from counterterrorism programs run by the United States, according to American officials and Congressional records.

The security aid, provided by several United States agencies, has been intended in part to improve the abilities of soldiers and law enforcement officers from the Uzbek intelligence service, military and Ministry of Internal Affairs, the national law enforcement service. Besides equipment aid, at least hundreds of special forces soldiers and security officers, many of whom fight terrorism, have received training.

Witnesses and American officials say the Uzbek Army, law enforcement and intelligence service were all present at the crackdown. Among them was a special Internal Affairs counterterrorism unit known as Bars, which has two or three members who trained in a course sponsored by the State Department for crisis-response commanders in Louisiana in 2004, according to the State Department.

It is not clear whether these specific officers were present in Andijon, although their unit was. Several United States officials said they had no evidence that any of the hundreds of individual troops or security officers with American training took part in the violence. At the same time, however, they said they were not certain that no American-trained personnel were present.

The uncertainty, officials said, is one reason an independent investigation of the violence is necessary. "Until Uzbek authorities allow an independent and credible investigation to occur, we cannot know who was responsible or was involved," said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman.

The participation of ministries that have received American aid underscores the implicit gamble in giving security help to a repressive state.

The United States has worked closely with Uzbekistan, a corrupt and autocratic state with a chilling human rights record, in the fight against international terrorism. It has also tried to professionalize the Uzbek military, improve its border security and help secure materials that could be used in nuclear, chemical or biological weapons - areas of engagement that American officials say are of clear national interest.

But such policies can backfire, improving the martial abilities of units that commit crimes against Uzbek citizens, and associating the United States with repression in the eyes of Uzbek people and the Islamic world. Uzbekistan is an overwhelmingly Muslim country with severe restrictions on freedoms of worship and expression.

Hundreds of civilians were killed when Uzbek forces fired into dense crowds on May 13, according to survivors and human rights organizations. The crackdown, which the Uzbek government has described as a counterterrorism operation, crushed an antigovernment rally that was prompted by an armed uprising and a prison break.

As Western nations renew calls for an independent investigation, witnesses and American officials say one focus is on the actions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Survivors, diplomats and American officials have said in interviews that the ministry, run by Col. Gen. Zakirdzhon Almatov, provided principal units involved in the crackdown.

General Almatov was present in Andijon on May 13, and he negotiated by telephone with Abdulzhon Parpiev, a leader of the uprising, according to a survivor who witnessed the conversations and a senior diplomat in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his posting in the repressive state, said General Almatov and President Islam A. Karimov coordinated the actions of Uzbek forces that day.

Among forces under General Almatov`s command were two special counterterrorism units, Bars and Skorpion, according to survivors, a relative of one of Bars members, a Bars driver and several Uzbeks familiar with the crackdown, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. American military officials say they have information that those units were present.

Bars, which survivors said was particularly active, is thought to have at least 300 members. It has previously worked in the Fergana Valley, a region that guerrillas from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group with links to Al Qaeda, have raided in the past.

Much else about the crackdown remains unknown. The full list of units present and names of their commanders have not been made public. Nor have the nature of orders and roles of specific units in the worst hours of violence and roundups. It is not publicly known whether the most lethal shooting was deliberate or the result of poor discipline, or both.

But an examination of elements of the security aid by The New York Times has found that the United States has provided extensive aid to the ministries, and the types of units, that took part in the crackdown. The aid was not limited to the Pentagon`s widely publicized assistance to the Uzbek military.

William C. Lambert, a retired Army officer who was the Central Asia desk officer for the United States Central Command in the late 1990`s through 2000, before moving to Tashkent to manage a border security program with Uzbek forces, said there were many other means of providing aid, including aid to special interior ministry troops.

"A myriad of other programs were authorized to work with them," he said. Mr. Lambert is now an assistant professor at the Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

State Department reports to Congress show that under a program managed by the department known as Anti-Terrorism Assistance, 18 Uzbek security officers flew to Louisiana last year to attend a Crisis Response Team-Tactical Commander course. Such classes typically train officers in techniques for confronting terrorist actions; among them were the two or three members of Bars.

An additional 12 Uzbek security officers, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the general prosecutor`s office received "antiterrorism instructor training" in 2003 in New Mexico. Such training typically prepares officers with tactics and techniques they then teach units at home.

The officers who attended were part of the 150 Uzbek security officers trained that year, during which the United States` Anti-Terrorism Assistance program provided $2.2 million to Uzbekistan.

"We provide antiterrorism assistance in Uzbekistan and elsewhere to help foreign police better address terrorist threats, and not for other purposes," Mr. Casey said. He noted that there were reliable accounts of the shooting of hundreds of people in Andijon. "There can be no excuse for this grave violation of the human rights of so many innocent Uzbek citizens," he said.

Since at least the mid-1990`s, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and other American government agencies have provided training or nonlethal equipment to Uzbekistan.

The equipment has included Humvees, jeeps, trucks, patrol boats, night-vision goggles, binoculars, two-way radios with encryption abilities, flak jackets, helmets, portable radiation detectors and more.

The Pentagon has also sent Navy SEAL teams and Special Forces to Uzbekistan to train its military in tactics, marksmanship and patrolling, as well as in human rights and laws of war. Participants are vetted to ensure they have no history of human rights violations, the Pentagon said. A senior Defense Department official said the training had included an Uzbek special forces battalion.

The Pentagon, which uses an Uzbek air base to support operations in Afghanistan, has conducted an initial review of units present in Andijon, and said it had no information that personnel it trained had taken part in the crackdown. It also said it had not trained personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has also been active, establishing an elite 25-member "sensitive investigation unit" in the ministry in 2003. There has been no public allegation that this unit was involved in the crackdown; the agency did not answer written questions about its cooperation with the ministry.

Another American official said the Central Intelligence Agency had trained Uzbek intelligence service personnel, but not Internal Affairs Ministry security officers, including members of Bars or Skorpion.

In addition to the presence of Bars, which has American-trained personnel, there are other potential routes by which American-trained soldiers or law enforcement officers might have been involved.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that there is personnel movement between the Uzbek Internal Affairs and Defense Ministries, and it is possible that Uzbeks who received American training in one unit could have taken part in the crackdown as member of other units or agencies.

"You can`t vet for life," a Pentagon official said. "We can only know these people up until the point at which they finish their training and move on, if they leave units that are part of our mil-to-mil cooperation."

Uzbekistan has resisted calls for an independent international investigation; its Internal Affairs and Defense Ministries did not reply to written requests for interviews about their actions in Andijon and relationships with the United States.

Mr. Chivers reported from Moscow and Kyrgyzstan for this article, and Mr. Shanker from Washington. Additional reporting was contributed by Ethan Wilensky-Lanford in Kyrgyzstan and Tashkent, and Alain Delaqueriere in New York.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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"[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. [We] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information....Our unfortunate troops...under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad."
-- T.E. Lawrence, 1920

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Saturday, June 18, 2005

First Round of Iran`s Presidential Elections Inconclusive
Turnout Stronger than Expected

The Presidential elections in Iran produced a messy result that will require a run-off between the two top candidates. The final outcome won`t be clear until Saturday afternoon at least, but it seems that former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will be one of the two.

Turnout was about 60 percent, better than expected. That is slightly bigger than the turnout in Iraq`s recent elections.

The problem for voters seeking genuine change is that the hardline clerics have found ways to blunt progressive movements. It remains to be seen if a new president will be able to outmaneuver them. The Iranian public appears to be voting for candidates with strong personalities who might be able to accomplish something nevertheless.

posted by Juan @ [url6/18/2005 06:35:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/first-round-of-irans-presidential.html[/url]

Mosque Attack Wounds 4
US Raids against al-Dhari, Muqtada

Sibernews reports, `A car bomb has exploded close to a Shia mosque in eastern Baghdad as people were emerging from Friday prayers, injuring at least two people [the Guardian reports 4 wounded]. The driver seems to have rammed a fuel lorry passing through the Kamaliya district, police sources said. `

The Guardian reports "a suicide bomber rammed an army convoy in northern Iraq wounding seven people."

About 1000 Marines and some Iraqi troops fought in Operation Spear against suspected guerrillas and jihadi infiltrators in western Iraq (Anbar province) near the Syrian border. The campaign involved the dropping of 500-pound bombs. Local hospitals reported that 6 Iraqi corpses were brought in, including a woman. Previous such operations have had only a temporary and limited effect, because the Marines would attack and then later withdraw. The US does not have enough troops in Iraq effectively to secure Anbar Province (where there are only 10,000 for a population of nearly some 800,000, with long borders with Syria and Jordan).

The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hardline Sunni group, protested the operation and threatened a strike if it continued.

AP/ al-Hayat report that 20 armed guerrillas surrounded a mosque in Ramadi to privent a meeting of tribal chieftains, who had assembled to discuss cooperating with the central government and to explore the issue of the constitution.

al-Zaman reports that the Association of Muslim Scholars protested a US raid on the home of its leader, Shaikh Harith al-Dhari. It also denounced the similar raid on the information office of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad. The AMS demanded in a communique that such raids be stopped, along with "arbitrary" arrests of Iraqis in general and of national symbols in particular. The raid on al-Dhari`s home took place Wednesday, while the Sadr office was searched on Thursday. The statement called upon the United Nations and international and regional organizations to intervene to stop what it called "terrorist and repressive practices against the principles of humanity." It also called for an investigatory commission to examine the the conditions and realities in the prisons and holding cells.

ADN Kronos International reports that the Zarqawi terrorist network in Iraq has threatened to kill any Iraqis who cooperate with the US or the new Iraqi government. The threats came in response to the indications that tribal leaders and other notables in Mosul are willing to work against the guerrilla moveement as long as they and theirs are amnestied and promised a better deal with the central government.

Richard Whittle of the Dallas Morning News explores the likely consequences for Iraq of an early US military withdrawal there.

Turkey is concerned about the reports in the Washington Post earlier this week that Kurds have detained large numbers of innocent Turkmen from Kirkuk. The nationalist Turkish government sees itself as protector of the Iraqi Turkmen, who constitute about 3 percent of the Iraqi population.

Malaysia will offer some reconstruction aid to Iraq and Palestine.

Most Virginians are pretty conservative politically, but are also fiscal conservatives. When Roanoke newspaper editorials begin worrying about the impact of the $5 billion a month the US spends on Iraq in direct costs, and that it is not being acknowledged in Bush`s federal budget plans, then Bush is starting to get into some trouble. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is gearing up to give Bush another extra payment for Iraq of $45 billion.

Al-Qaeda is bringing Arab suicide bombers into Afghanistan in hopes of creating the same sort of instability and hostile environment for the 20,000 US troops there as that tactic has produced in Iraq. This according to Rahim Wardak, the Defense Minister.

posted by Juan @ [url6/18/2005 06:27:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/mosque-attack-wounds-4-us-raids.html[/url]

Zarqawi and the Scarlett Pimpernel

WESTLEY: ` Well, Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me to his cabin and told me his secret. "I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts," he said. "My name is Ryan. I inherited this ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia." Then he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley." `

-William Goldman, "The Princess Bride"



Bill Montgomery`s "Form over Substance" goes beyond expressing skepticism about the shadowy stories coming out of Iraq about top aides of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi being arrested. He suggests that the stories are a combination black psy-ops operation to influence public opinion, and scripted Hollywood entertainment value. I would only add that it is now often forgotten that the major politicians running Iraq are the same people who lied to the US public about Saddam`s WMD and about Baath links to terrorism, etc. Vice-Premier Ahmad Chalabi, Member of Parliament Iyad Allawi, and others told bald-faced lies or provided to Western intelligence defectors who told bald-faced lies. They told Tony Blair that Saddam could launch a chemical weapons attack on Western interests "within 45 minutes." Chalabi`s lies and those of his cronies would fill a multi-volume print encyclopedia. How likely is it that now that they are running the Iraqi government, we can suddenly trust everything their spokesmen tell us? Yet the Western press dutifully reports these allegations about the attrition against the Zarqawi network as though it is gospel. I almost never refer to such reports, because they seem to me obviously questionable and impossible to verify, except that obviously someone continues to go on blowing things up in Iraq despite Iraqi government claims about all these arrests.

Meanwhile, Reuters says that an internet site associated with the Zarqawi network denies that any Zarqawi aides were arrested recently in Iraq or in Spain, as had been reported in the press. There is no way of knowing who posts these supposed communiques, and there is every reason to be suspicious of the information in them.

posted by Juan @ [url6/18/2005 06:05:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/zarqawi-and-scarlett-pimpernel-westley.html[/url]

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The Independent
UN team opens inquiry into Hariri murder
Saturday, 18th June 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=647…


It’s a white Mitsubishi Canter FH truck - 1995-96 model - a tarpaulin over the back to conceal the thousand kilograms of explosives that killed the Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri and 20 others on 14 February.

Or that, at least, is what Detlev Mehlis, the head of the UN’s International Investigation Commission, believes. In the picture, a photograph of a brand new lorry from what appears to be a Mitsubishi publicity brochure has the tarpaulin painted over it. On another mock-up, the tarpaulin is missing. "Has anyone information related to a vehicle of this kind, its owner, its whereabouts prior to 14 February 2004?" Mr Mehlis asked yesterday.

The commission was formally starting its investigation in Beirut with a team which will soon include investigators from Britain, Germany, Lebanon, Finland, Canada, Morocco, India, Chile, Kenya, Malawi, Austria, the Dominican Republic, Portugal, the Philippines, Denmark, Egypt, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, South Africa, Ukraine, the US and Zambia; which is, indeed, international.

It has, it appears, juridical powers and Mr Mehlis, who has been to Lebanon before - when he came to arrest the Palestinian believed to be responsible for the 1985 Berlin disco bombing - warned that any country which "does not provide [information] to the commission will bear the responsibility should we fail in our efforts to establish the truth".

German and Swiss explosives experts, he said, had now established "99.9 per cent" that the explosion that killed Mr Hariri was above ground and not detonated beneath the road.

Mr Mehlis did not know if the vehicle carrying the explosives was parked or being driven by a suicide bomber.

Nor did he know anything more than he had read in the local newspapers of men arrested in Syria who had allegedly confessed to Mr Hariri’s murder - an intriguing tale, albeit one that Mr Mehlis is likely to take with a traditional sprinkle of Damascus salt on his tongue. Any arrests that had to be made would be by the Lebanese security authorities, and it was the Lebanese judicial authorities who would be involved in the inquiry.

Which is a bit odd - since the judicial authorities in Beirut have long been accused of working for the Syrians and because Mr Mehlis gently declined to reveal the wording of an understanding he had signed with those same authorities about the work of his commission. As they say, watch this space.

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The Independent
We are all complicit in these vile acts of torture - but what can we do about it?
Saturday, 18th June 2005, by Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=647…


If our government uses information drained out of these creatures, it is we who are holding the whips

I still have my notes from a man who knew all about torture, a Druze friend in the 1980s, during the Lebanese war, pleased with himself because he’d just caught two Christian militiamen trying to plant a car bomb on the Beirut seafront. "I saw two Phalangists over there. I knew who they were. They had a bomb in their car. I called the PSP [Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party] and they took them off for questioning." What happened to them? "Well, they knew what would happen to them; they knew there was no hope. They were questioned here for a couple of days and then they were taken up to Beit Eddin."

Ah, Beit Eddin, one of the prettiest villages in Lebanon, the palace of the Emir Bashir the Second, site now of one of the country’s finest music festivals - run by Jumblatt’s glamorous wife Nora. But Beit Eddin was different in the 1980s. "The guys are always told that they are going to die, that there’s no point in suffering - because they are going to be killed when they’ve talked," my Druze friend told me. "There’s a centre. They don’t survive. There are people there who just press them until they talk. They put things into a man’s anus until he screams. Boiling eggs, that sort of thing. They kill them in the end. It’s only a few days and it’s all over. I don’t really like that sort of thing. I really don’t. But what can I do?"

It’s a good question again now. What can we do? What can we do when an American president dispatches "suspects" to third countries where they will be stripped, wired up, electrocuted, ripped open and tortured until they wish they had never been born? What can we do with a prime minister - ours - who believes that information from torture victims may be of use to us and may be collected by us? How can we clean our hands when we know that men are being subject to "rendition" through our own airports? Doesn’t a policeman have the right to go aboard these CIA contract jets that touch down in Britain and take a look at the victim inside and - if he believes the man may be tortured - take him off the plane?

I started thinking about this more seriously in the beautiful little town of Listowel in Co Kerry - not far, by chance, from Shannon airport - where I went to give a talk at the recent writers’ festival. I was handed a flyer by a bearded man in the audience. "Who was on board the CIA-chartered plane Reg No N313P that landed in Shannon on 15 December 2003 en route from Iraq?" it asks.

Now, a little fact-checking suggests that the Tralee anti-war group got the details right. And planes have also gone in the other direction - to Uzbekistan and Egypt and other countries where Geneva Conventions - already disregarded by the lads and lassies in charge of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - are used as lavatory paper. In Uzbekistan, they boil "suspects" in fat. They take out their nails. In Egypt, they whip prisoners and sometimes sodomise them. In one Egyptian prison complex a local human rights group found that guards forced prisoners to rape each other. But no friendly Garda walks up to find out who’s aboard at Shannon. The Irish government will not investigate these sinister flights. Outside, Irish eyes may be smiling. But they won’t be allowed a peek into these revolting aircraft.

It’s not difficult to trace our journey to this perdition. First, we had Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, who in November 2003 was ranting away at a joint press conference with George Bush, that "in the face of this terrorism, there must be no holding back, no compromise, no hesitation in confronting this menace". No holding back? In tandem with this drivel, we had writers such as David Brooks at the New York Times perniciously asking readers what would happen to "the national mood" when "the news programmes start broadcasting images of brutal measures our own troops will (sic) have to adopt... The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action..." Indeed.

Already there’s an infamous case in Canada of a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was transiting the United States, who was arrested and put on a plane to Damascus where he was duly tortured until the Syrians decided he had nothing to tell them. Then he came back to Canada - only to find that the Canadian authorities might have tipped off the US spooks that he was a wanted man. Now I’m quite an expert on Syrian torture. A beating is about the best you can expect. But there exists in one of their "mukhabarat" basements an instrument known as the German chair, installed long ago by the now defunct German Democratic Republic. The victim is strapped down and the back then moves inwards until the prisoner’s spine is snapped. A home-made version - the Syrian chair - was nastier. It broke prisoners’ backs more slowly.

And as we all know - and Saddam’s torture boys were also experts at this - prisoners’ families can be brought to prisons to be beaten, raped and sodomised if the inmate still refuses to talk. With all this are we now complicit. As long as we send men off to this physical hell, we have the electrodes in our hands; we are the torturers. As long as our government accepts information drained out of these emasculated creatures, it is we who are pulling out the fingernails; it is we who are holding the whips.

Mind you, our American friends are already, it seems, dab hands at smearing prisoners with excrement and beating them and - given the evidence I’ve heard from a prisoner who was at Bagram in Afghanistan - sticking brooms up men’s anuses, and, of course, just killing them. Thirty prisoners have now died in US custody. I don’t believe in the few bad apples line. It’s happened on far too great a scale. And how do we excuse all this filth? How do we excuse ourselves for this immorality? Why, we say Saddam was worse than us.

Saddam had women raped; he shot them down into mass graves. He was much worse. But if Saddam’s wickedness has to be the tuning fork against which all our own iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? If Saddam’s regime is to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad - how iniquitous - does that allow us to be?

Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects at Bagram and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantanamo and sent others off to be boiled and fried and killed off by our "friends" without the embarrassment of being present. Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam’s shame - Abu Ghraib - subsequently became the symbol of our shame too.

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Hier mal wieder ein Artikel über Venezuela und Chavez.
Ich bin gespannt, wenn der nächste Versuch der USA gestartet wird Chavez zu stürzen. Es ist augenblicklich sehr viel Unruhe in den Hinterhöfen der USA, aber die USA sind mit dem Irak-Abenteuer vollständig ausgelastet.

Neocon Nightmare: Oil, Socialism, and Chutzpah in Venezuela
by Jason Miller
http://www.selvesandothers.org/article9946.html

DRIVEN by obscene greed and hubris, the Oligarchs ruling America attempt to mercilessly crush those who stand in the way of their imperialistic ambitions.

John Steinbeck once wrote:

"It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second."


The plutocrats rule America behind the clever guise of a constitutional republic rife with corruption. With an unmatched ferocity in embodying the “traits of success” discerned by Steinbeck, their Neocon representatives in the government vigorously protect the interests of the wealthy and tirelessly push the American system of corrupt avarice on the rest of the world. Strategies they typically employ include economic pressure, psychological manipulation through propaganda and media control, covert intervention by the CIA, and in cases like Iraq, invasion and occupation. What the proletariat has needed for a long time is a champion for their cause. Plebeians of the world, meet Hugo Chavez.

Yes, there is a viable alternative to plutocracy

With America’s government fiercely advancing the interests of avaricious corporations around the world, Hugo Chavez has emerged in Venezuela as a welcome antithesis. While there is little doubt that Chavez is complex, acts with a degree of self interest, and has a multi-faceted agenda, he has remained steadfast in his promise to provide for the poverty-stricken in Venezuela. His open defiance of US imperialism and nascent attempt to implement a social democracy make him a rare breed in this world. As they sustain blows to their economic security, civil liberties, and intellectual freedoms almost daily under the Bush administration, people around the world can look to Chavez as illumination in a very dark age.

Chavez has tenacity. He was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 and again in 2000 by significant margins of victory. Contrary to claims of corruption by the Bush administration and its media lap-dogs, international observers declared both elections to be free. Chavez survived a coup attempt in 2002, which was openly supported by the Bush administration. Dogged by the opposition of the Oligarchs in his own country, Chavez overcame a recall election in August of 2004. His approval margin was a comfortable 59%. The recall was organized and supervised by the Organization of American States and the Carter Center. Jimmy Carter, noted for his sterling integrity, helped supervise the referendum process. Carter himself confirmed the legitimacy of the procedures. Unlike Americans, Venezuelans can rest assured that their recent elections have not been rigged. Having tenaciously survived several rigorous tests, Chavez is a president who truly represents a majority of his people, and has the chutzpah to go toe to toe with the Neocons.

In 1998, Chavez inherited a nation of extreme "haves" and "have nots". For years, corrupt Oligarchs had plundered the revenue from Venezuela’s rich oil reserves. Chavez rode to office on a wave of populist support for his promises to bring social and economic justice to his nation. When he took the reins of leadership, 3% percent of the population (mostly of white European descent) owned 77% of the country’s land. About 80% of the Venezuelan population was of black and Indian descent. They comprised most of the 21 million poverty-stricken people in a nation with a population of 25 million. Widespread poverty in a nation that sits atop the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere? The word unconscionable could only begin to describe the situation. Enter Hugo Chavez with his grand designs to beat back the economic disparity.

Hollow rhetoric or real promises?

In Venezuela, just under a million children who live in the many shameful shanty towns now receive free education. Three new universities offer a secondary education to 250,000 who would not have had the opportunity for further education under the Oligarchs. By the end of 2006, there will be six more universities. In exchanged for subsidized oil, Chavez has arranged for the immigration of 10,000 Cuban doctors to operate free clinics for the poor. He has tripled the health care budget. Under Chavez, over 100,000 families have received land under his Agrarian Reform Act, despite stiff legal and sometimes violent resistance from landlords. State subsidized markets offer necessities to poor consumers for as little as fifty percent of market cost. In 2004, 84% of the poor in Venezuela saw their income increase 33%. Unemployment decreased from 17% in 2004 to 14% by February of 2005.

How has America fared under the Bush Oligarchy?

In a poll conducted in February of 2005, Chavez’s approval rating in his country was 70%. Bush’s approval rating in April of 2005 was a paltry 45%. The numbers demonstrate who is acting in the interest of their electorate, and who is not. Despite victory (by landslide popular votes) in two presidential elections and the recall, Bush still questions Chavez’s legitimacy. Tremendous controversy surrounded both of Bush’s presidential “victories”, and he lost the popular vote in 2000. Who is in a position to question whom?

Since the Bush Oligarchy came to power, over 1600 Americans have died in an imperialistic war which the Neocons initiated by flagrant lies. The Patriot Act placed stunning restrictions on the civil liberties of Americans as Bush and the Neocons leveraged the fear inspired by 9/11. Theocracy has crept into what is left of America’s democracy through Bush’s "faith based initiatives". Corporate interests predominate over the welfare of individuals. At $5.15 per hour, the pitifully low minimum wage has not increased since 1997. Organized labor continues to weaken as union membership has declined to about 12% of the workforce. Greedy, profiteering corporations like Wal-Mart grow exponentially as they strip-mine the American economy. 45 million Americans do not have health insurance and the Oligarchs are deepening the problem by slashing Medicaid’s budget. Under Bush, the wealth gap has become a chasm. The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s assets, and lay claim to as much wealth as the bottom 95%. The American government is infested with Neocon disciples of Leo Strauss like Paul Wolfowitz and Karl Rove. American leaders are driven by a Machiavellian lust for power and practice deceit like an art-form.

Wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth

Treading in deep water in Iraq, America’s Oligarchs do not have the resources to deal with Chavez in their usual ways. He has fostered a close relationship with long-time "enemy of the state" Fidel Castro. Venezuela is the fifth largest oil producer in the world and accounts for 15% of US oil imports. Chavez has led a resurgence in the power of OPEC to influence the world oil market. Under his leadership, oil-rich developing nations are increasingly demanding a just price for their precious resource to enhance the quality of life for their populaces. Having learned to wield oil as an economic weapon to subdue the Neocons, Chavez presents a tremendous challenge for Rumsfeld and company.

Chavez also represents a growing threat to the Neocon agenda to advance the cause of "freedom and liberty" around the globe. His philosophy of government is that of a "new socialism", which carefully balances democratic principles, a constitution, government intervention in economic matters, and the existence of a private business sector. In contrast, America espouses laisez-faire capitalism and media-induced psychological tyranny masquerading as "freedom and liberty". As evidenced by the occupation in Iraq, George Bush has vowed not to take "no" for an answer. Chavez is forcing Bush to face rejection.

Bush’s media loyalists like Fox have attacked Chavez’s sanity, reputation, competence, and legitimacy. The Neocons have tried to unseat him by supporting a military coup in 2002. Accusations from Chavez, leaks from the CIA, and US history in Latin America all point to a potential CIA assassination attempt against Chavez in the near future. What the Neocons would not give to use their military might to crush Chavez and seize the bountiful oil fields of Venezuela. With Saddam Hussein, the Neocons did not need to throw too much mud to turn public opinion against him. Chavez is another matter. Even the masters of deceit do not lie well enough to discredit him in the court of public opinion. How galling for them that Chavez’s devotion to the poor inspires such fierce loyalty in his supporters, Venezuelan or otherwise.

Undaunted by coups, recall elections, or the $500 million of US military aid to Colombia (his neighbor), Chavez persists in aggressively pursuing his agenda. With unflinching devotion, he works to strengthen his nation, tend to the needs of the poor, and advance his "Bolivarian Revolution". To defend his people, he recently purchased military hardware from Russia, which included 100,000 AK 47s and 10 military helicopters. He is utilizing PDVSA, the state-run oil titan, to finance his social programs for the poor. To the tune of $4 billion per year (drawn from a company with estimated profits of $6.5 billion), Chavez is making good on his promise to share the oil wealth of his nation. He is expanding his profit base by finding new markets for Venezuelan oil in Brazil and China. Chavez has increased the royalties that foreign oil companies (like Chevron) pay to Venezuela. Having raised them from 1% to 16.6%, he is now pushing for 30%. Following the example of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America from European powers, Chavez’s ultimate goal is to form a coalition of independent South American nations to reject US leadership and intervention.

“Hello, Mr. President”

Despite drawing the wrath of the Bush administration for his courageous defiance of their insidious agenda, Chavez remains faithful to his causes. In his weekly addresses to his constituents called "Hello, Mr. President", he continues to express his views opposing the American government quite candidly:

[US government advisers and planners are] "not only planning the death of the world, but are executing it. They are killing the world, our world, and our grandchildren’s world.....(in reference to US imperialistic and environmentally damaging policies)

"....because we have generals, commanders and soldiers who are patriots, and who will not bend their knees before the US empire; they know that there are people with a conscience who they will not be able too confuse through the media they control."

"Look at the example of Iraq; there was a campaign against Saddam Hussein, accusing him of having chemical weapons, accusing him of being a menace, by presenting evidence that resulted to be false, to justify the aggression."

...."poisoned medicine..." and "That is what is killing the peoples of Latin America....This is the path of destabilization, of violence, of war between brothers." (Chavez’s condemnation of Bush’s capitalist free-trade policies)


The world needs him

Controversial as he may be, Hugo Chavez has a spine, and he has stood by his devotion to economic justice. He has weathered multiple political storms. Regardless of the lies perpetrated by the Neocons and their lackeys in the media, Chavez ascended to the presidency, and has maintained office, through legitimate means. Too little time has passed to judge the long-term efficacy of his economic or political ideologies, but his ideals are admirable, and he has done much to enhance the quality of life for the poor of his nation.

His successes notwithstanding, Mr. Chavez has many forces working against him. His fortunes are inextricably linked to the volatile crude oil market. He inherited an economy that was in shambles, and robust economic health is still years away for Venezuela. The wealth gap remains wide despite his programs that have provided desperately needed assistance to the impoverished. Chavez bears the universal burden of being human, all too human, and could fall prey to the corruption that often accompanies power. As a substantial obstacle to Neocon expansionism in Latin America, Chavez has a highly visible target painted on his back. He is in the cross-hairs of a well-armed and experienced hunter. It is a steep grade, but Chavez has the juice to keep climbing.

Bush and his Neocons have the deck stacked in their favor. However, Hugo Chavez is no light-weight and will not go down easily. America’s Oligarchs need to learn their place in the world community, and Chavez appears poised to teach them. The real hope for the perpetuation of human civilization is the success of Chavez, and others like him. We need leaders who will champion the rights of the poor and the plebeians. Strauss’s disciples offer humanity the misery of perpetual war, poverty for the masses, tyranny, and desecration of our planet.

Bush and his Neocons long to awaken from their nightmare in Latin America, but fortunately for the plebeians, their real angst has just begun. Thank you, Mr. Chavez!

Jason Miller, civillibertarian.blogspot.com.

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Halliburton given $30m to expand Guantanamo Bay
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

18 June 2005

A subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has won a $30m (£16m) contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon announcement, giving further details of the planned two-storey jail, complete with air conditioning and exercise and medical facilities, is a further sign that the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is determined to keep the jail in operation.

There are some 520 inmates from 40 countries at Guantanamo, some of them held there for more than three years. The new jail will be capable of holding 220 people. Under the contract with the US Naval Engineering Command, the work is to be finished by the end of July 2006. The final deal could be worth as much as $500m.

The work will be carried out by Halliburton`s contracting subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). It will include site work, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, plumbing and electrical work.

Announcement of the deal comes when the whole future of Guantanamo, recently described by Amnesty International as "the gulag of our times," is under fierce debate in the US. There have been repeated allegations of mistreatment of inmates, bordering on torture.

A recent Pentagon report acknowledged incidents in which the Koran had been desecrated (though not flushed down a toilet, as claimed in a report by Newsweek magazine last month, which detonated deadly riots in Pakistan).

Not only Democrats but also several prominent Republicans - among them Mel Martinez, Florida Senator and former Bush cabinet member - have publicly argued that the damage to America`s image caused by the prison now outweighs any practical benefits it might have. Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has described the prison`s image as a "recruiting agent" for al-Qa`ida.

The administration itself seems divided on the issue. The White House has hinted at a possible closure, with a spokesman declaring that "all options" were under review. But Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld have indicated that the prison will continue to operate. Both insist that there is no practical alternative, and that detainees are decently treated and still providing valuable information in the "war on terror".

The most recent suggestion came this week from a Democratic think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, which urges that long-term inmates be transferred to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and tried before military courts-martial. Low value and low security risk detainees should be transferred back to their home countries.

Like Guantanamo Bay, Halliburton has become something of an image problem for the US, a focus for criticism that Iraq reconstruction contracts have been handed out on a no-bid basis to a small group of US companies, and then subsequently suffered massive cost over-runs.

Mr Cheney headed Halliburton for five years, before resigning to become President Bush`s running mate in the 2000 election.


18 June 2005 11:07

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Politicalcartoons.comMonte Wolverton, The Wolvertoon --
Monte`s work appears regularly in Mad Magazine
[urlWeekly Wolvertoon ]http://www.pacificnet.net/toons/archive.html[/url]

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Cold war, take two
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1509166,00.ht…

US v China will soon be the dominant fault line of global politics
Martin Jacques
Saturday June 18, 2005

Guardian
Ever since 9/11, the US and China have been rubbing along nicely. The US needed China`s support in the war against terror and China is anxious to create the best conditions for its economic growth. But how long will this latest honeymoon last? A string of recent announcements coming out of Washington suggest that the Bush administration may be adopting a rather more abrasive position.

First, China was attacked for the huge wave of textile imports that followed the lifting of the global quota agreement at the beginning of the year, a decision the US had 10 years to prepare for. The US has now imposed quotas on Chinese textiles, as has the EU. Meanwhile the US treasury has demanded that China revalue the yuan within the next six months, describing its currency policies as "highly distortionary". In fact, even if China does revalue the yuan, it will make precious little difference to America`s huge current account deficit; moreover China`s own current account is broadly in balance, suggesting that the case for revaluation is hardly overwhelming.

A fortnight ago Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, claimed that Chinese military spending was much higher than officially admitted, questioned the motives behind the increased expenditure, and called on Beijing to embrace a "more open and representative government". A fortnight earlier it had been reported that the Pentagon is preparing to release a report on the Chinese military that warns that the US should take more seriously the possibility that China might emerge as a strategic rival to America: indeed, such was the tenor of the report that it has generated some controversy within the Bush administration.

Prior to 9/11, the incoming Bush administration had adopted an aggressive stance towards China, describing it as a "strategic competitor" rather than the "strategic partner" preferred by the Clinton administration. But 9/11 brought that to an abrupt end: for almost four years, the relationship between the two countries has been relatively mellow. But perhaps that period is also now drawing to a conclusion. Certainly it would appear that the importance of the anti-terror crusade is waning in the eyes of the Bush administration. The underlying purpose of the war against terror, of course, was never as stated but rather as a lever to begin the transformation of American foreign policy. To regard Bin Laden and al-Qaida as a serious threat to the US was a patent absurdity: even their capacity to wreak havoc has been profoundly limited. This was a case of the Grand Old Duke of York: terrorism was a pretext.

China is a different matter altogether. Bin Laden was never going to pose even the most minuscule threat to the position of the US as the sole superpower. China clearly could, and in the long run certainly will. Its growing economic power will, in time, underpin wider political and military ambitions. A strong sense of this is already evident in east Asia. Since 9/11 China has been extremely proactive and sophisticated in the way it has gone about seeking to enhance its position in east and south Asia, concluding a series of agreements, notably with India, Indonesia and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), aimed at better ties.

Its wider significance is clear. First, this is China`s back yard, and its ability to establish a pivotal position there will be a crucial determinant of its capacity to become a global power. Second, east Asia is destined to become the centre of global affairs, a role previously played by Europe during the cold war. Third, the US remains the dominant security player in the region; as China`s influence grows, however, that of the US will diminish, a process that is already under way. Since 9/11, the US has not been inactive in the region - in particular it has been forging closer links with Japan, directed against China - but its primary attention has been directed elsewhere.

No global power ever gives up its power voluntarily (in the case of the Soviet Union, it simply disintegrated). The US will be no exception. On the contrary, having defeated the USSR in the cold war and now glorying in its status and power as the sole superpower, it will defend its position with ruthless determination. The growing conflict between an extant America and a rising China will become the dominant fault line of global politics. We are not entering a period of calm or quiescence; the contrary in fact. The lines of future conflict are already anticipated in a Pentagon review of America`s military needs leaked by the Wall Street Journal in March: the review explicitly commits to the idea of huge military spending as a way of deterring would-be superpowers, with China explicitly mentioned in this context. Given the huge military expenditure of the US, Rumsfeld`s hypocrisy in criticising China`s still very limited military budget is manifest: the hubris and swagger of the sole superpower.

But even if this pessimism proves correct, we should not expect a simple rerun of the cold war. There may be obvious similarities, notably that the US will once again be one of the protagonists and that China is ruled by a communist party. But there the similarities end. First, China`s economy is immeasurably stronger than the Soviet Union`s ever was and its growth is continuing at breakneck speed: economic strength is the key precondition for global power and influence. Second, unlike the Soviet Union, which chose confrontation and autarky, China has opted for global integration and its own form of capitalism. As a consequence, China is already deeply entwined with the global economy. It is the biggest exporter to the US, the largest recipient of foreign direct investment and the main reason why the US is presently able to live with a huge budget deficit and enjoy an enormous house price bubble. The US`s relationship with China is strangely symbiotic in a way that its relationship with the Soviet Union never was.

Perhaps this will act as some kind of constraint. In practice it already has. The US has blown hot and cold over China ever since the rapprochement between Nixon and Mao, but it has so far always resisted seeking to isolate China or prevent its economic rise. China, for its part, has abided by the dictum of Deng Xiaoping and put the priority of economic growth above all else. But as China and the US bump against each other in a growing number of regions and over an expanding number of issues - trade and financial imbalances between the two, oil and natural resources in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, regional competition in east Asia, not to mention Taiwan and Japan - then this will become progressively more difficult and relations will become increasingly fraught. It is not impossible, indeed, that the rise of China will undermine the advantages of globalisation in the American mind - as the US economist Clyde Prestowitz has recently suggested - leading to increasing acrimony, the end of globalisation as we know it, and a rising tide of protectionism.

The prospect of decades of political tension lies ahead. It will require enormous willpower on the part of the US, China, the EU and Japan to contain those tensions. China will be demonised for its political system and its profound cultural differences - for the first time in modern history, a non-white, non-European-based society will be a global superpower. The west will need to learn to live with difference rather than seeking to denounce and subjugate it. The US will need to learn to contain its primordial desire to have an enemy, be it Native Americans, the Soviet Union, Bin Laden or China. Otherwise the 21st century will be grim indeed.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Japan

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Saturday, June 18, 2005
War News for Saturday, June 18, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers killed, one wounded, five Iraqi soldiers wounded in fighting near Buhriz.

Bring `em on: Two US Marines killed by roadside bomb in Ramadi.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi girl killed, two wounded in roadside bomb attack on US convoy in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Fourteen Iraqi soldiers killed, eight wounded by car bomb in Fallujah.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed, four wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Five Iraqi marines wounded by car bomb near Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Sunni tribal leader assassinated near Mahmoudiya.

Bring `em on: Four Iraqi policemen wounded in small arms attack on US convoy near Baquba.

Bring `em on: Heavy fighting, air strikes continue near Qaim.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis wounded by car bomb in Baghdad.

Operation Whack-a-Mole. "About 1,000 U.S. Marines and Iraqi troops launched a second offensive Saturday against insurgents in restive Anbar province, this time targeting the marshy shores of a remote lake just north of Baghdad. Operation Dagger, or Khanjar in Arabic, aims to uncover insurgent training camps and weapons caches in the southern part of the Lake Tharthar area in central Iraq, some 60 miles northwest of Baghdad. The region was the focus of a major campaign in late March that killed 85 insurgents."

Checkpoints. The U.S. military checkpoints in Iraq lack basic safety measures and endanger civilians and soldiers, Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Friday. In a joint letter to the U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the organizations demanded the military to immediately implement a series of measures recommended in the army’s internal probe into the checkpoint shooting of an Italian intelligent agent."

Picket lines. "Doctors at the main hospital in Baquba, north of Baghdad, have gone on strike, saying they are fed up with constant abuse at the hands of aggressive Iraqi police and soldiers. Staff and security guards at the hospital, the largest in the province with more than 100 doctors and 400 beds, handed a petition to the director on Saturday saying they would only handle emergency cases until their grievances were addressed. `We want the governor and the minister to do something to protect us from the organised terrorism of the police and army,` Mohammed Hazim, a specialist at Baquba General Hospital, said."

Interview with Saddam`s attorney. "Saddam Hussein`s lead Iraqi lawyer, Kaleel Dolami, recently sat down with ABC News producers in Amman, Jordan. Hussein`s Jordanian lawyer, Ziad Al Khasawneh, was also present. The following report is exclusive to ABCNEWS.com. Dolami would not agree to an on-camera or audio interview. Dolami talks about Saddam`s allegations of torture, the dictator`s contention that he was not captured in the `spider hole` and how curious U.S. interrogators have been about his purported weapons of mass destruction." Thanks to alert reader Nechtar.

Riverbend`s greatest hits.

Goopers slime the Red Cross.

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Friday accused a Senate Republican policy committee of peddling “false and unsubstantiated” allegations in an attempt to discredit the humanitarian agency.

Jakob Kellenberger, ICRC president, rejected criticisms made by the committee this week that questioned the ICRC`s impartiality in its dealings with the US, notably over the treatment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay and Iraq.
He added that he was “very confident” of continued US financial support for the ICRC, which helps victims of war and conflict around the world. The US is the biggest contributor to the ICRC`s budget, accounting for more than 20 per cent of the SFr820m ($645m, €530m, £355m) raised last year.

“The paper`s purpose appears to be to discredit the ICRC by putting forward false allegations and unsubstantiated accusations,” Mr Kellenberger said on Friday at the launch of the agency`s 2004 annual report.


Gitmo. "Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, was assaulted in January 2003 after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee. Baker said the MPs, who were told that he was an unruly detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant, inflicted a beating that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. Baker, a Gulf War veteran who reenlisted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was medically retired in April 2004. He said the assault left him with seizures, blackouts, headaches, insomnia and psychological problems. In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Lexington, Ky., Baker asked the Army to reinstate him in a position that would accommodate his medical condition. He said the Army put him on medical retirement against his wishes."

Gitmo:

The US attorney-general defended the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, saying the US government would evaluate the detention centre but had no immediate plans of shutting it down.

Alberto Gonzales was speaking on the final day of a summit that drew home affairs and interior ministers from the Group of Eight industrialised nations.

US President George W Bush`s government is under growing pressure to evaluate the usefulness of the US prison camp in eastern Cuba, where about 520 men accused of links to Afghanistan`s ousted Taliban regime or the al-Qaeda terrorist network are being held.

Some have been held for three years without charge.

"We have Guantanamo because there are people that are captured on the battlefield, and we need to hold them somewhere so they do not go back and fight against American soldiers or the soldiers of our allies fighting in Afghanistan," Gonzales said.


Cheneyburton.

The Pentagon capped a week of intense debate on the future of its prison for terrorism suspects Friday with an announcement that Vice President Dick Cheney`s old firm will build a new, $30 million 220-cell prison block at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root received the work under a $500 million Navy contract from July 2004, according to a Defense Department contract announcement e-mailed to The Herald on Friday.

The $30 million will cover a two-story, air-conditioned building overlooking the Caribbean called Camp Six as well as a security fence. Work should be completed by July 2006 and will include day rooms, exercise areas and space for medical personnel to treat captives.



Whopper Alert!

THE PRESIDENT: "In order for Iraq to be a free country those who are trying to stop the elections and stop a free society from emerging must be defeated.

"And so Prime Minister Allawi and his government, which fully understands that, are working with our generals on the ground to do just that. We will work closely with the government. It`s their government, it`s their country. We`re there at their invitation. And -- but I think there`s a recognition that some of these people have to -- must be defeated, and so that`s what they`re thinking about. That`s what you`re -- that`s why you`re hearing discussions about potential action in Fallujah." Lieutenant AWOL, November 5, 2004. I missed this on the first time. (Emphasis added.)


Commentary

Editorial:

The administration should, as a first step, shut down the Guantánamo prison. Beyond that, Mr. Specter was exactly right when he said Congress must establish legal definitions of detainees from antiterrorist operations, enact rules for their internment and determine their rights under the Geneva Conventions and American law, including what sorts of evidence can be used against them. Those steps would help fix a system in which prisoners have been declared enemy combatants on the basis of confessions extracted under torture by countries working in behalf of American intelligence.

The Bush administration says 9/11 changed the rules and required the invention of new kinds of jails and legal procedures. Even if we accept that flawed premise, it is up to Congress to make new rules in a way that upholds American standards. The current setup - in which politically appointed ideologues make the rules behind closed doors - has done immense harm to the nation`s image and increased the risk to every American in uniform.

A trial "says as much about the society that holds the trial as it does about the individual before it," Commander Swift reminded the Senate. "Our trials in the United States reflect who we are."

The detention camps should meet no less of a standard.


Editorial:

It is time for the United States to close the camp. If there`s a legal basis on which to charge any of the detainees held there, the U.S. government should lay the charges and make its case in U.S. courts. If it cannot do that, it has to let those people go.

Hundreds of suspected enemy combatants have been held incommunicado, some subjected to abuse and torture, in the nearly four years since the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 100 detainees have died in custody in Guantanamo, which is just one camp in a secret network of detention facilities maintained by the CIA. About 520 people are currently detained Guantanamo, without any charges having been laid against them for the most part.

These "enemy combatants" have been kept locked up under the spurious notion that calling them unlawful fighters and keeping them off U.S. soil exempts the administration from accounting for them under international law. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Nor can the alternative to Guantanamo be continued "extraordinary rendition," the practice of shipping prisoners to other countries, such as Syria, where they are tortured, allowing the United States to disclaim any mistreatment of prisoners. Canada`s Maher Arar knows too well how it feels to be shipped off arbitrarily, by U.S. authorities, to a Syrian jail.

As long as it operates, the Guantanamo Bay camp serves as a priceless propaganda tool for every anti-American orator, not to say government, the world over. The abuse of suspects at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has reinforced the view the United States has abandoned its commitment to the rule of law. This impression is reinforced by the way corrective action at Abu Ghraib has fallen principally on low-ranking personnel, and by the absence of any truly independent investigation.


Editorial:

Take the case of Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Muslim Turkish citizen who was traveling in Pakistan shortly after the September 2001 attacks. He`d gone there to study Islam. He was arrested by Pakistani police during a routine bus check on evidence that he had attended a mosque in Germany that fomented anti-American feelings, and that he was friends with a man who conducted a suicide bombing. On that evidence, Kurnaz has been at Guantanamo for three years. Except that the suicide bomber never actually was a suicide bomber. He`s alive and well, and free, and living in Germany, as German authorities told the American military. German investigators also found out that the mosque in question was just another mosque. Nothing to worry about. Even a federal district court judge who reviewed Kurnaz`s file this year, including the secret document supposedly proving his guilt, was bewildered by the flimsiness of the case: "Not only is the document rife with hearsay and lacking in detailed support for its conclusions," the judge said, "but it is also in direct conflict with classified exculpatory documents."

Still, Kurnaz remains at Guantanamo. Cases like that have led even some Republicans, Sen. Mel Martinez among them, to call for closing the prison, albeit with caveats as alarming as Cheney`s "for the most part." Martinez is worried about the "cost-benefit ratio" of the prison. He asked: "Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?" The question was only a rewording of Rumsfeld`s suggestion that if Guantanamo didn`t exist, it would have to be invented elsewhere -- if not in an American jurisdiction, then at least in the prisoners` home countries. But returning the prisoners to their country is not necessarily a good thing if they`re exchanging one extra-judicial prison system for another, especially when the prisoners might be rendered into the hands of torturers, out of sight of all scrutiny.

Whatever may be said about Guantanamo`s shame, it is at least in part in the public eye, focusing attention on the Bush administration`s problem with due process in ways that similar prisons under the CIA`s or the American military`s control do not. Those prisons exist in Afghanistan, in Iraq, on the militarized island of Diego Garcia, but are virtual no-go zones for public scrutiny. That`s no reason to keep Guantanamo going. But closing it would not be the end of the story. It would only bury the story for thousands of similarly held individuals in numerous prisons elsewhere.


Opinion:

The madness of King George and his courtiers may have finally prodded many American royal subjects and peasants out of their stupor.

That`s because so much evidence has mounted over the past three years concerning the kingdom`s scruples.
Let`s recount some and add a few to the scrolls.

No evidence linked Iraq to 9/11. No weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq. But we know from the Downing Street memo that the war against Iraq was planned anyway.

Because of these deceits, more than 1,700 Americans and 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives.

Whatever he`s been fed by his courtiers works wonders for King George`s sleeping habits. As he has admitted, he sleeps well. His only top worries are for the princesses. But they`re not serving in Iraq or Afghanistan now, are they?

His worries don`t include our troops or the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or finding Osama bin Laden.

He has been deluded into believing Iraq is (once again) at a turning point toward "democracy." Time and time again, news headlines from the Pentagon declare, "U.S. troops launch a new offensive in Iraq."


Opinion:

American generals already are saying it could be two years or more before the Iraqi army is skilled enough for the United States to withdraw some of its troops. It`s no wonder that recent polls show most Americans are coming around to Jones` point of view.

But we can`t stop now. The time to turn back was before the first shot was fired. Too many good men and women have died to bring us here.

We can`t turn around and walk back over their bodies to avoid what`s ahead. This is something we have to finish, something we have to get right to make sure they didn`t all die in vain.

So, thanks for the change of heart, Jones. I only wish it had been two years sooner.



Analysis:

More important, however, is the fact that the Downing Street Memo does suggest that the British government did not believe the evidence of Iraq`s WMD programs was strong. As the memo states, "the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The case for the politicization of intelligence is not difficult to make -- it merely involves citing evidence the media ignored at the time. In its March 3, 2003 issue, Newsweek reported what should have been a bombshell: The star defector who supplied some of the most significant information about Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction had told investigators that those weapons no longer existed.

Iraq defector Hussein Kamel -- Saddam Hussein`s son-in-law, who ran Iraq`s unconventional weapons programs -- was debriefed in 1995 about the status of those programs. Some of what Kamel said to the weapons inspectors would become very familiar: 30,000 liters of anthrax had been produced by the Iraqi regime, for example, and four tons of the VX nerve agent. These specific quantities were cited repeatedly by White House officials to make the case for war, and were staples of media coverage in the run-up to war.



Casualty Reports

Local story: California Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: California sailor killed in Iraq.

Local story: Colorado Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Nevada Guardsman dies in Iraq.

Note to Readers



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June 18, 2005
Small town bucks the trend in backing war that took its sons
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1659019_2,00.h…

By Tim Reid in Houma, Louisiana
Tragedy in Iraq has increased support for President Bush in the bayous

THE alligator-filled bayous and shrimp shacks of Houma are a long way from Iraq, but the war has become horribly real in this small Louisiana fishing town.

January 6 was Houma’s darkest day. In one instant, a roadside bomb killed six soldiers from the town’s National Guard unit as they patrolled in their Bradley Fighting Vehicle outside Baghdad. Two more were killed several days later.

It was a shattering blow for such a close-knit community. Few other small American towns have lost so many sons and husbands in Iraq.

None has buried so many in one week. The deaths represented the biggest single loss by a National Guard unit in Iraq.

In a week when polls show public support for the Iraq war, and President Bush, at their lowest point, one would think that the people of Houma would be in the vanguard of that dissent, clamouring for a quick withdrawal.

But in Houma, support for the war has never been so fervent. Question the Iraq campaign and you would probably be run out of town, past the Stars and Stripes fluttering along Main Street, by a community where most of those killed grew up playing football together, or fishing in the swamps.

Lolly Fassbender, whose grandson, Sergeant Huey Fassbender, 24, was one of the victims, said: “We have to stay. For them to come out now, I would be angry. Huey’s death would be in vain.”

In Houma, the growing paradox of Iraq is on vivid display. The United States as a whole has never been so negative about the war. But in many of the small communities where the sacrifice has been the greatest, support for the campaign only intensifies with each loss of life.

With sliding polls and mounting concern in Congress, Mr Bush is to launch a big political offensive on Iraq, starting this month with a landmark visit to Washington by the Iraqi Prime Minister.

More than 100 American troops have died since the beginning of May, bringing the total US death toll to 1,713. Now 58 per cent of Americans disapprove of Mr Bush’s handling of Iraq. Six out of ten want some or all troops withdrawn.

According to another poll for The New York Times and CBS News yesterday, Mr Bush’s approval rating is 42 per cent, one of the lowest of his presidency. On Capitol Hill, some Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for a withdrawal timetable.

Questions are growing about the “Downing Street memo”, which came to light last month and suggested that some British officials believed that the White House was manipulating information before the war to justify its argument to invade Iraq.

Its publication triggered accusations that the Bush Administration fixed intelligence to gather support for the invasion.

But in Houma, National Guard recruitment is steady, in a state that has lost more soldiers per capita than any other in the US.

Since it sent its 126 members of Charlie Company, the 2nd Battalion, 156th Mechanised Infantry Regiment, to Iraq last year, few in Houma have voiced doubts. Sarah Ferguson, who runs a local coffee shop, said: “It’s just hardened attitudes. It’s made us more passionate about the mission.”

Mrs Fassbender said that her grandson had been desperate to go to Iraq. “He was so proud,” she said. “He said he was going to the Super Bowl. He was keeping us safe.”

Mrs Fassbender kept a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings for her grandson’s return. On one page is a clipping declaring: “6 Louisiana Guardsmen Die In Iraq”.

“I’ve continued the scrapbook to show why he was there,” she said, pointing to another headline: “Iraqis Go To The Polls”.

Mrs Fassbender, 67, said: “Every time you hear another one has gone, it cuts through you. I know the pain and heartache another family is about to go through. We all feel the same. Everyone here believes they must stay and finish the job.”

Huey Fassbender’s father, also Huey, said: “Whether the President is right or wrong on Iraq, it doesn’t really matter. These are our sons, our daughters. I have to honour my son. We have to support our soldiers.”

Kurt Comeaux, 34, a parole officer and father of three, was also killed on January 6.

His wife, Tiffany, her house filled with American flags and pictures of her husband, said: “This has just hardened our resolve. I haven’t found any negativity from anyone around here. People just say, ‘If we pull our boys out now, what’s been the point of the whole thing?’ ”

The paradox of Houma, and other communities like it, lies in the legacy of Vietnam. After a war in which the role of the guards and the reserve was very little, Creighton Abrams, who became US Army Chief of Staff in 1972, decided to reverse that policy.

Dr Lewis Sorley, Abrams’s biographer, said: “Abrams felt that if you go to war without the reserves, you will never have the American people with you.”

More than 40 per cent of troops in Iraq are guards or reservists — the firemen, policemen and schoolteachers of the American heartland.

Dr Sorley said: “In a place like Houma, when you have a stake in it, even to the point of losing life, the commitment is such that thinking the cause is reckless would make the loss unbearable. That’s the psychology.”



Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 17, 2005
Juni05: 55


Iraker: Civilian: 290 Police/Mil: 185 Total: 475
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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British Documents: The Pentagon Papers of Our Time?
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_dis…

The so-called Downing Street memos, now seven in number, have been dismissed by some in the press as "old news," but the same could be said of the Pentagon Papers when they were published. As in the previous case, the shock value comes from their official nature, and they bring key questions about deceit and poor judgment in the run-up to the Iraq war back to the forefront for public debate.

By William E. Jackson, Jr.

(June 17, 2005) -- On public radio this week, Walter Pincus, the senior national security reporter for The Washington Post, posed the question: if the statements in the various Downing Street memos are to be dismissed as "old" news--since preparing to go to war in Iraq and questions about intelligence were already "conventional wisdom" and published as such in 2002--then why was so much made of the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s when reporters knew early on, and were writing, that the Vietnam war was a disaster in which the U.S. had made a string of mistakes?

Ironically, it is the same New York Times which bravely published the Pentagon Papers that, as recently as today, is still treating the Downing Street Papers as merely fodder for “antiwar” types.

Even though their importance has been dismissed, or played down, by both the Bush Administration and several leaders of the mainstream news media in the United States, the British government memos leaked to Michael Smith of the Sunday Times of London do constitute “primary” sources from near the heart of government when composing the first draft of an authoritative history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Moreover, all the key questions about the deceit and lack of judgment by the Administration when making the case for war are back on the table for public debate.

Comparable American official documents, at the National Security Council level, have yet to be leaked. The introduction of a Congressional resolution this week calling for military withdrawal from Iraq, and plummeting public support for Bush and U.S. Iraq policies, are bound to encourage leaks from dissident voices
within the White House and the bureaucracies.

---The Seven Inconvenient Memos

How to distinguish between the latest grand total of seven official
documents that made their way from London to American shores? And what is important about them?

Following the revelation of the minutes of the British ministerial meeting held at 10 Downing on July 23, 2002--which strongly suggested that the Bush Administration was “fixing” intelligence to sell a policy of war--this last weekend saw the surfacing of the transcript of a July 2002 Cabinet office briefing paper entitled “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action.” The latter warned: “A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation- building exercise.”

Pincus wrote on the front page of the June 12 Washington Post: "The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23 Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.”

Defense correspondent Smith described it in the Sunday Times of London:"Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The warning said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W. Bush three months earlier. The briefing paper said that since regime change was illegal it was `necessary to create the conditions` which would make it legal."

Then the Los Angeles Times weighed in on June 15 with five more previously classified memos--texts provided by Michael Smith--that helped to flesh out the background to the original DSM: “British Officials Believed the U.S. Favored Military Force a Year Before the War, Documents Show.” These convincingly establish that the Brits more clearly saw the problems ahead and tried to engage the Bush Administration in considering their implications.

For example, in a memo to the Prime Minister on March 14, 2002, Blair’s foreign policy adviser listed some big questions: “how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition [read Chalabi]; what happens the morning after” invasion and the toppling of the Baghdad government. Foreshadowing developments a year before the war started,
British officials in these memos emphasized the importance of UN
diplomacy--which they said might force Saddam into a misstep--and suggested that confronting the Iraqi leader be cast as an effort to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists.

Another memo, to Foreign Secretary Straw, frankly stated that the case against Saddam was weak because the Iraqi leader was not accelerating his weapons programs, and there was scant proof of links to Al Qaeda. Other countries such as Iran appeared closer to getting nuclear weapons; and arguing for regime change in Iraq alone “does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.”

The documents contained little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. Instead, wrote Daniszewski, “the focus” was on “how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the UN so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law.”

There is another sensational revelation in the reporting of
Michael Smith that has not been followed up on at all by major American news outlets. He wrote on May 29: “RAF Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam into War.” British and American aircraft had doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war. The attacks were intensified from May,
six months before the United Nations resolution that P.M. Blair argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war.


--American Press With An Attitude

In trying to explain the lagging coverage of the memos by American newspapers--let alone broadcast outlets for whom such matters were beneath the radar--Michael Smith in a Washington Post on-line chat on Thursday offered this opinion: “[A]s the pressure mounted from the outside, there was a defensive attitude: ‘We have said this before, if you the reader didn`t listen well what can we do?’” Smith continued: “It is one thing for the New
York Times or the Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting within the Prime Minister`s office.

”Think of it this way: All the key players were there (at Downing Street). This was the equivalent of an NSC meeting, with the President, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks all there. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the U.N. to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal, and oh by the way we aren’t preparing for what happens after and no one has the faintest idea what Iraq will be like after a war. Not reportable--are you kidding me?

”The Washington Post came to it late but look at everything it is doing now… Sadly there is no sign of the New York Times changing its sniffy we-told-you-this-already-view! … You can be inaccurate just as much by ignoring something as you can by writing it up and getting it wrong.”

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief of Knight Ridder Newspapers, who co-authored one of the first substantial stories about the memo on May 6 (and picked up by E&P at the time), told Howard Kurtz of The Post this week : "We thought it was newsworthy that the British government interpreted their meetings with members of the administration this way and took from it that
an attack on Iraq was virtually inevitable.” While some in the press
"obviously felt this was old news," the question remains "whether the information provided to the American public at the time was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

Some newspaper editors said they were stymied by the Associated Press`s lack of coverage of the memo. Deborah Seward, AP`s international editor, said in a statement, "There is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner."

But of all the major national newspapers, none have been so
deconstructionist, cavalier, and churlish in treating the memos as The New York Times. Todd Purdum, for example, has declared that the documents are not “shocking.” Official evidence of a rush to war not shocking?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that, for the most part, the American print media’s bringing up the rear “beetlebum” approach in covering the memos constituted a rather blatant dereliction of duty. It indicates a complicity in resisting a re-examination of the official lies on the path to war. It is almost enough to make one believe that major media outlets are afraid to take on the White House’s version of truth, either out of worry over being out of step with other “mainstream media,” or because they fear
losing access to high-level sources, or because top editors supported, and support, the invasion and occupation of Iraq--and in some well-known cases, their own stories “fixed” intelligence to fit the pro-war view.

But what about the Fourth Estate’s integrity before history?



William E. Jackson, Jr. ([e-mail]) is a former arms control official and top legislative aide in Washington, D.C. He is a frequent contributor to E&P on national security and the press.



Find this article at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_dis…

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Conyers hat sich über die Berichterstattung der WaPost über sein Hearing beschwert.
[urlJohn Conyers:
Letter to the Washington Post]http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0618-23.htm[/url]

Neues von der Memo Front. Alle durchgesickterten Memos veröffentlicht.

Secret British government memos show Blair hand wringing over Bush`s Iraq war plans
By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press Writer
http://cbsnewyork.com/international/DowningStreetMemos-ai/re…

06/18/05 LONDON (AP) When Prime Minister Tony Blair`s chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn`t want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about ``regime change`` in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

President Bush wanted Blair`s support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington`s motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.

``U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing,`` Ricketts says in the memo. ``For Iraq, `regime change` does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.``

The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam`s alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America`s top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.

``The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein`s WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September,`` said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

``But even the best survey of Iraq`s WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.``

Details from Rice`s dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage.

The eight memos all labeled ``secret`` or ``confidential`` were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

The eight documents total 36 pages and range from 10-page and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq, to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found.

``The documents show what official inquiries in Britain already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity,`` Dodge said. ``In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war`s legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt.``

Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the postwar instability that was likely among Iraq`s complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated.

The British documents confirm, as well, that ``soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq,`` Dodge said.

Speculation about if and when that would happen ran throughout 2002.

On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea ``an axis of evil.`` U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible.

On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congress voted to authorize Bush to go to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5, 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the Bush administration`s case about Iraq`s weapons to the U.N. Security Council. On March 19-20, the U.S.-led invasion began.

Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been re-elected, defending the conflict for removing a brutal dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both administrations have dismissed the memos as old news.

Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos` contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.

It was in a March 14, 2002, memo that Blair`s chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, told the prime minister about the dinner he had just had with Rice in Washington.

``We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq,`` wrote Manning, who`s now British ambassador to the United States. Rice is now Bush`s secretary of state.

``It is clear that Bush is grateful for your (Blair`s) support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option.``

Manning said, ``Condi`s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed.`` But he also said there were signs of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.

Blair was to meet with Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 8, and Manning told his boss: ``No doubt we need to keep a sense of perspective. But my talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking decisions. He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his Iraq policy.``

A July 21 briefing paper given to officials preparing for a July 23 meeting with Blair says officials must ``ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks.``

``In particular we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective... A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point.``

The British worried that, ``Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired end state would be created, in particular what form of government might replace Saddam Hussein`s regime and the time scale within which it would be possible to identify a successor.``

In the March 22 memo from Foreign Office political director Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Straw, Ricketts outlined how to win public and parliamentary support for a war in Britain: ``We have to be convincing that: the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for; it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).``

Blair`s government has been criticized for releasing an intelligence dossier on Iraq before the war that warned Saddam could launch chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes` notice.

On March 25 Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law.

``If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq,`` Straw wrote. ``In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida.``

He also questioned stability in a post-Saddam Iraq: ``We have also to answer the big question what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything.``



On the Net:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

[urlInformation Clearing House ]http://informationclearinghouse.info/index.html[/url]

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Dieses Dokument war auch schon vor dem Irak-Krieg allgemein zugänglich.

Interview with Hussein Kamel:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article9188.htm

Text of the [urltranscript is here pdf format.]http://informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/unscom950822.pdf[/url]

Gen. Hussein Kamel, the former director of Iraq`s Military Industrialization Corporation, in charge of Iraq`s weapons programme, defected to Jordan on the night of 7 August 1995, together with his brother Col. Saddam Kamel. Hussein Kamel took crates of documents revealing past weapons programmes, and provided these to UNSCOM. Iraq responded by revealing a major store of documents that showed that Iraq had begun an unsuccessful crash programme to develop a nuclear bomb (on 20 August 1995). Hussein and Saddam Kamel agreed to return to Iraq, where they were assassinated (23 February 1996).

The interview was conducted in Amman on 22 August 1995, 15 days after Kamel left Iraq. His interviewers were:

* Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of Unscom (from 1991 to 1997).

* Professor Maurizio Zifferero, deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and head of the inspections team in Iraq.

* Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat who led UNSCOM`s ballistic missile team and former Deputy Director for Operations of UNSCOM.

During the interview, Major Izz al-Din al-Majid (transliterated as Major Ezzeddin) joins the discussion (p.10). Izz al-Din is Saddam Hussein`s cousin, and defected together with the Kamel brothers. He did not return with them to Iraq in 1996, moving instead to Jordan and now to an unknown European country.

In the transcript of the interview, Kamel states categorically:

"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
(p. 13).

Kamel specifically discussed the significance of anthrax, which he portrayed as the "main focus" of the biological programme (pp.7-8). Smidovich asked Kamel: "were weapons and agents destroyed?"

Kamel replied: "nothing remained".

He confirmed that destruction took place "after visits of inspection teams. You have important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." (p.7)

Kamel added: "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal." (p.8)

Furthermore, Kamel describes the elimination of prohibited missiles: "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed." (p.8)

On VX, Kamel claimed: "they put it in bombs during last days of the Iran-Iraq war. They were not used and the programme was terminated." (p.12).

Ekeus asked Kamel: "did you restart VX production after the Iran-Iraq war?"

Kamel replied: "we changed the factory into pesticide production. Part of the establishment started to produce medicine [...] We gave insturctions [sic] not to produce chemical weapons." (p.13).

Despite the significance of these claims, it was not known that Kamel made this assertion until February 2003. Kamel`s claim was first carried on 24 February 2003 by Newsweek, who reported that Kamel told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims (Newsweek, 3/3/03). Newsweek reported that the weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Newsweek reported.

However, these facts were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more", according to Newsweek.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. "It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," Harlow told Reuters the day the report appeared (Reuters, 24 February 2003).

On Wednesday (26 February 2003), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript -- an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive" -- was obtained by Glen Rangwala.
The Significance of Hussein Kamel

Kamel`s departure from Iraq was the major turning point of the inspections saga. As UNSCOM said in their final substantive report:

" the overall period of the Commission`s disarmament work must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamal".

(25 January 1999 letter to U.N. Security Council, Enclosure 1, para.12).

Kamel`s defection has been cited repeatedly by President Bush and leading officials in both the UK and US as evidence that (1) Iraq has not disarmed; (2) inspections cannot disarm it; and (3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq`s weapons.

* Prime Minister Tony Blair in his statement to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, said: "It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam`s son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered."

* President Bush declared in a 7 October 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq`s military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."

* Colin Powell`s 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein`s late son-in-law."

* In a speech on 26 August 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney said 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".

Hussein Kamel was not in the process of providing excuses for the Iraqi regime. Much of the interview is taken up with his criticisms of its mistakes: "They are only interested in themselves and not worried about economics or political state of the country. [..] I can state publicly I will work against the regime." (p.14). And yet, when it comes to prohibited weapons, Kamel is unequivocal: Iraq destroyed these weapons soon after the Gulf War.
The Significance of the Kamel Transcript

The above quotes from President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and Secretary Powell refer to material produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has cited various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many other occasions -- weapons that Iraq produced but which remain unaccounted for. All of these claims refer to weapons produced before 1991. According to Kamel`s transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these weapons in 1991.

Kamel`s statement casts into new light the claims made by the Iraqi government that it destroyed its non-conventional weapons in the period immediately after the end of the Gulf War. This topic remains highly potent, with Hans Blix declaring that "[o]ne of three important questions before us today is how much might remain undeclared and intact from before 1991" (statement of 27 January 2003 to the Security Council). If Kamel is to be taken as seriously as the UK and US administrations have previously held him to be, then his claim that "[a]ll weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed" should be taken seriously.

Text of the transcript is here pdf format.

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June 19, 2005
Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19rich.html?hp

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells`s time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.

That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast`s phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as `entertainment` might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."

That`s one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn`t make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.

Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie`s star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.

But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles`s, there`s one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise`s credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.

The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We`ll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it`s only in the past few years that Welles`s ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe`s Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner`s girlfriends and Paris Hilton`s mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."

Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they`re being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.`s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles`s bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.

But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush`s 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn`t repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise`s desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn`t "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military`s progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it`s fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it`s hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Zu Rich, voriges Posting.

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Da haben einige ihre Drohung endlich wahr gemacht:

Spies
threaten Blair with `smoking gun` over Iraq
Senior intelligence officers kept secret records of meetings after pressure from No 10
By Kim Sengupta and Andy McSmith
08 June 2003


Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair`s staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=41…

Mai 2003
!!!



Wurde aber auch Zeit. Uhoh, es schaut schlecht aus für die Bushies- auch wenn die NYT und WaPo recht haben- für mich ist es eine olle Kamelle, dass die US-Regierung lügt, betrügt, Kriege und Terror inszeniert und sich einen Dreck um Menschenleben oder deren Rechte kümmert.

So gesehen...

Hoffen wir, dass der Spuk bald vorüber ist- so schlimm die Schmerzen auch sein mögen...

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Sit,
du hälst dich mit Bagatellen auf.

Bushs Umfragewerte sind gefallen. Na und? Er ist sowieso nur noch eine `lame duck`.

Andere stellen sich in Position für die Wahlen von 2008.

Mit einem Impeachmentverfahren ist nicht zu rechnen.

Das DSM war nichts anderes als der Beweis für eine Theorie, die schon seit 2 1/2 Jahren bekannt war.

Viel schlimmer ist das totale Versagen der US-Aussenpolitik.

Die USA hat es geschafft innerhalb von knapp 4 Jahren zu dem meist gehassten und verachtesten Land in der Welt zu werden.

Sie haben die sogenannten westlichen Werte der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben und in den Mülleimer der Geschichte entsorgt.

Wann gab es schon mal Zeiten, dass sich chinesische und russische Politiker in aller Öffentlichkeit über die Scheinheiligkeit der jetzigen US-Führung lustig gemacht haben.

Was da im nicht offiziellen Raum abgeht, ist nur zu erahnen.

Nordkorea ist doch nichts anderes, als ein Mittel mit Hilfe eines Gnoms die USA an jedem Tag auf ein Neues vorzuführen.
Sie dürfen jeden Tag aufs Neue in Asien ihr Gesicht verlieren.

Auch sind viele Massaker, die in Asien mit der Duldung der USA oder durch die die USA verübt wurden, nicht vergessen.

Und es sind auch nicht die Forderungen der Neocons vergessen, dass der Feldzug zur Demokratisierung der Welt erst in Peking endet.

Man sollte sich auch der Japaner nicht so sicher sein. Durch den Irakkrieg hat man Japan aus der selbsgewählten Beschränkung von Truppeneinsetzen im Ausland befreit. Die japanische Tradition lebt aber noch weiter.

Was würde in den islamischen Ländern passieren, wenn dort wirklich freie Wahlen erlaubt würden? Es gäbe wohl kein Land, dass proamerikanisch seien würde.

Dann muß man auch noch die Entwicklungen in Südamerika beobachten.

Für die Chinesen sind die USA doch nur die Mastschweine, die man füttern kann und von denen man noch lernen kann.
Und dafür kommen auch eine Menge immer wertloser werdende bedruckter Scheine.

Aber da in den USA der Wissensvorsprung rapide durch ihre katastrophale Schulpolitik und durch die zurückgehende Immigration von Wissenschaftlern zurückgeht und dazu von der Wirtschaft nur noch potemkinsche Dörfer zurückgeblieben sind, wird sich diese chinesische Einstellung auch bald ändern.

Einige vernunftbegabte Wesen in der US-Führung haben das erkannt, und es wird hoffentlich die Uhr zurückgedreht, aber der bis jetzt angerichtet Schaden ist nicht zu schnell zu reparieren.

Wenn die USA dazu noch in der Lage sind, werden sie der Gegenpol zu der chinesischen Großmacht sein. Wenn nicht wird sich das Zentrum der Welt nach Asien verlagern.

Was von Europa übrig bleiben wird bedarf einer längeren Überlegung gerade jetzt nach dem Tief in der Einigung.

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Das ist ein der am meisten gelesenen gestrigen Artikel in der NYTimes

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From left: Adam Brody, Marc Jacobs, Brad Pitt, E. Lynn Harris and John Varvatos.
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[urlGay or Straight? Hard to Tell]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/fashion/sundaystyles/19GAYDAR.html?incamp=article_popular_3[/url]

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Sunday, June 19, 2005

US & UK Bombing raids on Iraq in summer 2002 were illegal

Michael Smith of the London Sunday Times continues his reporting on leaked British memos from 2002 that shed light on the decision-making process that led to the Iraq war. Today he explores the implication of the US/UK bombing campaigns against Iraq, which Gen. Tommy Franks called "spikes of activity." The US and British governments intended the bombing of Iraq to produce two desirable outcomes. First, they hoped that Saddam would retaliate, a retaliation that the Western Powers would be able easily to paint as an act of naked agression against the US and the UK, thus providing a pretext for war against Iraq.

The British government had legal advice that the bombing raids were illegal under the United Nations Charter. (The Charter forbids aggressive war, which is how the bombing was interpreted by the lawyers).

Arguments over the meaning of the UN Charter in the UK come as a surprise to an American, since our government-- the Bush Administration-- not only disgregards the UN charter as "quaint" but also is actively seeking to destroy the international organization.

Smith points out that Bush`s bombing of Iraq in summer of 2002 was also unconstitutional if it aimed at provoking war (which it did, as the memos demonstrate). The US Constitution invests the power to declare War in the Congress.

In the US, however, political and legal discourse is so debased that George W. Bush can get away with declaring that we went to war in Iraq "because we were attacked" on September 11. Bush has never produced any documentary evidence to support his allegation of a Saddam- al-Qaeda link, which most professional intelligence analysts and Middle East experts consider impossible.

posted by Juan @ 6/19/2005 06:35:00 AM

Al-Hakim Hails Iran for its Cultural and Religious Privileges

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the United Iraqi Alliance list that dominates the Iraqi parliament and head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has been visiting Iran for the past few days. He met with Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei and several other high Iranian officials. He said to an Iranian VP,

` For his part, Hakim appreciated the Islamic Republic`s policies toward Iraq. He hailed the massive turnout of Iraqis in election and also briefed Aref on Iraq`s latest developments and problems, particularly in the fields of economy and reconstruction. Hakim said Iran enjoys cultural and religious privileges that other states are deprived of.`



I`m confused. US President George W. Bush more or less put al-Hakim in a leading position in Iraq. Al-Hakim thinks well of Iran and praises its system. But Bush trashes Iran as an execrable dictatorship and theocracy.

Reports from the Iraqi Press for June 16 via BBC World Monitoring:


` Al-Da`wah . . .: Security plan to include armed militias within army ... Al-Ja`fari receives Japanese, UK ambassador in Baghdad ... ... Twenty-three Iraqi army members martyred in Ba`qubah ... [MP] Shirwan al-Wa`ili: Islam is the state`s official religion, main source of legislation ... New measures to defuse fuel crisis ... Flights between Baghdad, Europe resumed (news agencies quoted) ... Wasit governorate records highest unemployment rate in Iraq . . .

Al-Hawzah [Young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr`s weekly]: Russian ambassador discusses Iraq`s political future with Muqtada al-Sadr ... Delegation of [Sunni] Al-Ramadi, Al-Fallujah tribes visit Muqtada al-Sadr ... Mounting pressure on Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq ... De-Ba`thification committee warns of Ba`thist comeback ... Health minister attacked in Al-Najaf ... Full text of the letter sent by Shaykh Ahmad al-Shaybani from Abu-Ghrayb prison ... The real motives behind attacks on barbershops ... Who are the sponsors of terrorism? ... `



For June 15:


` Al-Furat publishes on page 3 a 250-word article by Husayn al-Samarra`i criticizing the electoral list system, which was adopted in the 30 January election in Iraq, because voters do not know for whom they are voting.

Al-Furat publishes on page 3 a 700-word report citing a number of Iraqi women expressing their views regarding drafting the constitution and the importance of ensuring women`s rights in the permanent constitution. . .

Al-Zaman carries on the front page a 150-word report citing a well-known tribesman in Al-Ramadi saying that the Independent Iraqi Popular Forces Grouping will hold an important conference tomorrow, 16 June, which will discuss participation in the drafting of the constitution and the next elections.

Al-Dustur publishes on page 6 a 100-word report saying that a number of activists in the civic organizations in Al-Diyaniyah Governorate held a meeting to discuss the establishment of the Middle Euphrates Union . . .

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 200-word report quoting Muwafaq al-Rubay`i, the National Assembly member and National Security adviser, as saying that Arab Sunnis should have proper representation in the committee drafting the constitution to ensure a true Iraqi constitution for all Iraqis. The report adds that al-Rubay`i visited Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in his house in Al-Najaf.

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 120-word report saying that al-Diwaniyah Governorate Council has decided to restore the name of "Al-Diwaniya" instead of "Al-Qadisiyah," which was used during Saddam`s tenure . . .

Al-Manar al-Yawm runs on page 3 a 2,000-word article by Taha Arif criticizing the Mojahidin-e-Khalq Organization for its terribles crimes it has carried out. The writer says that the recent explosions in Iran were carried out by this organization. `

posted by Juan @ [url6/19/2005 06:23:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/al-hakim-hails-iran-for-its-cultural.html[/url]

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[url`Doonesbury` at War]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/review/19COVERANDER.html[/url]

THE LONG ROAD HOME One Step at a Time. By G. B. Trudeau. Illustrated. 93 pp. Andrews McMeel Publishing. Paper, $9.95.

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June 19, 2005
Gitmo appalling
By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN
http://torontosun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/200…

MIAMI -- Last week Duncan Hunter, chairman of the powerful U.S. House armed services committee, went on TV to rebut charges by Amnesty International that the Bush administration is running "the gulag of our time" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

His ludicrous performance reminded me that my father, who dealt with many politicians when he was chairman of Elgin Watch Co., called congressmen "used car salesmen from Biloxi." Hunter is from California, but the shoe fits.

The San Diego Cicero waved some fruit and a chicken leg at viewers to illustrate Guantanamo`s haute cuisine, declaring its inmates have "never eaten better ... they`ve never been treated better -- courtesy of the American taxpayer!"

Those lucky, lucky 540 Muslims at Gitmo.

One wonders if Hunter plans to spend his next vacation there. Apparently it`s a great, all-inclusive resort, with programs like sleep deprivation, intense noise assault, cigarette burning, water torture, beatings, humiliation. Deluxe wire cages are even included in the package. And what food!

Not to be underthought, VP Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld also rushed to Gitmo`s defence. Cheney advanced the masterful thesis that the camp had to be kept open because it held "bad guys." Rumsfeld claimed it must stay open because taxpayers had invested $100 million US to build it and spend $90 million annually to run it.

The Senate majority leader, Republican Bill Frist, added, "to cut and run because of image problems is the wrong thing to do." Brilliant, Bill. In an earlier time, you might have advised: "Mein Fuhrer, ignore all that stupid criticism of our concentration camps. Stand firm!"

Fortunately, decent Americans find the Guantanamo gulag an outrageous violation of everything the nation stands for. Former president Jimmy Carter, who has become the country`s conscience in a time of growing totalitarian impulses, demanded it be closed, as have a growing number of legislators, including the Republican party`s most courageous senator, Chuck Hegel.

Americans are being told that all Guantanamo inmates are mad-dog terrorists. Not true. Many were rounded up in Afghanistan by local warlords offered $10,000 or more per head by the U.S. for "terrorist" captives.

Some are Pakistanis who were visiting Afghanistan for religious or family matters. Some had joined Taliban forces to fight the Russian-backed Afghan Communist Party known as the Northern Alliance -- not against the U.S. Others were jihadis preparing to fight Uzbekistan`s brutal communist regime or to oppose Indian occupation of Kashmir. Only a handful of real anti-U.S. al-Qaida members are there.

Sen. John McCain, himself a former POW, is right to call for speedy trials of Guantanamo`s inmates and an end to their indefinite jailing. But the past three years have shown that people charged with terrorism are unlikely to get fair trials in post-9/11 America. A military defence lawyer told Congress this week his superiors warned that if he represented a prisoner at Gitmo, "only a guilty plea would be accepted" -- shades of the U.S.S.R.

ABC News revealed the U.S. Navy`s general counsel, Alberto Mora, warned in 2003 that interrogation methods used against Muslim prisoners might expose senior officials to "liability and criminal prosecution."

Guantanamo violates the Geneva Conventions, international and U.S. law. There are reports that in the rest of the secret U.S. gulags in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Diego Garcia, even worse crimes are being committed against those suspected of anti-U.S. activities.

If true, this is a criminal enterprise, and those involved should be prosecuted -- starting at the top.

The White House says Taliban and jihadi fighters were "illegal combatants" deserving no mercy or legal protection. Then what of the 20,000 plus non-uniformed U.S. and British mercenaries operating in Iraq and Afghanistan as "civilian contractors," and non-uniformed U.S. Special Forces?

Guantanamo, just 150 km from Miami, is not a problem of image. It is an arrant violation of every American value. It`s worthy of KGB. Close this disgrace now.

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A gagging order too far
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1509735,…

If it becomes illegal to criticise religious belief, we will lose a precious freedom. And that will not help Muslims
Will Hutton
Sunday June 19, 2005

Observer
Being a Muslim, especially a Muslim woman, in Britain is for many a dispiriting and occasionally terrifying experience. The society that prides itself on tolerance has lost its bearings over Islam. On the streets, the prejudice that Islam is irrationally and murderously violent and menacingly foreign has spawned a subculture of hatred and abuse. If you are a woman in a hijab, being jeered at, even spat at, is routine. Many never venture from their houses.

This is fertile ground for widespread racism and where the law is currently uncertain. Harassment and abuse are certainly illegal, but the threshold that incurs legal action is very high; equally illegal is the expression of hatred, or views that might incite hatred, towards a group or individual for their race.

But the woman in a hijab could be African, Asian or Middle Eastern. It is not her race that makes her the object of hatred; it is her religious belief and culture that require her to dress in such a conspicuously different way and make her part of the hated group.

The law, as currently framed, offers her no systematic protection, and no explicit penalty for a political party, say the BNP, that chooses to make such hatred a central plank of its electoral pitch.

The Commission for Racial Equality and the Association of Chief Police Officers, along with the leaders of all Britain`s faith groups, believe the position is unsustainable and toxic. The CRE thinks it wrong that because Islam is a multiethnic religion, the automatic protection under the Race Relations Act offered to Jews and Sikhs, who unite ethnicity and religion, is not available to Muslims.

The police, when dealing with incidents sparked by hatred against Muslims, want stronger legal backing to justify intervention and, by having a stiffer law, protect themselves from the charge of racism for stopping and searching so many more Muslims when, in truth, their reason is the prevention of terrorism.

And thus the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill has been reintroduced, a seemingly more than justified response to what is actually happening on our streets. Inciting hatred over someone`s religion is to have the same status as inciting hatred for their race, a provision expressly formulated to deal with the Muslim issue.

It all sounds extremely reasonable, but it isn`t. It has crossed another line that is no less dangerous in a liberal society. To incite or express hatred for someone because of the colour of their skin is plainly unacceptable, but to put the expression of views about religion in the same off-limits territory, even if only in tightly drawn circumstances where they incite hatred, is wrong. By protecting belief systems from criticism, it challenges the very heart of why and what we are.

The Home Office understands the line that has been crossed and has done its level best to build in protections. To incite hatred sets a very high bar for any legal action, it says, and expressly does not include making jokes, as some comedians have feared.

The number of prosecutions will be tiny; actions cannot be brought by individuals or groups against each other, but only by the Attorney General, so there won`t be a rash of religious groups suing each other; the European Convention on Human Rights entrenches freedom of expression on religion, so serious reflection and criticism can continue as before.

All that is being attempted, it pleads, is to deal with the worsening situation on our streets. Muslims are being abused every day and need a signal that the host society condemns what is happening and is ready to act.

I agree. Too much criticism of the bill has been insouciant about the rising tide of abuse against Muslims, and to do nothing is not an option. But, equally, any signal that is sent needs both to work and to respect the values of the host society or else it will end up being seriously delegitimised and inflame the sense of the majority that their core values and principles are under as much assault as those of the minority. The reason why the race-hate laws work is that they go with the grain of core British values; incitement for religious hatred is new territory.

Any explanation about the way European civilisation overtook the Islamic world and China, both of which were more advanced until at least the 13th and 14th centuries, and, in China`s case later still, has to incorporate the capacity of Europe to accept the intellectual and practical consequences of the catalytic impact of ideas. Continuing technological innovation drove growth; but behind technological innovation lay the Enlightenment`s willingness, which did not exist elsewhere, to subject every belief and tradition to sceptical inquiry and to accept the practical consequences. This is part of any conceptualisation of modernity; it is at the core of who we are and it is profoundly secular and sometimes abusive about the way religion may hold back human advances.

For myself, I am simultaneously respectful of Islamic culture for its achievements, but intensely critical of the way the Islamic religious belief system condemns the civilisation to pre-modernity, together with an embedded sexism. I find the hijab offensive; it is a symbol of female oppression and relegation of women to second-class status that offends universal principles of human rights.

It is a matter of concern to me as a British citizen that this degree of inequality exists in my country; it is of wider concern that Islam predisposes its adherents to poverty, backwardness and sexism because it incubates deep resentment and, at its extremes, terrorism.

I can write this today. When the bill becomes law, I and many others will be exceptionally wary of expressing any such view, even if formally it is not inciting hatred or intended to. A key debate will be closed down that needs to be had, not least within the British Islamic community itself. On the other hand, daily abuse of Muslims is intolerable. The way to respond is surely the compromise formula suggested by the Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, member of the National Secular Society, in his suggested amendment to the bill: that freedom of expression about religion and culture should remain uncurtailed but prosecutable only if it is used as a pretext for inciting racial hatred. Thus, we offer Muslims more protection than they currently have but, crucially, we do not cross the line into limiting freedom of expression about religion.

The events of 11 September cast a long shadow. There is a terrorist threat on a scale that did not exist before and there is an intensification of Islamophobia. The government would be condemned if it did not respond. But just as in its response to terrorism, where it has been too careless about civil liberties, here it is being too careless about protecting freedom of expression. There are lines that cannot be crossed, even while we have to do more to stamp out intolerable abuse. This is one of them.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Sunday, June 19, 2005
War News for Sunday, June 19, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Correspondent for television channel Al Arabiya seriously wounded in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi soldiers and one civilian killed and thirteen others injured in suicide bomb attack on a checkpoint in Tikrit.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi policemen killed in a raid on their patrol in western Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Nine coalition troops reported killed in mortar attack in Fallujah.

Bring `em on: Casualties reported after car bomb attack outside Shia mosque in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi police officers killed by gunmen in northern Baghdad.

Doctors go on strike in Baquba: Doctors at the main hospital in Baquba, north of Baghdad, have gone on strike, saying they are fed up with constant abuse at the hands of aggressive Iraqi police and soldiers.

More on Operation Whack a Mole: "It`s like hunting birds," said Colonel Steve Davis of the U.S. Marines as he surveyed the ruins of what he said was an insurgent base in Karabila on Saturday. "You shoot a few, the rest fly away. You shoot a few again, the rest fly away again."

Neoconservative doing well in Iranian Elections:

He is seen to be an ultra-conservative, having also been a top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s ideological army.

Following the 1979 Islamic revolution he became a member of the Office for Strengthening Unity. He belonged to the ultra-conservative faction of the OSU. According to other OSU officials, when the idea of storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran was raised in the OSU central committee by Mahmoud Mirdamadi and Abbas Abdi, who later became leading figures in President Mohammad Khatami’s faction, Ahmadinejad suggested storming the Soviet embassy at the same time.

Ahmadinejad’s activities in the Revolutionary Guards were directly related to suppression of dissidents in Iran and terrorist attacks abroad. A recently revealed document has shown his involvement in planning an attempt on the life of the Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie.

He served as governor-general of Ardebil Province (northwest Iran) during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.

He is presently a member of the right-wing Association of Engineers and a member of the central council of the Society of the Devotees of the Islamic Revolution

As mayor of Tehran, he moved to restrict activities in cultural centres in the capital, turning them into religious centres.


Mission Not Accomplished

President George W Bush has rejected calls for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and tried to counter growing impatience with the war by calling it a "vital test" for American security.

"The mission isn`t easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Coming under renewed attack for his rationale for invading Iraq in March 2003, Bush described the conflict as part of the broader US war on terrorism. He said stabilising Iraq and quelling the insurgency were important for American interests.

"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world`s terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror," Bush said.

"By making their stand in Iraq, the terrorists have made Iraq a vital test for the future security of our country and the free world," he added.

A congressional resolution proposed this week calls on the Bush administration to develop a strategy for removing all US troops from Iraq and to begin the withdrawal by October 1 next year. Two Republicans are among its backers.

Opinion and Commentary

Decision to go to War:

Highly classified documents leaked in Britain appear to provide new evidence that President Bush and his national security team decided to invade Iraq much earlier than they have acknowledged and marched to war without dwelling on the potential perils.

The half-dozen memos and option papers, written by top aides to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, buttress previous on-the-record accounts that portray Bush and his advisers as predisposed to oust Saddam Hussein when they took office - and determined to do it at all costs after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Blair is Bush`s closest global partner, and the documents, startlingly frank at times, were never meant to become public.

Now they have rocketed around the Internet and been seized on by opponents of the Iraq war as evidence that the president and his administration were not leveling with the American people about their war preparations.


What will this Action achieve?:

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw questioned the stability of a post-Hussein Iraq.

"We have also to answer the big question, What will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything," he said in a March 25, 2002, memo to Blair.

"Most of the assessments from the U.S. have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq`s WMD threat," he said. "But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better. Iraq has had NO history of democracy, so no one has this habit or experience."


WMD or a Grudge?:

When Prime Minister Tony Blair`s chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn`t want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

President Bush wanted Blair`s support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington`s motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.

"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change` does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."


Goading Saddam was Illegal:

A sharp increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.

The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.

The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.


Rummy in Wonderland!:

Tell Americans the painful truth about what`s going on in Iraq and what must be done to overcome an insurgency that is not in its "last throes," in Vice President Dick Cheney`s absurdly optimistic words.

That`s the message that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must hear. Neither he nor other key members of President George W. Bush`s foreign policy team can continue to try to bridge the yawning gap between what they say is steady improvement in Iraq`s security nightmare and what is actually happening on the ground.

The Pentagon says there are enough U.S. troops in Iraq to defeat the insurgency. U.S. commanders in Iraq, from the lowest to the highest levels, say there are not enough troops deployed to make a significant difference, despite their technological and firepower advantages. As one high-level officer in Iraq put it recently, "We have all the toys but not enough boys." But the Pentagon has no plans to add troops, and even if it did, it is hampered by the failure to meet military recruitment goals by as much as 40 percent, a reflection of growing popular disenchantment with the war.

The paucity of U.S. troops in Iraq and the difficulty in training a sufficient number of Iraqi forces point to two key - and disastrous - decisions Rumsfeld made before the invasion and as the occupation began. He insisted the war could be won with a minimal force, far less than some experienced commanders suggested, because of the superb training and technological superiority of U.S. troops. When it came to the actual invasion and the blitzkrieg defeat of Saddam Hussein`s army, he was right. But he was grievously wrong when it came to the force it would take to secure Iraq afterward and ward off formation of a resistance movement.

That mistake was compounded tragically when the American proconsul in Iraq as occupation chief, Ambassador Paul Bremer, implemented the decision to disband the entire Iraqi army in a misguided attempt at de-Baathification. That left out in the cold 400,000 soldiers with no pay, lots of weapons and a huge grudge. Inevitably, many of them drifted to the nascent insurgency. That decision, it could be argued, provided a bigger boost to the insurgency than any other. And Iraq is still paying for it, in blood and disorder.


Afghanistan Effect:

There are fears of an `Afghanistan effect` in a new generation of young men, inspiring them to fight the Americans in Iraq in the same way that a previous generation flocked to fight the Russians.

In the past six months, old and dormant networks - including some that had been concerned with violence in north Africa, others with the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and others in criminality - have been reactivated across Europe.

Some intelligence sources believe that there are now up to 21 networks active in Europe, some of them linked to more than 60 groups in the Mahgreb area of north Africa, involved in training and recruitment of volunteers, many for suicide bombing missions in Iraq.


Hearts and Minds will follow:

"When you have them by the throat, their minds and hearts will follow," said former US President Richard Nixon. How very wrong he was. The Vietnam War was a humiliating defeat for the US forces. But after all the bloodshed, the senseless deaths and the suffering of maimed and deformed children, nothing was gained from that war.

The Vietnam War was one clear example of how not to fight insurgency. Any regime change by brute military forces is doomed to fail, but George W. Bush and his administration haven’t learned the lesson. History shows that only political solutions solve what is essentially a political and religious problem.

In the case of Iraq, the Bush policy of using unrestrained brute force, torture physical and psychological only serves to intensify the hatred of the Muslim opponents to the U-led invasion. That anger and hatred are so easily inflamed by well-orchestrated propaganda as seen in the aftermath of the Newsweek story on the abuses in the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay where pages of the Muslim sacred book, the Koran, were reportedly flushed down the toilet.

The magazine report was brandished by Imran Khan,a Pakistani politician at a press conference. The report incited riots by extremists in Afghanistan in which 17 people were killed. The Bush administration took Newsweek to task for irresponsible reporting and forced it to apologize. The White House spokesman Scott McClellan called on the magazine to "help repair the damage that has been done." But should it be those responsible for the invasion, torture and widespread prisoner abuse that should be held accountable?

The magazine was exonerated when documents optioned through the US freedom of information act gave eyewitness accounts of acts of desecration of the Koran. These accounts been related by detainees released from US detention in interviews with journalists and the Human Rights Watch.

So the Newsweek report nothing new. The sexual abuse and humiliation inflicted on prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib that so inflamed the Arab world and shocked the West had gone improperly addressed and unpunished. Not a single ranking officer has been reprimanded or held answerable for that.

The reputation of the United States has been sullied too by the failure of the administration to investigate the continuous reports of abuses in its many detention and torture facilities. Forty deaths have been reported and hundreds of innocent suspects have been subjected to brutal interrogations as previously reported in this column. The pressure on journalists from the US administration is a severe blow to the freedom of the press in the United States. How ironic that President George Bush justifies everything he does in the name of freedom.


Life in the Green Zone:

One condition that makes his life there so difficult is the myriad levels of security. Almost every major contractor or organization in the Green Zone has its own security unit. Each one is an entity unto itself. He refers to these security guards as cowboys, strutting around with their guns strapped to their thighs. Many security companies have their own checkpoints in front of their buildings. He said every time he leaves his apartment he must pass through two of these checkpoints on his street alone. It can take him as long as fifteen minutes to pass through them. I asked him if the guards ever recognized him and let him pass without checking him. He said they do recognize him but always search him.

From my own experiences in the Green Zone and from what other people I know who live there have said, life in such a tight environment is not satisfying. It might be a "safe" place but it isn`t real. It doesn`t reflect what is happening in Iraq. Most foreigners who live in the Green Zone never set foot outside its borders. They spend months here but they have no idea what Iraq is really like. It makes me wonder if people inside the Green Zone, particularly U.S. military and government officials, really know what is going on in Iraq at all.


Life in Sadr City:

But security and political empowerment of Sadr City`s estimated 2.5 million residents have brought little improvement to life. Lengthy power cuts and open sewage drains remain the norm. Running water is scarce and many streets are strewn with garbage.

In many ways, the district`s reality is similar to that of other former Iraqi hotspots where the end of violence has failed to change the quality of life. Pledges of reconstruction funds have failed to materialize, been slow in coming or poorly managed.

In the case of Sadr City, the absence of a peace dividend is boosting the standing of Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose militiamen are loyal to his Imam al-Mahdi Army and fought U.S. troops last year.

With that, al-Sadr`s lieutenants have further tightened their hold on the area through an elaborate network of modest but reliable social and religious services and feeding anti-American sentiments.

"The absence of a genuine Iraqi sovereignty and the rule of law is allowing reconstruction funds to be wasted," said Falah Shanshal, a Sadr City legislator and a supporter of al-Sadr. "I am convinced that the funds have been stolen."



Father`s Day

Kentucky National Guard Sgt. Michael Ochs says there are seven reasons he will cherish this Father`s Day -- his seven children.

But there is one important reason he knows he will have to miss it next year -- he will be in Iraq.


# posted by Friendly Fire : 2:48 AM
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[SittinBuII]

Ich halte das nicht für eine Bagatelle.

Es gibt mehr und mehr Stimmen, die treason schreien.

Auch wenn du recht hast, es war seit 2003 bekannt..

Irgendwann stürzen selbst die größten Lügengebäude zusammen. An eine Wahl erst 2008 glaube ich nicht...

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Der Lake Powell liegt oberhalb des Gran Canyon und hat vor über 40 Jahren eine der schönsten Landschaften im nördlichen Arizone überflutet. Allein im Unterlauf des Colorado gibt es mehrer Stauseen, wovon der Lake Powell und der Lake Mead (Las Vegas) die größten sind.

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Houseboat Heaven: Flush It
The "Jewel of the Colorado" Is Gone for Good
By Wade Graham
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op…

June 19, 2005

Exploring Utah`s Lake Powell several weeks ago, I expected to find a wide, placid reservoir. Instead, a friend and I whipped along in a brisk current flowing between 20-foot-high sand banks. Suddenly, the channel narrowed and the smooth water erupted into 6-foot-high standing waves. Our boat flipped. Flushed downstream in the cold, muddy water, we understood what recent hydrology studies have been indicating: The Colorado River is taking back its canyon.

Lake Powell will soon be no more — at least the Lake Powell that Americans have known for nearly 40 years: the green lake shimmering incongruously in the baking red desert of southern Utah and northern Arizona, a play land for houseboaters created when the federal Bureau of Reclamation shut the gates of the new Glen Canyon Dam in 1963.

Sure, the water could rise 30 feet to 50 feet by the end of next month. But it will drop again by the end of August, and keep falling. No matter what the climate, the drought at Lake Powell will never end. "The Jewel of the Colorado" will never be full again. Much of the time, it will sit nearly empty.

You aren`t likely to hear the responsible government agencies acknowledging this or announcing any contingency plans. But they should. They should concede the inevitable end of Lake Powell, celebrate the return of Glen Canyon and take steps to preserve it for future generations by changing the management of the reservoir and dam.

The facts are clear — and startling. Drought didn`t drain the reservoir, as commonly believed. Rising demand for water did. Simply put, we are taking more water out of the river than nature puts in.

The river has supplied an average of 14.6 million acre-feet of water a year over the 110 years records have been kept. (One acre-foot is enough for two typical southwest U.S. families for one year.) For the first two decades after the dam was completed, states with rights to Colorado River water took just 10.6 million acre-feet a year, which left enough water to fill Lake Powell. Still, that took 18 years, a period that included back-to-back 100-year runoff levels. But over the last two decades, population growth has driven demand to virtually equal supply, with users taking 14.4 million acre-feet a year.

Lake Powell has done exactly what it was supposed to do: It served as a savings account against a dry spell. During the drought, downstream users continued to take their business-as-usual allotment, draining the piggy bank. Now, having been tapped, the piggy can never be replenished because there is no longer a water surplus. Lake Powell was a one-trick pony.

That is true today and will be even truer tomorrow because the Colorado River is over-allocated. There are legal rights to take more water from the river than the river has ever supplied. The holders of those paper rights intend to "develop" them in coming years. Every state has plans for new reservoirs, tunnels and diversions.

The Bureau of Reclamation expects that the four Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico will increase their take from 4.2 million acre-feet today to 5.4 million in a few decades, and legally they could take as much as 6 million. That adds up to 15 million acre-feet of annual demand on a river that has supplied just 14.6 million over the last 110 years.

How, then, could Lake Powell ever be refilled? Certainly, there will be flood years on the turbulent Colorado, but even if a couple of back-to-back 100-year storm seasons filled the reservoir to capacity, it would be drawn down almost as fast as it filled. What is far more likely is that the West`s climate will grow warmer, leading to less runoff. A recent study in the Journal of Climatic Change predicts 14% to 18% less stream flow in the Colorado basin with just modest warming of a few degrees — robbing the Upper Basin of 2 million acre-feet a year and leaving Powell empty.

To date, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the seven states with rights (including California, Arizona and Nevada in the Lower Basin) have no plan to address the stark new reality. Instead, they apparently intend to act as though one slightly-above-average snow year has saved them from a permanent drought of their own making.

The nation`s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, is downstream from Lake Powell, at the outlet of the Grand Canyon. Under the policy of "equalization" designed to keep the cold peace between the bitter antagonists of the Upper and Lower basins, Lake Mead and Lake Powell will be kept equally full (or empty).

Even the most conservative hydrological assumptions show that the result will be a rump reservoir in Glen Canyon, partly filling, then draining, every year. Even assuming none of the expected increases in demand and temperatures, Lake Powell will be less than half-full more than half the time. If Upper Basin demand increases as expected, it will be less than one-quarter full more than half the time. If the climate also warms, it will empty for practical purposes almost all the time.

Common sense says water managers should fill Lake Mead first. There is enough storage there for all but the biggest flood years, and existing and planned storage elsewhere in the system is more than enough to catch the remainder. If demand rises or the climate warms, even Mead will not be kept full.

From a strictly practical point of view, Lake Mead is a far better place to store water than Powell, where the cracked sandstone of Glen Canyon sucks up water like a sponge and the high desert sun burns it off like a blowtorch. On average, Lake Powell loses 600,000 acre-feet every year — almost as much as the 660,000 acre-feet Los Angeles uses in one year and twice as much as Las Vegas does. Keeping the two reservoirs equalized creates two lake surfaces, not one, and that means losing 70% more to evaporation than would be lost by filling just Mead. In a future of shortages, this waste will be intolerable.

From an aesthetic and ethical point of view, Glen Canyon is among the worst places in America to bury beneath a reservoir.

Its geological spectacle of sinuous red rock canyons is unique in the world. Its quiet rivers, including 200 miles of the Colorado, and 40 miles each of the San Juan and Escalante, form the biological heart of the Colorado Plateau, nursery of the region`s eight unique species, half of them extinct and the other half endangered. Its cultural resources are unparalleled. Thousands of ancient Indian ruins and artworks went underwater after 1963, and many are resurfacing.

After our mishap, my companion and I looked at the remains of Fort Moqui, a stone Anasazi fort perhaps 1,000 years old, now being battered and drowned again by the rising reservoir. Under a ledge we saw ancient petroglyphs, and nearby, chanced on this inscription: "J W Powell 1872," carved into the rock by the first American to run the Colorado River, Maj. John Wesley Powell.

Though buried by water and mud for 40 years, Glen Canyon and the Colorado River are alive and well. Everywhere, restoration is happening before our eyes. This spring`s runoff is helping clean out the sediment deposits left by the reservoir in the rivers and the 125 smaller side canyons. Willows, cottonwoods and flowers grow. Beavers, otters, birds and native fish are back. The white "bathtub ring," left on the red sandstone by the reservoir water, which some feared would last 1,000 years, is flaking off like cracked mud, giving the rocks back their colors.

It is Glen Canyon, not Lake Powell, which is returning. The Glen`s 1.25 million acres are already managed by the National Park Service as a National Recreation Area — a status designed to manage power-boating that is no longer sufficient as the flat water disappears. The national treasure of Glen Canyon ought to be preserved for future generations as a national park.

It`s an idea first proposed in the 1930s, and it requires nothing more than a name change by Congress and a recognition by the people of the Southwest that the challenges of the future cannot be met by the answers of the past.


Wade Graham is a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute and editor of the journal Hidden Passage. He has written on environmental issues for the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Harper`s, Outside and Environmental History.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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IRAQ INDEX
Tracking Reconstruction and Security
in Post-Saddam Iraq

[urlThe Iraq Index]http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf[/url]is a statistical compilation of economic, public opinion, and security data.
Eine PDF-Datei.


@Sit
ich habe geschrieben
du hälst dich mit Bagatellen auf.

Der Irakkrieg ist keine Bagatelle, das versuche ich mit gesamten Posting zu erklären.
Aber deine Überschätzung der Wirkung vom DSM und den Aktionen von Conyers. Es ist gut gemeint, aber die Wirkung ist gering.
Diese Aktionen sind Bagatellen.

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Picture-perfect killers
Military weapons are often technological marvels but always instruments of death Birds of praise
- Norman Solomon
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/a…
Sunday, June 19, 2005


In his memoir of Vietnam, former war correspondent Jacques Leslie recalls visiting an American aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, when suddenly "I was engulfed in technology, released to a vast metallic universe where nothing grew, where doubt had no place."

The young reporter for the Los Angeles Times found that "the press officers who took turns accompanying me could tell me all about the astonishing mechanics of jet takeoffs and landings, of how the pilots got graded on their bombing accuracy, but they couldn`t say if the pilots thought of people below as they dropped their bombs or ever felt regret. Most of the pilots couldn`t tell me either, preferring to dwell on the marvels of their flying machines."

American media coverage has long glorified such marvels, and the hype about military technology remains profuse. What happens to people on the other side of the awesome firepower is downplayed or ignored, while the awesome weaponry is often presented as implicit further evidence of America`s greatness. It`s hardly objective reporting. Nor is it in any way good, old- fashioned skeptical reporting. Nor does it tell the whole story. It`s mostly mindless cheerleading that avoids asking readers or viewers to think about the terrible carnage and horribly ruined lives the use of such weapons causes.

In January 1991, when the Gulf War`s overwhelming bombardment began, a CNN correspondent remarked on the "sweet beautiful sight" of U.S. bombers leaving runways in Saudi Arabia. CBS correspondent Jim Stewart told viewers about "two days of almost picture-perfect assaults." (Meanwhile, an enemy armament became anthropomorphically sinister. On NBC, reporter Arthur Kent termed the Iraqi Scud missile "an evil weapon," while CNN`s Richard Blystone called it "a quarter-ton of concentrated hatred.") After three weeks of the air war, Newsweek put the U.S. Stealth bomber on the cover. Under the headline, "The New Science of War," was a reassuring subhead, "High-Tech Hardware: How Many Lives Can It Save?"

Seven years later, with anticipation running high for a missile attack on Iraq during the first weeks of 1998, news reports again touted America`s air power as new and improved. "The smart bombs of the Gulf War have gotten smarter, and there will be more of them," USA Today reported happily. The news was filled with footage and upbeat descriptions of cruise missiles, F-117 Stealth bombers, F-16CJ jets and other modern aircraft, with their technical prowess highlighted in detail. Under the circumstances, Iraqi victims would be blips on screens for American TV viewers and military personnel alike.

In a "Morning Edition" broadcast that aired on NPR close to Thanksgiving in 2001, while U.S. bombing of Afghanistan was in its second month, the program`s host Bob Edwards interviewed a 12-year-old boy about a new line of trading cards marketed "to teach children about the war on terrorism" by "featuring photographs and information about the war effort." The elder male was enthusiastic as he compared cards. "I`ve got an Air Force F-16," Edwards said. "The picture`s taken from the bottom so you can see the whole payload there, all the bombs lined up." After the boy replied with a bland "yeah," the news anchor went on: "That`s pretty cool."

A year later, with another war on the near horizon, a USA Today feature article described the B-2 as "a technological marvel." Not only could the bomber "drop 16 of the one-ton satellite-guided bombs in a single mission," it could also "carry eight 5,000-pound `bunker buster` bombs." The massive warhead was "known in Air Force lingo as `the crowd pleaser.` "

Days before the launch of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote that "the Defense Department has evolved highly selective and accurate munitions that can sharply reduce the need to take or receive casualties. The predictions of widespread mayhem turned out to be false last time -- when the weapons (in the Gulf War) were nothing like so accurate." Hitchens went on to proclaim, "It can now be proposed as a practical matter that one is able to fight against a regime and not a people or a nation." However, as a practical matter, such words ended up providing zero comfort to people killed or maimed by ultramodern bombs, cruise missiles, cluster warheads and more pedestrian weapons.

On the media home front, most U.S. outlets paid tribute to the nation`s high-tech weaponry. It was routine when the Washington Post printed a large color diagram under the headline "A Rugged Bird." Unrelated to ornithology, the diagram annotated key features of the AH-64 Apache -- a helicopter excelling as a killing machine. Overall, presumably, readers were supposed to admire the advanced technology; the deadlier the better. In the capital of the world`s only superpower, the Post was cheering.

Adulation for the Pentagon`s arsenal has become a permanent aspect of the war story. Several months into the occupation of Iraq, for instance, at the top of the front page of the New York Times, a color photo showed a gunner aiming his formidable weapon downward from a Black Hawk helicopter, airborne over Baghdad. Underneath the picture was a story lamenting the recent setbacks in Iraq for such U.S. military aircraft: "In two weeks," the article said, "the Black Hawks and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and panache have suddenly become vulnerable." Referring to machinery of death in a reportorial voice, the words "grace" and "panache" were attributed to no one; they hovered as objective characterizations by a newspaper widely seen as epitomizing the highest journalistic standards.

During the U.S. military`s 14th month in Iraq, a New York Times news story -- under the headline "A Full Range of Technology Is Applied to Bomb Fallujah" -- began by reporting that "the air strikes in Fallujah in the past three days by American warplanes and helicopter gunships have been the most intense aerial bombardment in Iraq since major combat ended nearly a year ago."

What followed were a score of paragraphs stuffed with numbing terminology: "Air Force F-15E and F-16 warplanes, and carrier-based F-14 and F-18 fighter- bombers, have dropped about three dozen 500-pound laser-guided bombs ... AH-1W Super Cobra helicopters have hovered over the city, launching Hellfire missiles ... lumbering AC-130 gunships have pounded trucks and cars ferrying fighters with the distinctive thump-thump of 105-millimeter howitzers. British Tornado ground-attack planes are also flying missions ... and remotely piloted Predator reconnaissance aircraft prowl the skies ... the air campaign`s weapons of choice -- 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs ... the Air Force has also dropped 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs, and Maverick missiles ... a Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft is to arrive next week ..."

For the reader, such verbiage affirmed that the "full range of technology" mentioned in the headline was always at the ready to get things under control, whether for the current war or the next one. The piece`s closing paragraph quoted an unnamed pilot, reducing it all to a with-us-or- against-us global perspective writ small: "The good guys were closing in one side, and suddenly we saw Iraqis shooting their own guys in the back, trying to push them forward. So we left those soldiers in front alone and I said, `Let`s get the really bad guys.` We trained our firepower on them. We could see all that from above, and could separate the bad guys from the really bad guys." This article, as it happened, had a Washington dateline.

Official interest in calibrating the lethal accomplishments has varied according to the PR strategy. Three years ago, with military operations settling into a routine in Afghanistan while an invasion of Iraq was on the White House drawing boards, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a CBS interview: "I don`t do body counts. This country tried that in Vietnam and it didn`t work." But more recently, eager to indicate progress in the U.S. war effort, the Pentagon has taken to releasing numbers on how many anti-U.S. fighters have died from the latest clashes in Iraq.

Yet the war victims who commanders are least interested in talking about -- civilians -- are the most prevalent casualties. Journalist Chris Hedges wrote in his 2003 book "What Every Person Should Know About War" that in the wars of the previous decade, "civilian deaths constituted between 75 and 90 percent of all war deaths." Such figures reflect a century-long trend that has turned warriors into a steadily dwindling proportion of war`s dead.

Official U.S. spin combines with the tendencies of mainstream American journalism to preclude sustained media attention to human suffering that results from Uncle Sam`s military ventures. Pentagon technology becomes part of media narratives that reduce carnage to simple-minded storylines. Even in ostensibly sophisticated media venues, the discourse is apt to be black hat/white hat. In the midst of an occupation that`s commonly spun as an effort to help ordinary Iraqis, a view akin to "either-with-us-or-against-us" has been routine.

More than a year ago, while deaths were mounting in Fallujah, the U.S. Marine Corps` retired Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor -- a repeat wartime guest on the PBS "NewsHour" -- told national TV viewers that the Marines were facing difficult challenges. "They`re fighting an irregular organization that does not wear uniforms, that does not subscribe to the laws of war and are mixed in with the population," he said. "And this makes it rather difficult in distinguishing good people from bad people."

While U.S. forces try to sort out who deserves death, it`s easy enough for news watchers to puff up with pride over the latest advances in American military technology. Glorification of the Pentagon`s new weaponry encourages us to feel better about what is being done in our names. But no amount of hype can change the fact that all the weapons are instruments of death.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," from which this article is excerpted. He is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, based in San Francisco. Contact us at [e-mail].


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Das Killing-Street-Memo*
Lasst sie die Schwelle zum Krieg nicht überschreiten
von Norman Solomon
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1453&PHPSESSID=ce480bcc76e…

ZNet 18.06.2005
Es gibt in den USA Leute, die den Betrug um den jüngsten Krieg bloßlegen*, und es gibt solche, die stetig bemüht sind, die Grundlage für den nächsten Krieg zu legen.

Im Memo dieser Leute steht: Lege den Fokus der Berichterstattung auf problematische Jugendliche im Iran. Im Zentrum stehe deren an Nihilismus grenzende Verzweiflung. Weniger Medieninteresse findet hingegen das Wachsen der iranischen Zivilgesellschaft. Viele Tausende junger Leuten im Iran - und deren Eltern - bemühen sich, eine Sozialbewegung für Demokratie und Menschenrechte auf die Beine zu stellen. Sie mag zwar diffus sein, nichtsdestotrotz ist sie kohärent.

Mache es der amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit leicht, wichtige Aspekte der gemeinsamen Vergangenheit von Iran und USA zu verdrängen - oder von vorneherein nichts davon zu erfahren. 1953 organisierten die USA einen Staatsstreich, mit dem der demokratisch gewählte iranische Premierminister gestürzt wurde - ein Demokrat namens Muhammad Mussadiq. An dessen Stelle wurde das brutale Regime des Schah installiert, das das Land ein Vierteljahrhundert lang regierte. Oder man denke daran, wie die US-Regierung Saddam Hussein während des achtjährigen Kriegs gegen den Iran unterstützte. 1980 hatten Saddams Truppen den Iran angegriffen.

Die Bush-Regierung entwirft einen Zeitplan für einen Raketenangriff (der Amerikaner oder der Israelis bzw. der Israelis mit Unterstützung der USA) gegen den Iran. Verlasst euch darauf, die meisten Mitglieder des US-Kongresses werden sich stillschweigend verhalten bzw. diese Vorbereitungen unterstützen - selbst jene, die das Weiße Haus wegen des sogenannten Downing-Street-Memos* kritisieren. Es geht weiter: Stelle den Iran als nuklearen Schweinehund dar - obgleich das Land sich an den Atomwaffensperrvertrag hält (während die israelische Regierung - trotz der israelischen Atomwaffen - sich beharrlich weigert, den Vertrag zu unterschreiben).

Vergifte auf ewig jede Chance auf Abbau der Spannungen zwischen Teheran und Washington.

Drohe implizit mit einer Militäraktion gegen Iran. Damit legst du den demokratischen Aktivisten im Iran neue Steine in den Weg.

Bringe die Präsidentschaftswahl im Iran in Misskredit - obwohl diese mit Mängeln behaftete Wahl ein wichtiges Werkzeug der sich entwickelnden Demokratiebewegung ist, um eine öffentliche Debatte anzuregen und die politischen Prozesse im Land zu vertiefen. `Obwohl`? Vielleicht gerade deshalb.

Stärke die Hardliner im Iran - während du sie (offiziell) denunzierst. Falle zur selben Zeit den Demokratieaktivisten in den Rücken, während du doch behauptest, auf ihrer Seite zu stehen. Sorge dafür, dass Washington die Chancen auf einen demokratischen Prozess im Iran zunichte macht, indem es die Situation massiv anheizt - was es den Verfechtern der Repression im Iran leichter macht zu argumentieren, der Iran sei von einer ausländischen Invasion bedroht.

Und, oberstes Prinzip, sorge dafür, dass die Amerikaner den Iran mit den Augen Washingtons sehen und Washingtons (politisch motivierte) Klischees übernehmen. Dass sie ihn nicht als ein Land sehen, in dem sich ein echter bzw. komplexer politischer Prozess anbahnt. Denn, je weniger die Amerikaner tatsächlich über den Iran wissen, desto leichter wird es sein, ihn mit Raketen anzugreifen.

Norman Solomon hält sich derzeit in Teheran auf. Er ist leitender Direktor des Institute for Policy Accuracy. Sein neues Buch `War Made Easy: How President and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death` ist letzte Woche erschienen. Für weitere Informationen s. www.War Made Easy.com

Anmerkung d. Überetzerin

* siehe www.DowningStreetMemo.com

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CHENEY OFFERS TO TRANSFER DETAINEES TO HIS UNDERGROUND LAIR

Veep Fires New Salvo at Gitmo Critics
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1154&srch=

The debate over the future of the detention center at Guantanamo, Cuba, was ramped up another notch today as Vice President Dick Cheney offered to transfer all detainees held there to the secure undisclosed location he calls home.

The vice president, whose underground lair is believed to be located thousands of feet beneath the earth’s crust, said that his subterranean home is well-equipped to hold thousands of detainees, adding that he would “relish the task” of interrogating them.

“If crybabies like Joe Biden think the detainees are being treated too roughly at Guantanamo, I say ship them down to Camp Cheney,” the vice president said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Tax Shelters in Gstaad, Switzerland. “A couple of days with me and those enemy combatants will be singing like canaries.”

The vice president’s extraordinary offer immediately raised legal questions in the human rights community, who argued that Mr. Cheney was trying to evade the Geneva Conventions against torture by holding detainees in a subterranean bunker that does not have a mailing address.

In response to those arguments, however, the vice president offered a terse rebuttal: “Tough.”

Mr. Cheney, acknowledging that tormenting hundreds of detainees was “too big a job for one man,” said he would seek the assistance of John R. Bolton, President Bush’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations.

“We’re a great team,” Mr. Cheney said. “We’re kind of bad cop, worse cop.”

Elsewhere, the mother of Michael Jackson’s accuser got a public vote of confidence today from Anna Ayala, the woman who claimed she found a finger in her Wendy’s chili.

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Da scheinen einige Mitglieder des Parlament doch Angst zu bekommen, dass sie nicht auf dem richtigen Dampfer sind. Wenn die Stimmung umschlägt muß man schnell auch als Rep dafür sorgen, dass die Wiederwahl 06 gesichert ist, denn sie wollen auch weiterhin ein Stück vom Kuchen abhaben.

Wie oft schlägt das Pendel, wenn zu extrem ausgeschlagen hat, auch wieder zurück.

So langsam ist die Schockstarre nach 9/11 vorbei, aber das heißt noch nicht, dass die Ära der Neocons vorbei ist.

Irgendwie werden sie versuchen den alten Zustand wieder herzustellen, denn nicht umsonst haben sie so lange auf ihre Chance gewartet.

Also warten wir auf den Konter.

Und sie haben mächtige Verbündete die Waffenindustrie, die Ölindustrie, der der Irakkrieg eine Verdoppelung der Preise beschert hat, wobei dieser Krieg günstige Preise sichern sollte. Und viele andere Industriezweige, die prächtig an der Politik des billigen Geldes verdient haben.

Und da das Jüngste Gericht, nach Ansicht der Evangelikalen, sowieso bevorsteht, braucht auch keiner seine Schulden mehr zurückzubezahlen.

Da haben wir eine neue Dreifaltigkeit zusammen, jede hat zwar ein anderes Ziel, aber der Weg dahin passt sehr gut zusammen.

Published on Sunday, June 19, 2005 by The Nation
The Beginning of the End?
by Katrina vanden Heuvel
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=3617

"We see this as the beginning of the end," said Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine who is executive director of the antiwar group Win Without War. "It`s the very beginning of a new wave of activism on this war. There`s a real sense that something is beginning to move." --Los Angeles Times, Friday June 17, 2005

Earlier that day, a friend and longtime antiwar activist left me a voice mail message. Just ten days earlier he told me that he was more depressed about our politics than at anytime in the last 40 years. "Hello, this is..." he said. "I was in Washington yesterday at the rally and at the Conyers hearings. And since I laid a heavy statement on you last week, I just wanted to make a correction. It`s finally over. My despair is over. Something has happened these last ten days that has revived the antiwar issue. It has to do with public opinion polls and casualties and Republicans like Walter Jones and more Democrats standing up. I won`t say how optimistic I am. But something is coming together--you can feel it."

You can feel it.

*Every day brings news of public opinion turning against the occupation--and the President`s conduct of the war. Last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that for the first time since the war began, more than half of the public believes the US invasion has not made the US more secure; and nearly 40 percent described the situation there now as analagous to the Vietnam War. A new Gallup survey finds that almost 60 percent of Americans say the US should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, the largest number in that category ever. And for the first time, most Americans say they would be "upset" if President Bush sent more troops. Gallup also found that 56 percent now feel the war was "not worth it," and 73 percent consider the number of casualties unacceptable.

* Every day brings news of more Democrats coming forward, standing up and introducing "exit strategy" resolutions. (Though, as of yet, leadership isn`t coming from the leadership.) Lynn Woolsey forced a Congressional vote on bipartisan legislation that would have asked Bush to submit a plan to Congress explaining the outlines of an exit strategy from Iraq. Senator Russell Feingold has introduced a nonbinding resolution calling on the Bush Administration to set specific goals for leaving Iraq.

In the House, the International Relations Committee last week voted overwhelmingly, 32 to 9, to call on the White House to develop and submit a plan to Congress for establishing a stable government and military in Iraq that would "permit a decreased US presence" in the country. Congresswomen Maxine Waters (D/CA)--along with 41 Congressional progressives, including Woolsey, John Lewis, Charles Rangel, Jim McGovern, Rush Holt, Marcy Kaptur and Jan Schakowsky--has just formed the "Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus." Its sole purpose, Waters says, "is to be the main agitators in the movement to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan." And Rep John Conyers` impassioned efforts to bring attention to the Downing Street Memo--on Thursday he held hearings on Capitol Hill and then delivered to the White House letters that contained the names of more than 560,000 Americans demanding answers to questions raised by the British memo--has reenergized and refocused opposition to the war.

While the Administration and its allies in Congress are trying to make it seem as if these new initiatives merely reflect Democrats` reading of the polls, I say--bring it on. Let`s welcome more Democrats--and sane Republicans--giving legislative expression and voice to the majority of Americans who want to see our Iraq policy changed. (In fact, according to the recent Gallup poll, Congress appears to be lagging behind the public on the issue: Some 72 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents and 41 percent of Republicans say they favor a partial or complete withdrawal.)

*Every day brings news of another Republican signing on to the bipartisan resolution introduced last Thursday by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC)--the man who brought us "Freedom Fries"--and Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii). That resolution calls for the Bush Administration to announce a plan for the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of the year and to initiate the plan as soon as possible. Maverick Congressman Ron Paul (R/Texas) is already a sponsor, Jim Leach (R/ Iowa) signed on Friday and Howard Coble (R/North Carolina) is considering adding his signature. (With 2006 midterms fast approaching, more Republicans will be hearing from constituents who are growing uneasy about the war. And more GOP members up for reelection may start sounding like Jones, who said in an interview with ABC`s George Stephanopolous last weekend that he votes his conscience first, his constituents second, and his party third. )

But much hard and grinding organizing work remains ahead.

On Monday afternoon, Abercrombie and others are going to sit down with Congressman Jones and other House members to discuss options to advance the resolution and build activism against the war.

They`ll be supported by a national coalition, that includes Win Without War, MoveOn.org, The National Council of Churches, True Majority, Sojourners, Working Assets and the National Organization of Women, which is planning a grassroots outreach campaign encouraging Members of Congress to sign onto the newly introduced bipartisan resolution.

These organizations are going to be concentrating on those members of Congress who should be particularly susceptible to constituent demand about the war. (As Tom Andrews of the invaluable Win Without War group says, "Take it from one who has been there, in Congress loyalty to one`s party leaders and president stops at the `waters edge` of the voters at home.")

"A prairie fire of activism has started," Andrews argues. "Our job now is to fan these flames and get a conflagration of opposition spreading across the country. We are working with our member groups as well as others on a range of action options to build momentum over the next several months. These will include a major action in Washington in September with what I hope will include a complementary Internet based component. Between those marching in DC and those joining through the Internet around the country I am certain that we could have a million Americans demonstrating against the Bush war in September."

The combination of dropping poll numbers, the grinding images of chaos and violence in Iraq, the daily news of young Americans dying in what seems a senseless war and the increasingly active and visible opposition of constituents is bad news for the president and his Congressional allies.

This really can be the beginning of the end of a disastrous war and a bankrupt national security strategy.

© 2005 The Nation

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RED NECK FALLS, TN (IWR News Parody) - At a [urlNathan Bedford Forrest Day]http://www.state.tn.us/sos/bluebook/online/holidays.pdf celebration in Tennessee last night, President Bush denied that he ever used any facts to base his decision on going to war in Iraq in 2002.

"I didn`t fix no facts in that stinking [urlDowning Street memo,]http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/ because I never use facts to make important decisions about things like, cutting taxes, going to war or global warming, in first place!

Shucks, if I had to use facts all the time, I`d never get anything done.

Besides my decisions are based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and that means I don`t need any of your secular homosexual scientific facts to justify anything.

All us Judaeo-Christians have to do is make shit up that we think justifies are so-called moral values and actions. You can`t impeach me for that now can you?

It`s evil people like Albert Einstein that are always causing problems for us fundamentalists.

Hell, if that Copernicus bastard would have kept his damn mouth shut, we all still be living in the gold old days of the Dark Ages!

Heck, no one worried about global warming or health care back then, did they?

Take the man we are honoring here today, [urlNathan Bedford Forrest,]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest he sure didn`t need any stinking facts to become the first Grand Wizard of Klan, did he?

Case closed," said Mr. Bush with a smug smile on his face.[/url][/url][/url]
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Published on Sunday, June 19, 2005 by the Providence Journal (Rhode Island)
More Populism! More Referendums!
by Dan Nagengast
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_2005…

The word populist has popped up in the recent European Union referendums as a dirty word, a stand-in for xenophobia and bigotry, the mark of a far right that is fearful of immigration.

The message comes from the elite. It implies that the powerful could never be nationalist, racist, sexist or classist. And that governments and their leaders are invariably the counter to the forces of darkness.

But populism is really a belief in the virtue of common people. And we need more of it. French and E.U. leaders called France`s 55 percent "no" vote on the proposed E.U. constitution an unholy alliance of the left and right. Indeed, the extreme right did oppose the charter. But so did 70 percent of farmers and 55 percent of people ages 18 to 25 -- and workers voted against it overwhelmingly.

Dutch opposition was even greater, 62 percent. For the BBC World News, Michiel van Hulten, of the Better Europe Foundation, identified the reasons: "The message from France and the Netherlands is that they are unhappy with the way Europe is being built. People are unhappy with the fact that Europe is a project of the elite, not the ordinary people."

Britain quickly shelved its E.U. referendum after the French and Dutch ones.

Do you wonder what would happen if the United States chanced a popular vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or, now, the Central American Free Trade Agreement?

Our leaders, Republican and Democratic, push all these pacts. They talk of modernization and removing archaic trade barriers. They have an almost religious faith that this kind of free-market economics floats all boats; that there is unlimited potential for wealth creation; and that world trade, if freed from regulation, will somehow overcome the problem of finite natural resources.

Truth is, these deals painted as win-win are big wins for a few, small wins for a few more, and big losses for many people, for rural communities, and for the natural-resource base on which our wealth is built. The deals aim to lower the cost of those resources and the cost of labor. They are a way to override conservationist restraint, and to push the environmental and social costs of business onto society and the natural world.

Before the French and Dutch votes, I had hoped that the E.U., along with India and China, would challenge U.S.-led ordering of the world`s political economy to suit our own elites. Granted, international financial interests are hardly attached to countries anymore; they`re equal-opportunity exploiters.

Still, I`d hoped that another big economy -- a united Europe -- and more competition might give a marginally better deal to the farmers, laborers, and rural communities of the world.

Middle-class French and Dutch voters saw through this. They understood that the reordering was not based on their interests.

U.S. leaders might take this as a lesson to never allow such a vote on how the world will be structured -- much better to incite a choice of politicians based on their views of gay marriage and what to do about a dying woman. By focusing our political debate on such issues, our leaders divert voters from matters of greater import, such as the war in Iraq.

There was a referendum of sorts in the Clinton administration`s final days. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman let hog producers decide whether to keep the checkoff for hog promotion. The checkoff is a toll on every hog sold and helps fund hog-producer associations. Many felt that the money was being misused to promote big operations and run family farms out of business. So they voted to discontinue the checkoff, and Glickman obeyed.

But a new agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, came with the Bush administration and reinstated the checkoff. No discussion. No embarrassment. No sense of right or wrong. No symbolic bow to democracy. Just exercise of power.

I think that we need more referendums, and ones that stick. I think voters need a more direct voice. I think our democracy is becoming farcical, skewed as it is by money, lobbyists, and a fuzziness that lets politicians hide behind inflammatory issues to get elected and then cheat their constituents. I think we need a change.

Dan Nagengast, a farmer and the executive director of the Kansas Rural Center, wrote this for the Land Institute`s Prairie Writers Circle, in Salina, Kansas.

© 2005 The Providence Journal Co.

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Seit langer Zeit mal wieder ein neuer Flash von TooStupidToBePresident.com. Viel Spaß:

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June 20, 2005
Bush`s Road Gets Rougher
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/politics/20assess.html?

WASHINGTON, June 19 - Five months after President Bush was sworn in for another four years, his political authority appears to be ebbing, both within his own party, where members of Congress are increasingly if sporadically going their own way, and among Democrats, who have discovered that they pay little or no price for defying him.

In some cases, Mr. Bush is suffering mere political dings that can be patched up, like the votes by the House this past week to buck him on withholding dues to the United Nations and retaining a controversial provision of the USA Patriot Act.

In others, the damage is more than cosmetic, as in the case of stem cell research, an issue on which a good portion of his party is breaking with him. In a few instances - most notably the centerpiece of his second-term agenda, his call to reshape Social Security - he is dangerously close to a fiery wreck that could have lasting consequences for his standing and for the Republican Party.

On Monday, Mr. Bush will face another test of his clout, when the Republican-controlled Senate tries again to overcome Democratic opposition and confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. And with his poll numbers sinking as voters grow more restive about Iraq and the economy, he faces additional big challenges in coming weeks and months, from legislative battles over energy, trade and immigration to the possibility of a divisive Supreme Court confirmation fight.

The cumulative effect of his difficulties in the last few months has been to pierce the sense of dominance that he sought to project after his re-election and to heighten concerns among Republicans in Congress that voters will hold them, as the party in power, responsible for failure to address the issues of most concern to the public.

"The political capital he thought he had has dwindled to very little, and he overstated how much he had to begin with," said Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington.

"Congress is like Wall Street - it operates on fear and greed," Mr. Lichtman said. "The Democrats don`t fear him anymore, and they`re getting greedy, because they think they can beat him. The attitude you see among Republicans in Congress is, my lifeboat first."

In the last week, Mr. Bush has responded by lashing out at Democrats, casting them as obstructionists, a strategy that carries some risk given that it seems to acknowledge an inability by Republicans to carry out a governing platform. Searching as well for a more positive message, the administration, which has always been reluctant to acknowledge that events are not unfolding precisely as planned, has embarked on a public relations campaign intended to reassure Americans that Mr. Bush is attuned to their concerns.

Mr. Bush has offered nothing new in the way of policy but is instead reiterating his views that the war in Iraq is worth the sacrifices it has demanded and that his approaches on issues like energy and trade are the best way of addressing economic jitters. But his message is being undercut somewhat by the more outspoken mavericks in his own party.

Among them are two potential candidates for Mr. Bush`s job: Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who in an interview in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report said the administration`s assertions on Iraq were "disconnected from reality," and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who on NBC`s "Meet the Press" on Sunday disputed Vice President Dick Cheney`s characterization last week of the Iraqi insurgency as being in its last throes.

It is far too early to dismiss Mr. Bush as a lame duck. He remains exceedingly popular among Republicans, he has a skilled and aggressive political team around him, and he has had a way in the past of teasing full or partial victories from dire-looking situations. Even if he has to wheel and deal, he stands a good chance of signing an energy policy bill and a trade agreement with Central American nations this summer.

But he has already had to postpone his next big initiative, an overhaul of the tax code. And barring some crisis that creates another rally-round-the-president effect, analysts said, Mr. Bush`s best opportunity to drive the agenda may be past.

To many Republicans, Mr. Bush`s problems are not unexpected given his willingness to take on politically difficult issues like Social Security and immigration. They say that divisions within the party are manageable and that Mr. Bush`s doggedness and personal appeal ensure that he will still drive the debate on Capitol Hill and around the country, even if he does not get everything he wants.

"More is being done than it appears," said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, pointing to the enactment this year of laws changing the bankruptcy system and limiting class-action lawsuits, as well as Mr. Bush`s success in moving more of his judicial appointments through the Senate.

But, Mr. King added, "it`s still going to be difficult on Social Security and immigration."

"He will be in control of the agenda, but that control is not going to be as emphatic as it was in the first four years," Mr. King said.

Democrats said Mr. Bush`s problems were of his own making, and stemmed from a tendency toward insistence on doing things his way and viewing bipartisanship as nothing more than winning over a few Democrats to get legislation passed.

Mr. Bush and his administration now find themselves with little or no support from Democrats and with a Republican Party that has proved reluctant to support him on a number of fronts.

"Their domestic agenda is really stalled, and they`re pretty much looking for an exit ramp," said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. "They seem to have been unwilling to shift from the politics of a first-term president who has to run for re-election into the clear-eyed policy of a second-term president who wants to be able to point to substantive achievements."

To some extent, Mr. Bush`s problems are a result of diverging political interests: the lawmakers he is asking to support him on difficult issues like Social Security, trade and immigration have to run for re-election, many of them next year, while he has the luxury of thinking about his place in history and reshaping, for the long term, politics and policy.

The current situation also reflects Mr. Bush`s style of not giving an inch until defeat is certain, and only then compromising or capitulating.

At a recent meeting with Republican Congressional leaders, Mr. Bush told them, "We`re on the verge of getting a lot of things done," according to a White House official who was there. The 55 Republican senators have been invited to hold their weekly policy luncheon at the White House on Tuesday, a gesture that is part of an effort by the administration to respond to grumbling among Republicans that the White House has failed to open good lines of communication with Capitol Hill.

"While it`s been a rough 45 days, Bush can and will get back on track, and all those jitters will go away," said Scott W. Reed, a Republican consultant who managed Bob Dole`s 1996 campaign for president.

But Mr. Lichtman said history suggested that it was difficult for second-term presidents to regain their clout in domestic policy once they had dissipated it.

"Second terms have never been redeemed by domestic policy," he said. "It`s very difficult once you`ve had problems in domestic policy, as they almost all do, to come back. To the extent you`ve had them come out successfully, it`s because of foreign affairs."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 19, 2005
Clinton slams Guantánamo Bay
By FT.COM
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050619_21…

Bill Clinton has become the most prominent figure so far to add his voice to criticisms of the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the former president called for the camp, set up to hold suspected terrorists, to "be closed down or cleaned up".

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Mr Clinton joined critics at home and abroad who have singled out the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial and widespread reports of human rights violations at Guantánamo. "It is time that there are no more stories coming out of there about people being abused," he said.

Mr Clinton said the test for judging whether harsh treatment of terrorist suspects was justified was whether it challenged the "fundamental nature" of American society. If the answer is Yes, you have already given the terrorists a profound victory."

The Bush administration has been rocked by criticism of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, which holds more than 500 prisoners, most of them captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr Bush has said that he might be willing to explore alternatives to the detention centre.

The Guantánamo detainees have been classified as "unlawful enemy combatants" rather than prisoners of war and are therefore not subject to the Geneva Convention or to US law. The US military has admitted to using coercive interrogation techniques on prisoners but denied that these amount to torture.

Mr Clinton said uniformed US military personnel had been "very outspoken" about abuses at Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Aside from moral issues, there were two practical objections to the US military abusing prisoners, he said. "If we get a reputation for abusing people it puts our own soldiers much more at risk and second, if you rough up somebody bad enough, they`ll eventually tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to stop doing it." Mr Clinton was careful to avoid criticising the administration on the issue of indefinite detention. In three or four cases, his own administration had resorted to a US law that allows suspected terrorists to be held beyond the normal length of time without trial, if bringing an indictment or trial would compromise intelligence sources.

"It sounds so reasonable but you`re the guy that is in prison and you are not guilty, you could be held there three, four, five years and there has to be some limit to that," he said.

Amnesty International stoked controversy over Guantánamo Bay by calling it "the gulag of our time", however it was criticised for drawing a comparison between US military prison and Soviet-era labour camps.

Last week, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, got into similar hot water for comparing American interrogation techniques to those employed by Hitler and Stalin`s regimes. He later issued a clarification.

During the interview Mr Clinton also discussed his role as special United Nations representative on tsunami relief and the Clinton Global Initiative, his plan to bring together politicians and business people to discuss solutions to some of the world`s most intractable problems.

* © Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Monday, June 20, 2005

45 Dead, Dozens Wounded in Guerrilla Attacks
Restaurant Bombing Mocks Operation Lightning

The Associated Press reports that a guerrilla wearing a bomb belt walked into a restaurant near the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad that was popular with Iraqi police and soldiers, and detonated his payload, killing 23 and wounding 45. Patrick Quinn writes,


` The Baghdad bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest at the Ibn Zanbour restaurant, 400 yards from the main gate of the heavily fortified Green Zone _ U.S. and Iraqi government headquarters. The cafe was popular with Iraqi police and soldiers. The dead included seven police officers. The bodyguards of Iraqi Finance minister Ali Abdel-Amir Allawi and 16 other police were injured, police and hospital officials said. The minister was not in the restaurant. `



Quinn`s details make me wonder if the finance minister sometimes did eat at Ibn Zanbour, and if the guerrillas thought he might be there. At the very least, wounding a man`s body guards is a pretty obvious threat against his person. Allawi is related to current Vice Premier Ahmad Chalabi and to former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A number of high Iraqi government officials have been assassinated in the past two years, and even more middle managers.

It seems obvious that this massive bombing at a key strategic site, near the Green Zone, at a place frequented by the bodyguards, police and troops of the elected government officials, was intended as a refutation of claims made by Interior Minister Bayan Jabr that the sweep of southeastern Sunni neighborhoods in the capital, called "Operation Lightning," has impeded the ability of the guerrillas to operate in Baghdad.

Al-Zaman says that a car bomb near Kazimiyah killed two policemen and two civilians and wounded 9 others.

In the Amariyah district east Baghdad, 7 unidentified corpses were discovered on Sunday.

Wire services reported that two policemen were gunned down in north Baghdad. It adds,


"Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and 13 wounded in a suicide car bombing outside a former palace of ousted leader Saddam Hussein in Tikrit now used as a US military base."



Guerrillas fighting back against current Marine operations in Western Iraq killed one Marine on Sunday. The US claimed to have killed or captured dozens of guerrillas, some of them foreigners. Al-Zaman reports that the Sunni hardline organization, the Association of Muslim Scholars, claimed that US bombing and operations have killed women and children and destroyed homes and other edifices in the area around Karabila and Qaim. Hamdi al-Alusi, a spokesman for the local hospital, said he had seen 10 corpses brought in and that 17 wounded had been treated. He said most of the victims were women and children. A spokesman for the International Red Crescent said that 300 families in Karabila have been left without food or water.

Two former senior Baathists have been shot down near the Shiite holy city of Karbala recently.

Mortar attacks on a police station in Mosul left a 12 year old child dead and 5 other persons wounded.

posted by Juan @ [url6/20/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/45-dead-dozens-wounded-in-guerrilla.html[/url]

Fixing the Intelligence Around the Facts Part Deux

AP has gotten hold of the text of some more Downing Street Memos.

Mark Danner at Tomdispatch.com has further thoughts about the Downing Street Memo and reactions to the dismissals of its significance in the mainstream press.

Justin Raimundo explores one source of the controversy around the Democratic Party hearings held by Congressman John Conyers, which was the criticism voiced by one witness of Israel and its rightwing Zionist supporters in the Bush Administration, for having helped push the US into war against Iraq.

Well, gee, I wonder what was the position of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on whether the US should go to war against Iraq? Ooops, one war wasn`t good enough for him. He wants our young men and women to die in Iran, as well. (Iran is 3 times more populous than Iraq and much bigger geographically--3 times the size of France). Then Sharon and other high Israeli officials tried to peddle the line to the gullible American public that Saddam transferred his (non-existent) chemical and biological weapons to Syria. I can`t prove this was a lie; I know it to be ridiculous on the face of it, and strongly suspect it was another Israeli disinformation campaign aimed at getting the US to go to war against Syria. So if the controversy is over whether the Sharon government egged the US on to war, it isn`t actually controversial. In fact, from Sharon`s point of view the US hasn`t fought enough wars in the Middle East yet.

American Jews were less likely to support the Iraq war than the general US population. So no one should blame "the Jews" for the Iraq War. Mainly they should blame Bush and Cheney and Delay and Frist. But the case for an Iraq War was significantly bolstered by American supporters of Ariel Sharon (by no means all of them Jewish) high in the Bush administration.

By the way, I`ve recently been criticized by Michael Rubin, once of the Pentagon the Office of Special Plans for linking to Bob Dreyfuss. (Rubin charges that Dreyfuss once was involved with Lyndon LaRouche, a political crazy, but then actually admits that Dreyfuss has long ago dissociated himself from the Larouchies for veering to the Right!) This is an old McCarthyite tactic. Rubin smears veteran investigative reporter Dreyfuss, then smears me for linking to him. It is an attempt to create taboos and non-persons. Rational public discourse requires that we all examine ideas put forward by members of the Republic of Letters. These ideas can be rejected or accepted on reasoned grounds. But to say "so and so is beyond the pale" about someone like Dreyfuss is an essentially Stalinist tactic. It is also clear that the Zionist Right especially targets liberal Jewish intellectuals, attempting to revive the kind of anti-Semitism prevalent in late 19th century Europe, which displayed a fear of Jews as progressives.

As in the case of another famous Dreyfus, I give the same answer as Zola: J`accuse!

By the way, Rubin`s ploy is rich given that Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute brought a former LaRouchie in to brief the Pentagon on Saudi Arabia when he was chair of the Defense Advisory Board. Will Rubin promise never to cite or refer to or use any ideas coming from Perle as a result? And, of course, it is a real question as to why anyone would listen to Rubin after he served in Doug Feith`s Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence and perpetrated the fraud of the Iraq-al-Qaeda and Iraq WMD fantasies on the American public. And it is further rich that Rubin publishes his screed in David Horowitz`s Frontpagemag, which is if anything more certifiable than the LaRouchie rags. But it isn`t his associations that we should interact with in Rubin; it is his ideas. If the ideas are flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated. Who he has been hanging out with is less important than whether he has something useful to say in any particular instance. In this particular instance, his keyboard has produced nothing more interesting than a stool sample.

posted by Juan @ [url6/20/2005 06:10:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/fixing-intelligence-around-facts-part.html[/url]

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Tomgram: Mark Danner on Smoking Signposts to Nowhere
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3602

Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press -- no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn`t go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn`t add up to much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn.

This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then memos. As of late last week, four of our five major papers (the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and USA Today) hadn`t even commented on them in their editorial pages. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, complete lack of interest was followed last Monday by a page 11 David Sanger piece (Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn`t Made) that focused on the second of the Downing Street memos, a briefing paper for Tony Blair`s "inner circle," and began: "A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair`s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made ‘no political decisions` to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced."

Compare that to the front-page lead written a day earlier by Michael Smith of the British Sunday Times, who revealed the existence of the document and has been the Woodstein of England on this issue (Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse`):

"Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier."

The headlines the two papers chose more or less tell it all. It`s hard to believe that they are even reporting on the same document. Sanger was obviously capable of reading Smith`s piece and yet his report makes no mention of the April meeting of the two leaders in Crawford explicitly noted in the memo and offers a completely tendentious reading of those supposedly unmade "political decisions." Read the document yourself. It`s clear, when the Brits write, for instance, "[L]ittle thought has been given [in Washington] to creating the political conditions for military action," that they are talking about tactics, about how to move the rest of the world toward an already agreed-upon war. After all, though it`s seldom commented on, this document was entitled, "Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action," and along with the previously released memo was essentially a war-planning document. Both, for instance, discuss the American need for British bases in Cyprus and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. It was, as well, focused on the creation of "an information campaign" and suggested that "[t]ime will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein."

We are talking here about creating the right political preconditions for moving populations toward a war, quite a different matter from not having decided on the war. To write as if this piece reflected a situation in which no "political decisions" had been made (taking that phrase out of all context), without even a single caveat, a single mention of any alternative possible explanation, was bizarre, to say the least.

A day later, the New York Times weighed in with another piece. Written by Todd Purdum and this time carefully labeled "news analysis," it was placed on page 10 and arrived practically exhausted. "But the memos," wrote the world-weary Purdum, "are not the Dead Sea Scrolls. There has been ample evidence for many months, and even years, that top Bush administration figures saw war as inevitable by the summer of 2002."

The Times editors at least had the decency to hide both their pieces deep inside the paper (and the paper remained editorially silent on the subject of the memos). The Washington Post did them one better. On its editorial page, its writers made Purdum look like the soul of cautious reason by publishing Iraq, Then and Now, which had the following dismissal of the memos:

War opponents have been trumpeting several British government memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush administration`s preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President Bush`s deceptions about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why "the mainstream media" have not paid more attention to them. Though we can`t speak for The Post`s news department, the answer appears obvious: The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration`s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.

Of course, the editorial writers might at least have pointed out that, before March 2003, the Post editorial page, now so eager to tell us that we knew it all then, was generally beating the drums for war. If they knew it all then, they evidently couldn`t have cared less that the administration`s "prewar deliberations" bore remarkably little relationship to its prewar statements and claims. Nor did they bother to repeat another boringly obvious point -- that the best of the Post`s reporting on the subject of the administration`s prewar deliberations from journalists like Walter Pincus had, in those prewar days, generally been consigned to the inside pages of the paper, while the administration`s bogus claims about Iraq (which, they now imply, they knew perfectly well were bogus) were regularly front-paged.

Let`s just add that if Post editorialists and Times journalists can`t tell the difference between scattered, generally anonymously sourced, pre-war reports that told us of early Bush administration preparations for war and actual documents on the same subject emerging from the highest reaches of the British government, from the highest intelligence figure in that government who had just met with some of the highest figures in the U.S. government, and was immediately reporting back to what, in essence, was a "war cabinet" -- well, what can you say? To return to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate affairs, long before news on the Papers was broken in 1971 by the Times, you could certainly have pieced together -- as many did -– much about the nature of American war planning in Vietnam, just as long before the Watergate affair became recognizably itself (only months after the 1972 election), you could have read the lonely Woodstein pieces in the Post (and scattered pieces elsewhere) and had a reasonable sense of where the Nixon administration was going. But material from the horse`s mouth, so to speak, directly from Pentagon documents or from Deep Throat himself, that was a very different matter, as is true with the Downing Street memos.

Let Sunday Times reporter Michael Smith -- by his own admission, a British conservative and a supporter of the invasion of Iraq -- explain this, as he did in a recent on-line chat at the Washington Post website, with a bluntness inconceivable for an American reporter considering the subject:

"It is one thing for the New York Times or The Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister`s office. Think of it this way, all the key players were there. This was the equivalent of an NSC (National Security Council) meeting, with the President, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks all there. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the U.N. to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal, and oh by the way we aren`t preparing for what happens after and no-one has the faintest idea what Iraq will be like after a war. Not reportable, are you kidding me?"

Similarly, on the line in the initial Downing Street memo that has been much hemmed and hawed about here -- "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." -- he has this to say:

"There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed and as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA). How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to (CIA director) George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But does all of this even qualify as a news story today? For that you need a tad of context, so here in full is the President`s response when, at a recent news conference with Tony Blair, he was asked about that facts-being-"fixed" reference in the Downing Street memo:

"PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I -- you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of (Tony Blair`s election) race. I`m not sure who "they dropped it out" is, but -- I`m not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.) And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There`s nothing farther from the truth.



    "My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations -- or I went to the United Nations. And so it`s -- look, both us of didn`t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It`s the last option. The consequences of committing the military are -- are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who`ve lost a loved one in combat. It`s the last option that the President must have -- and it`s the last option I know my friend had, as well.



    "And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a -- put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power."

So even today, our President gets up and, in response to these memos, denies that he or Tony Blair made a decision to go to war until the last second ("There`s nothing farther from the truth."), something our papers are now saying we all knew wasn`t so back when. So he lied then, and he lies today on this matter, and somehow this isn`t considered a news story because somewhere, sometime, some reporters on some major papers actually published pieces contradicting him before the Downing Street documents themselves were written? The logic is fascinating. It is also shameful.

As ever, to hear this discussed in a blunt fashion, you have to repair to the Internet, where, at Salon, for instance, you can read Juan Cole writing in The Revenge of Baghdad Bob:

"Bush is trying to give the impression that his going to the United Nations showed his administration`s good faith in trying to disarm Saddam by peaceful means. It does nothing of the sort. In fact, the memo contains key evidence that the entire U.N. strategy was a ploy, dreamed up by the British, to justify a war that Bush had decided to wage long ago... The docile White House press corps, which until the press conference had never asked the president about the Downing Street memo, predictably neglected to press Bush and Blair on those issues, allowing them to get away with mere obfuscation and meaningless non-answers."

I swear, if the American equivalents of the Downing Street memos were to leak (as they will sooner or later), there would be stories all over the world, while our papers would be saying: No news there; we knew it all along. So how have the various memos defied a mainstream media consensus and over these weeks risen, almost despite themselves, into the news, made their way into Congress, onto television, into consciousness?

Well, for one thing, the political Internet simply wouldn`t stop yammering about them. Long before they were discussed in print, they were already up and being analyzed at sites like the War in Context and Antiwar.com. So credit the blogosphere with this one, at least in part. But let`s not create too heroic a tale of the Internet`s influence to match the now vastly overblown tale of the role of the press in the Watergate affair. Part of the answer also involves a shift in the wind -- the wind being, in the case of politics, falling polling figures for the President and Congress. Can`t you feel it? The Bush administration seems somehow to be weakening.

The mainstream media can feel it, too, and weakness is irresistible. Before we`re done, if we`re not careful, we`ll have a heroic tale of how the media saved us all from the Bush administration.

Sadly, the overall story of American press coverage of this administration and its Iraqi war has been a sorry one indeed, though there are distinct exceptions, one of which has been the work done by the Knight Ridder news service. Its reporters in Washington -- Warren Strobel, John Wolcott, and Jonathan Landay among others -- seemed remarkably uncowed by the Bush administration at a time when others were treading lightly indeed. Even now, compare Strobel`s recent piece published under the very un-American sounding headline British documents portray determined U.S. march to war with the reporting norm. It begins: "Highly classified documents leaked in Britain appear to provide new evidence that President Bush and his national security team decided to invade Iraq much earlier than they have acknowledged and marched to war without dwelling on the potential perils." As it happens, Knight Ridder doesn`t have a flagship paper among the majors that would have highlighted its fine reporting, and so its work was essentially buried.

About a month ago, to accompany a forceful analysis by Mark Danner (posted on May 15 at Tomdispatch), the New York Review of Books would become the first publication in this country to put the initial Downing Street memo in print (a striking act for a "review of books" and an indication of just how our major papers have let us down). Recently, John Wolcott of Knight Ridder wrote Danner a brief response and in the July 14th issue of the Review, Danner, who has been on fire this year, considers what to make of the strange media coverage of the memo in this country and why it is important. Thanks to the kindness of the Review`s editors, you can read the exchange here. Tom

Why the Memo Matters
By Mark Danner

(On May 16th, the New York Review of Books put the original Downing Street memo in print in this country for the first time. Mark Danner wrote the accompanying analysis, "The Secret Way to War." In response to that piece, John Walcott of Knight Ridder news service wrote a brief letter and Danner, in answering, has now taken the opportunity to return to the significance of the Downing Street memo and the press coverage of it. This exchange will appear in the July 14th issue of the New York Review of Books, on newsstands June 20th.)

To the Editors:

Mark Danner`s excellent article on the Bush administration`s path to war in Iraq [The Secret Way to War, NYR, June 9] missed a couple of important signposts.

On October 11, 2001, Knight Ridder reported that less than a month after the September 11 attacks senior Pentagon officials who wanted to expand the war against terrorism to Iraq had authorized a trip to Great Britain in September by former CIA director James Woolsey in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein had played a role in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Then, on February 13, 2002, nearly six months before the Downing Street memo was written, Knight Ridder reported that President Bush had decided to oust Saddam Hussein and had ordered the CIA, the Pentagon, and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic, and covert steps to achieve that goal. Six days later, former Senator Bob Graham of Florida reports in his book, he was astounded when General Tommy Franks told him during a visit to the US Central Command in Tampa that the administration was shifting resources away from the pursuit of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to prepare for war in Iraq.

John Walcott
Washington Bureau Chief
Knight Ridder

Mark Danner replies:

John Walcott is proud of his bureau`s reporting, and he should be. As my colleague Michael Massing has written in the pages of the New York Review of Books, during the lead-up to the Iraq war Knight Ridder reporters had an enviable and unexampled record of independence and success. But Mr. Walcott`s statement that in my article "The Secret Way to War" I "missed a couple of important signposts" brings up an obvious question: Signposts on the way to what? What exactly does the Downing Street memo (which is simply an official account of a British security cabinet meeting in July 2002) and related documents that have since appeared, prove? And why has the American press in large part still resisted acknowledging the story the documents tell?

As I wrote in my article,

"The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo...is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to ‘fix,` as it were, what Blair will later call ‘the political context.` Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as ‘C` [the chief of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA] points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government – ‘had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime`s record.` This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street."

Those "political concerns" centered on the fact that, as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw points out, "the case [for going to war] was thin" since, as the Attorney General points out, "the desire for regime change [in Iraq] was not a legal base for military action." In order to secure such a legal base, the British officials agree, the allies must contrive to win the approval of the United Nations Security Council, and the Foreign Secretary puts forward a way to do that: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors." Prime Minister Tony Blair makes very clear the point of such an ultimatum: "It would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the inspectors."

On February 13, 2002 -- five months before this British cabinet meeting, and thirteen months before the war began -- the second of the articles Mr. Walcott mentions had appeared, under his and Walter P. Strobel`s byline and the stark headline Bush Has Decided to Overthrow Hussein. The article concludes this way:

"Many nations...can be expected to question the legality of the United States unilaterally removing another country`s government, no matter how distasteful. But a senior State Department official, while unable to provide the precise legal authority for such a move, said, ‘It`s not hard to make the case that Iraq is a threat to international peace and security.`... A diplomatic offensive aimed at generating international support for overthrowing Saddam`s regime is likely to precede any attack on Iraq...

"The United States, perhaps with UN backing, is then expected to demand that Saddam readmit inspectors to root out Iraq`s chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs... If Baghdad refuses to readmit inspectors or if Saddam prevents them from carrying out their work, as he has in the past, Bush would have a pretext for action."

Thus the stratagem that the British would successfully urge on their American allies by late that summer was already under discussion within the State Department -- five months before the Downing Street meeting in July 2002, and more than a year before the war began.

Again, what does all this prove? From the point of view of "the senior State Department official," no doubt, such an admission leaked to a Knight Ridder reporter was an opening public salvo in the bureaucratic struggle that reached a climax that August, when President Bush finally accepted the argument of his secretary of state, and his British allies, and went "the United Nations route." Just in the way that unnoticed but prophetic intelligence concealed in a wealth of "chatter" is outlined brightly by future events, this leak now seems like a clear prophetic disclosure about what was to come, having been confirmed by what did in fact happen. But the Downing Street memo makes clear that at the time the "senior State Department official" spoke to the Knight Ridder reporters the strategy had not yet been decided. The memo, moreover, is not an anonymous statement to reporters but a record of what Britain`s highest security officials actually said. It tells us much about how the decision was made, and shows decisively that, as I wrote in my article, "the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible."

The Knight Ridder pieces bring up a larger issue. It is a source of some irony that one of the obstacles to gaining recognition for the Downing Street memo in the American press has been the largely unspoken notion among reporters and editors that the story the memo tells is "nothing new." I say irony because we see in this an odd and familiar narrative from our current world of "frozen scandal" -- so-called scandals, that is, in which we have revelation but not a true investigation or punishment: scandals we are forced to live with. A story is told the first time but hardly acknowledged (as with the Knight Ridder piece), largely because the broader story the government is telling drowns it out. When the story is later confirmed by official documents, in this case the Downing Street memorandum, the documents are largely dismissed because they contain "nothing new."

Part of this comes down to the question of what, in our current political and journalistic world, constitutes a "fact." How do we actually prove the truth of a story, such as the rather obvious one that, as the Knight Ridder headline had it, "Bush has decided to overthrow Hussein" many months before the war and the congressional resolution authorizing it, despite the President`s protestations that "no decision had been made"? How would one prove the truth of the story that fully eight months before the invasion of Iraq, as the head of British intelligence reports to his prime minister and his cabinet colleagues upon his return from Washington in July 2002, "the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy"? Michael Kinsley, in a recent article largely dismissing the Downing Street memo, remarks about this sentence:

"Of course, if ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,` rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush`s intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that was true and a half. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the war in Iraq. But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing the facts."

Consider for a moment this paragraph, which strikes me as a perfect little poem on our current political and journalistic state. Kinsley accepts as "true and a half" that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" -- that is, after all, "the Bush II governing style" -- but rejects the notion that the Downing Street memo actually proves this, since, presumably, the head of British intelligence "does [not] assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing the facts." Kinsley does not say from whom he thinks the chief of British intelligence, in reporting to his prime minister "on his recent talks in Washington," might have derived that information, if not "actual decision makers." (In fact, as the London Sunday Times reported, among the people he saw was his American counterpart, director of central intelligence George Tenet.) Kinsley does say that if the point, which he accepts as true -- indeed, almost blithely dismissing all who might doubt it -- could in fact be proved, it would be "pretty good evidence of Bush`s intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right."

One might ask what would convince this writer, and many others, of the truth of what, apparently, they already know, and accept, and acknowledge that they know and accept. What could be said to establish "truth" -- to "prove it"? Perhaps a true congressional investigation of the way the administration used intelligence before the war -- an investigation of the kind that, as I wrote in my article, was promised by the Senate Intelligence Committee, then thoughtfully postponed until after the election -- though one might think the question might have had some relevance to Americans in deciding for whom to vote -- then finally, and quietly, abandoned. Instead, the Senate committee produced a report that, while powerfully damning on its own terms, explicitly excluded the critical question of how administration officials made use of the intelligence that was supplied them.

Still, Kinsley`s column, and the cynical and impotent attitude it represents, suggests that such an investigation, if it occurred, might still not be adequate to make a publicly acceptable fact out of what everyone now knows and accepts. The column bears the perfect headline, "No Smoking Gun," which suggests that failing the discovery of a tape recording in which President Bush is quoted explicitly ordering George Tenet that he should "fix the intelligence and facts around the policy," many will never regard the case as proved -- though all the while accepting, of course, and admitting that they accept, that this is indeed what happened. The so-called "rules of objective journalism" dovetail with the disciplined functioning of a one-party government to keep the political debate willfully opaque and stupid.

So: if the excellent Knight Ridder articles by Mr. Walcott and his colleagues do indeed represent "signposts," then signposts on the way to what? American citizens find themselves on a very peculiar road, stumbling blindly through a dark wood. Having had before the war rather clear evidence that the Bush administration had decided to go to war even as it was claiming it was trying to avert war, we are now confronted with an escalating series of "disclosures" proving that the original story, despite the broad unwillingness to accept it, was in fact true.

Many in Congress, including many leading Democrats who voted to give the President the authority to go to war -- fearing the political consequences of opposing him -- and thus welcomed his soothing arguments that such a vote would enable him to avoid war rather than to undertake it, now find themselves in an especially difficult position, claiming, as Senator John Kerry did during the presidential campaign, that they were "misled" into supporting a war that they believed they were voting to help prevent. This argument is embarrassingly thin but it remains morally incriminating enough to go on confusing and corrupting a nascent public debate on Iraq that is sure to become more difficult and painful.

Whether or not the Downing Street memo could be called a "smoking gun," it has long since become clear that the UN inspections policy that, given time, could in fact have prevented war -- by revealing, as it eventually would have, that Saddam had no threatening stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction" -- was used by the administration as a pretext: a means to persuade the country to begin a war that need never have been fought. It was an exceedingly clever pretext, for every action preparing for war could by definition be construed to be an action intended to avert it -- as necessary to convince Saddam that war was imminent. According to this rhetorical stratagem, the actions, whether preparing to wage war or seeking to avert it, merge, become indistinguishable. Failing the emergence of a time-stamped recording of President Bush declaring, "I have today decided to go to war with Saddam and all this inspection stuff is rubbish," we are unlikely to recover the kind of "smoking gun" that Kinsley and others seem to demand.

Failing that, the most reliable way to distinguish the true intentions of Bush and his officials is by looking at what they actually did, and the fact is that, despite the protestations of many in the United Nations and throughout the world, they refused to let the inspections run their course. What is more, the arguments of the President and others in his administration retrospectively justifying the war after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- stressing that Saddam would always have been a threat because he could have "reconstituted" his weapons programs -- make a mockery of the proposition that the administration would have been willing to leave him in power, even if the inspectors had been allowed sufficient time to prove before the war, as their colleagues did after it, that no weapons existed in Iraq.

We might believe that we are past such matters now. Alas, as Americans go on dying in Iraq and their fellow citizens grow ever more impatient with the war, the story of its beginning, clouded with propaganda and controversy as it is, will become more important, not less. Consider the strong warning put forward in a recently released British Cabinet document dated two days before the Downing Street memo (and eight months before the war), that "the military occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." On this point, as the British document prophetically observes, "US military plans are virtually silent." So too were America`s leaders, and we live with the consequences of that silence. As support for the war collapses, the cost will become clear: for most citizens, 1,700 American dead later -- tens of thousands of Iraqi dead later -- the war`s beginning remains as murky and indistinct as its ending.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com

This article appears in the July 14th issue of The New York Review of Books

Copyright 2005 Mark Danner


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The US war with Iran has already begun
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article9199.htm

By Scott Ritter

06/19/05 "Aljazeera" - - Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the `execute` orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.

It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of "diplomacy" and a desire for a "peaceful" resolution to the Iranian question.

But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah`s to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.

"Liberation" and the spread of "democracy" have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

By the intensity of the "liberation/democracy" rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool`s dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation`s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein`s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA`s Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of "one man`s freedom fighter is another man`s terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.

But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld`s interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan`s role in the upcoming war with Iran.

The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Persian Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

A much shorter route to Tehran now exists - the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003.

America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.

Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone`s heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.

Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, and author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America`s Intelligence Conspiracy, to be published by I B Tauris in October 2005.

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Monday, June 20, 2005
War News for Monday, June 20, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: As many as twenty policemen killed and fifty wounded in suicide bomb attack during roll call at police headquarters in Arbil. This other news link puts the dead at forty.

Bring `em on: Twenty three people killed and thirty six wounded in a suicide bomb attack on a restaurant popular with Iraqi security forces a few hundred yards from the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Five Iraqi security force members killed in car bomb attack in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed in IED attack in Tal Afar.

Bring `em on: The bodies of seven executed Iraqis found late Saturday in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US Marine killed by small arms fire near the Syrian border.

Totally Implausable: A key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors says today that claims the government made about Iraq`s weapons programme were "totally implausible". He tells the Guardian: "I`d read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there`s no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too".

Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the UN in New York during the run-up to the invasion, resigned from the FO last year, after giving evidence to the Butler inquiry.

US Allies resist secret deportations: U.S. allies have begun to resist Washington`s secretive role in spiriting away terror suspects: Italy is investigating the disappearance of one accused militant as a kidnapping, Sweden wrote rules to assert its authority over outside agents and Canada is holding hearings after one of its citizens was sent to Syria.

At least two of the cases bear the hallmarks of the CIA`s "extraordinary rendition" program — stepped up after Sept. 11 — in which the Bush administration has transferred dozens of suspects to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible torture.

Senator Chuck Hagel does not drink the kool-aid: "The White House is completely disconnected from reality," said Hagel. "It`s like they`re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we`re losing in Iraq," said Hagel, who added that increasingly, fellow Republicans are coming to share his view.

"More and more of my colleagues up here are concerned," he said.

Senator John McCain has a lucid moment also: He disagreed Sunday with Vice President Dick Cheney`s assertion that the insurgency in Iraq is in its "last throes," and called on the Bush administration to stop telling Americans victory is around the corner.

Iraqi official has accused the US forces of "indiscriminate killing" and destruction in the Iraqi town of Al-Qa`im, on the Syrian border.

82 Iraqi members of parliament call on occupation forces to leave.

Weak links in Washington`s war on terror make it unlikely that Osama bin Laden will be apprehended in the near future, CIA Director Porter Goss said in a magazine interview, although he has an "excellent idea" of the Al-Qaeda leader`s whereabouts.

"I have an excellent idea of where (Osama bin Laden) is," Goss told Time in an interview set to hit newsstands Monday.

But he added: "In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we`re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. Bin Laden to justice."

CNN Late Edition:

BLITZER: Do you have an excellent idea of where Osama Bin Laden is?

REP. CURT WELDON (R), PENNSYLVANIA: Well, Wolf, not right now I don`t. But I have given three specific instances to the CIA, two to Porter Goss and one to George Tenet over the past two years. I`m confident that I know for sure he`s been in and out of Iran, where Ayatollah Khomenei has been protecting him with his Revolutionary Guard.

Two years ago, he was in the southern town of Ladis (ph), ten kilometers inside the Pakistan border. I also know that earlier this year, he had a meeting with al-Zarqawi in Tehran. His whereabouts right now, no, I do not know.

BLITZER: How can you be so confident of that when the CIA says they`re not confident of that? They dismiss it.

WELDON: Two years ago, the CIA was totally dismissing that bin Laden would be in Iran. But if you look at the recent comments coming out of both the CIA and some of our military generals in theater, they`re now acknowledging the same thing that I`ve been saying -- that in fact, he`s been in and out of Iran. No one can prove it exactly until we capture him.

But you asked my opinion. My opinion is he`s been in and out of Iran several times over the past several years.


More on the fuck-up and move-up promotions of officers that were on duty when Abu Ghraib happened. Billmon blogs about it.

Secretary of State Condolezza Rice now says American must make a generational commitment to Iraq. 30 years anyone?

Opinion and Commentary

Juan Cole today:

The United States has failed militarily in Iraq, and the situation there is deteriorating rapidly. A protracted guerrilla war is increasingly becoming an unconventional civil war. The US can mount operations against infiltrators on the Syrian border, but cannot permanently close off those borders. The US can prevent set piece battles from being fought by militias. It cannot prevent night-time raids. Seven bodies showed up Sunday in East Baghdad, executed. They were almost certainly victims of this shadowy sectarian war.

snip

Would the Iraqi government accept a United Nations military mission? Almost certainly. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has often attempted to involve the UN, and would welcome such a development. The Sunni Arabs would also much prefer to deal with the UN than with the US.

Would the United Nations be willing to take it on? It would be a very hard sell. But remember that if the members of the military mission succeeded, they would have gained enormous good will from the Iraqi government, which would soon be able to pump 5 million barrels of petroleum a day. That is, participation could be worth billions in future contracts. The US could also provide substantial incentives. For countries like Pakistan, India, and Malaysia, such benefits could prove decisive.

Would the Americans be willing to cede Iraq to the blue helmets? It is not impossible. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appears to want to draw down US troop strength in Iraq on a fairly short timetable, and even he must realize the need for a replacement. Of course, the Bush administration may well resist this move right to the end. But that makes this plan an ideal platform for the Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008. Instead of Kerry`s vague multilateralism, let us specify an UNTAC-like mission for the UN. The entire world depends on Gulf petroleum; the entire world should step up to ensure security for Iraq and the region. The US will continue to have to bear a significant share of the costs, but these would become bearable if several allies shared them.


Easy to be Macho:

It`s easy to be macho when you have nothing at risk. The hawks want the war to be fought with other people`s children, while their own children go safely off to college, or to the mall. The number of influential American officials who have children in uniform in Iraq is minuscule.

Most Americans want no part of Mr. Bush`s war, which is why Army recruiters are failing so miserably at meeting their monthly enlistment quotas. Desperate, the Army is lowering its standards, shortening tours, increasing bonuses and violating its own recruitment regulations and ethical guidelines.

Americans do not want to fight this war.


$50 to plant a bomb:

Numbering in the millions, Iraq`s unemployed have found little refuge in an economy derailed by two years of relentless insurgent attacks. Many have not had steady jobs since the United States dissolved the Iraqi army after the 2003 invasion. And U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that every young man without work is a potential recruit for insurgents who pay as little as $50 to people who plant explosives on a highway or shoot a policeman.

"The longer this goes on, we are asking for trouble because we are breeding more and more insurgents," said Muhammed Uthman, an Iraqi businessman and former oil ministry official who serves on a panel that advises the government on reconstruction. "Unemployment is exactly what the terrorists want."

A report published last month by the government and the United Nations put the unemployment rate at 27 percent. But many experts here say the actual number is probably closer to 50 percent or more because the survey was not conducted in some of the least stable parts of the country and because many Iraqis work unreliable part-time jobs.


Friedman Dead Wrong:

Republicans and Democrats alike are trapped in the logic that U.S. troops are bringing "stability" to Iraq while democracy sets its roots. Those Republicans who criticize the president - and the number is growing - actually argue that we need to send more troops to create more stability.

Writing in the New York Times this week, columnist Thomas Friedman suggests that: "Ever since Iraq`s remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it ... Maybe it`s too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground."

Ah, the echoes of Vietnam. I think he`s dead wrong.

American troops aren`t the solution to the problem. They are the problem.

Like the Mexican finger trap that pulls tighter and tighter the more we pull against it, American troops are the incendiary fuel that sustains the insurgency, turning fascists into patriots, crackpot extremists into defenders of religion, all the while making allies out of mortal enemies. Our occupation creates the insurgency and compromises the ability of Iraq`s newly elected government to claim any legitimacy on its own.

George Bush is not a man of nuance. He lives in a black and white world. Our troops are good and noble (notwithstanding a few maniac prison guards). Those who oppose us are savages. His arrogance makes him blind to the most basic, universal truth of community.


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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 20, 2005

Iraker:
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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from the June 21, 2005 edition -

US strategy in Iraq: Is it working?
Major sweeps show results in western Iraq. But insurgents keep adapting and attacking.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0621/p01s01-woiq.html

By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US military strategy in Iraq has been consistent for months now: Use aggressive military operations to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters entering the country and the insurgent support lines that run along the Euphrates River west to the Syrian border. Simultaneously, the US is training Iraqi troops to fill the security vacuum that persists in the center and north of the country.

By any metric of tactical military success, it`s working, say analysts. US forces have strung together victory after victory. Marine and Army operations from Najaf in the south to Fallujah in the heart of the Sunni triangle and on to Mosul in the north have ended with thousands of insurgents killed and captured and tons of enemy munitions destroyed with minimal US casualties.

This is what Vice President Dick Cheney probably had in mind when he told "Larry King Live" last week that the insurgency is in its "last throes."

But if another measure of success is used - a reduction in the number and lethality of insurgent attacks - the US and the new Iraqi government are failing. In the past two days, for example, US Marines and Army soldiers carried out Operations Spear and Dagger (designed to disrupt insurgent capabilities between Baghdad and Syria). At the same time, separate suicide attacks killed 20 policemen in the Kurdish city of Arbil and 23 people in a Baghdad restaurant popular with policemen, while insurgents overran a police station in southern Baghdad, killing eight officers.

The gap between tactical victories on the one hand, and few tangible improvements in the overall Iraqi security situation on the other, is creating a widening disagreement over whether the US is winning or losing the war in Iraq.

The Bush administration and its supporters insist the current course is the right one and, given enough time, will succeed. Administration officials say there`s anecdotal evidence that more and more Iraqis are turning from the insurgency, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Sunday. The insurgents "are losing the Iraqi people," the US and its allies are "making steady progress," and political developments inside Iraq point to "a strategic breakthrough," she said.

Retired Marine Col. Mackubin Owens, now a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., wrote in a commentary for the New York Post earlier this month that US offensive operations are yielding more gains than many in the press are crediting, and points especially to US efforts in the province of Anbar along the Euphrates River towns that serve as support lines for foreign fighters entering the country for Syria, and for domestic insurgents within the country.

He argues that capture of key insurgent leaders, including up to two dozen lieutenants for the Jordanian Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is yielding intelligence that has had "a cascading effect, permitting the Coalition to maintain pressure on the insurgency."

But the doubters - who anecdotally seem to include a growing number of US forces on the ground - say that Iraq`s war is beyond the point where it can be won by force of arms and that "staying the course" is a recipe for a deeper Iraqi quagmire. They see few signs that the conditions for a political settlement, between the country`s newly empowered Shiites and its now disenfranchised Sunni Arabs, are emerging. They point to the evidence of mounting attacks, and the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence, to back up their views.

"It`s indisputable that the insurgents are enormously more popular among the Sunni Arab community today than they were two years ago,`` says Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan. "Every time you hear a suicide bomb has gone off ... I guarantee you that means there are 3,000 Iraqis who saw the preparations and decided that this would be a good thing."

The situation is creating increasing restlessness within President Bush`s own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska told US News & World Report magazine last week, "Things aren`t getting better, they`re getting worse.... The White House is completely disconnected from reality."

On NBC`s "Meet the Press" over the weekend, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona said: "Too often we`ve been told ... that we`re at a turning point. What the American people should have been told and should be told ... [is] it`s long; it`s hard; it`s tough."

Professor Cole says that Secretary Rice was correct to point out over the weekend that the key goal is to drain popular support for the insurgency within the Sunni Arab communities in the center of the country, but he disagrees that there`s evidence this is happening. "If people decide ... that these guys are dirty rotten rats, and they start turning them in, then the insurgents are toast,`` he says. "But their support is not only deeper now, it`s wider, too, and there`s opinion polling to back this up."

The attacks of the past few days maintain the insurgent trend of the past half-year or so of targeting lightly armed and less well-protected Iraqi security officers instead of Americans. Through Sunday, 1,095 Iraqi soldiers and police have been killed this year, and that compares with 1,300 Iraqi military and police casualties in the previous 21 months, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualties.org/oif/), a nongovernmental organization that tracks civilian and military casualties. Car bombings surged from 65 in February to 135 in April, and major attacks per day rose from around 40 in February and March to 70 in April and May.

US commanders and soldiers in Iraq frequently complain they don`t have the manpower to deal anything resembling a decisive blow. Soldiers operating in tough Iraqi provinces like Anbar say they feel as if they`re watering the desert: They can win any neighborhood or mid-sized city they care to and make it "bloom" for as long as they`re present in strength, but their efforts wither when they inevitably leave and move on to the next engagement.

"We`ve won every fight they`ve given us, but there always seem to be just as many people fighting us as when we got here,`` says one career Marine officer, who recently finished a tour in Iraq.

Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence for the Office of the Secretary of Defense who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and has produced a series of detailed studies on the war in Iraq, quotes a Marine counterinsurgency expert in Iraq in a recent paper as saying "seizing the components of suicide bombs [is] like making drug seizures: comforting, but ultimately pointless.... Both sides are still escalating to nowhere."

In cities like Fallujah, once thought to be decisively won by the US, engagements are on the rise, with three firefights on Sunday ending with 15 insurgents killed. In the city of Tal Afar in the north, violence still rages, despite three major US offensives there in the past two years; and while the once notorious Haifa Street in central Baghdad was pacified by joint US and Iraqi military efforts this spring, suicide attacks continue in other parts of the city.

"The Iraqi Government and US can scarcely claim that they are clearly moving towards victory,`` Mr. Cordesman wrote at the end of May in "Iraq`s Evolving Insurgency,`` a 70-page analysis of the situation (www.csis.org/ features/050512_IraqInsurg.pdf). While Cordesman acknowledges large weapons seizures made by "tireless" US operations in the country, he doubts the supply of weapons and bombmaking materials is going to dry up soon.

"Few experts - if any - feel that the insurgents face any near-term supply problems given the numbers of weapons looted from Iraq`s vast arms depots during and after the fighting that brought down Saddam,`` he writes.

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Um mal aufzuzeigen, wie im Senat gestimmt wurde, hier die Stimmen der Abweichler.
3 Dem haben der Ernennung Boltons zugestimmt, 4 haben sich enthalten.
Deshalb sind größere Entscheidungen gegen Bush im Senat niemals mehrheitsfähig. Die Demokraten können mit der Filibuster Regelung höchstens Bush Entscheidungen verzögern.

DEMOCRATS YES
Landrieu, La.; Nelson, Neb.; Pryor, Ark.
DEMOCRATS NOT VOTING
Feingold, Wis.; Johnson, S.D.; Kerry, Mass.; Kohl, Wis.; Levin, Mich.
REPUBLICANS NO
Voinovich, Ohio
REPUBLICANS NOT VOTING
Burns, Mont.; Coleman, Minn.; Thune, S.D.

June 21, 2005
Democrats Block a Vote on Bolton for the Second Time
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/politics/21bolton.html?hp&…

WASHINGTON, June 20 - For the second time in a month, Senate Democrats blocked a vote on Monday evening on the nomination of John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, raising the possibility that President Bush will circumvent the confirmation process and appoint Mr. Bolton when Congress recesses.

The final tally was 54 to 38, six votes short of the 60 required to break a filibuster, the parliamentary tactic that Democrats have used to forestall a final vote on the confirmation.

The vote, a setback for both President Bush and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, came after the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., made a fruitless attempt to negotiate an end to the impasse with one of Mr. Bolton`s chief Democratic opponents, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. With Mr. Biden and other Democrats holding firm in their demand for the White House to release information relating to Mr. Bolton, his future is unclear.

"At this juncture, I think it`s a pretty tough climb," said Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, who has tried to broker a deal with Democrats, when asked if he thought Mr. Bolton would eventually be confirmed. He added, "We tried our best and we failed."

The next move, then, is up to the president, who must decide whether to use his constitutional authority to put Mr. Bolton in the ambassador`s job when Congress takes a vacation, perhaps as early as the July 4 break. The White House has not ruled out a recess appointment, though Mr. Bush did not answer directly when asked about it Monday morning at a news conference with leaders of the European Union.

"I think Mr. Bolton ought to get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor - that`s my call to the Senate," Mr. Bush said.

He added, "The American people know why I nominated him - because the U.N. needs reform, and I thought it made sense to send a reformer to the United Nations."

But the vote on Monday suggested that the climb might have grown tougher. One Republican who voted last month to break the filibuster, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, sided with Democrats this time.

Mr. Voinovich, who threw the Bolton nomination into turmoil when he opposed it as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Monday that new information had "confirmed my belief that John Bolton is not the right man for this job."

With the United Nations facing various problems, including allegations of irregularities in its oil-for-food program, conservatives say the organization is sorely in need of reform. Backers of Mr. Bolton, who until recently served as under secretary of state for arms control, describe him a straight shooter whose blunt, tough-talking approach is just what the United States needs.

"The president has tapped Secretary Bolton to undertake an urgent mission," Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Monday during a relatively brief one-hour debate before the vote.

But critics say that Mr. Bolton is overly aggressive and that he has bullied intelligence officials who held more conservative estimates of weapons programs in Cuba and Syria than his. Mr. Bolton`s detractors also say his disparaging comments about the United Nations make him unfit to represent the United States at a time when diplomacy is critical.

Democrats are demanding information relating to his State Department tenure, including an early draft of a speech he was to deliver about Syria`s weapons programs, and a list of names of American companies and officials reviewed by Mr. Bolton that were contained in classified reports maintained by the National Security Agency.

Shortly before the vote on Monday, Mr. Card placed a telephone call to Mr. Biden, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and offered to share information relating to the speech on Syria, aides to Mr. Biden said.

But the White House was not willing to provide a full list of the names that Mr. Bolton had requested from National Security Agency reports, called intercepts, and Mr. Biden announced on the Senate floor that he had refused the offer about the speech on Syria.

"I indicated to him that was not sufficient," the senator said. "We will agree to vote up and down on the Bolton nomination as soon as the administration provides the information requested by the committee."

That does not appear likely to happen soon. Unless the White House and Democrats can resolve their dispute, a senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill said, it is unlikely that Mr. Frist would make another attempt to confirm Mr. Bolton. A spokesman for Mr. Frist, Bob Stevenson, said Monday evening that no decision had been made.

"The ball is in the Democrats` court," Mr. Stevenson said. "If they`re willing to work for U.N. reform and with the administration, there`s a chance we`d bring it back up again."

Should Mr. Bush install Mr. Bolton during the recess, the appointment would last only until the end of this Congress, in January 2007. While that would fill the post in the short term, both Democrats and Republicans said it could undermine both Mr. Bolton and the Bush administration by sending a representative to the United Nations without the imprimatur of the Senate.

"That`s a legitimate concern," said Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia.

Mr. Roberts, the chairman of the intelligence committee, said, "I hope that people will take a little longer look at our national interests and say that, `Let`s not go down the road to a recess appointment.` "

One Republican, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who has said he is uncomfortable with Mr. Bolton`s nomination but supports it because he believes that Mr. Bush has the right to appoint his own team, said he saw another way to resolve the dispute.

"The other way," Mr. Chafee said, "would be to release the papers."

Mr. Bush has in the past made recess appointments involving judges, but a recess appointment involving an ambassador would be rare, though not unprecedented. In 1996, for instance, President Clinton appointed Wyche Fowler, the Democratic former senator from Georgia, to serve as ambassador to Saudi Arabia while Congress was in recess.

The confrontation over Mr. Bolton comes in the context of a larger debate in the Senate over the Democrats` use of the filibuster against Mr. Bush`s judicial nominees.

In recent weeks, seven Republicans and seven Democrats have joined together to avert a showdown over the nominations. But their compromise is tenuous, and with the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy on the horizon, the filibuster of Mr. Bolton could further poison relations between the two parties.

After the vote, Republicans complained bitterly that Democrats were "on a fishing expedition," in the words of Mr. Allen, a leading backer of Mr. Bolton. Mr. Frist has said repeatedly that Democrats keep changing their demands; other Republicans, including the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, are now adopting his language.

"We have worked in good faith, yet Democratic leaders continue to move the goal posts," Mr. McClellan said after the vote on Monday night. "They are not interested in documents, they are only interested in preventing progress and blocking John Bolton."

Mr. Frist said, "Despite hours and hours of relentless questioning, deliberation and debate, the minority has still resorted to parliamentary maneuvers to thwart the president`s choice for U.N. ambassador, a post that has remained vacant now for over five months."

A former senator, John C. Danforth, resigned as United Nations ambassador last December and left the post in January.

As was the case last month when Senate Democrats first delayed a vote on Mr. Bolton, three Democratic senators - Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska - crossed party lines to vote with Republicans. Eight senators, five Democrats and three Republicans, all of whom previously voted with their parties, did not vote Monday.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 21, 2005
Guantánamo`s Long Shadow
By ANTHONY LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/opinion/21lewis.html

Boston

WHEN Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that detainees at the American prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were treated better than they would be "by virtually any other government on the face of the earth," he was carrying on what has become a campaign to whitewash the record of abuses at Guantánamo.

Right-wing commentators have been sounding the theme. Columnist Charles Krauthammer said the treatment of the Guantánamo prisoners had been "remarkably humane and tolerant."

Yes, and there is no elephant in the room.

Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation observed what went on in Guantánamo. One reported on July 29, 2004: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."

Time magazine published an extended article last week on an official log of interrogations of one Guantánamo detainee over 50 days from November 2002 to January 2003. The detainee was Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi who is suspected of being the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001, but who was unable to enter the United States.

Mr. Kahtani was interrogated for as long as 20 hours at a stretch, according to the detailed log. At one point he was put on an intravenous drip and given 3½ bags of fluid. When he asked to urinate, guards told him that he must first answer questions. He answered them. The interrogator, not satisfied with the answers, told him to urinate in his pants, which he did. Thirty minutes later, the log noted, Mr. Kahtani was "beginning to understand the futility of his situation."

F.B.I. agents, reporting earlier on the treatment of Mr. Kahtani, said a dog was used "in an aggressive manner to intimidate" him. At one point, according to the log, Mr. Kahtani`s interrogator told him that he needed to learn, like a dog, to show respect: "Began teaching detainee lessons such as stay, come and bark to elevate his social status to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated."

At a minimum, the treatment of Mr. Kahtani was an exercise in degradation and humiliation. Such treatment is forbidden by three sources of law that the United States respected for decades - until the administration of George W. Bush.

The Geneva Conventions, which protect people captured in conflict, prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." The scope of that clause`s legal obligation has been debated, but previous American governments abided by it. President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban members who are detained at Guantánamo.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture, also ratified by the United States, requires signatories to "prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction ... cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." The Bush administration declared that this provision did not apply to the treatment of non-Americans held outside the United States.

Finally, there is the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It makes cruelty, oppression or "maltreatment" of prisoners a crime. Armed services lawyers worried that some methods of interrogation might violate the Uniform Code and federal criminal statutes, exposing interrogators to prosecution. A Pentagon memorandum obtained by ABC News said a meeting of top military lawyers on March 8, 2003, concluded that "we need a presidential letter" approving controversial methods, to give interrogators immunity.

The idea that a president can legalize the unlawful evidently came from a series of memorandums written by Justice Department officials. They argued, among other things, that President Bush`s authority as commander in chief to set interrogation methods could trump treaties and federal law.

Although President Bush decided to deny detainees at Guantánamo the protection of the Geneva Conventions, he did order that they must be treated "humanely." The Pentagon, responding to the Time magazine article on the treatment of Mr. Kahtani, said, "The Department of Defense remains committed to the unequivocal standard of humane treatment for all detainees, and Kahtani`s interrogation plan was guided by that strict standard."

In the view of the administration, then, it is "humane" to give a detainee 3½ bags of I.V. fluid and then make him urinate on himself, force him to bark like a dog, or chain him to the floor for 18 hours.

No one can seriously doubt now that cruelties and indignities have been inflicted on prisoners at Guantánamo. Nor is there any doubt that worse has happened elsewhere - prisoners beaten to death by American soldiers, untold others held in secret locations by the Central Intelligence Agency, others rendered to be tortured by governments such as Uzbekistan`s.

Since the widespread outrage over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Americans have seemingly ceased to care. It was reported yesterday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is being considered for promotion. Many people would say the mistreatment of Mohamed al-Kahtani, or of suspects who might well be innocent, is justified in a war with terrorists. Morality is outweighed by necessity.

The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.

Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.

Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: "If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law."

Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Saddam: The `clean freak` who thinks he`s still president
By Helen McCormack
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?st…

21 June 2005

A glimpse into the mind of Saddam Hussein has revealed that he wrestles as much with his hatred of the cereal Froot Loops as with his anger towards Bush`s Senior and Junior.

American soldiers who spent 10 months guarding him have revealed a list of the former dictator`s passions - and topping the bill are Doritos, Raisin Bran Crunch and Ronald Reagan, although not necessarily in that order.

Saddam`s unexpected admiration for Reagan was expressed in broken English to the five soldiers who have now finished their tour of duty in Iraq and have given an interview to the American edition of GQ magazine.

The former leader, whom they said had convinced himself was still president, said of them: "The Bush father, son, no good," maintaining of George W Bush: "He knows I have nothing - no mass weapons. He knows that he will never find them."

One soldier, Jesse Dawson, said: "He`d always tell us he was still the president. That`s what he thinks, 100 per cent."

Saddam derided the Americans, according to the magazine, for failing to target the palace he was in during a spate of bombing in Baghdad at the start of the invasion in March 2003. "America, they dumb" he reportedly said to the soldiers. "They bomb the wrong palace."

The magazine provided a portrayal of Saddam as a poetry lover, who enjoyed telling jokes, tending to his garden and smoking cigars, who also displayed paternal instincts towards his guards, offering them advice and the opportunity to tour his country once he regains power.

Saddam displayed a perhaps unsurprising chauvinism, telling one soldier: "You must find a good woman, not too smart, not too old, one that can cook and clean". And he displayed an obsession with cleanliness during the period the soldiers, all Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, were observing.

A Pentagon spokes-woman said that it would be inappropriate to comment on the story.

n In defiance of two major US-Iraqi offensives against rebels in the past few days, a suicide car bomber killed at least 15 traffic policemenoutside their unit`s headquarters yesterday in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.And insurgents assaulted a police station in Baghdad, killing at least eight policemen and an eight-month-old baby.


21 June 2005 11:20
©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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Tuesdays with Saddam

Specialist Sean O`Shea and several fellow members of the Pennsylvania National Guard spent close to a year guarding one of the most highly valued detainees in American history, Saddam Hussein.

In the July issue of GQ, O`Shea and friends talk to writer Lisa DePaulo and reveal the Saddam Hussein we never knew. (He likes Cheetos, writes poetry, and loved Ronald Reagan!)

Here`s an excerpt from the story:

Saddam was not supposed to know anything about current events. One of the interpreters` job was to cut any news items out of the papers before giving them to Saddam each morning, which didn`t leave much to read. He was not given any information on the U.S. presidential election, and the boys aren`t even sure if he knew that John Kerry was the guy running against Bush, because Saddam never mentioned him. (At the time he was captured, Dean was the front-runner.)

"I told him Jesse Jackson was president, just to screw around," says Jesse. "And he cracked up."

But he had plenty to say about Bush. Both Bushes, actually.

"He`d always be like, `Bush is no good,` " says Jesse. "And then he`d be like, `Reagan? Reagan and me, good.` "

Paco: "And Clinton was all right. He`d always say, `The Cleeenton, he`s okay. The Bush father, son, no good.` "

Sean: "But he wanted to be friends with them. Towards the end, he was saying that he doesn`t hold any hard feelings and he just wanted to talk to Bush, to make peace with him."

Jesse: "He thought that Bush could forgive and forget about what has happened. `He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he`ll never find them.` "

He weighed in on everyone from Dan Rather ("a good guy") to Osama bin Laden ("He said he never had relations with him," according to Paco). But Reagan was his favorite.

"He talked about how Reagan sold him planes and helicopters and stuff," says Jesse. "And basically funded his war against Iran," says Sean. "He said, `I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president, and I said, `Yeah, I wish they were, too, because then I wouldn`t be here.` "

When Sean told him that Reagan had recently died of Alzheimer`s, Saddam got quiet for a minute, then said, "Yes. This happens."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE ONLINE NOW...WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO GQ FOR JUST $1 AN ISSUE!

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Alle demokratischen Wahlen würden antiamerikanische Regierungen in der arabischen und islamische Staaten wählen.
Das zeigt die US-Einmischischung im Libanan. Der Libanon nähert sich mit Riesenschritten einem Bürgerkrieg, obwohl es noch nicht einmal freie Wahlen gab, sondern ein Wahlsystem, in dem der Ausgang nach fest vorgegebenen Regeln festgelegt war.

Democracy`s advance in Egypt brings dilemma for US
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,15205,151093…

Simon Tisdall
Tuesday June 21, 2005

Guardian
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, called yesterday for a more inclusive, democratic process in Egypt, but sidestepped the continuing ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, the country`s biggest Islamic opposition group.

Speaking in Cairo, Ms Rice said President Hosni Mubarak`s decision to allow an unprecedented, multi-party presidential election in September was an "important first step", but stressed the need for a more open, competitive contest.

"President Mubarak has unlocked the door for change. Now, the Egyptian government must put its faith in its own people," she said. "It must fulfil the promise it has made to its people, and to the entire world, by giving its citizens the freedom to choose."

Her silence on the Muslim Brotherhood`s lack of free choices reflected the strong official Egyptian resistance to legalising the organisation. But it also illustrated Washington`s larger dilemma in calling for greater Arab democracy while opposing Islamic groups such as Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon with proven electoral appeal.

Muhammad Mursi, the brotherhood`s spokesman, said conditions imposed by Mr Mubarak on the poll meant it would be neither inclusive nor fair. The president is widely expected to win a fifth consecutive term.

Mr Mursi said the organisation would decide soon whether to call for a boycott, and was meanwhile focusing on the parliamentary elections this autumn. The brotherhood currently has 15 MPs, who are officially described as independents.

"In a free election we would have 20% to 25% of the parliament," Mr Mursi told the Guardian last week. "Many more independents would support us. We are known in this society. We are active in the villages, in the universities, in the parliament, in the mosques ... We`re organising, building strength."

The brotherhood had forsworn violent means in Egypt, he said, and was committed to "real and comprehensive reform ... through constitutional and legal channels". Following a strict interpretation of the Qur`an was not incompatible with a recognised role in public life, he said.

Mr Mursi suggested that the continuing repression, such as the recent arrests of several hundred brotherhood members during pro-democracy demonstrations, could have explosive consequences.

"The regime is getting very weak. Weakness is dangerous. We hope reform will work. Or else there will be a bloody conflict. We don`t want it," he said.

While pledging free elections, Egyptian officials insist that the ban will remain. "The government is not afraid of the brotherhood," Ahmed Nazif, the prime minister, said last week. "We won`t allow them to create a political entity that is based on religion."

Gamal Mubarak, the president`s son and a leading member of the ruling National Democratic party, said there were contacts with the brotherhood. "I`ve met them on numerous occasions," Mr Mubarak said. "But we don`t want to infect our political process and have it dominated by religious groups."

The foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, took a more aggressive view. He said last week that the brotherhood, the oldest Islamic organisation of its kind, that has branches in Syria and elsewhere, was a danger to Egypt and the world.

"The Muslim Brotherhood committed 9/11 through its offshoots. All of them, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Gemal Islamiya, are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood," he claimed. "There is no such thing as a moderate Islamist."

Pressure on the government to liberalise the political process is building in many other quarters. By allowing a contested election, Mr Mubarak has effectively opened a pharaoh`s tomb of old dreams and modern aspirations.

Almost every week, a new political party or pressure group plunges into the fray. Nearly all agree that the reforms so far are not enough. But most are sceptical about how far democratisation will be allowed to go.

The legal, secular opposition parties are weak and divided and the great majority of Egyptians are not yet engaged in the reform process. But diplomats predict that if they do become so, most probably for economic reasons, the momentum for change may prove unstoppable.

"Egypt is at a critical moment," said Ayman Nour, an opposition presidential candidate and the leader of the al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party, whose jailing this year prompted western protests. "There could be a snowball effect, bringing together all the opposition movements."

But if democracy is truly to take root, diplomats and analysts suggest, the problems of exclusion must be overcome. And that will not be easy while the US, Egypt`s paymaster to the tune of an annual $1.8bn in aid, is seen to be cherry-picking democratic favourites.

If one issue unites Egyptians of all political colours, publicly at least, it is opposition to meddling by Washington.

Some western governments still have a "Richard the Lionheart" mindset and look down on Arab countries, Mr Abul Gheit, the foreign minister, said. "The west should not interfere in our internal affairs, because you don`t know what you are talking about."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Beirut Bombing Kills Communist Opposition Leader

The victory in Sunday`s polling of the anti-Syrian faction in Lebanese politics has not led to social peace. The coalition of Saad Hariri won in the north in part by having Sunni clerics mount their pulpits in mosques and play on sectarian feelings to defeat Maronite General Michele Aoun`s supporters and other pro-Syrian figures. Ironically, the Syrians originally gerrymandered the north in 2000 so as to give an advantage to the Sunnis over the Christians. In this election, Hariri`s Sunni supporters were anti-Syrian and many of the Christian candidates were pro-Syrian.

Among the primary demands of the victorious parties is the removal of pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud. This aim will be difficult to accomplish, since the opposition has a small majority in parliament and it is not even clear how a president, as opposed to a prime minister, could be removed.

The first major event of the new regime was the assassination of Georges Hawi, a former secretary-general of the Communist Party of Lebanon, who had thrown in with the anti-Syrian opposition. His is the fourth high-profile assassination by bombing in the past year. Many Lebanese believe that Syrian intelligence and/or pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud is behind the assassinations. Gen. Aoun, despite having earlier fought Syria, has defended Lahoud from such charges, saying that they are unfounded. Aoun has about 20 seats for his list in parliament.

The US analysts who called the anti-Syrian movement of last spring, in the wake of the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, a "Cedar Revolution" or an "Arab Spring" profoundly misread the situation. While it is true that the Syrians had outworn their welcome for most Lebanese, and could be induced to withdraw their troops, Lebanon remains deeply divided, unlike post-election Ukraine, e.g. The Shiite parties, Hizbullah and Amal, support President Lahoud, as does Aoun and his list. Minority factions among the Sunnis and Druze do, as well. But most Sunnis turned against Syria with Hariri`s assassination, and the majority of Druze follow Waleed Jumblatt, who has also come out against Lahoud.

The question is therefore whether a drive to remove the president on the part of Hariri and his allies will so polarize Lebanon as to bring back the social violence of the Civil War years. Hawi`s killing on Tuesday is not a promising omen in that regard.

posted by Juan @ [url6/21/2005 06:33:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/beirut-bombing-kills-communist.html[/url]

Condi Can`t Count

Condi Rice seems extremely confused about military affairs and the nature of guerrilla wars:


Interviewed on CNN during her visit to the Middle East, Dr Rice was asked about the recent claim by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, that the insurgency in Iraq was "in its last throes". She did not comment directly on the claim but said Americans needed to understand Iraq does not need an army of hundreds of thousands, "because it isn`t facing an enemy like that. What they face is an insurgency and they need to be able to run counter-insurgency operations. Once they can do that, we can begin to start a withdrawal process."



Let`s do some figuring. The US-led Coalition has 160,000 well-trained, well-equipped, often experienced troops in Iraq. It is losing the guerrilla war. So contrary to her assertion that Iraq "does not need an army of hundreds of thousands," every indication is that it does, too. Condi is just channeling Rummy, who was wrong on this from day one.

The Iraqi military needs to be bigger than the current Coalition force, since that isn`t big enough. So, if Iraq did need a trained military of say, 300,000, how long would that take to stand up? (You can`t count the traffic cops in this total, as SecDef Rumsfeld has been wont to do; I mean soldiers.) The new recruits to the Iraqi military are mostly green and apparently in large part Shiite Arab. The experienced military men are mostly on the side of the guerrillas. So the new Iraqi military really needs training, maybe 5 years worth or more.

Moreover, there is a real question as to whether you will ever get the troops of the new Iraqi government to fight in a thoroughgoing way on behalf of what they mostly think of as an imperial power (the US). It turns out that a lot of the officers in the South Vietnamese Army were actually working for the North Vietnamese even while they were hanging around with their US military counterparts. Newsweek reports that Iraqi officials admit that the new security services are infiltrated by the guerrillas. Numbers won`t solve this problem of legitimacy, and nor will time.

Dr. Rice`s comments imply that she thinks a counter-insurgency effort can be handled with a small force that can be stood up relatively soon. That is not true. And if her comments were intended to make the US public confident that US troops could be withdrawn from Iraq any time soon, then she was actively misleading them.

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor examines the debate over whether the US military is making progress in Iraq or not. I am quoted saying that every indication is that the guerrillas have gained in popularity in the Sunni Arab areas over the past 2 years. Other quotes:


` "We`ve won every fight they`ve given us, but there always seem to be just as many people fighting us as when we got here,`` says one career Marine officer, who recently finished a tour in Iraq.

Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence for the Office of the Secretary of Defense who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and has produced a series of detailed studies on the war in Iraq, quotes a Marine counterinsurgency expert in Iraq in a recent paper as saying "seizing the components of suicide bombs [is] like making drug seizures: comforting, but ultimately pointless.... Both sides are still escalating to nowhere." . .

In the city of Tal Afar in the north, violence still rages, despite three major US offensives there in the past two years; and while the once notorious Haifa Street in central Baghdad was pacified by joint US and Iraqi military efforts this spring, suicide attacks continue in other parts of the city.

"The Iraqi Government and US can scarcely claim that they are clearly moving towards victory,`` Mr. Cordesman wrote at the end of May in [url"Iraq`s Evolving Insurgency,]http://www.csis.org/features/050512_IraqInsurg.pdf[/url]`` [pdf]
a 70-page analysis of the situation . . . While Cordesman acknowledges large weapons seizures made by "tireless" US operations in the country, he doubts the supply of weapons and bombmaking materials is going to dry up soon. `



The Boston Globe recently wrote:


` Meanwhile, a recent internal poll conducted for the US-led coalition found that nearly 45 percent of the population supported the insurgent attacks, making accurate intelligence difficult to obtain. Only 15 percent of those polled said they strongly supported the US-led coalition. `



If these figures are for Iraqis as a whole, they are breathtaking. They suggest that virtually all Sunni Arabs and a good third of Shiites support the guerrilla attacks on US targets! (These militant Shiites are probably disproportionately Sadrists, though they may include some more nationalist Dawa and Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq members). We know from other polling that the Americans are wildly popular with the Kurds, and they probably account for most or all of the 15 percent. [Thanks to Patrick Cummins for the cite and observations.]

The Daily Star is alleging that some of the attacks on Kirkuk pipelines have been carried out by tribal groups as a sort of protection racket. The charge is that they are hoping to be paid handsomely to guard the pipelines from further attack.

As for the political process, , it is moving with the speed of molasses in winter. Sunni Arab groups who were given the opportunity to appoint 15 members to a committee for the drafting of a permanent constitution have been wrangling over how exactly to appoint them.

Bill Montgomery over at the Whiskey Bar suggests that my call for turning Iraq over to the United Nations is unrealistic.

Oh, I agree entirely. It is highly unlikely that Bush, who is trying to destroy the UN by sending John Bolton there, would even consider such a thing. And UN member states may well decline to send their boys into the Anbar meat grinder, especially if they think of it as cleaning up Bush`s mess.

On the other hand, the Right is always coming up with unlikely plans and managing to get them implemented, and we on the Left may have to simply learn to be more tenacious. After all, it was highly unlikely that Bush would get the opportunity he had long yearned for, of invading Iraq and deposing Saddam. Moreover, you have to set up issues in such a way as to make your opponent take the fall. If centrists and progressives go to the American public next year and say, "We want to hand Iraq over to the United Nations, but the War Party insists on keeping our young men and women there in harm`s way for the sake of their corporate sponsors," I think that may resonate pretty powerfully. As a line, it would have the virtue of associating the UN with problem-solving and the War Party with greed and stupidity.

As for getting anyone over at the UN to take on Iraq, I fear I think there are few third world armies that couldn`t be enticed by a couple of billion dollars-- the kind of money they would probably be rewarded with if they really could help Iraq. Progressives are usually people of principle, and they often can`t imagine the cupidity of the world, or how to play on it. Dwight Eisenhower was a past master of that sort of thing; he got DeGaulle out of Algeria before the latter could go Communist by threatening to call in US loans to France. If the US and Iraq both wanted blue helmets on the Tigris, I think it could be made to happen. Whether it would be successful I don`t know. But the Bush administration`s policies in Iraq are demonstrably unsuccessful, so it is worth a try. If it succeeded, it would enormously bolster the prestige of the UN and help make the world a safer place.

My main point was to try to find a progressive/centrist approach to Iraq that avoided the two extremes of a) agreeing with the Bushies that we should stay `until the mission is accomplished` or b) simple-mindedly chanting `bring the troops home` with no thought for the world-class disaster that might befall us from the resulting power vacuum.

posted by Juan @ [url6/21/2005 06:32:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/condi-cant-count-condi-rice-seems.html[/url]

37 Dead in Attacks on Monday

Al-Zaman, the `Times of Baghdad,` refers to "a sudden and unprecedented deterioration of the security situation in Baghdad" on Monday. The biggest single attack, however, took place in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.

Louise Roug of the Los Angeles Times reports that suicide attackers killed 36 [the Scotsman says 37] persons in Iraq on Monday and wounded well over a hundred. She writes,


` The bloodiest attack took place in a dusty field behind Irbil`s traffic-police headquarters, where a suicide car bomber killed 13 [late reports say 15] and wounded 100 during police officers` morning workout. In a second attack in the mainly Kurdish town, a suicide bomber killed a local security official and two of his guards as their convoy passed a cemetery. `



The Scotsman describes the bomb attack on the police chief of Halabja, which killed him and three bodyguards. The Kurds of Halabja were gassed by Saddam in 1988, leaving 5000 dead.

There was also an attack on a checkpoint outside the disputed oil city of Kirkuk, killing 4 soldiers.

Guerrillas launched 5 separate attacks in Baghdad, including one at a military checkpoint on the airport road. Another military checkpoint received mortar fire.

al-Zaman: Fourteen neighborhoods of Baghdad near Karkh were deprived for a second straight day of drinking water, after a water main had been sabotaged early Sunday morning.

Armed guerrillas disguised in the uniforms of Iraqi army troops assassinated two leaders of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq after they invaded their homes in the Abu Saida quarter of the city of Baquba. This according to a police colonel who asked not to be identified.

A funeral procession was held in Basra for Shaikh Abd al-Salam Alwan, a tribal chieftain of the al-Ghanim clan. He had been kidnapped, tortured and killed, his body dumped in the al-Haritha district.

Shaikh Usama al-Jadaan al-Sanad, who described himself as chief of the Karabilah tribe, said in a press conference on Monday in Baghdad, "We ask that first aid be sent to the districts of Qaim and Karabilah because they lack the simplest medical facilities." He added, "The secretary-generals of the parties that run the government in Iraq must stop the shedding of innocent blood in Qaim and Karabilah that is being carried out under the pretext of the presence of Arab and foreign terrorists."

Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani warned that those who oppose (loose) federalism in favor of centralized government in Iraq are in reality working for a partition of the country.

The Sunni Pious Endowments Board issued a plea that the usurpation of Sunni mosques in the southern, largely Shiite city of Amara cease. It alleged that a group of persons supported by Iraqi police occupied the Hatin Mosque in Amara. The governor of Maysan province then ordered that the mosque by locked up until the question of its ownership could be decided. Several other Sunni mosques, it alleged, have also been usurped there.

Maysan province is politically dominated by followers of Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr.

posted by Juan @ [url6/21/2005 06:25:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/37-dead-in-attacks-on-monday-al-zaman.html[/url]

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Wie schell sich Vorhersagen erfüllen können.

The American Taliban is the `unholy alliance` of the super-rich U.S. investors, neo-conservative jingoists and Zionist "Evangelical Christians" in the rural states, typically the poorest people in America, who have succeeded in replacing the American democracy with an "IRONFISTED THEOCRACY WITH THE PRESIDENT AS MULLAH AND POLICY AS RELIGIOUS WAR".

 For the American Taliban abortion is a mortal sin, and rightfully so, but killing tens of thousands of human beings, men, women and children is perfectly all right, as long as the victims are non-American goim (cattle, according to the Talmud). According to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S.citizens is able to name [urlthe most basic of the Christian texts, the four Gospels.]http://www.christusrex.org/www1/news/lat-1-13-05a.html Only one out of three U.S. citizens has heard about the Sermon on the Mount.

Ignorance is bliss! The crass manipulation of the incredible ignorance and of the functional illiteracy of the American masses constitutes the basis of the new theocratic regime of the American Taliban.

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Karl Rove: America`s Mullah
This election is about Rovism, and the outcome threatens to transform the U.S. into an ironfisted theocracy.
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/news/lat-10-26-04c.html

By Neal Gabler
Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."

Los Angeles Times

October 25, 2004

Even now, after Sen. John F. Kerry handily won his three debates with President Bush and after most polls show a dead heat, his supporters seem downbeat. Why? They believe that Karl Rove, Bush`s top political operative, cannot be beaten. Rove the Impaler will do whatever it takes — anything — to make certain that Bush wins. This isn`t just typical Democratic pessimism. It has been the master narrative of the 2004 presidential campaign in the mainstream media. Attacks on Kerry come and go — flip-flopper, Swift boats, Massachusetts liberal — but one constant remains, Rove, and everyone takes it for granted that he knows how to game the system.

Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans — past and future — go to the heart of what this election is about.

Democrats will tell you it is a referendum on Bush`s incompetence or on his extremist right-wing agenda. Republicans will tell you it`s about conservatism versus liberalism or who can better protect us from terrorists. They are both wrong. This election is about Rovism — the insinuation of Rove`s electoral tactics into the conduct of the presidency and the fabric of the government. It`s not an overstatement to say that on Nov. 2, the fate of traditional American democracy will hang in the balance.

Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush`s. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush`s foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in "the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country."

Rovism begins, as one might suspect from the most merciless of political consiglieres, with Machiavelli`s rule of force: "A prince is respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy." No administration since Warren Harding`s has rewarded its friends so lavishly, and none has been as willing to bully anyone who strays from its message.

There is no dissent in the Rove White House without reprisal.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was retired after he disagreed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s transformation of the Army and then testified that invading Iraq would require a U.S. deployment of 200,000 soldiers.

Chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster was threatened with termination if he revealed before the vote that the administration had seriously misrepresented the cost of its proposed prescription drug plan to get it through Congress.

Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill was peremptorily fired for questioning the wisdom of the administration`s tax cuts, and former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III felt compelled to recant his statement that there were insufficient troops in Iraq.

Even accounting for the strong-arm tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, this isn`t government as we have known it. This is the Sopranos in the White House: "Cross us and you`re road kill."

Naturally, the administration`s treatment of the opposition is worse. Rove`s mentor, political advisor Lee Atwater, has been quoted as saying: "What you do is rip the bark off liberals." That`s how Bush has governed. There is a feeling, perhaps best expressed by Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller`s keynote address at the Republican convention, that anyone who has the temerity to question the president is undermining the country. At times, Miller came close to calling Democrats traitors for putting up a presidential candidate.

This may be standard campaign rhetoric. But it`s one thing to excoriate your opponents in a campaign, and quite another to continue berating them after the votes are counted.

Rovism regards any form of compromise as weakness. Politics isn`t a bus we all board together, it`s a steamroller.

No recent administration has made less effort to reach across the aisle, and thanks to Rovism, the Republican majority in Congress often operates on a rule of exclusion. Republicans blocked Democrats from participating in the bill-drafting sessions on energy, prescription drugs and intelligence reform in the House. As Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) told the New Yorker, "They don`t consult with the nations of the world, and they don`t consult with Congress, especially the Democrats in Congress. They can do it all themselves."

Bush entered office promising to be a "uniter, not a divider." But Rovism is not about uniting. What Rove quickly grasped is that it`s easier and more efficacious to exploit the cultural and social divide than to look for common ground. No recent administration has as eagerly played wedge issues — gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, faith-based initiatives — to keep the nation roiling, in the pure Rovian belief that the president`s conservative supporters will always be angrier and more energized than his opponents. Division, then, is not a side effect of policy; in Rovism, it is the purpose of policy.

The lack of political compromise has its correlate in the administration`s stubborn insistence that it doesn`t have to compromise with facts. All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don`t mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, which explains why Bush can claim that postwar Iraq is going swimmingly or that a so-so economy is soaring. As one administration official told reporter Ron Suskind, "We`re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We`re history`s actors."

When neither dissent nor facts are recognized as constraining forces, one is infallible, which is the sum and foundation of Rovism. Cleverly invoking the power of faith to protect itself from accusations of stubbornness and insularity, this administration entertains no doubt, no adjustment, no negotiation, no competing point of view. As such, it eschews the essence of the American political system: flexibility and compromise.

In Rovism, toughness is the only virtue. The mere appearance of change is intolerable, which is why Bush apparently can`t admit ever making a mistake. As Machiavelli put it, the prince must show that "his judgments are irrevocable."

Rovism is certainly not without its appeal. As political theorist Sheldon Wolin once characterized Machiavellian government, it promises the "economy of politics." Americans love toughness. They love swagger. In a world of complexity and uncertainty, especially after Sept. 11, they love the idea of a man who doesn`t need anyone else. They even love the sense of mission, regardless of its wisdom.

These values run deep in the American soul, and Rovism consciously taps them. But they are not democratic. Unwavering discipline, demonization of foes, disdain for reality and a personal sense of infallibility based on faith are the stuff of a theocracy — the president as pope or mullah and policy as religious warfare.

Boiled down, Rovism is government by jihadis in the grip of unshakable self-righteousness — ironically the force the administration says it is fighting. It imposes rather than proposes.

Rovism surreptitiously and profoundly changes our form of government, a government that has been, since its founding by children of the Enlightenment, open, accommodating, moderate and generally reasonable.

All administrations try to work the system to their advantage, and some, like Nixon`s, attempt to circumvent the system altogether. Rove and Bush neither use nor circumvent, which would require keeping the system intact. They instead are reconfiguring the system in extra-constitutional, theocratic terms.

The idea of the United States as an ironfisted theocracy is terrifying, and it should give everyone pause. This time, it`s not about policy. This time, for the first time, it`s about the nature of American government.

We all have reason to be very, very afraid.

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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 21, 2005
June05: 59



Iraker: Civilian: 319 Police/Mil: 230 Total: 549
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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U.S. Ambassador, `Viceroy of Afghanistan,` Turns to Iraq
By Halima Kazem
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-zalm…
Special to The Times


June 21, 2005

LAGHMAN, Afghanistan — His boots pounded the rocky terrain as he skillfully maneuvered through the mountainous ravine, challenging his security detail and entourage of aides to keep up.

Hiking to a U.S.-funded project site in the southern province of Laghman, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad chattered away in a stream of guttural Pashto, discussing the necessity of creating jobs for Afghans.

"If you don`t provide work for these men, they will turn to the gun and fight again," Khalilzad told the provincial governor.

The governor nodded and motioned to a group of six men digging a large ditch for a river dam project. The dike was one of several U.S.-backed projects the affable Afghan-American ambassador visited before heading to Baghdad on Monday as the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

"I have waited to come to Laghman because I know you all have high expectations of me," Khalilzad told a large crowd gathered Sunday to inaugurate a government headquarters in the province. The crowd burst into applause. "Laghman is where my parents were born and where my grandparents are buried."

As the top U.S. official in Afghanistan for the last two years, Khalilzad has been somewhat of an enigma to many Afghans.

"He is a representative of the U.S. government, I understand that, but he is also one of our own," said Abdul Hadi Wahidy, a former militia commander in Laghman.

But it is exactly this mixed identity that helped Khalilzad wield such strong influence over Afghanistan`s politics and reconstruction. Fluent in the nation`s two main languages, Dari and Pashto, Khalilzad was nicknamed the "viceroy of Afghanistan," and was touted by supporters and detractors as the power behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

A former university professor who has served in the State Department, the Pentagon and on the National Security Council, Khalilzad had long been considered a political and security expert on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan when President Bush tapped him as special envoy to Afghanistan in early 2002, then ambassador in 2003. Flying to the capital, Kabul, was a homecoming of sorts for Khalilzad, who came to the United States in the 1970s as a student. He arrived in his homeland, he said, with a simple agenda: "to accelerate success in Afghanistan."

"Because of my background, that I was born here, I speak the languages of Afghanistan and I knew the key players here, this has made my job here easier," he said. But at the same time, Khalilzad said, being an Afghan added to the pressures he faced. People expected more of him than they might have of another U.S. ambassador.

Critics accused Khalilzad of trying to paper over Afghanistan`s deep-rooted problems with short-term solutions, in an effort to show U.S. success. They faulted the U.S. for using warlords to fight Al Qaeda and remnants of the Taliban regime. Many of those local commanders later proved disloyal to Karzai.

"The United States` policies in Afghanistan ended up contradicting each other. On one end they were helping the warlords, and on the other trying to set up the Karzai government," said Abdul Fayez, a political scientist at Kabul University. "It didn`t make sense."

Daad Noorani, a political analyst and editor in chief of the Rozgaran newspaper, accused Khalilzad of pushing Karzai to accept warlords in his government after his election in 2004.

"The people of Afghanistan were very clear when they voted for Mr. Karzai. They wanted him to eliminate warlords from his government," Noorani said. "But Mr. Khalilzad ignored the promises President Karzai made to the people and talked him into including Ismail Khan and Dostum in his administration."

Khan ruled Herat province as his personal fiefdom until late 2004, and Abdul Rashid Dostum is an ethnic Uzbek leader from northern Afghanistan. Khan is now minister of energy; Dostum is the army chief of staff.

With Khalilzad leaving, Noorani and others fear Karzai will have trouble handling these powerful commanders.

"Khalilzad has appeased these warlords by bringing them into the government, but this is not a long-term solution," said Noorani. "President Karzai is going to be left to deal with them in his already struggling government."

Khalilzad dismissed such criticism, saying that "there is a lot written about my role with regard to specific things that historians will have to look at much more closely…. All the information with regard to what happened is not out there out yet."

In a recent farewell address, the ambassador called on the Afghan government to stop rotating bad leaders and appoint new and qualified officials.

With parliamentary elections scheduled for September, Khalilzad says Afghanistan still has many challenges ahead. "As we get closer [to the elections], insurgent attacks by terrorists could intensify," he said.

On Monday, Afghan officials said they had foiled a plot this weekend to kill Khalilzad. Three Pakistanis were arrested in Laghman shortly before his visit.

Khalilzad says the solution lies in strengthening the nation`s police force and army, and in a long-term security alliance with the United States.

"A strategic partnership can deter big efforts, like someone invading. But in regards to covert operations … that`s much harder," he said. "For that, what is needed is to be provided by the Afghan government, intelligence and police."

He warned the country`s neighbors and other forces not to meddle in Afghanistan`s affairs.

"There are those who think the U.S. will get tired of Afghanistan," Khalilzad said. But Washington won`t walk away, he insisted. Insurgents, he said, are "wasting their money."



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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ROBERT SCHEER
Even Bush`s GOP Allies Are Breaking Ranks
Key party members are raising questions about the Iraq war.
Robert Scheer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-schee…

June 21, 2005

How best to support our troops in Iraq? By sacrificing more of them in a war that should never have been launched and has no end in sight, or by bringing them home? The latter is the best course for the U.S. and Iraq. Our military occupation fuels nationalist and religious insurgents and we should begin a phased withdrawal as soon as feasible, while increasing aid.

Although this position is shared by millions of Americans and many others globally, it has long been deemed beyond the pale by leading politicians of both parties. Now that appears finally to be changing, as an increasing number of Republicans are admitting that the emperor has no clothes — having lied his pants off about our motives for invading Iraq, and ever since about how great things are going there. Declining public support for the war and the latest outrageous claims by Vice President Dick Cheney have given these moderates an opening to challenge their own party`s administration.

"Too often we`ve been told, and the American people have been told, that we`re at a turning point," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on NBC`s "Meet the Press," as he disagreed with Cheney`s absurd claim last week that the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes." "What the American people should have been told and should be told [is that] it`s long, it`s hard, it`s tough."

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was even more blunt: "Things aren`t getting better; they`re getting worse," he told U.S. News and World Report, as the latest suicide bombings claimed the lives of dozens of Iraqis. "The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It`s like they`re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we`re losing in Iraq."

Even Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), who brought us "freedom fries," has found enough of his wits to admit publicly that he has lost confidence in the Iraq occupation and would sponsor legislation calling on the administration to more clearly define how, and when, it intends to bring the war to a close.

All of this means we may finally get a long-overdue national debate on ending the U.S. occupation. A "democracy can`t do certain things if, in fact, the citizens don`t support it," the Pentagon`s Lt. Gen. James T. Conway admitted, citing the Vietnam War experience. "It`s extremely important to the soldier and the Marine, the airman and the sailor over there to know that their country`s behind them," he said. A Gallup poll released last week found that about six in 10 Americans don`t approve of President Bush`s handling of the war and want a partial or full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Funny that Conway should mention Vietnam. Its prime minister arrives today for a historic visit to the White House, in belated recognition of the renewed diplomatic relations and robust economic trade now enjoyed between the two countries. It is thus an especially good time to reflect on the pitfalls of false patriotism and blind loyalty to a lost cause.

The general was right that growing public opposition to the Vietnam War pushed President Nixon to pull the plug on that conflict. But he was wrong to imply that being guided by voters to set firm deadlines for withdrawing from a foreign quagmire was a bad thing for either side. An estimated 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American deaths later, Vietnam is run by the same Communist Party that was our enemy back then, but it now seems to matter not at all. We are perfectly happy to see them open their cheap labor markets to the West.

The sad irony is that Iraq — unlike Japan or Germany during World War II — also wasn`t a viable threat to the United States when we "preemptively" invaded it. Once again, we have been reminded that violent intrusions into other people`s history have unforeseen consequences, usually negative. First among these effects is the inciting of insurgencies, united only by common hatred of the occupying foreign soldiers

Iraq, as Vietnam, will likely have serious problems after the American withdrawal. These problems, however, will be Iraq`s, destined for Iraqis to sort out. Simply put, the best thing we can do now to encourage stability in Iraq is to stop serving as a recruitment poster for the insurgency.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Mit Kronprinz

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Jun 22, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
The axis of lesser evil
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF22Ak01.html

A member of the Iranian diaspora summed it up, wryly, in just one phrase: "Welcome to the axis of lesser evil."

The sophisticated Persian civilization invented chess. The nuclear negotiations between Iran and the EU-3 (France, Germany and Great Britain) is nothing but a game of chess. Iranians are now taking pleasure in reducing President George W Bush`s moves to dust. Bush said that last week`s presidential elections were a sham. A flood of electors (62%) went to the polls to demonstrate otherwise. Ali Yunesi, Iran`s Intelligence Minister, quipped, sarcastically, "Thank you. He motivated people to vote in retaliation." Now the counter move is the axis of lesser evil: the reformist movement backing pragmatist Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani en masse in the second and deciding round of voting on Friday in a runoff against against ultra-hawk Mahmud Ahmadinejad. A committee called Students` Anti-Fascism Headquarters is even traveling to rural Iran to campaign for Rafsanjani.

Between a dogmatic ex-commando still very active in the trenches of puritanism and a pragmatic, let`s-talk-to-the-West insider, Rafsanjani the millionaire mullah could not but be regarded by the reformists as the lesser evil - Their candidates were routed in the first round, with Mostafa Moin - the tentative successor to outgoing president Mohammed Khatami - only getting 14% of the votes. Reformists feel that they have lost a battle but not the war. Moin`s defeat was Khatami`s last, undeserved humiliation. Reformists now seem to realize that Ahmadinejad got to the second round because he was talking about unemployment and inflation - practical problems for most Iranians - not more freedom and democracy, which had been Khatami`s favored rhetoric.

Ahmadinejad, Tehran`s mayor, stormed the finishing line with 19% of the votes (Rafsanjani got 21%) thanks to the discreet but very efficient mobilization of the highly motivated masses of the pious poor. The mobilization was directed by very organized militias like the Basijis and the Hezbollahis: it`s important to remember that both the Basijis and Ansar-e Hizbollah attacked reformist students in 1999 and 2003. Ahmadinejad`s simple, straightforward rhetoric - a throwback to the early period of the Islamic revolution of 1979 - was a smash, especially in Tehran`s poor side of town. Tehran, a metropolis of 14 million, is deeply segregated. The made-up girls with silky designer scarves bought in Dubai driving Pathfinders in north Tehran are definitely a minority. One of the most popular of Ahmadinejad`s campaign slogans was "we didn`t conduct a revolution so that we could become a democracy". Then in his post-first round press conference he added that, "in our democratic system, liberty is already beyond what could be imagined".

European Union diplomats concur with the analysis by the reformist Shargh daily newspaper, which compared this Iranian election with the French presidential election in 2002. Then, in the first round, socialist Lionel Jospin was overtaken at the last minute by ultra-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen - an outcome no one had predicted. In the second round, Jacques Chirac won by a landslide - thanks to a massive strategic vote by the left. Shargh`s chief editor, Mohammad Kuchani, writes, "It is now explicitly clear that Rafsanjani is the only option to keep democracy in Iran." For him, talking about boycott "is a betrayal to freedom" and "political suicide".

The ultimate Persian neo-con
As the head of the extremely powerful Expediency Council - which arbitrates between the Guardians Council and the majlis (parliament) - 70-year-old Rafsanjani already was Iran`s de facto number 2, responding only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much more influential than the outgoing Khatami. Rafsanjani`s team is in charge of the ultra-sensitive nuclear dossier. It was basically Rafsanjani`s decision to freeze Iranian nuclear enrichment, be available to all sorts of UN inspections, and negotiate with the EU-3. He wants detente with the US - although he clearly stipulates Washington has to make the first move.

Ahmadinejad, 49, a former commando with the regime`s ideological army, the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), active in covert cross-border operations during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, is a completely different story. He`s backed by practically all the extreme right-wing spectrum, people who are even further to the right of the Supreme Leader. He has no problems with his persona: in one of his campaign rallies he said that "the people are waiting for the fundamentalists to serve them". He rules out any dialogue with the "Great Satan". And he will be much tougher in nuclear negotiations.

Reformists say that he "Islamized" Tehran to an enormous extent, cracking down heavily on social and cultural life, transforming cultural centers - which used to offer language courses, movies, libraries, theater groups and music concerts - into ersatz prayer rooms. He also shut down fast food joints where the city`s vast young armies went to grab a chicken burger and at least try to strike up a conversation with girls. Anyone driving an Iranian-made Paykan with the stereo blasting was fined. Soccer superstar David Beckham - advertising motor oil on a billboard - was also banned. The mayor`s new, strictly enforced dress code imposed long-sleeved shirts for male municipal employees and a compulsory beard. Ahmadinejad`s beard is neatly trimmed. He looks scruffy - cheap shirt, cheap jacket, no tie - miles away from the sartorial splendor of Khatami.

Remember Ohio
The losers in the first round are not going quietly. Supporters of Mohammad Baqir Qalibaf insist that on election day last Friday, Basij militia commanders and clerical leaders saying prayers and branding fatwas ordered all conservative families at the last minute to switch their support from Qalibaf to Ahmadinejad. The allegation needs to be considered: as late as Thursday, one day before the vote, Ahmadinejad was trailing at only 5 %, way behind Qalibaf and reformist Moin.

Moin supporters alleged that members of the Guardians Council - supposed to be observers - were actually counting votes, and organizing a US$15.5 million operation involving 300,000 members to make sure Ahmadinejad got to the second round. Centrist-reformist cleric Mehdi Karoubi told of "bizarre interference" and "money changing hands". The 12-member Guardians Council - headed by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati - denied every accusation and said the election process was "healthy" and ordered a meek recount of only 100 ballot boxes. Two reformist newspapers, Aftab and Eghbal, were banned for attempting to publish a letter by Karoubi denouncing an elaborate plot to rig the polls. But "we do not know if this measure only applies to today`s issue or if it is a more long-term ban," said reformist official Issa Saharkiz.

Reformists are intrigued, to say the least, that after the first post-election projections, Ahmadinejad was in third place, behind Moin; then Ahmadinejad declared victory hours before the Interior Ministry had said anything officially. Comparisons are being made with the 2004 US presidential election in Ohio. Significant numbers of Americans are convinced the election in Ohio was stolen. Unfazed, Karoubi appealed to the Supreme Leader to "appoint an honest and trusted committee" to investigate the Guardians Council themselves, as well as the Interior Ministry, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basijis. It`s very unlikely the system will investigate itself.

We prefer regime change
As Ahmadinejad is very close to the Supreme Leader, a victory in the second round means all the institutions in the Islamic republic - from the judiciary to parliament - will be controlled by the right-wing. "Not unlike the US," quips a European diplomat. The conservatives are emboldened. According to Ressalat newspaper, "People want an honest fundamentalist who is proud of his fundamentalism, not someone who resorts to different appearance to win votes." Sounds like Republicans blaming Democrat hopeful John Kerry as a flip-flopper. Reformists and large swathes of the Iranian diaspora are deeply disturbed - because they know that for the regime, Rafsanjani is considered a dangerous rival to the Supreme Leader, while Ahmadinejad is regarded as a "son of the revolution". Anything can happen.

Rafsanjani has publicly appealed for the votes of everyone to the left of Ahmadinejad - which in fact means everyone except the hardliners - "so that we can prevent extremism". Student reformists are busy shoring up the axis of lesser evil. If pragmatist Rafsanjani wins, the Bush administration will have to do business with a moderate. No regime change. No invasion. No war. Certainly the last thing Washington neo-cons want.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

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Tuesday, June 21, 2005

General Update...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_riverbendblog_a…
The cousin, his wife S. and their two daughters have been houseguests these last three days. They drove up to the house a couple of days ago with several bags of laundry. “There hasn’t been water in our area for three days…” The cousins wife huffed as she dragged along a black plastic bag of dirty clothes. “The water came late last night and disappeared three hours later… what about you?” Our water had not been cut off completely, but it came and went during the day.

Water has been a big problem in many areas all over Baghdad. Houses without electric water pumps don’t always have access to water. Today it was the same situation in most of the areas. They say the water came for a couple of hours and then disappeared again. We’re filling up plastic containers and pots just to be on the safe side. It is not a good idea to be caught without water in the June heat in Iraq.

“I need to bathe the children and wash all these clothes,” S. called to me as the older of the little girls and I hauled out their overnight bag. “And the sheets- you know nothing has been washed since last weeks ajaja…” We call a dust storm an “ajaja” in Iraq. I don’t think there’s a proper translation for that word. Last week, a few large ajajas kept Baghdad in a sort of pale yellow haze. What happens when an ajaja settles on the city is that within a couple of hours, the air becomes heavy and thick with beige powdery sand. Visibility decreases during these dust storms and it often becomes difficult to drive or see out the window.

On such occasions, we rush about the house shutting windows tightly in a largely futile attempt to keep dust out of the house. For people with allergies or asthma- it’s a nightmare. The only thing that alleviates the situation somewhat is air conditioning. The air feels a little less dusty when there’s an air conditioner pumping cool air into the room.

One dust storm last week was so heavy, E. slept for a couple of hours during its peak and woke up with little beige-tipped lashes from the dust that had settled on his face while he was dozing. You can even taste the dust in the food sometimes. These storms can last anywhere from a few hours to several days.

After the ajaja is over and the air has cleared somewhat, we begin the cleaning process. By this time, the furniture is all covered with a light film of orangish dirt, the windows are grimy, and the garden, driveway and trees all look like they have recently emerged from a sea of dust. We spend the days after such storms washing, wiping, polishing and beating dust out of the house.

“I’ve been dying to wash the curtains and sheets since the ajaja…” S. breathed, pulling out dusty curtains from the plastic bag. She paused suddenly, a horrific idea occurring to her, “You have water, right? Right?” We had water, I assured her. I didn’t mention, however, that there had been no electricity for the better part of the morning and the generator was providing only enough for the refrigerator, television and a few lights. The standard washing machine consumed too much water and electricity- we would have to use the little ‘National’ washing tub, or ‘diaper machine’ as my mother called it.

The pale yellow plastic washing tub is a simple device that is designed to hold a few liters of water and to swish around said water with a few articles of clothing tossed in and some detergent. Next, the clothes have to be removed from the soapy water and rinsed separately in clean water, then hung to dry. While it conveniently uses less water than the standard washing machine, there is also a risk factor involved- a sock or undershirt is often sacrificed to the little plastic blade that swishes around the water and clothes.

We spent some of yesterday and a good portion of today washing clothes, rinsing them and speculating on how our ancestors fared without washing machines and water pumps.

The electrical situation differs from area to area. On some days, the electricity schedule is two hours of electricity, and then four hours of no electricity. On other days, it’s four hours of electricity to four or six hours of no electricity. The problem is that the last couple of weeks, we don’t have electricity in the mornings for some reason. Our local generator is off until almost 11 am, and the house generator allows for ceiling fans (or “pankas”), the refrigerator, television and a few other appliances. Air conditioners cannot be turned on and the heat is oppressive by 8 am these days.

Detentions and assassinations, along with intermittent electricity, have also been contributing to sleepless nights. We’re hearing about raids in many areas in the Karkh half of Baghdad in particular. On the television the talk about ‘terrorists’ being arrested, but there are dozens of people being rounded up for no particular reason. Almost every Iraqi family can give the name of a friend or relative who is in one of the many American prisons for no particular reason. They aren’t allowed to see lawyers or have visitors and stories of torture have become commonplace. Both Sunni and Shia clerics who are in opposition to the occupation are particularly prone to attacks by “Liwa il Theeb” or the special Iraqi forces Wolf Brigade. They are often tortured during interrogation and some of them are found dead.

There were also several explosions and road blocks today. It took the cousin an hour to get to work, which was only twenty minutes away before the war. Now, he has to navigate between closed streets, check points, and those delightful concrete barriers rising up everywhere. It is especially difficult to be caught in traffic and that happens a lot lately. Baghdad has been cut up into sections and several of them may be found to be off limits immediately after an explosion or before a Puppet meeting. The least pleasant situation is to be caught in mid-day traffic, on a crowded road, in the heat- waiting for the next bomb to go off.

What people find particularly frustrating is the fact that while Baghdad seems to be falling apart in so many ways with roads broken and pitted, buildings blasted and burnt out and residential areas often swimming in sewage, the Green Zone is flourishing. The walls surrounding restricted areas housing Americans and Puppets have gotten higher- as if vying with the tallest of date palms for height. The concrete reinforcements and road blocks designed to slow and impede traffic are now a part of everyday scenery- the road, the trees, the shops, the earth, the sky… and the ugly concrete slabs sometimes wound insidiously with barbed wire.

The price of building materials has gone up unbelievably, in spite of the fact that major reconstruction has not yet begun. I assumed it was because so much of the concrete and other building materials was going to reinforce the restricted areas. A friend who recently got involved working with an Iraqi subcontractor who takes projects inside of the Green Zone explained that it was more than that. The Green Zone, he told us, is a city in itself. He came back awed, and more than a little bit upset. He talked of designs and plans being made for everything from the future US Embassy and the housing complex that will surround it, to restaurants, shops, fitness centers, gasoline stations, constant electricity and water- a virtual country inside of a country with its own rules, regulations and government. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Republic of the Green Zone, also known as the Green Republic.

“The Americans won’t be out in less than ten years.” Is how the argument often begins with the friend who has entered the Green Republic. “How can you say that?” Is usually my answer- and I begin to throw around numbers- 2007, 2008 maximum… Could they possibly want to be here longer? Can they afford to be here longer? At this, T. shakes his head- if you could see the bases they are planning to build- if you could see what already has been built- you’d know that they are going to be here for quite a while.

The Green Zone is a source of consternation and aggravation for the typical Iraqi. It makes us anxious because it symbolises the heart of the occupation and if fortifications and barricades are any indicator- the occupation is going to be here for a long time. It is a provocation because no matter how anyone tries to explain or justify it, it is like a slap in the face. It tells us that while we are citizens in our own country, our comings and goings are restricted because portions of the country no longer belong to its people. They belong to the people living in the Green Republic.

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Tuesday, June 21, 2005
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

War News for Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Bring ‘em on: Two people killed in two car bombings targeting Iraqi special forces in the Rissalla neighborhood of Baghdad. According to the US military, ten insurgents and four Iraqi police officers were killed and twenty insurgents were captured when the Bayaa police station was stormed in a “highly coordinated assault” using mortars, RPGs, a car bomb and small arms fire. Four officers killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad’s Mansour neighborhood. Three Iraqis wounded in a checkpoint bombing on Baghdad’s airport road. Three Kurdish pershmerga members killed by gunmen near Hit. The Ansar al Sunna Army militant group claimed to have killed seven people in a convoy near Ramadi. Four suspected insurgents killed, 18 captured, and one kidnapped civilian rescued in various operations in the vicinity of Tal Afar and Mosul. Shops in Tal Afar reported closed due to insecurity, depriving some families of food.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi policemen wounded in battle with gunmen who assaulted the police station in Baghdad’s Aamil neighborhood. US patrol attacked by roadside bomb north of Baquba, no casualties reported.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqi army soldiers killed in suicide attack on checkpoint in Kirkuk. Five Iraqi police and soldiers killed and 20 wounded in Baghdad attack (This may be the same incident reported in the first entry above where insurgents stormed the Bayaa police station). At least eight policemen and an eight-month-old baby killed when insurgents launched an assault on a Baghdad police station. (Apparently insurgents, in what seem to be particularly violent death throes, stormed at least two police stations or security complexes on Monday.)

Bring ‘em on: Director general of internal security in the Shahrazouz area of Iraqi Kurdistan and two of his bodyguards killed in suicide bombing between Halabja and Suliemaniya.

Push it in here, it pops out there: Insurgents killed at least 26 people and wounded more than 80 yesterday in a complex series of attacks on Iraqi police stations and army bases across the country, while two large Marine and Iraqi army operations were in progress in the restive al-Anbar province.

The violence - including coordinated car bombs, mortars and heavy machine-gun fire - underscored the apparent strategy of insurgents in Iraq: As U.S. and Iraqi commanders hit hard in one region, insurgents hit back in another.

The U.S.-led assaults so far don`t appear to have seriously undermined the long-term ability of insurgents to move forces and launch attacks.

President Bush, in Washington yesterday, acknowledged the dangers facing U.S. troops and vowed that their sacrifices wouldn`t be in vain. He said the goal was to have Iraqi troops take over the job now done by U.S. troops, but didn`t set any timetable.

``I understand how dangerous it is there,`` he said. ``I understand we`ve got kids in harm`s way, and I worry about their families. And obviously, anytime there`s a death, I grieve.``

Yeah. Obviously. You smirking piece of shit.


Far from over: U.S. Marines claimed success on Tuesday in another battle against insurgents in the Iraqi desert but acknowledged that the war was far from over and that guerrillas would soon recover lost ground.

After four days of bombardment and street-to-street gunbattles, the Marines cleared Karabila -- a strategic way station near the main border crossing where the Euphrates flows in from Syria -- of foreign fighters who made it a base.

But U.S. officers and local people in the town, badly damaged by the fighting, said the insurgents would be back.

"That is another in a string of successful operations that continue to disrupt and interdict insurgent activity in west Anbar province," said Colonel Steve Davis, who commanded the 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops involved in "Operation Spear".

Battalion intelligence officer Captain Thomas Sibley pointed out, however, that any final victory was still some way off: "If this was the only thing we did, we would lose this war -- quickly. But it`s not the only thing we`re doing.

"Yeah, in a couple of weeks they`ll be back and they`ll make up for these losses. But that`s fine, because we`re not beating them in two weeks. We`re beating them in two years."

Remember when they told us this?: This morning on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked if “the Bush administration fairly [can] be criticized for failing to level with the American people about how long and difficult this commitment will be?” Rice responded:

Former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, 3/28/03: “The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid…”

Yeah, I know this is old news but it dovetails so nicely with the story above. I guess CPT Sibley never got the memo though…hope he packed an extra toothbrush.

Tactics reminiscent: The public war on the Iraqi insurgency has led to an atmosphere of hidden brutalities, including abuse and torture, carried out against detainees by the nation`s special security forces, according to defense lawyers, international organizations and Iraq`s Ministry of Human Rights.

Up to 60% of the estimated 12,000 detainees in the country`s prisons and military compounds face intimidation, beatings or torture that leads to broken bones and sometimes death, said Saad Sultan, head of a board overseeing the treatment of prisoners at the Human Rights Ministry. He added that police and security forces attached to the Interior Ministry are responsible for most abuses.

The units have used tactics reminiscent of Saddam Hussein`s secret intelligence squads, according to the ministry and independent human rights groups and lawyers, who have cataloged abuses.

"We`ve documented a lot of torture cases," said Sultan, whose committee is pushing for wider access to Iraqi-run prisons across the nation. "There are beatings, punching, electric shocks to the body, including sensitive areas, hanging prisoners upside down and beating them and dragging them on the ground…. Many police officers come from a culture of torture from their experiences over the last 35 years. Most of them worked during Saddam`s regime."

Lots of secrets: Iraqi`s justice minister said today that U.S. officials are trying to delay interrogations of Saddam Hussein.

Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal, in Brussels for an international conference on Iraq, also accused the U.S. of concealing information about the ousted Iraqi leader.

"It seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide,`` he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

Is a United Front far away?: Iraqi lawmakers from across the political spectrum called for the withdrawal of foreign forces from their country in a letter released to the media June 19.

The move comes as U.S. President George W. Bush is under increasing domestic pressure to set a timetable for the pullout of American forces in the face of an increasing death toll at the hands of insurgents.

Eighty-two Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, Christian and communist deputies made the call in a letter sent by Falah Hassan Shanshal of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the largest group in parliament, to speaker Hajem al-Hassani.

(I know Friendly Fire posted an article on this yesterday, but I thought it was worth a second look. After all, this is Iraqi democracy in action! Does anyone know how many deputies would have to vote for a resolution calling for withdrawal for it to become law? I’m afraid my grasp of the mechanics of Iraqi government isn’t all it could be…)


Two stories in one: The new US ambassador to Iraq said Tuesday he would work with the population to crush the insurgency that is throttling much of the country despite massive operations against the rebels.

"I will work with Iraqis to break the back of the insurgency," said Zalmay Khalilzad, who presented his credentials to President Jalal Talabani on the way to Brussels for an international conference on rebuilding Iraq.

"Foreign terrorists and hardline Baathists want Iraq to be in a civil war," Khalilzad told reporters, referring to members of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party.

"Foreign terrorists are using Iraqis as cannon fodder."

(snip)

A tribal leader in Karabilah near the border came to Baghdad to beg for medical supplies and called on leaders to stop the fighting.

"We ask (the government) to send medical relief to Qaim and Karabilah," said Osama al-Jadaan al-Sanad, head of the Karabilah tribe. "We must force US forces and the Iraqi defence and interior ministries to stop bleeding the innocent in Karabilah under the pretext that they are terrorists."

Journalism in Iraq: Television channel Al-Arabiya said US military authorities had refused to authorize the evacuation from Iraq of reporter Jawad Kazem, who was wounded by armed men Saturday in Baghdad.

In a statement received by Agence France-Presse, the Dubai-based TV station said its attempts to obtain permission for a medical aircraft to evacuate its journalist from Baghdad had met with `a refusal from the American military authorities`.

In `intensive` contacts with `the Iraqi government, the Pentagon, the State Department and American Central Command (Centcom) in Qatar` Al-Arabiya had explained `the gravity of the state of health` of Kazem and `the need to transfer him out of Iraq in the hope of saving his life,` the statement said.

Soldiers’ perspectives: Their faces dusty and streaked with sweat, the soldiers huddle to talk through the incident, raising more questions than answers. Why had the engineers been operating in daylight, when insurgents could easily "template" their position? Why had the infantry left them vulnerable? Why hadn`t they caught the sniper who killed Miller?

"What sucks the most," says Miller`s platoon leader, Lt. Tom Lafave, of Escanaba, Mich., "is we sweep an area and five hours later an IED goes off in the same spot."

Miller`s squad leader, Staff Sgt. Steve "Shaggy" Hagedorn, is more blunt. "We spent three days clearing a route and I guarantee it`s worse now than when we started," he says. "So everyone`s asking, `What are we doing it for?` Everyone`s asking, `Am I next?` "

Miller has made his final escape from the war, his body refrigerated and readied for the flight out. But his death will replay in the minds of his platoon mates for a very long time. The shock is compounded by the loss just weeks earlier of the platoon`s commander, 2nd Lt. Richard B. Gienau, 29, of Peoria, Ill., and Sgt. Seth K. Garceau, 27, of Oelwein, Iowa, when their Humvee was hit by a large road bomb. For some, it was already too much to bear.

Syrian border: Syrian President Bashar Assad is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad, which have charged in the past that the Syrians let militants cross the frontier. His government denies that, arguing it is impossible to seal the 360-mile border.

Seeking to show they are trying to guard the frontier - as Iraqi and American soldiers across the border fight yet another offensive against insurgents believed to have entered from Syria - Syrian officials gave journalists a rare peek Monday at part of the border.

The Syrians did increase their work along the border starting nine months ago, said Lyne-Pirkis. Nevertheless, the border remains "very difficult" to control, especially at night, he said.

The Syrians also need to improve patrols and get better intelligence to understand how the insurgency works, said Lyne-Pirkis, who has surveyed the entire border and went on the tour.

A Syrian border official acknowledged it is difficult to keep insurgents from crossing at night, although he said such crossings are generally prevented during the day.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the border issue, said 15 border guards had been killed either by outlaws crossing the border or by fire from U.S. troops who apparently mistook the Syrians for infiltrators. He did not provide the time span or other details.

Mercenaries: ``Private Warriors" is the closest thing to must-see TV that ``Frontline" has uncorked in ages. Veteran correspondent Martin Smith, on his fourth trip to Iraq for the program, has reported, written, and coproduced a devastating look at the rodeo of private contractors working for the US government there that should trouble all of us.

There are as many as 100,000 civilian contractors and another 20,000 private security forces in the country who exist outside of the military chain of command and who are thus largely unaccountable to military leaders. The security cadre shows up from Russia, South Africa, and Europe, as well as the United States. Some are well-trained, others are disasters. Many are former soldiers, others are debtors desperate for cash.

More troubling are the rules the security types follow: There aren`t many. ``They don`t communicate in the same networks. They don`t get the same intelligence information," one expert says on the program. Adds another: ``They can decide to leave when and where they want. . . . And so what you`ve done is put a level of uncertainty into your military operation. And military operations are not a place that you want uncertainty."

As pressure mounts on the Bush administration to withdraw troops from Iraq, so does the seductiveness of replacing them with even more contractors.

``Perhaps it is part of their policy to reduce troop members and replace them with private security contractors," offers the head of one such outfit.

June 2005 and we still have equipment shortages?: Marine Corps units fighting in some of the most dangerous terrain in Iraq don`t have enough weapons, communications gear, or properly outfitted vehicles, according to an investigation by the Marine Corps` inspector general provided to Congress yesterday.

The report, obtained by the Globe, says the estimated 30,000 Marines in Iraq need twice as many heavy machine guns, more fully protected armored vehicles, and more communications equipment to operate in a region the size of Utah.

The Marine Corps leadership has ``understated" the amount and types of ground equipment it needs, according to the investigation, concluding that all of its fighting units in Iraq ``require ground equipment that exceeds" their current supplies, ``particularly in mobility, engineering, communications, and heavy weapons."

What the hell are they spending this money on? Obviously not the Marines: Lawmakers in the United States were scheduled to vote on Monday to approve $45 billion US in additional funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the recent Middle East foray more expensive than the entire Korean War.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has approved $350 billion, mostly for combat and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The amount, which includes $82 billion approved last month, is equal to the total amount in today`s dollars spent on the Korean conflict from 1950-53.

Sleight of hand: By refusing to estimate the costs for the war in Iraq, Bush makes his budget deficits look much smaller than they actually are.

With two full years of experience waging war in Iraq, President George W. Bush should have some idea of how much it will cost to continue the fight next year.

But when he submitted his 2006 budget to Congress in February, it didn`t contain one penny for combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sunny optimist that he is, Bush wasn`t operating on the assumption that the mission would actually be accomplished by then.

Instead, Bush insisted it would be impossible to know how much would be needed, so instead of including anything in the regular budget, he plans to continue the tradition of coming to Congress for emergency supplemental appropriations when war funds get low.

Coincidentally, that approach has the side effect of making the federal budget deficit appear smaller than it actually is. Far smaller, considering that spending in Iraq has averaged more than $5 billion a month.

The Times Are Changing, Indeed They Are

If 51% is a mandate, what is 59%?: Nearly six in 10 Americans oppose the war in Iraq and a growing number of them are dissatisfied with the war on terrorism, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.

Only 39 percent of those polled said they favored the war in Iraq -- down from 47 percent in March -- and 59 percent were opposed.

The survey of 1,006 adults, conducted by telephone Thursday through Sunday, had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Please support this fine citizen: Since Mike Norton, of Layton, began displaying the pictures of American soldiers killed in Iraq on an illuminated sign in his front yard, his home has been vandalized, cars have stopped in front of his home and honked horns in the early morning hours and he has received anonymous harassing phone calls.


Growing a spine?: The Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, created last week, will to try to increase pressure on the Bush administration and Congress to end the Iraq conflict and bring American forces home. The group of progressives, led by California Reps. Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, has been urging a withdrawal for some time but formalized its effort last week as part of its push to become a more forceful voice on the issue within the broader party Caucus.

Waters said many House Democrats have become increasingly frustrated with the party’s failure to effectively challenge the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. She said the caucus was needed to help organize a message offensive and ensure that the White House comes up with and presents a plan to conclude the war.


Dickheads: A radical Midwestern hate group plans to protest at the funerals of two local soldiers killed in action, claiming the slain heroes ``were cast into hell to join many more dishonorable Americans.

The Westboro Baptist Church, proclaiming ``thank God for IEDs`` or roadside bombs, claims the 9/11 attacks and American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God`s vengeance on a nation that is tolerant of homosexuality.

``It`s going to shock and enrage every person who sees it. That is our goal,`` said Margie Phelps, daughter of WBC leader Fred Phelps. The group is based in Topeka, Kansas, and has made headlines protesting homosexuality at school events, graduations and mainstream churches.

Commentary

Analysis: The U.S. military strategy in Iraq has been consistent for months now: Use aggressive military operations to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters entering the country and the insurgent support lines that run along the Euphrates River west to the Syrian border. Simultaneously, the U.S. is training Iraqi troops to fill the security vacuum that persists in the center and north of the country.

By any metric of tactical military success, it`s working, say analysts. U.S. forces have strung together victory after victory. Marine and Army operations from Najaf in the south to Fallujah in the heart of the Sunni triangle and on to Mosul in the north have ended with thousands of insurgents killed and captured and tons of enemy munitions destroyed with minimal U.S. casualties.

But if another measure of success is used - a reduction in the number and lethality of insurgent attacks - the U.S. and the new Iraqi government are failing. In the past two days, for example, U.S. Marines and Army soldiers carried out Operations Spear and Dagger (designed to disrupt insurgent capabilities between Baghdad and Syria). At the same time, separate suicide attacks killed 20 policemen in the Kurdish city of Arbil and 23 people in a Baghdad restaurant popular with policemen, while insurgents overran a police station in southern Baghdad, killing eight officers.

U.S. commanders and soldiers in Iraq frequently complain they don`t have the manpower to deal anything resembling a decisive blow. Soldiers operating in tough Iraqi provinces like Anbar say they feel as if they`re watering the desert: They can win any neighborhood or mid-sized city they care to and make it "bloom" for as long as they`re present in strength, but their efforts wither when they inevitably leave and move on to the next engagement.

"We`ve won every fight they`ve given us, but there always seem to be just as many people fighting us as when we got here," says one career Marine officer, who recently finished a tour in Iraq.

Editorial: The president is deluding himself if he believes the nation must stay the course. He and his administration must acknowledge what has become obvious for more than two years -- it`s time to start withdrawing U.S. troops and give full control of Iraq back to the Iraqis.

As U.S. forces withdraw, Iraq should be put under some form of United Nations trusteeship. The UN can put together an international peacekeeping force to maintain civic order. It can start the negotiation process with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for how they will share power.

It can also start shipping in food and medicine as well as engineers and construction supplies. It can throw Haliburton and the rest of the war profiteers out and give the jobs to Iraqis so they can rebuild their own country and take control of their economic destiny.

We can`t do anything about what has already happened to put our nation into this mess in Iraq. We can, however, do something to prevent it from getting worse. Without an honest timetable to internationalize the political and economic rebuilding of Iraq that will keep U.S. involvement to a bare minimum, we can expect to see more chaos and death in Iraq and American troops bogged down in a tragic, unwinnable war.

Interview with Wesley Clark

What should the Democrats be doing and saying now about Iraq?

First of all, we`ve got to support the troops that are there, their families at home, the military as an institution that`s fighting the war, and our veterans. We have to do that because it`s a duty for Americans, and if we`re going to be the leading party in America, then we have to lead. There`s nothing more important for a government than protecting the safety and security of its people, and that requires a strong and ready armed force. So that`s the first thing that Democrats have to do. I think we`ve done a good job at that, and I think we`re getting increasing recognition for that.

It`s been Democrats who have supported and proposed measures to make sure every vehicle has the appropriate armor, to make sure every solider has body armor and adequate ammunition and training, to make sure that our veterans and our returning soldiers can be taken care of. Democrats have a long-standing reputation for being more interested in the people than in the weapons systems.

So Democrats have to pull off being critical of the administration`s Iraq policy -- and articulating a better policy of their own -- while not being perceived as denigrating the troops.

First, it`s still true that the war in Iraq was a strategic blunder. Even had the intelligence been proven to be correct, it wouldn`t have established a compelling necessity to go to war when we did. Second, the intelligence wasn`t correct. That said, once we`re there, we want to succeed.

The administration`s overall strategy is sort of unarguable in the broadest sense. The problem is that it is not executing it well.

"Unarguable" in the sense that the United States has to stay in Iraq until the job is done?

"Unarguable" in the sense that you have to create an Iraqi government that people can have confidence in, that has legitimacy. You also have to have the ability to train the Iraqi military and security forces to take over an increasing proportion of the burden. And you have to deal with Iraq`s rough neighborhood.

As far as creating an Iraqi government, the administration essentially did very little for more than a year. And even today, we`re having a great deal of difficulty bringing that government together. Then, on the military side, we also wasted a year [before] getting serious about training the Iraqi military and security forces. And the administration hasn`t ever really talked about how to deal with Iraq`s neighbors other than to threaten them; and it doesn`t talk to some of the neighbors, like Syria and Iran.

So it`s not that there`s no way out. It`s that the administration isn`t doing a very good job of making a success of what it got us in to.

(This whole interview, and especially these passages, strike me as a worthy discussion topic. I admire General Clark but I’m not sure I agree with him here. I’d really appreciate it if one of these muckymucks would define for me in plain language just what ‘victory in Iraq’ would constitute.)


Opinion: "He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, `One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.` And he said, `My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.` He went on, `If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I`m not going to waste it. I`m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I`m going to have a successful presidency.`"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher`s popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush`s father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz`s revelations illuminate Bush`s personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Comment: Although official administration spokesmen have for some time been saying things like ``We have turned a corner in Iraq`` or ``We have broken the back of the insurgency`` or ``The insurgents are in a last-gasp campaign,`` the truth seems to be otherwise. A brief quiet followed the Iraqi election, but it has been broken by a sustained round of insurgent attacks. Iraqi civilian casualties in May were up by 33 percent over April, while Iraqi police deaths were up 75 percent over the same period. American military dead in Iraq more than doubled last month over the lull in March. Because the need for large numbers of troops there has remained much longer than originally planned (some reports suggest that Pentagon civilian planners anticipated a force of only 30,000 by 2004; we now have more than four times that number in Iraq), many of the active-duty Army units in Iraq are on their second deployments.

In addition to the thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, one victim of this slow bleeding in Iraq is the American military as an institution. Across America, the National Guard, designed to assist civil authorities in domestic crises (like the pandemic of a lethal avian flu that some public-health planners fear), is in tatters. Re-enlistments are down, training for domestic support missions is spotty at best, equipment is battered and many units are either in Iraq or on their way to or from it. Now the rot is beginning to spread into the regular Army. Recruiters are coming up dry, and some, under pressure to produce new troops, have reportedly been complicit in suspect applications.

The implications for the all-volunteer military are significant. With almost every unit in the Army on the conveyor belt into and out of Iraq, few units are really combat-ready for other missions. If the North Korean regime that is often called crazy were to roll its huge army the few kilometers into South Korea, significant American reinforcements would be a long time coming. This raises the possibility that the United States may have to resort to nuclear weapons to stop the North Koreans, as has been contemplated with increasing seriousness since the last Nuclear Posture Review in 2002.

Opinion: In his June 18 weekly radio address last Saturday, Bush again lied to the American people when he told them that the U.S. was forced into invading Iraq because of the Sept. 11 attack on the WTC. Bush, the greatest disgrace that America has ever had to suffer, actually repeated at this late date the monstrous lie for which he is infamous throughout the world: "We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens."

Whoever the "people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens" might be, they were not Iraqis, at least not until Bush invaded their country, killed tens of thousands and maimed tens of thousands more, detained tens of thousands others, destroyed entire cities, destroyed the country`s infrastructure, and created mass unemployment, poverty, pollution, and disease.

The only reason Iraqis want to harm the U.S. is because George W. Bush inflicted, and continues to inflict, tremendous harm on Iraqis.

If the Bush administration has its way, the Iraqi insurgents will be joined by the Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Jordanians, and Palestinians. The "people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens" will increase exponentially.

Editorial: Another day, another round of bombings, electricity cuts, death and destruction in Iraq. Monday`s grim tally included a suicide attack in northern Iraq that killed at least 15 traffic policemen and wounded 100. Insurgents` sabotage of water pipes left 2 million sweltering Baghdadis without water.

Nothing, in other words, out of the ordinary. Just more evidence that the United States is bogged down in Iraq, battling a fierce insurgency with the outcome uncertain. More than two years after Saddam Hussein`s regime was toppled, no end is in view for the 140,000 U.S. troops. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives.

Not surprisingly, public support for the war in Iraq is slipping. Almost six in 10 Americans, in a Gallup poll this month, want some or all troops to come home. For the first time, a bipartisan group of congressmen is beginning to press for an exit deadline.

The White House response? A series of speeches starting this week intended, according to spokesman Scott McClellan, as an "update" for the American people. But far more is needed than another hopeful scenario, or a set of idealistic goals without a hard assessment of the realities on the ground and what has brought the USA to this point.

Opinion: President Bush planted the seeds of the destruction of his Iraq policy before the war started. Salvaging the venture will require an unprecedented degree of candor and realism from a White House that was never willing to admit -- even to itself -- how large an undertaking it was asking the American people to buy into.

The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn`t expect one.

How else to explain the fact that the president and his lieutenants consistently played down the costs of the endeavor, the number of troops required, the difficulties of overcoming tensions among the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds? Were they lying? The more logical explanation is that they didn`t know what they were talking about.

Opinion: Though Mr. Bush doesn’t do nuance and he often fights a losing battle with syntax and pronunciation, he somehow makes it all work to potent political effect. “See, in my line of work,” he has said, “you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda . . .”

This folksy bit of arrogance helps explain his talent for communication. While FDR insisted that repetition does not transform a lie into a truth, Bush has persevered, brazened out and repeated lies that meeker men might have buckled under. He has hidden the truth in plain sight, wrapped in the cult of personality and patriotism and been rewarded for his efforts. His hand-picked audiences respond with thunderous applause. They relish the president’s jovial delivery, happy just to let the propaganda sink in and work its magic. Cares be gone. God bless America.

The confluence of religious fanaticism, war, fear and corporatism, have indeed proven ripe for catapulting his propaganda. The Iraq war has cost the lives of 1,683 soldiers and the lives of untold numbers of civilians. More than 12,000 Americans have been wounded and the war has a price tag of $300 billion and counting.

A mother’s story: "My only child, Lt. Ken Ballard, was 26 years old when he was killed in Najaf, Iraq, on 5-30-04. My son saved the lives of 60 men that horrible night – they all got to go home to their families. He was one of three soldiers in his battalion killed after they were extended with the First Armored Division.

"After I read the notes from the meeting at Downing Street, I knew that his fate was decided and he was a dead man in July 2002, when that meeting took place.

"How sad that I didn`t know then – just two months after he was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, just two months after he took an oath to obey the orders of the President of the United States – that his fate was already determined by a corrupt administration. Members of the Bush Administration lied repeatedly to this country when they told us time and again that no decision to go to war had been made.

"And how devastating to know that if the administration had planned for more ground strength, my son might be alive today.”

Opinion: Bush lied, and Americans died. And continue to die. But politically - at least so far - it has worked out well for Bush.

It was a lie of political expediency, with the war resolution carefully timed just before the 2002 elections to help the Republicans take back the Senate.

It was echoed and amplified and repeated over and over again to help him and other Republicans get elected in 2004.

It wasn`t a war for oil - cheap oil was just a useful secondary benefit.

It wasn`t a war against terrorism - that was just a convenient excuse.

It wasn`t a war to enrich Bush`s and Cheney`s cronies - those were just pleasant by-products.

It wasn`t a war to show Poppy Bush that Junior was more of a man than him - that was just a personal bonus for Dubya.

It was, pure and simple, well planned years in advance, a war to solidify Bush and the Republican Party`s political capital.

It was a war for political power. That had to be first. Everything else - oil, profits, ongoing PATRIOT Act powers, easy manipulation of the media - all could only come if political power was seized and held through at least two decisive election cycles.

The Bush administration lied us into an invasion to get and keep political power. It`s that simple.


An open letter to Fred Hiatt: Men and women of good faith cannot any longer deny that the preponderance of evidence points to one conclusion, and one conclusion only: The President of the United States and much of his cabinet are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors against the US Congress and against its citizens, and those crimes were motivated by a deadly brew of political opportunism, and an arrogant and destructive neoconservative foreign policy.

Mr. Hiatt, you made one other assertion that has proven to be patently false. You said that Bush "...inherited a failing strategy with regard to Iraq."

Here again, the facts point to a different conclusion. One of the most important implications of the Kay Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, the 911 Commission’s Report, and the Duelfer Report is the clear evidence that Clinton’s policy – which was begun by Bush’s father -- was, in many ways, a stunning success. Hussein had been completely deterred from developing WMD and totally contained.

Which, of course, brings us to your last point – that "What Kennedy has laid out for the Democrats is a powerful critique; it is not yet a policy." Call it what you will, Mr. Hiatt – we now know that the strategy of containment and deterrence worked, just as it had in defeating the far more dangerous Soviet Union. On the other hand, Mr. Bush’s policy of preemption has, in fact, weakened the US in all the ways Mr. Kennedy outlined – a set of issues you wisely choose not to rebut.

And neither purple-fingered ex-post facto justifications about democratization nor any of the other 22 separate retroactive rationalizations ginned up by a White House desperate to justify breaking the law and lying to Congress and the American people undermines the case for impeachment.

It’s time, Washington Post. We all make mistakes. And it’s very hard to admit them. Particularly when papers in the Knight-Ridder chain and the Guardian got it right all along, while you and your editorial page clung to increasingly transparent lies.

But your current editorial position wouldn’t hold up against a highschool debater. Quit embarrassing yourself and insulting your reader’s intelligence.

By your own logic, the Post’s next editorial on the administration’s Iraq policy should be calling for impeachment proceedings to begin.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two Georgia soldiers, one from Ellijay and one from Liliburn, killed June 17 in Buritz.

Local story: Fowlersville, MI, Marine killed near Fallujah.

Local story: Soldier with western Pennsylvania ties killed in vehicle accident in Nippur.

Local story: Two Mississippi National Guardsmen killed in bomb attack in Iraq.

Local story: Montrose, CO, Marine killed in roadside bombing near Ramadi.

Local story: Antigo, WI, Marine who was killed in Iraq buried with full military honors.

Local story: Chicopee, MA, Marine killed in Ramadi.

Local story: Charleston, WV, Marine killed in Karabilah.


Notice To Readers: I see alert reader zig posted a bunch of interesting articles in yesterday`s Comments. I didn`t see them in time to incorporate them in this post, but if your eyeballs aren`t already falling out, go take a look. Thanks, zig!

# posted by matt : 9:06 AM
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Bush responds to the Downing Street Memo: "It`s a free country. I can bomb whoever I want."-- Grant Gerver

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Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 by the Inter Press Service
U.S. Moral Authority in `Free Fall`, Senators Warn
by William Fisher
http://www.ips.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0621-01.htm

NEW YORK - As Amnesty International urged the George W. Bush administration to "close Guantánamo and disclose the situation in the USA`s shadowy network of detention centers around the globe", a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, won a 30-milli
on-dollar contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at the U.S. Navy`s controversial detention center in Cuba.

The Pentagon said that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root would be building a two-story jail with air conditioning and exercise and medical facilities.

The plan is seen as a sign that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plans to keep the jail in operation, despite a growing chorus of criticism and mixed signals from the White House.

Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy group, drew world attention to the Guantanamo facility in its recently released annual report, which referred to the detention facility as "the gulag of our times".

The organization said keeping the prison open was the "wrong decision and will fuel worldwide concern over the stories of torture and ill-treatment, religious humiliation and arbitrary detention that are seeping from the facility."

Amnesty said the Bush administration "plans to memorialize in bricks and mortar its decision to operate outside of the law," according to Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director.

The group called for "an independent investigation into U.S. policies and practices on detention and interrogation, including torture and ill-treatment, (which) would reassure the world that the U.S. administration has nothing to hide."

Key lawmakers have said they will press Congress to intervene in detainee policies despite the administration`s claim that running the detention camp is the province of the executive branch and the military.

"This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has proposed that an independent 9/11-type commission investigate Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations.

Former president Jimmy Carter has also added his voice to those urging the U.S. to close the camp. "The U.S. continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to our reputation... because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo," Carter said.

Last week, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, some Republicans agreed that Congress has been too passive in allowing detainees to be held for years without trials or consultations with lawyers.

Some senators objected when an administration official said detainees could be held at the prison forever. But others said criticisms of the prison camp might endanger U.S. military morale.

The U.S. Constitution "explicitly confers upon Congress" the power to define appropriate treatments for captured foreign suspects, said Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina and former military judge, suggested that Congress develop "some statutory provisions defining enemy combatant status and standardizing intelligence-gathering techniques and detention policies."

Pentagon and Justice Department officials have defended the administration, saying the approximately 520 detainees are not covered by legal protections afforded criminal defendants or prisoners of war. Most of the detainees at Guantanamo were captured in Afghanistan, although some were apprehended in Bosnia, the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Pressure has mounted on Congress in recent weeks to address allegations of detainee abuse at the prison, opened in January 2002 at a Navy base in Cuba leased by the U.S.

Some detainees have complained about physical abuse and religious humiliation, though many claims are unverified. Rights groups have assailed the government for holding some prisoners for more than three years without trial.

Pres. Bush has left open the possibility of closing the facility, but he and Rumsfeld also have defended treatment of Guantanamo Bay captives and said the government must have a facility where it can hold terrorism suspects.

Several senators said U.S. detention policies are undermining the nation`s moral authority and inflaming the Islamic world. The situation "is an international embarrassment to our nation and to our ideals, and it remains a festering threat to our security," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee`s top Democrat.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, said abuses at Guantanamo Bay "have shamed the nation in the eyes of the world and made the war on terror harder to win. Our moral authority went into a free fall."

Several prominent Republicans -- among them Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, a former Bush cabinet member -- also have publicly argued that the damage to Washington`s image caused by the prison now outweighs any practical benefits it might have.

And Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has warned that Guantanamo is "going to end in disaster - if we don`t wake up and smell the coffee."

Other observers think closing the base would not go nearly far enough. Beau Grosscup, professor of international relations at the University of California, told IPS, "Closing Gitmo is the easy thing to do but has only symbolic value if the torture is not ended."

And Brian J. Foley, a professor at Florida Coastal School of Law, told IPS, "At this stage, closing Gitmo would be an empty gesture unless the abhorrent policies of torture, rendition and imprisoning people without appropriate evidentiary hearings to determine guilt or innocence are changed."

"Otherwise it`s just a shell game, and these activities will simply be offshored elsewhere," he said.

Like Guantanamo, Halliburton has become a magnet for critics of the Iraq war. It is among a small group of U.S. companies awarded no-bid contracts, and its work has been criticized for massive cost overruns and inflated billing.

Edward Herman, emeritus professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told IPS, "The combination of looting and conflict-of-interest makes the selection of Halliburton for construction of the new Guantanamo prison something you might expect to see in Doonesbury, not in a real world supposedly democratic state.``

© Copyright 2005 IPS - Inter Press Service

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Last update: June 20, 2005 at 7:09 AM
Where were the doctors at Abu Ghraib?
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5465361.html
Maura Lerner
Star Tribune
Published June 20, 2005

When Dr. Steven Miles first saw the news photos of American guards abusing Iraqi prisoners last year, he couldn`t help wondering one thing:

Where were the doctors?

Surely, he thought, there was a medical staff at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Somebody must have seen the bruises and treated the injuries that the prisoners had suffered.

So why didn`t they speak up?

It`s a question that has haunted Miles, 55, a human rights activist and University of Minnesota physician, ever since.

Now, after more than a year of research, he`s writing a book on the hidden role of U.S. military medicine in the prisoner abuses that shocked the world.

Miles argues that health professionals turned a blind eye, or worse, to the torture and deaths of some of their patients. "These health professionals could have protested," he said. Instead, "the medical system here became one of the professional arms of a torturing society."

His allegations -- first published in a medical journal last summer -- have infuriated the Pentagon. "We have no evidence that military medical personnel collaborated with interrogators or guards accused or suspected of detainee abuse, or condoned abusive behavior," said James Turner, a spokesman for the Defense Department in Washington.

Miles, though, says the evidence tells another story.

Last month, he opened a lecture to hospital employees in St. Paul with a notorious photo: the picture of two U.S. guards, a man and woman, grinning behind a pile of naked men at Abu Ghraib prison. Miles let the image sink in.

"The question for today is, how does the image of this picture change when we know that there`s a health professional in this room?" he asked.

According to witness reports, Miles said, a "nurse medic" was called into the room to examine a prisoner who was having trouble breathing. The medic determined he was having an anxiety attack, and "simply walked off and made no further note of it," Miles said.

Medical workers from other nations have been complicitous in torture before, he said, but this is something new for the United States. "We have suffered enormous damage from this," Miles told a spellbound audience at Regions Hospital. "And the damage goes far beyond Iraq."

Troubling disclosure

Dr. Todd Morris, a Regions surgeon who served in Iraq with the Navy Reserve, admitted he was troubled by the disclosures. "What they did was wrong, and what they did is absolutely crushing to what we [in the military] are trying to do," he said later. "The vast, vast majority of people who are in Iraq in the military are really trying to make the world a better place."

He said military doctors are supposed to treat enemy patients the same as "friendlies," but things can become muddied in this kind of war.

More than a year ago, Miles began hunting for information on the Abu Ghraib scandal on the Internet. He found thousands of government documents on the scandal -- many of them from the military`s own investigations -- that had been posted on websites by the Department of Defense and watchdog groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

He started poring through them, one by one, looking for the medical side of the story.

His first article, in the British medical journal Lancet in August, created something of an international sensation. He reported that doctors had falsified the death certificates of some of the detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wrote that they had written off suspicious deaths as natural ones -- in one case, attributing a man`s death to a heart attack, even though he died in a coma with skull fractures and burns on his feet. Another death certificate said that a prisoner had died of "natural causes" in his sleep -- although the Pentagon later found that he was beaten to death. Beyond that, Miles wrote, evidence showed that doctors had helped design the "psychologically and physically coercive" interrogation techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions.

And he urged an inquiry into the behavior of medical personnel at the detention centers.

Making news

Miles was on vacation in Iceland when his Lancet study hit the news, but he couldn`t escape the media fallout. The story was front-page news in Reykjavik. Calls started pouring into his hotel from CNN, the BBC and other news organizations.

The Pentagon responded with an indignant letter to the medical journal, accusing Miles of denigrating "the honorable, and sometimes heroic, efforts of the military medical system ..." The letter, signed by Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army`s surgeon general, disputed the allegation that death certificates had been altered to cover up homicides and said the investigations were continuing.

Miles, unruffled, stood by all his allegations, and proceeded to add more.

Miles, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2000, has devoted much of his career to championing social causes. He once spent months working with torture victims in southeast Asia in the 1970s as medical director of the American Refugee Committee, and he still volunteers at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis.

So the idea of American involvement in torture holds a special horror for Miles, who also teaches medical ethics. "Torture is prohibited for all, but health professionals serve in a special kind of role," he said. They`re in a unique position, he insists, to detect evidence of torture and to do something about it.

"Torture, when it occurs in prisons, is never the result of a few bad apples," he said. It can`t thrive, he said, without other people`s silence.

Maura Lerner is at [e-mail].
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Die selbe Meldung einmal von Spiegel-Online und dann die Originalquelle von AP.
Da treten ganz schöne Unterschiede zu Tage.

[urlUSA planen Teilabzug ihrer Truppen]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361542,00.html[/url]
Voraussichtlich im kommenden Frühjahr wollen die USA mit dem Truppenabzug aus dem Irak beginnen. Auf einer aus dem Irak ins Pentagon übertragenen Videokonferenz sagte ein General, bis März 2005 könnten vier oder fünf Brigaden abrücken.
Weiter:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361542,00.html

[urlU.S. General: Many Insurgents in Iraq Paid]http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Insurgency.html[/url]
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 21, 2005

Filed at 5:41 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top U.S. general in Iraq suggested on Tuesday that reductions in American troops there could be possible by early next year despite the recent spasm of violence, though he said he was not ready to recommend any significant reduction now.
Weiter.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Insurgen…

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June 22, 2005
Iraqi Rebels Refine Bomb Skills, Pushing Toll of G.I.`s Higher
By DAVID S. CLOUD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/international/middleeast/2…

WASHINGTON, June 21 - American casualties from bomb attacks in Iraq have reached new heights in the last two months as insurgents have begun to deploy devices that leave armored vehicles increasingly vulnerable, according to military records.

Last month there were about 700 attacks against American forces using so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.`s, the highest number since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the American military command in Iraq and a senior Pentagon military official. Attacks on Iraqis also reached unprecedented levels, Lt. Gen. John Vines, a senior American ground commander in Iraq, told reporters on Tuesday.
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An attack on an American military convoy on June 14 destroyed a tractor-trailer.
Insurgents are using more sophisticated bombs for such attacks.
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The surge in attacks, the officials say, has coincided with the appearance of significant advancements in bomb design, including the use of "shaped" charges that concentrate the blast and give it a better chance of penetrating armored vehicles, causing higher casualties.

Another change, a senior military officer said, has been the detonation of explosives by infrared lasers, an innovation aimed at bypassing electronic jammers used to block radio-wave detonators.

I.E.D.`s of all types caused 33 American deaths in May, and there have been at least 35 fatalities so far in June, the highest toll over a two-month period, according to statistics assembled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a Web site that tracks official figures.

In a sign of heightened American concern, the Army convened a conference last week at Fort Irwin, in the California desert, where engineers, contractors and senior officers grappled with the problems posed by the new bombs. One attendee, Col. Bob Davis, an Army explosives expert, called the new elements in some bombs "pretty disturbing." In a brief interview, he declined to discuss the changes, but said the "sophistication is increasing and it will increase further."

Although the number of bombs using the refinements remains low, their appearance underscores the insurgents` adaptability and the difficulty the Pentagon faces, despite a strong effort, in containing the threat. Improvised explosives now account for about 70 percent of American casualties in Iraq.

At a briefing on Tuesday for reporters at the Pentagon, General Vines, who spoke by telephone from Iraq, said that the insurgents` tactics "have become more sophisticated in some cases," and that they were probably drawing on bomb-making experts from outside Iraq and from the old Iraqi Army. He added that the insurgency was "quite small" and "relatively static," a view not shared by all his colleagues.

Car bomb attacks against American forces - both suicide attacks and attacks with remotely detonated devices - reached a monthly high of 70 in April and fell slightly in May, according to figures provided by the United States military in Iraq.

"For a period of time we felt we were pushing them away from us, and now it looks like they are back to targeting coalition forces," said a Pentagon official involved in the anti-I.E.D. effort. "And they`ve learned that in order to attack us, they need to get more sophisticated."

The next highest two-month period was in January and February, around the time of the Iraqi elections, when 54 Americans were killed by bombs, according to the official statistics assembled by the casualty-count Web site. Iraqis suffer the most casualties by far, though reliable figures are not available.

The insurgents "certainly appear to be surging right now," Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who leads the anti-I.E.D. task force, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. "Time will tell about their ability to sustain this."

American officials also worry that the increase in attacks threatens to disrupt Iraq`s fledgling government further and could threaten the Bush administration`s strategy for maintaining public support for the American presence in Iraq by holding down American casualties.
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"We`re in a very, very dangerous period," said a senior military official at the Pentagon. "To be a successful insurgent you need to be able to create spectacular attacks, and they`ve certainly done that in the past several weeks."

In addition to technical improvements in their bombs, insurgents, especially in rural areas, are resorting to packing more explosives into the devices to disable armored vehicles, Army experts at the Fort Irwin conference said.

Hundreds of armored Humvees have been rushed to Iraq over the past year, and Pentagon officials say unarmored vehicles are now confined to bases. Still, five marines were killed this week near Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, when their vehicle hit an I.E.D. Earlier this month, five marines were killed after their vehicle struck a bomb in Haqlaniya, about 150 miles northwest of Baghdad.

A senior Marine officer with access to classified reports from the field said that the vehicles involved in the two fatal attacks were armored Humvees but that the bombs "were so big that there was little left of the Humvees that were hit."

Insurgents have long been able to build bombs powerful enough to penetrate some armored vehicles. But the use of "shaped" charges could raise the threat considerably, military officials said. Since last month, at least three such bombs have been found, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing this month.

The shaped charge explosion fires a projectile "at a very rapid rate, sufficient to penetrate certain levels of armor," General Conway said, adding that weapons employing shaped charges had caused American casualties in the last two months. He did not give details.

A Pentagon official involved in combating the devices said shaped charges seen so far appeared crude but required considerable expertise, suggesting insurgents were able to draw on well-trained bomb-makers, possibly even rocket scientists from the former government. Shaped charges and rocket engines are similar, the official said.

Infrared detonators are an advance over the more common method of rigging bombs to explode after an insurgent nearby presses a button on a cell phone, a garage-door opener or other device that gives off an electric signal. That approach is vulnerable to jammers, however, and a shift to infrared detonators, which rely on light waves, underscores the insurgents` resourcefulness.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 22, 2005
A War Shrine, for a Japan Seeking a Not Guilty Verdict
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/international/asia/22lette…

TOKYO - One recent rainy morning, a couple of dozen vehicles belonging to the Patriotic Youth League and other Japanese right-wing groups gathered inside the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial to Japan`s war dead. "Revere the Emperor," read a slogan on one truck. Others alluded to enemies unnamed: "Love and Protect our Motherland" and "Kill one, one at a time."

At 12:30 p.m., the caravan spilled out onto Tokyo`s streets, destination unclear. But the targets are usually the same: the Chinese Embassy, the liberal media, anybody daring to challenge the argument that Japan`s wars were legitimate and that their leaders were not criminals. Yasukuni Shrine is the symbolic center of Japan`s efforts to revise its militaristic past, and lies at the heart of worsening relations between Japan and its neighbors. Not only right-wing extremists, but now also mainstream politicians and the news media are more openly arguing that the 14 war criminals enshrined in Yasukuni were not guilty - and, because they were not, Japan`s wars could not have been that bad.
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At Yasukuni Shrine, visitors watch a video on the Russo-Japanese War. War criminals like Tojo are honored there.
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In a face-to-face meeting on June 20, for example, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi steadfastly resisted the entreaties of President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea that he stop visiting the shrine and build an alternate one that would be more acceptable to China and the Koreas, all of them victims of a brutal Japanese colonization.

While the Japanese have received the bulk of the criticism for the shrine, they are not, however, the only ones to have manipulated the meaning of Yasukuni and its war criminals. So have the Chinese, the Taiwanese and the Americans, each according to their own interests.

During America`s six-year occupation of Japan after World War II, Americans spent the first half democratizing the country and prosecuting war criminals. In the second half, with Communists controlling China and the cold war bearing down, Washington reversed course: wartime leaders were rehabilitated overnight in an effort to make Japan strong. Some Class A war criminal suspects, after barely escaping the noose, became postwar Japan`s political and business leaders; one, Nobusuke Kishi, even became prime minister.

The mixed messages from America - as well as the highly politicized Tokyo Trials that tried the Japanese leaders but avoided mentioning Emperor Hirohito, whom America had decided not to depose - laid the seeds of confusion here. They also left open the door for the Japanese to argue that the overall verdict - that Japan had led a war of aggression - was also false.

"It was a war of self-defense," Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of the wartime prime minister who was executed as a Class A war criminal and is enshrined in Yasukuni, said in a telephone interview. "China claims it is unforgivable that the head of state visits Yasukuni, where those responsible for causing trouble by conducting a war of aggression are enshrined. But if we agree with China, it would mean that we recognize it as a war of aggression. So we can`t."

Visits to Yasukuni have long been regarded as coded endorsements of conservative nationalist views like hers. Indeed, when Mr. Koizumi said two weeks ago that he actually recognized the validity of the Tokyo Trials, the nation`s largest-selling newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, which does not, was flabbergasted. "With what view of history has Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Yasukuni Shrine in the past?" it asked in an editorial, adding that if Mr. Koizumi accepted the trials` rulings, "then Koizumi should not visit Yasukuni Shrine."

Yasukuni Shrine was built in 1869, as part of Japan`s drive to create a nationalistic state religion centered around a divine emperor. By the end of World War II, almost 2.5 million soldiers would be enshrined here for giving their lives for the emperor. Except for two civil conflicts, the other nine wars in which the soldiers died all revolved around Japan`s advance into China, the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and, ultimately, its attack on the United States.

Yasukuni`s war museum argues that America forced Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor as a way of shaking off the Depression, saying that "the U.S. economy made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war." A video shown at the museum, called "We Won`t Forget," describes America`s postwar occupation of Japan as "pitiless." But the museum makes no mention of Japan`s own occupation of Asia. As for the Rape of Nanjing, the museum blames the Chinese commander and adds that, thanks to Japanese actions, "inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace."

In a written statement, Yasukuni officials said, "The exhibition is not based on any special historical viewpoint, but is based on clear evidence."

Yasukuni`s view of history is one that few Asians or Americans would accept. But like Japanese politicians, foreigners also appear to recognize the shrine`s political value.

Shu Ching Chiang, a Taiwanese lawmaker who is pro-independence and anti-China, visited Yasukuni in April. Taiwanese soldiers who served Japan`s Imperial Army during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan are also enshrined in Yasukuni.

"Every country has the right to pay respect to its war dead in the way it chooses," Mr. Shu said in a recent interview in Taipei. Like many Japanese, he compared Yasukuni to Arlington National Cemetery.

Arthur Ding, an international relations expert at National Chengchi University in Taipei, decoded Mr. Shu`s trip: "He delivered a message to Japan that his party wants a close relationship with Japan and to China that they are for Taiwanese independence."

While the Chinese and the South Koreans have legitimate reasons to oppose the shrine, they have been accused of using it to shore up domestic support by appealing to nationalist sentiments.

Noticeable in its silence on Yasukuni and the verdict on the Class A war criminals is the United States. As the nation that defeated Japan, occupied it and still has 50,000 troops deployed here, America is the one country that Japan may still listen to on these subjects. America is hardly a disinterested observer, after all, because Yasukuni deifies Japanese who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

American officials raise an eyebrow at Japanese comparisons of Yasukuni to Arlington National Cemetery. But they tend to defend, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, Japanese visits to Yasukuni, or maintain a studied silence. The cold war may be over, but China`s rise alarms America just as much as did the rise of Communism in the 1940`s. So better a strong, remilitarized Japan, no matter what the Japanese say about Yasukuni or war criminals.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 22, 2005
Abu Ghraib, Rewarded
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/opinion/22wed1.html

It is nice that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team feel as if they have achieved closure on their prisoner abuse issues and are ready to move on. The problem is, they are still in deep denial. The Bush administration has not only refused to face the problem squarely, but it is also enabling a pervasive lack of accountability.

The most recent evidence of this sad state of affairs came this week in an article in The Times by [urlEric Schmitt and Thom Shanker,]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/politics/20military.html[/url] who reported that the Pentagon believes the Abu Ghraib scandal has receded enough in the public`s mind that Mr. Rumsfeld is considering a promotion for Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was commander of American forces in Iraq at the time of the disaster.

We can see why General Sanchez would expect a promotion; Mr. Bush has rewarded the people who drafted the policies that led to the illegal detention, abuse, humiliation and, ultimately, torture and even killing of prisoners at the hands of American military forces. A couple were nominated to the federal appeals court. One became attorney general. Mr. Rumsfeld still has his job.

And we feel General Sanchez`s pain. As the Army`s own investigation showed, he lacked the experience to command the forces in Iraq. Once given that job, he labored under Mr. Rumsfeld`s obsession for waging war with too few troops inadequately equipped. For months, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld were pretending the war was over, while General Sanchez faced a mushrooming insurgency. He ordered his soldiers to start getting tough with prisoners to get intelligence.

General Sanchez relied on established practice in Mr. Bush`s military. He set aside American notions of decency and the Geneva Conventions, authorizing harsh interrogations - including forcing prisoners into painful positions for long periods, isolating them, depriving them of sleep and using guard dogs to, as he put it, "exploit Arab fears." These practices would have been controversial for captives with information that would save Americans` lives. But the vast majority of Abu Ghraib inmates knew nothing.

General Sanchez was exonerated by the last in a series of investigations meant to keep the heat off top generals and civilian policy makers. But his own words at the Texas A&M University commencement were damning. When conditions are at their worst, General Sanchez said, "That is when a leader must step forward and lead - our ethics mandate it and our subordinates expect it."

General Sanchez failed to do that. He should not be the only senior person to pay the price for failure, but neither should he be the latest to be rewarded for it.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The Independent
Anti-Syrian politician latest to die as murder takes hold in Lebanon
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=648…

Wednesday, 22nd June 2005, by Robert Fisk

It was Georges Hawi. Former head of the Communist Party, mediator between Christians and Muslims, friend of the Palestinians during the civil war and - of course - bitter critic of Syria. "Help me, help me," he had cried as he was dragged by his driver and a neighbour from his bombed car. Covered in blood, he died in their arms. A "soft" target, a man who thought he had no need of protection. Just like his journalist friend and fellow critic of Syria, Samir Kassir, who was assassinated in his car - the explosives were set in an identical manner - earlier this month.

Hawi’s right shoe lay among the wreckage on the street in the Wata Mouseitbeh area of Beirut, along with pieces of the passenger door. His Mercedes had been passing a petrol station near his home when someone - with line of sight, presumably, either in one of the high-rise apartments above or in the parking lot opposite - set off the bomb under the passenger seat and sent the car slithering 30 feet down the highway. The crowd were angry and the word "Syria" was on their lips. When I found Ghazi Aridi, Walid Jumblatt’s friend, fellow Druze and former minister of information at the scene, his shock was palpable. "Come with me," he muttered angrily and led me away from the broken car.

"This," he hissed, "is the same project to assassinate all the leaders of the opposition, of the future of Lebanon. The big question is this: why are all the leaders of the opposition now targets?" And of course, within hours, Syria was insisting that it had nothing to do with Lebanon’s latest assassination, and President Emile Lahoud - Syria’s best friend in Lebanon - was denouncing the murder of this "national" figure as "another chapter of the conspiracy targeting Lebanon".

But important and devastating events are taking place in this country which are already reaching deep into the roots of political power. For while the assassins were at work, the UN’s investigation team began questioning Brigadier General Mustafa Hamdan, the head of President Lahoud’s presidential guard brigade, about the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February. This was no ordinary chat.

The investigators, whose team includes US police officers and is led by Germany’s senior prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, also searched Mr Hamdan’s office and his home - a severe shock for the President since Mr Hamdan is one of his top security advisers and one who has been accused by the opposition of involvement in the government cover-up of Hariri’s assassination.

The murder did not only target a much-admired nationalist famous for being among the first to call for resistance to Israel’s army in 1982. It was also a blow to the country’s political, economic and social stability. Lebanon, it is becoming clear, is a murder state where the killers are not intimidated by the UN’s powerful investigators; where assassins work with impunity and - it seems - safe from security authorities. Hawi was Greek Orthodox who, like Samir Kassir, the last murder victim here, was a leftist and a philosopher though by no means a fanatical Communist. His killing came only a day after Saad Hariri announced that his opposition and anti- Syrian coalition had won a majority in parliament. So the Lebanese spring was followed, as usual, by a Lebanese grave.

Saad Hariri said his murder was intended to disrupt the effects of the election. Jumblatt said Lebanese intelligence agencies must be "completely purged".

Hawi’s colleague in the Communist Party, Farouk Dahrouj, was blunter. "Yes, it’s the Lebanese security system - the remnants - the tutelage," he said. "Tutelage" is Lebanon-speak for Syria’s domination of the Lebanese government and its intelligence services.

So another innocent man, another opponent of Syria, a 65-year-old who was only on his way to meet friends at the Gondole coffee shop, was blasted to death. His body, his grey hair and face still visible but with bloody wounds, was gently placed in an ambulance, just as Kassir’s had been. And we were left with the same old question: who’s next?

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Iraqi Hospitals Ailing Under Occupation
Tuesday 21st June 2005, by Dahr Jamail
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/

Der Report ist auf einer PDF-Datei:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/

DAHR Jamail reports on the struggling health care situation in Iraq. The report surveys 13 Iraqi Hospitals, examines the actions taken by US military against hospitals and care workers that constitute war crimes as defined by the Geneva conventions, discusses and documents cases of US medical personnel complicit in torture through failures to document the visible signs of torture on their patients, and much more.

The following is the introduction of the report. To download the entire report please visit dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/. The report is a PDF. (...)

I. INTRODUCTION

Although the Iraq Ministry of Health claims its independence and has received promises of over $1 billion of US funding, hospitals in Iraq continue to face ongoing medicine, equipment, and staffing shortages under the US-led occupation.

During the 1990s, medical supplies and equipment were constantly in short supply because of the sanctions against Iraq. And while war and occupation have brought promises of relief, hospitals have had little chance to recover and re-supply: the occupation, since its inception, has closely resembled a lowgrade war, and the allocation of resources by occupation authorities has reflected this reality. Thus, throughout Baghdad there are ongoing shortages of medicine of even the most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anesthetics, and insulin. Surgical items are running out, as well as basic supplies like rubber gloves, gauze, and medical tape.

In April 2004, an International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) report stated that hospitals in Iraq are overwhelmed with new patients, short of medicine and supplies and lack both adequate electricity and water, with ongoing bloodshed stretching the hospitals’ already meager resources to the limit. [1]

Ample testimony from medical practitioners in the interim in fact confirms this crisis. A general practitioner at the prosthetics workshop at Al-Kena Hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman, said, "Eleven months ago we submitted an emergency order for prosthetic materials to the Ministry of Health, and still we have nothing," said Dr. Rahman. After a pause he added, "This is worse than even during the sanctions." [2]

Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the chief manager at Chuwader General Hospital, one of two hospitals in the sprawling slum area of Sadr City, Baghdad, an area of nearly 2 million people, added that there, too, was a shortage of most supplies and, most critically, of ambulances. But for his hospital, the lack of potable water was the major problem. "Of course we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones, but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E...and it has become common in our area," said al-Nuwesri, while adding that they never faced these problems prior to the invasion of 2003. [3]

Chuwader hospital needs at least 2000 liters of water per day to function with basic sterilization practices. According to Dr. al-Nuwesri, they received 15% of this amount. "The rest of the water is contaminated and causing problems, as are the electricity cuts," added al-Nuwesri, "Without electricity our instruments in the operating room cannot work and we have no pumps to bring us water." [4]

In November, shortly after razing Nazzal Emergency Hospital to the ground, [5] US forces entered Fallujah General Hospital, the city’s only healthcare facility for trauma victims, detaining employees and patients alike. [6] According to medics on the scene, water and electricity were "cut off," ambulances confiscated, and surgeons, without exception, kept out of the besieged city. [7]

Many doctors in Iraq believe that, more widely, the lack of assistance, if not outright hostility, by the US military, coupled with the lack of rebuilding and reconstruction by foreign contractors has compounded the problems they are facing.

According to Agence France-Presse, the former ambassador of Iraq Paul Bremer admitted that the US led coalition spending on the Iraqi Health system was inadequate. "It’s not nearly enough to cover the needs in the healthcare field," said Bremer when referring to the amount of money the coalition was spending for the healthcare system in occupied Iraq. [8]

When asked if his hospital had received assistance from the US military or reconstruction contractors, Dr. Sarmad Raheem, the administrator of chief doctors at Al-Kerkh Hospital in Baghdad said, "Never ever. Some soldiers came here five months ago and asked what we needed. We told them and they never brought us one single needle... We heard that some people from the CPA came here, but they never did anything for us." [9]

At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Mohammed [10] said there has been virtually no assistance from foreign contractors, and of the US military he commented, "They send only bombs, not medicine." [11]

International aid has been in short supply due primarily to the horrendous security situation in Iraq After the UN headquarters was bombed in Baghdad in August 2003, killing 20 people, aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations either reduced their staffing or pulled out entirely.

Dr. Amer Al Khuzaie, the Deputy Minister of Health of Iraq, blamed the medicine and equipment shortages on the US-led Coalition’s failure to provide funds requested by the Ministry of Health. [12]

"We have requested over $500 million for equipment and only have $300 million of this amount promised," he said, "Yet we still only have promises." [13]

According to The New York Times, "of the $18.4 billion Congress approved last fall, only about $600 million has actually been paid out. Billions more have been designated for giant projects still in the planning stage. Part of the blame rests with the Pentagon’s planning failures and the occupation authority’s reluctance to consult qualified Iraqis. Instead, the administration brought in American defense contractors who had little clue about what was most urgently needed or how to handle the unfamiliar and highly insecure climate." [14]

The World Health Organization (WHO) last year warned of a health emergency in Baghdad, as well as throughout Iraq if current conditions persist. But despite claims from the Ministry of Health of more drugs, better equipment, and generalized improvement, doctors on the ground still see "no such improvement." [15]

To download the entire report please visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/. The report is a PDF.


This report is endorsed by the Brussells Tribunal, El Taller International, Asian Women’s Human Rights Council, Association of Humanitarian Lawyers, SOS Iraq, and Medical Aid for the Third World, a.o. I’d also like to thank 11.11.11 (a consortium of NGO’s.), who offered their facilities for the presentation of this report to the press.

This report is submitted as evidence to the Jury of conscience during the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq, Istanbul 23-27 June.

Der Report ist auf einer PDF-Datei:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/

Notes:

[1] Naomi Koppel, "Red Cross Says Iraq Hospitals Overwhelmed," Associated Press, April 9, 2004.

[2] Dahr Jamail, interview with Dr. Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman at Al Kena Hospital, April 28, 2004.

[3] Dahr Jamail, interview with Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri at Chuwader General Hospital, June 14, 2004.

[4] Ibid.

[5] BBC News, "US strikes raze Fallujah hospital," November 6, 2004.

[6] Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times, "Early Target of Offensive Is a Hospital," November 8, 2004.

[7] Fares Dulaimi, Agence France-Presse, "Doctors, medical supplies scarce in Fallujah as major assault begins," November 8, 2004.

[8] "Bremer Admits Coalition Spending on Iraq Health Grossly Inadequate," Agence France Press, February 15, 2004.

[9] Dahr Jamail, interview with Dr. Sarmad Raheem at Al-Kerkh Hospital, June 1, 2004.

[10] This doctor also asked that only his first name be used, due to his fear of military reprisals.

[11] Dahr Jamail, interview with Dr. Mohammed at Fallujah General Hospital, May 10, 2004.

[12] Dahr Jamail, interview with Dr. Amer Al Khuzaie at Ministry of Health, June 24, 2004.

[13] Ibid.

[14] "The Iraq Reconstruction Fiasco," The New York Times, August 9, 2004.

[15] Matthew Price, "Hospitals Endure Iraqi Paralysis," BBC News, March 17, 2005.

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Arms trade `undermines efforts to relieve debt`
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story…

22 June 2005

The world`s richest nations stand accused of double standards - exporting billions of pounds worth of arms to poor countries while discussing measures to lift them out of poverty.

In a joint report published today, pressure groups including Oxfam and Amnesty International say the G8 countries are compounding the problems in developing nations, including much of Africa, by allowing them to import costly arms and weapons.

Tomorrow, G8 foreign ministers, meeting in London, will consider a proposal by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary for a watertight worldwide treaty covering small arms as well as major weapons. Although today`s report strongly endorses his proposal, it could also prove embarrassing because it criticises Britain over its arms exports.

According to the report, Britain is the world`s second biggest arms supplier with exports estimated at $4.3bn (£2.2bn) between 1996 and 2003, less than America`s $15.18bn but more than other G8 nations such as France ($3.02bn), Russia ($2.62bn) and Germany ($1.08bn). The five countries are the world`s biggest arms exporters, accounting for 84 per cent of the global trade.

The pressure groups express concern that open licences for multiple shipments issued by Britain for exports to Turkey could allow weapons to be sent on to other countries with whom Britain would not trade directly. They say Britain has licensed arms exports to countries with serious human rights concerns, including Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Israel and Indonesia. They also raise fears that the Government is not putting enough resources and staff behind new legislation on arms control which took effect last year.

The United States is accused of providing military aid to states guilty of persistent human rights violations including Pakistan, Nepal and Israel, while France is alleged to have exported bombs, grenades, ammunition and mines and to countries subject to EU arms embargoes, such as Burma and Sudan.

The pressure groups warn that the trade could jeopardise Britain`s goal during its year in the G8 presidency of relieving global poverty because the purchase of arms diverts resources in poor countries.

The report says: "Many of the G8 countries are large donors to aid programmes in Africa and Asia. However, continuing arms transfers to developing countries undermine their pledges to relieve debt, combat Aids, alleviate poverty, tackle corruption and promote good governance." It also warns that the arms could be used to suppress human rights and democracy.

It accuses the G8 nations of not matching their rhetoric about arms sales and Africa with action. "G8 governments have left significant loopholes in their own arms export standards and control mechanisms. Their efforts to control arms exports are not in proportion to the G8`s global responsibility," the report says.

The Foreign Office defended Britain`s record, saying that export licence applications were considered on a case-by-case basis and were blocked if there was a risk they would be used for "internal repression or external aggression".

But a spokesman admitted: "There is currently no international treaty that sets binding global standards. The irresponsible and unregulated trade in these arms inflicts untold misery in some of the world`s poorest and most vulnerable nations, so it is vital to tighten the net to eliminate blatantly irresponsible trading and ensure legitimate trade is properly regulated and not diverted to undesirable purposes or end-users."

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, said: "Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed, tortured, raped and displaced through the misuse of arms.

"How can G8 commitments to end poverty and injustice be taken seriously if some of the very same governments are undermining peace and stability by deliberately approving arms transfers to repressive regimes?"


22 June 2005 12:13


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd

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Withdrawal is a prelude to annexation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1511702,00.ht…

US hypocrisy is not new but Condi Rice has taken it beyond chutzpah
Avi Shlaim
Wednesday June 22, 2005

Guardian
Condoleezza Rice hailed the understanding between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the need to destroy the homes of the 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza as a historic step on the road to peace. This is a fatuous statement by one of the most vacuous US secretaries of state of the postwar era.

American foreign policy has habitually displayed double standards towards the Middle East: one standard towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. To give just one example, the US effected regime change in Baghdad in three weeks but has failed to dismantle a single Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in 38 years.

The two main items on America`s current agenda for the region are democracy for the Arabs and a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. America, however, insists on democracy only for its Arab opponents, not for its friends. As for the peace process, it is essentially a mechanism by which Israel and America try to impose a solution on the Palestinians. American hypocrisy is nothing new. But with Dr Rice it has gone beyond chutzpah.

With Ariel Sharon, by contrast, what you see is what you get. He has always been in the destruction business, not the construction business. As minister of defence in 1982, Sharon preferred to destroy the settlement town of Yamit in Sinai rather than hand it to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel. George Bush once described his friend Sharon as "a man of peace". In truth, Sharon is a brutal thug and land-grabber.

Sharon is also the unilateralist par excellence. The road map issued by the quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) in the aftermath of the Iraq war envisaged three stages leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. Sharon wrecked the road map, notably by continuing to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank and building an illegal wall that cuts deep into Palestinian territory.

He presented his plan for disengagement from Gaza as a contribution to the road map; in fact it is almost the exact opposite. The road map calls for negotiations between the two sides, leading to a two-state solution. Sharon refuses to negotiate and acts to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel. As he told rightwing supporters: "My plan is difficult for the Palestinians, a fatal blow. There`s no Palestinian state in a unilateral move." The real purpose of the move is to derail the road map and kill the comatose peace process. For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the prelude not to a permanent settlement but to the annexation of substantial sections of the West Bank.

Sharon decided to cut his losses in Gaza when he realised that the cost of occupation is not sustainable. Gaza is home to 8,000 Israeli settlers and 1.3 million Palestinians. The settlers control 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and most of the water. This is a hopeless colonial enterprise, accompanied by one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times. Bush publicly endorsed Sharon`s plan to withdraw from Gaza and retain the four main settlement blocks on the West Bank without consulting the quartet - a reversal of the US position since 1967 that viewed the settlements as an obstacle to peace. Last year Sharon proposed handing the remaining Israeli assets in Gaza to an international body. Now he proposes to destroy the homes and farms.

The change of plan is prompted by Israeli fear that Hamas will claim credit for the withdrawal and raise its flag over the buildings vacated by the settlers. This is inevitable both because Hamas, not the PA, is the liberator of Gaza and because Israel is refusing to coordinate its moves with the PA. Another fear is that Hamas, supported by 35-40% of the Palestinian population, will emerge as a serious electoral challenger to Mahmoud Abbas`s Fatah movement.

This is Condi`s conundrum. If she is serious about spreading democracy in the Arab world she must accept the outcome of free elections; in most of the Arab world they would produce Islamist, anti-US governments. Israel has contributed more than any other country to this sorry state of affairs. Condi and the American right regard Israel as a strategic asset in the war on terror. In fact Israel is America`s biggest liability. For most Arabs and Muslims the real issue in the Middle East is not Iraq, Iran or democracy but Israel`s oppression of the Palestinian people and America`s blind support for Israel.

America`s policy towards the Middle East is myopic, muddled and mistaken. Only a negotiated settlement can bring lasting peace and stability to the area. And only America has the power to push Israel into such a settlement. It is high time the US got tough with Israel, the intransigent party and main obstacle to peace. Colluding in Sharon`s selfish, uncivilised plan to destroy the Jewish homes in Gaza is not a historic step on the road to peace.

· Avi Shlaim is a British Academy research professor at St Antony`s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Withdrawal on the Agenda
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3717

Republican Congressman Walter B. Jones (famed for insisting that the Congressional cafeteria re-label French fries as "freedom fries" on its menu), a man who represents North Carolina`s 3rd Congressional District, home to the Marine`s Camp LeJeune, voted enthusiastically for the Iraq War, but recently changed his mind. Last week, he became one of four congressional sponsors of a resolution calling for a timetable for withdrawal. "Do we want to be there 20 years, 30 years?" he said at a Capitol Hill news conference. "That`s why this resolution is so important: We need to take a fresh look at where we are and where we`re going."



Various explanations for his unexpected change of mind (and heart) have been offered. In the last lines of a June 13 piece, Sunni-Shiite Quarrel Edges Closer to Political Stalemate (scroll down), New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise made the following connection:

"(Jones`s) remarks came two weeks after military commanders told a Congressional delegation visiting Iraq that it would take about two years before enough Iraqi security forces were sufficiently trained to allow the Pentagon to withdraw large numbers of American troops."

About two years. I was struck by that phrase in part because I had just been rereading a piece I wrote less than seven months after our President announced from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." I called it "The Time of Withdrawal" and posted it on October 31, 2003. At the time, I offered the following:

"Two years hence, according to (occupation head) L. Paul Bremer`s men in Baghdad, we Americans are still going to be `reconstructing` the country. In the Pentagon, according to the latest reports, generals are discussing what our troop levels there will be in 2006."

That was then, this is now -- or do I mean, that was now, this is then? After all, as Tavernise and other reporters, quoting our military commanders in Iraq, make clear, we`re still that miraculously receding "two years" away from significantly drawing down U.S. forces and having a reconstructed Iraq (not that the reconstruction of Iraq is much mentioned any more). In other words in October 2003, we were talking about 2005-06. In June 2005, we`re talking about 2007-08. What`s wrong with this picture?



Sadly, if anything, the similarities may be deceptive. After all, at the end of October 2003, it was still possible for most Americans to imagine a pacified -- or as the Bush people would now say, "democratic" -- Iraq by 2005-06. Today, as poll figures indicating fast-sinking support for the war and the President tell us, as edgy monthly casualty figures tell us, as Walter Jones`s changed position tells us, as the latest nose-dive in military recruitment figures tells us, as the fact that 35% of Americans, according to a Pew poll, think we are now back in Vietnam tells us, things in Iraq are just getting worse and worse.



John Newton, a reader from Michigan, recently framed this in an interesting way when, after reading a Jonathan Schell piece on our failing attempt to create an Iraqi army, he sent the following into the Tomdispatch e-mail box:

"It occurred to me that we`ve reached the point where we`ve got to bribe everyone to fight this war. The Iraqi Army salaries aren`t much by our standards, but they are probably twice or three times what an ordinary Iraqi makes. And yet in a place with massive unemployment, they still desert. We have perhaps 20,000 or more "contractors" doing security work who make salaries in the 6 figures to be in Iraq. And now the military is offering signing bonuses of up to $40,000. For a high school kid, that is a down payment on a house and a car. That is not so easy to pass up, but the recruiters still can`t get them to sign."

He`s right. In a sense, between 2003 and 2005, we`ve moved decisively to the devolving side of our first free-market war. Before the invasion of Iraq even began, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was eagerly privatizing the Pentagon, stripping its forces, beefing up its technology, and outsourcing many matters which were once distinctly military to the private economy. (In other words, Halliburton, of which our Vice President was previously the CEO, and its subsidiary, KBR, off constructing bases and doing KP.) Hence, even before the invasion of Iraq, when General Eric Shinseki was essentially laughed out of neocon Washington for telling Congress that we would need an army of "several hundred thousand" men to occupy a defeated Iraq, such an army already didn`t exist. (The statement was undoubtedly Shinseki`s way of saying: Don`t go in!)



Next, under the label of "reconstruction," the Bushniacs attempted (catastrophically) to privatize Iraq, more or less turning it over to friendly "free market" corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton (which had the good fortune of getting Global War on Terror goodies coming and going -- it was, after all, responsible for building much of that jewel-in-the-crown in the Bush administration`s Bermuda Triangle of Injustice, Guantánamo prison, and only recently got a $30 million contract to add further facilities there). Now, as Newton points out in his letter, the Bush administration is trying to privatize defeat by turning military recruitment in Iraq and at home into a bonus-plus bidding war. Under these circumstances, the draft-era phrase from the Vietnam years, "Hell no, we won`t go," is morphing into the Volunteer Army phrase, "Hell, no, I won`t join."



Withdrawal on the Agenda



Back in 2003, when I wrote "The Time of Withdrawal," I offered the following simple summary of our situation and why withdrawal should be on the American agenda:

"History, long term and more recent, is not on our side.

"We are a war-making and an occupying force, not a peacekeeping force.

"We never planned to leave Iraq.

"Time is against us.

"Or to boil all this down to a sentence: We are not and never have been the solution to the problem of Iraq, but a significant part of the problem."

I wouldn`t change a word. In October of 2003, however, the "time of withdrawal" was distinctly not upon us. Now -- finally -- it is. We seem to have reached the actual moment when the idea of "withdrawal," at least, is being placed on the American agenda -- by the unlikely Walter Jones, among others. This is, of course, a far worse moment for withdrawal than in 2003, for Iraqis as well as Americans, just as 2007 will be worse than today.



But at least it`s here. How can we tell? Several signs (other than just the Congressional resolution) point to its arrival. First of all, there`s the return of Vietnam. It`s on everyone`s mind these days -- and not just because our President is at the moment welcoming the Vietnamese prime minister to the White House and announcing that a visit to our former enemy`s land is in the offing. (Keep in mind that when Richard Nixon started feeling the combined pressure of Vietnam/Watergate, he used travel to strange lands -- think: Communist China and the Soviet Union -- as a way to try to distract public attention.)



Representative Jones, for instance, recently said: "When I think about what happened in Vietnam -- we lost 58,000 -- I wonder, Wouldn`t it have been nice if, two years into the war, some representatives would have said, `Mr. President, where (are) we going?`" At about the same time, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Pentagon`s Joint Staff, "alluded to the precedent of Vietnam, in which plummeting public support for the war was blamed for undercutting the U.S. effort." You could pile up such examples endlessly.



Perhaps more important, the President is now working off what clearly seems to be the Vietnam playbook -- Lyndon Johnson`s playbook circa 1967. Like Johnson, facing falling polling figures and calls for withdrawal, he is staging a series of major addresses to "reassure" the American people (and shore up those polls). Just last Saturday on the radio, in his radio address, he declared that there would be no cutting-and-running for him, no withdrawal option at all: "This mission isn`t easy," he said, "and it will not be accomplished overnight. We`re fighting a ruthless enemy that relishes the killing of innocent men, women, and children. By making their stand in Iraq, the terrorists have made Iraq a vital test for the future security of our country and the free world. We will settle for nothing less than victory."



Words to eat, of course.



As readers never hesitate to remind me, Iraq is not Vietnam -- or as Daniel Ellsberg put it sardonically, "In Iraq, it`s a dry heat. And the language that none of our troops or diplomats speak is Arabic rather than Vietnamese." But the Vietnam experience is fused into American consciousness in such a way that, the minute things start to go wrong, our leaders find themselves, almost helplessly, following that Vietnam playbook. So, as we enter the terrain of withdrawal, we should be thinking about Vietnam as well. The withdrawal resolution Jones and his co-sponsors put forward was, on the face of it, Vietnam-ish in the sense that it had relatively little to do with actual withdrawal. (In the Vietnam years, almost every "withdrawal" plan or strategy that came out of Washington had a great deal to do with keeping us in Vietnam, not getting us out.) This particular resolution evidently proposes that, by the fall of 2005, the administration create a "timetable" for a withdrawal to be begun the following fall of 2006 (with no designated end in sight, nor total withdrawal, it seems, even mentioned). This is, on the face of it, a non-withdrawal withdrawal proposal.



But the details may make little difference. The Bush administration, which could essentially have accepted the proposal and had endless "withdrawal" time to spare, attacked it strongly because what they can see -- as well they should -- is the first cracks appearing in Republican Party support. You know something`s happening when Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says "Things aren`t getting better; they`re getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It`s like they`re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we`re losing in Iraq"; or Republican Senator from Florida Mel Martinez pronounces himself "discouraged" by the "lack of progress" in Iraq. This is no small thing. This is not a party that is eager to be pulled into a Vietnam-like hell and then swept out of Congress in 2006 or 2008. As University of North Carolina professor (and former U.S. Air Force historian) Richard Kohn puts it: "You`ve got Republican grandees in the Senate who probably aren`t willing to put up with this much longer."



Paralyzing Fantasies



So here we are on Vietnam-like withdrawal turf, and one sure sign of that is the sudden foregrounding of a series of predictions about the horrors that would occur if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. These are well summed up in a recent piece by Richard Whittle of the Dallas Morning News (Experts: Iraq withdrawal now would be bad idea). According to the "foreign policy experts" Whittle interviewed, these nightmare scenarios could "at worst" include:

"A civil war in Iraq resulting in far greater bloodshed than the current conflict, though presumably without further U.S. losses.

"The transformation of western Iraq, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims, into a haven for international terrorists from al-Qaida and other groups.

"A collapse of U.S. credibility among nations of the Middle East, whose leaders would probably distance themselves from Washington.

"A collapse of the Bush administration`s push for democracy in the region.

"Instability in the Persian Gulf that could lead to steep increases in oil prices, driving the cost of gasoline beyond current record levels."

Now, here`s the fascinating thing when you look over a list like this: All these predicted nightmares-to-come constitute a collective warning not to act in a certain way; but each of the specific potential nightmares also represents a phenomenon intensifying at this very moment exactly because we are in Iraq. Each is in operation now largely because we have almost 140,000 troops on the ground in that country; a vast intelligence and diplomatic network, a shadow government, embedded in a kind of Forbidden City in Baghdad`s Green Zone; humungous military bases all over the land, some of which have the look of permanency; an Air Force that is periodically loosed to bomb heavily populated urban areas of Iraq -- all of this, in a very foreign land which, under any circumstances, would be hostile to such an alien presence.



Between the moment in late 2003 when I wrote "The Time of Withdrawal" and today, Iraq has, in fact, crept ever closer to some kind of civil war -- it may already have begun; Western Iraq has been transformed into a "haven" for terrorists and jihadis; American "credibility" has collapsed not just in the Middle East but globally; the Bush push for "democracy" does look embattled; and oil prices, which in 2003 were surely hovering around $30 a barrel, are now up at double that price, while Iraq is almost incapable of exporting significant amounts of oil and "instability" in the Gulf has risen significantly.



A similar situation played itself out in Vietnam back when nightmarish visions of what might happen if we withdrew ("the bloodbath") became so much a part of public debate that the bloodbath actually taking place in Vietnam was sometimes overshadowed by it. Prediction is a risky business. Terrible things might indeed happen if we withdrew totally from Iraq, or they might not; or they might -- but not turn out to be the ones we`ve been dreaming about; or perhaps if we committed to departure in a serious way, the situation would actually ease. We don`t know. That`s the nature of the future. All we know at the moment, based on the last two years, is what is likely to happen if we stay -- which is more and worse of the very nightmares we fear if we leave.



The most essential problem in such thinking is the belief that, if we just hang in there long enough, the United States will be capable of solving the Iraqi crisis. That is inconceivable, since the U.S. presence is now planted firmly at the heart of the crisis to be solved.



One guarantee: the Bush administration won`t hesitate to deploy such fantasies of future disaster to paralyze present thinking and planning. Expect it. And it will be all too easy to take our eyes off this disastrous moment and enter their world of grim future dreams. After all, they already live in a kind of ruling fantasy world. They step to the podium regularly, their hands dipped in blood, call it wine or nectar, and insist that the rest of the world drink. They will be eager to trade in their best future nightmares so that the present nightmare can continue. (They argue, by the way, for the use of torture, under whatever name, in quite a similar fashion, proposing future nightmares -- let`s say we held a terrorist who had knowledge of an impending nuclear explosion in a major American city and you only had two hours to get that information from him, what would you do? -- in order to justify the ongoing horrors at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and other places.)



Returning to what I wrote in October 2003, on only one point was I wrong, I believe. I wrote then:

"What is bad now for us – and for the Iraqis – will only be worse later. The resistance will be greater, more organized, and more determined. Our allies, both within and without Iraq, ever more distant; American troops more isolated, angry, and embattled; money in shorter supply; military morale lower; and the antiwar movement here stronger."

Generally on the money, except when it came to the antiwar movement. I was, of course, projecting from the huge antiwar marches of the prewar moment. But so far, at least, Iraq has not proved to be Vietnam when it comes to an antiwar movement; or rather, it`s as if we had arrived at the end of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement first. In 1972, when the non-military part of that movement more or less collapsed, the antiwar soldiers remained. Vietnam Veterans Against the War was the official name of the main organization they formed, but the military in Vietnam itself was in near-revolt -- rising desertions and AWOLs, fraggings, "search and avoid" missions (where patrols just left perimeters and then sat out their assigned duties), escalating drug use, demonstrations by veterans in the U.S., and so on.



In the Iraq War, though in a far more modest way so far, the antiwar movement has been emerging in large part from the world of the military itself -- from worried parents of soldiers and would-be soldiers, angry spouses of soldiers in danger or killed in Iraq, and (slowly and quietly) from within the military itself. This is what has moved Rep. Walter B. Jones. Along with growing cracks in the Republican Party, the alienation of the military (including many officers who clearly believe that Iraq=madness) is a real threat -- perhaps the only real withdrawal threat at present. Predicting the future is a chancy thing to attempt. We humans are notoriously lousy at it. This I was incapable of fully imagining.



Otherwise, read my October 2003 piece. Withdrawal is now on the agenda, not just ours but the Iraqi one as well. Just the other day in a letter, "82 Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, Christian and communist legislators," just under a third of the newly elected Iraqi parliament, called for the withdrawal of American occupation forces. Given this administration, withdrawal is likely to be on the agenda for a long time to come. But that shouldn`t stop us. Let the thoughts pour out. Let the plans pour in. (Note that Juan Cole at his always invaluable Informed Comment website has recently taken a first stab at offering a reasonable withdrawal plan, one involving the UN. Don`t hold your breath, of course, if John Bolton arrives at UN headquarters after being rejected by the Senate.



I hope to return to the issue of such plans next week. In the meantime, let me just end on another letter that came into the Tomdispatch email box recently. It`s a reminder -- the sort that Rep. Jones evidently got in his district -- that there is a complex constituency out there, people connected to soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women deployed in or around Iraq, who are also considering what we really should be doing and how our world actually works in fascinating and sometimes inspiring ways.

"Dear Tom,

"My grandson`s father came home from Iraq two weeks ago. He is one of the lucky ones as the Air Force appears (I have no documentation either way) to not be in harms way over there, but time will tell.

"I am happy for my grandson and his father. My only concern now is the 1,700 men and women who have died needlessly in this unholy war -- my version as a devout Catholic, but I believe all Christian people regardless of their religious beliefs, not the religious right, but the true Christians who believe in and pray for peace are against this war. Let us not forget that Muslims also pray to the same God we do, and believe we are doing them harm by occupying their country, so naturally, they feel God is on their side. There is too much labeling going on in the media right now and it is difficult to watch. We all have a birth-right to follow our conscience, without judgment or bias from the media.

"What concerns me is most Americans are just like me, trying to squeak out a living, pay their mortgage, pay their bills and take care of their children, and grandchildren. Example, I hit the ground running each day, fire up the laptop, answer the endless email requests I receive at work, spend long hours at work due to the volume and corporate greed which keeps our VPs from hiring enough staff, so all of us carry the jobs of two or more people. I grew up here and now that I`m 53, I think my state is going to hell in a hand-basket (pardon the expression).

"I have an interesting parallel going on in my life. My son has a Vietnamese girlfriend who is as cute as a button (she came here when she was a year old) and her dad has returned to Vietnam to live, and my son and his girlfriend are considering visiting there in the next year.

"When our boys were in Vietnam, it never for a moment crossed my mind that in my wildest dreams any of my descendents, let alone my only son, would even think of going to visit Vietnam. It was unthinkable because of the war, which we thought would never end.

"Next slide: can you picture your grandchildren visiting Iraq on vacation? No, I can`t imagine it either. But it brings me back to the fact that war is momentary, even if it lasts for 20 years, and then life changes, making things we never thought possible, possible.

"I hope and pray we can get out of Iraq sooner, not later, or another 20 years of conflict and another 58,000 of our men and women will have lost their lives for nothing. There was absolutely no reason to start this war and it`s brought pain and suffering to many parents in America and many citizens of Iraq.

"Don`t get me wrong, I pray every day for the men and women who are over there; I know they are following orders and went into the military with open and true hearts. As a country, we have let them down. I said when George W. became president in January 2001, I`d be lucky if my job was still there by the end of his presidency, never dreaming he would be in office for 8 years.

"Well, off to get ready for another Monday. Please keep our soldiers and their parents in your prayers. I came so close to losing my daughter in the hospital in ‘99, and still can`t imagine what it`s like to lose a child; I`m grateful I didn`t and pray for those who have.

"We can`t give up on ending this war, but we have to find a better way to mobilize America. We can`t give up. I pray every, every day for an end to this. Take care and Godspeed..."

It`s up to all of us to consider the timing and the time of withdrawal.

Tom

The Time of Withdrawal
By Tom Engelhardt

[Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal visited the U.S. Army`s 21st Combat Support Hospital in Balad, Iraq. It handles American casualties from the Sunni Triangle. Few of the doctors and nurses, he writes, "expected to deal with such a steady stream of casualties more than six months after the fall of Baghdad." At the hospital he interviewed Lt. Col. Kim Keslung, an orthopedic surgeon, who summed up the situation this way:]

"`It was a mistake to discount the Iraqi resistance,` Col. Keslung said, adding, ‘If someone invaded Texas, we`d do the same thing.`" ("In a Tent Hospital, A close-Up View Of Attacks in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2003)

"The U.S.-run government in Iraq has vowed to seek no congressional funding in 2005 to reconstruct that nation if it receives the Bush administration`s full $20.3 billion request this fall, raising questions about how it will meet its total spending needs." (Jonathan Weisman, Iraq Aid Needs, Pledge At Odds, the Washington Post. )

Two passages from an ongoing travesty. Let`s start with the second of them, which looks to me for all the world like "Read my lips, no new aid." In 2005, if we`re still in Iraq and George Bush is still in the White House, Congress will be asked to pony up more money as surely as the sun rises in the east. But the more striking part of that passage is simply the date: 2005. Two years hence, according to L. Paul Bremer`s men in Baghdad, we Americans are still going to be "reconstructing" the country. In the Pentagon, according to the latest reports, generals are discussing what our troop levels there will be in 2006. Imagine such time-scapes and you know a great deal not about what`s going to happen, but about the Bush administration`s vision of our occupation of Iraq -- which is never to depart.

Lt. Col. Kim Keslung, who won`t even leave the base where she works because she knows full well what kinds of things happen to Americans "out there," is a far better historian than our president, our viceroy in Baghdad, our secretary or undersecretary of defense, or the various neocons in the administration and inhabiting the souks of Washington. She`s right. Invade Texas, invade Iran, invade China, invade Albania, invade Lebanon, invade Iraq -- name your place, in fact -- and you better not assume there won`t be resistance. Someone always resists. That single sentence sums up the last two centuries of global history.

Empires invariably think that it`s they who are bringing civilization and progress in their train and that only the barbarians, the terrorists, the bitter-enders resist for fear of being thrown onto that dust heap of history. But history is, as it turns out, filled to the brim with barbarians, terrorists, and bitter-enders, not to speak of enraged ordinary people who have seen their friends and relatives die, who feel the discomfort -- which has only grown more psychologically unbearable over the last century -- of watching well-armed, well-paid foreigners walk with impunity across their lands. They do resist, exactly as Texans would. Afterwards perhaps they fall on each other`s throats. Such things are unpredictable.

But in recent centuries, if empire -- the Great Powers, the Great Game, Global Domination, the Great Rivalry, the Great Arms Race -– has been the Great Theme of history, the less publicized but perhaps more powerful one has been resistance. Resistance everywhere to occupation of any sort. Resistance by forgotten millions (not all of them wonderful human beings). If you need to be convinced of this, just read Jonathan Schell`s new book The Unconquerable World.

Sooner or later, regimes of occupation withdraw or collapse. Or both. In our times, it seems, ever sooner. Even the Soviet Union didn`t make it past one long human lifetime. Of course, we`ve never been in a single hyperpower version of an imperial world before. But I think it might be possible to start into the subject of withdrawal from Iraq by saying one thing: There`s a great deal of "hype" in that "hyperpower." American power has been distinctly over-hyped. The leaders of other countries have perhaps taken us too much at the Bush administration`s overheated estimate of ourselves. Yes, our military can destroy much, quickly and from afar. Yes, we have the economic power to punish in various ways. Yes, you wouldn`t want to find yourself in a dark alley or even a cul de sac with this administration in a bad mood. But being powerful and being all-powerful are two quite different things which the utopian dreamers of Bush`s Washington have confused utterly – to their ultimate detriment I believe. Yes, militarily, our power is awesome and no other country can come close to matching it in conventional war settings. But it is most powerful withheld. As Iraq shows, once we commit ourselves to action, we are likely to find ourselves strangely overmatched. The irony here is that what an Iraqi military of 400,000 couldn`t hope to do, relatively small groups of ill-armed men and women are doing.

Having taken Iraq, eager to nail down its resources, to establish an imperial "democracy" as well as a string of permanent military bases there, and then drive a policy dreamt up inside Washington`s Beltway directly through the Middle East, the sole Great Power on this planet, issuing documents on Global Domination till the end of time, without a Great Rival, playing a Great Game with no one, and in an Arms Race of one (but still developing plans for ever higher-tech weaponry for future decades), nonetheless finds itself driven by a modest if growing resistance movement in Iraq. The president of the greatest power on Earth is being forced by events in "5% of Iraq" to call in his advisers for endless meetings, shake up the structure of his administration, hold sudden news conferences, offer new and ever more farfetched explanations of American actions, and backtrack on claims -- all because of Iraqi resistance.

I think one thing is predictable in a world where predicting anything accurately is a low-percentage bet: Sooner or later, the time of withdrawal will be upon us. Some of us would like it to be sooner, not later.

An antiwar movement shut down for months -– but still emotionally in place -– is now reconstituting itself and one of its demands is already for withdrawal, for an "end to the occupation," for "bringing our troops home." But this demand still has the feel of a slogan without particular resonance or content. Part of the reason for this is quite logical. Everyone knows to the point of despair that we -– the antiwar movement, the anti-imperialists -- are not in control. They are and they don`t want to leave. "We" will not withdraw from Iraq. They will, or they will feint at it anyway, but only under the pressure of impending catastrophe, literal or electoral. Withdrawal will not be directed by us or according to any plans the experts among us might draw up. Yes, we want this over. Except among military families, however, "bring our troops home" or "end the occupation" are at the moment just feeble slogans, raised to put a little pressure on the administration.

Still, a demand is being made in the face of all those people who claim that we can`t "cut and run," that we must "stay the course," that, whatever our thoughts about the war once were, we are all now somehow committed to an Iraqi occupation lest American "credibility" suffer grievous harm -- all statements that would have sounded no less credible, or incredible, nearly four decades ago when they were indeed part of the Vietnam playbook and the language of that era. Right now in the mainstream, with the exception of a few columnists like James Carroll of the Boston Globe and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, and the odd intellectual figure like the economist Jeffrey Sachs, withdrawal is not yet on anyone`s agenda. The Democratic candidates, Kucinich aside, are criticizing how we got into the war without suggesting ways to get out any time soon.

But, given ongoing events in Iraq, the idea of withdrawal is already on an inexorable course into the mainstream world. One sign: The administration has begun floating stories about withdrawing some troops next year. As withdrawal comes to seem like an actual alternative, we`re going to be challenged on it. And by then, it better be something more than a vague slogan for us. By then, we should have explored the subject as carefully, honestly, and fully as we can.

Just the other day, a friend challenged me to stop ducking the subject. He claimed that in my dispatches I was taking the easy way out. And I think maybe he was right. It`s time for us to do our best not just to put withdrawal on the American agenda as a slogan but to give it some thought and content.

Here, then, is my modest attempt to begin to think this out and get a discussion started.

Why we must leave Iraq

The Path of History: It`s not only that history -– in its last centuries -– speaks eloquently against the imperial occupation of any country; a far more circumscribed, recent, and specific history speaks against this occupation as well. So let me start with that:

The United States has long been involved with Iraq and the record doesn`t make for pleasant reading. The CIA had a hand in Saddam Hussein`s rise and the success of the Baath Party. The Reagan administration supported Saddam during the years of some of his worst crimes because he seemed a reasonable, if somewhat shaky bulwark against the evil Shi`ite regime in Iran. The first Bush administration, having decided not to march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War (during which we slaughtered possibly tens of thousands of Iraqis), despite full command of the skies over Iraq, proceeded to look the other way while Saddam crushed a Shi`ite uprising (itself filled with bloody revenge killings). We let him use his helicopters and other weaponry against the Shi`ite rebels for fear of an Islamic Republic in Baghdad. This resulted in the killing fields whose graves Paul Wolfowitz and others now visit regularly and use as the very explanation for our invasion of Iraq. The first Bush and Clinton administrations then enforced a fierce and unrelenting version of UN-sanctions supposedly against Saddam but crushing to ordinary Iraqis and, though it`s seldom mentioned, so destructive to the various Iraqi support systems (electricity, water purification, oil fields etc.) that, under the pressure of war, looting, occupation and resistance these more or less collapsed. The second Bush administration then launched a savage war against Saddam`s regime which only lasted a few weeks but again killed many thousands of soldiers and civilians. The killings of civilians have yet to end.

Though we arrived in Iraq speaking the language of liberation (in English only) and most Iraqis were relieved initially to have the sanctions regime and the war ended as well as a horrendously abusive regime gone, we did not arrive as liberators. Though almost all of the above had largely been forgotten by Americans and could barely be found in our media, it was certainly in the minds of many Iraqis, who had to assume, on the basis of the historical record, a distinct self-interestedness on our part. We arrived in Iraq thinking utterly beneficently about ourselves, but undoubtedly from the Iraqi point of view (dangerous as it is to assume that there is only one such) we had much to prove (or perhaps disprove) -– and fast. The proof in the last six months has been painfully in line with the previous historical record cited above.

No exit: When thinking of withdrawal, it`s important to remember that it was never a concept in the Bush administration`s vocabulary. Despite all those years of Vietnam "lessons" and Colin Powell`s "doctrine" which said that no military action should be undertaken without an "exit strategy" in place, Bush`s boys had no exit strategy in mind because they never imagined leaving. Of course, they expected to quickly draw down American forces in the face of a jubilant and grateful population. But there was no greater signal of our long-term intentions than our dismantling of the Iraqi military, and their planned recreation as a lightly armed border-patrolling force of perhaps 40,000 with no air force. Put that together with the four permanent bases we began building almost immediately and you know that we were expecting to be Iraq`s on-site military protector into the distant future.

Iraq itself was to be the lynchpin of an American empire of bases that was to extend from the former Yugoslavia to Uzbekistan, right across the "arc of instability" which just happened to coincide with the major oil lands of this Earth. Occupying Iraq would also – of this the neocons were quite confident -- tame Syria and Iran, settle the Palestinian question on grounds favorable to the Sharon government, and solve the awkward problem of basing our troops in Saudi Arabia about which Osama bin Laden had so long been bitter. This is what "liberation" truly meant. So when considering withdrawal, you can`t think only of Iraq. When occupying it, the Bush administration had far larger fish to fry. They had a global no-exit strategy of domination they wanted to put fully in place.

It has often been said -– and on this score there has been much complaint in the military -– that our troops were never trained to be policemen or peacekeepers (and that we didn`t bother to bring into Iraq any significant number of military police) -– but that`s the narrowest way to look at a very large problem. We arrived in Baghdad as a victorious, or more bluntly, a conquering army, not as peacekeepers. And we have continued in that vein.

In the weeks before, during and after the war, the administration itself often compared the occupation of Iraq to the Japanese and German occupations at the end of World War II. But we did allow actual Japanese and Germans to rebuild their countries economically, more or less to Japanese and German specifications. Iraq has been another matter. At every level, the Iraqis themselves have been sidelined. Reconstruction has been a kind of economic pillage, booty offered to huge American corporations linked to the Bush administration -– and the future economy of Iraq has been declared a free-fire zone for international finance. This is not what the Americans did to Japan, but what the Huns did to Europe, even if dressed up in modern capitalist garb. When mobs of Iraqis began to loot museums, ministries, stores, homes, oil refineries, electric plants, anything in sight, we were all shocked. When the power occupying Iraq opens the country to foreign (read American) corporations for the wholesale looting of its wealth and economic well-being, no one so much as blinks.

Again, history tells us that the Iraqis -– and not just thugs, terrorists, and "bitter-enders" -– will not live long on the sidelines of such a situation. Soon, they will challenge us about withdrawal, something never previously part of the Bush agenda. It must be part of ours.

The time of withdrawal: When considering the issue of ending the occupation quickly and bringing our troops home, perhaps the most important matter to think about is time itself. As we hear endlessly, we must not "cut and run," but instead "stay the course." The implication in all such statements is that, if only the United States toughs it out, on the other side of this rough patch of resistance lies another far less chaotic world in which a new and more peaceful Iraq will play at least something like the role the Bush administration imagined for it. Perhaps it was once true, when news traveled slowly and the colonial world was in more or less another universe, that an imperial power indeed did have five or ten years in which to pacify, at least for a time, a conquered and occupied land. Time like that is no longer available to the United States or to the Bush administration.

It is far more reasonable -– given what we know of history and of the present situation -– to assume that time is not on our side. What is bad now for us -– and for the Iraqis -– will only be worse later. The resistance will be greater, more organized, and more determined. Our allies, both within and without Iraq, ever more distant; American troops more isolated, angry, and embattled; money in shorter supply; military morale lower; and the antiwar movement here stronger. This is a prediction, of course, but a far more reasonable one, I think, than those that we hear every day. And if "staying the course," toughing it out, only makes a bad situation worse, then withdrawal when it comes, as it will, will only be that much harder and the results only that much more catastrophic for all parties concerned.

Let me sum up in four sentences:

History, long term and more recent, is not on our side.

We are a war-making and an occupying force, not a peacekeeping force.

We never planned to leave Iraq.

Time is against us.

Or to boil all this down to a sentence: We are not and never have been the solution to the problem of Iraq, but a significant part of the problem.

If this is true, then that`s what we`ll remain as long as our troops are there, all of which speaks to the need for a quick withdrawal from Iraq. I don`t claim to have a plan for doing so. Withdrawal plans must come, but probably not from the likes of me. A look at history (by those more expert than I) might be of use. There are endless imperial withdrawals from various occupied lands to consider -- some more embattled and horrific, some more peaceful, some braver, some more cowardly, some showing foresight, some barely ahead of collapse itself. And sometimes, of course, there was no withdrawal at all. The occupying forces were simply driven out. Examples obviously range from the French in Algeria and the Portuguese in Africa to the Israelis in Lebanon and the Russians in Eastern Europe. How this might be done and whom Iraq would be handed off to must be considered as well. Would the UN take some responsibility for Iraq or, for that matter, the Arab League? I don`t know. All I know is that if the will to withdraw, and withdraw quickly, is there, withdrawal is what will happen.

I`m no expert on Iraq. I can hardly keep the Shi`ite groups straight even with the help of the writings of Juan Cole. I do think it would be a mistake for any of us to claim that we know what would happen during a genuine withdrawal. It could indeed be a terrible mess or simply a true horror. Iraq could split in three – an embattled Kurdish semi-democracy in the north (under the ominous shadow of Turkey), a Sunni dictatorship in the center, and a harsh Islamic Republic in the South. There could be bloodshed or civil war. Or not. The future has a way of surprising – and since the American occupiers have chosen not to trust Iraqis with either responsibility or power, we have no idea what they might have done with it, or might someday do with it. All of that is speculation. But what we can see is what a long-term horror an American occupation and reconstruction of Iraq is likely to turn out to be. We can see the rising death toll; we can read about the civilians slain; we can note the mini-gulag set up there. We can mull over the greed and corruption in what passes for "reconstruction." All this we know. The rest is possibility. This we should not want to continue in our names. This "course" we should not want to "stay." Alternatives should not be considered "cutting and running."

For me at least, the imperial occupation of the lands of this earth -– whatever the empire -– is unacceptable. Any armed occupation will always be part of the problem not the solution on this planet. In our present world, such acts can only lead to hell. We need to pressure this administration hard to step outside the box it has created for us, our troops, and the Iraqi people who truly did deserve a liberation and not the occupation and looting that they are living through. They are not the spoils of war.

Let us offer Iraq genuine help, reconstruction aid, and support of all sorts afterwards, possibly indirectly through groups whose interests can`t be mistaken for ours. But our troops are an occupying army. They can`t keep the peace. They are the war.

-- October 31, 2003

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute`s Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

Copyright 2003 Tom Engelhardt


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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - President Bush today called the mysterious Jackson Toast being sold on eBay "an omen of Armageddon".

"First somebody makes a cake of soap out of [urlBerlusconi`s excess blubber]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4110402.stm and then we have this [urlJacko Toast thing!]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4114248.stm This has got to be the end of the world," said Bush to the startled reporters.[/url][/url]
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Ich möchte noch mal auf #29385 von heute Nacht zurückkommen.
Es ist in jedem Fall der gleiche Vorgang auf dem die Meldungen beruhen.

Einmal Spiegel-Online:
USA planen Teilabzug ihrer Truppen
Weiter:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361542,00.html

U.S. General: Many Insurgents in Iraq Paid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 21, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq-Insurgen…

Und heute LATimes:
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
No Troop Reduction for Now, Commander Says
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-mili…

By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

June 22, 2005

WASHINGTON — The Iraqi insurgency shows little sign of weakening and probably will prevent any reduction in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq before the end of the year, a top U.S. commander said Tuesday.

Army Lt. Gen. John Vines, operational chief of coalition forces in Iraq, said insurgent attacks were expected to continue over the next several months as an interim Iraqi government drafts a constitution and holds a national election scheduled for December.

"At this point, I would not be prepared to recommend a draw-down prior to the election, certainly not in any significant numbers," Vines told Pentagon reporters in a videoconference briefing from Baghdad.

The general`s comments were the most definitive yet by an American commander in the field that the U.S. military presence in Iraq would not diminish in 2005.

Vines said he still hoped that by early next year a more battle-tested Iraqi army would be able to assume greater security responsibilities and allow for a U.S. troop reduction of four to five brigades — approximately 12,000 to 15,000 troops.

Recently, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." Vines declined to make the same assessment, but he emphasized that any long-term solution to the insurgency would have to come from Iraqi politicians — not U.S. soldiers.

If the Iraqi government "drafts a constitution that is acceptable to the larger segments of the population and is ratified, I mean, my assessment is, the insurgency could dwindle down very quickly," Vines said.

He added that recent polls indicating declining support in the United States for the war in Iraq showed that many Americans "don`t have a good perception of what`s at stake here." Because the United States has not been attacked since 2001, Vines said complacency had set in among Americans.

"Quite honestly, I think we have a pretty clear-cut choice: We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad or we deal with it when it comes to us," Vines said.

Violence continued across Iraq on Tuesday, despite efforts by U.S. and Iraqi forces to arrest suspected insurgents in Iraqi cities and crush rebel strongholds in rural Sunni Arab enclaves.

A booby-trapped car bomb set off at a checkpoint in Tuz Khurmatu, a mostly Turkmen city in the country`s north, left five dead. Suicide bombings in Irbil and Baghdad over the last several days have killed dozens, many of them members of Iraq`s nascent security forces.

An improvised roadside bomb killed a U.S. Army soldier on patrol near Rutbah in western Iraq, the military said in a news release. The soldier was the second attached to the 1st Corps Support Command to be killed in two days.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has dispatched truckloads of supplies to the Syrian border, where U.S. Marines and warplanes have been battering suspected insurgents. Recent U.S.-led assaults on the cities of Qaim and Karabilah have displaced 7,000 families, said Said Hakki, president of the nongovernmental aid society and an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.

Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad contributed to this report.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Duncan Hunter ist der Abgeordnete, der Gitmo als Searesort empfohlen hat.

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The game of their lives
Biofeedback through video helps returning troops fight post-traumatic stress disorder
- Eilene Zimmerman, Special to The Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/22/M…

Wednesday, June 22, 2005



San Diego -- Once a week, Pfc. Joshua Frey, a Marine who spent several months in Fallujah before he was shot Dec. 12, heads to a darkened office in the Naval Medical Center here and places a headset over his eyes.
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A Marine participates in a study at USC for
veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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He attaches biofeedback sensors to his arms, hands and chest, grabs hold of a joystick and enters a video game version of the Iraq war. As he moves through a "virtual" Fallujah, he encounters sniper fire, explosions and insurgents lurking in shadows. A Navy psychologist checks readouts from a flat- screen monitor showing the Marine`s heart rate, breathing, hand perspiration and skin temperature.

But for Frey and the U.S. military, this is no game. It is part of a potentially groundbreaking approach to treating the effects of severe combat stress, in Iraq and elsewhere.

Frey, like tens of thousands of other veterans of Iraq and other U.S. wars, has post-traumatic stress disorder. Since coming home, he has experienced nightmares, flashbacks and insomnia. But instead of the traditional talk therapy approach, Frey, in a study funded by the Office of Naval Research, is coming almost literally face to face with some of his most traumatic memories. The hope is that "virtual reality" scenes of violent conflict will provide a way for Frey to gradually confront his most painful memories and fears and manage the related anxiety.

"I`ve been doing psychotherapy for PTSD for 20 years, and my therapy has never been as effective as it is now, within the virtual reality environment," says Frey`s doctor, Navy psychologist James Spira.

The virtual war, created at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, uses elements of Full Spectrum Warrior, a video game originally developed as an Army combat training tool.

Psychologists working with the military say soldiers suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder may be more amenable to such a treatment approach rather than traditional psychotherapy, often seen as too warm and fuzzy for the military`s macho culture.
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A still from the game shows the virtual conditions that can help troops discuss their experiences and deal with the mental traumas of war.
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"This is a gaming generation, they feel comfortable with games, and we see a lot more soldiers who want to take part in it, but won`t go to traditional talk therapy," says Skip Rizzo, the clinical psychologist, professor and research scientist at USC who heads the team that built the virtual environment.

The three-year, $3 million study, the first of its kind for U.S. soldiers, will include veterans from both Iraq and Afghanistan, with the bulk of the research taking place at the Naval Medical Center and the Camp Pendleton Marine base, both in San Diego. Some testing will also take place in Hawaii, at Tripler Mary Medical Center in Honolulu.

The study comes on the heels of the Department of Defense`s decision in January that military personnel be assessed three times in a 90-day period after their return from Iraq in an effort to head off the development of post- traumatic stress disorder. About 18 percent of the approximately 130,000 soldiers and Marines currently serving in Iraq are at risk for the illness, according to a 2004 study on mental health problems and combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mental health casualties Number affected: 25,000 World War II and 161,000 Vietnam veterans receive disability compensation for PTSD related symptoms. The Afghan toll: 18 percent of veterans returning from Afghanistan were diagnosed with psychological disorders, including PTSD. At risk in Iraq: 1 in 6 soldiers and Marines acknowledges symptoms of severe depression. The Iraq toll: 8 percent to 10 percent of active duty and retired military women who served in Iraq suffer from PTSD.

Earlier this month, researchers begin the first phase of the study, using a new version of the game, which allows users to drive around in virtual humvees, travel desert roads in a convoy, and walk around a military base or a village. Patients can explore a small section of an Iraqi city. The next version will likely add war-related smells as well, such as burning oil.

As the study continues, the game will be modified to reflect input from users so that it can more accurately depict their experiences.

So far Frey has used the virtual reality game in treatment four times.

"There were snipers all over the place in Fallujah. I was on top of a vehicle in a line of tanks, and I was the rear lookout," he says, recalling his real life experiences. "I was shot in the arm -- it shattered completely. I`m in pain every day."

When he wears the headset, says Frey, it is the sounds more than anything else that take him back to the day he and six other Marines were shot. His best friend died in the attack. "I hear voices and I can see my friend," he says. "It`s intense, with the headset, but it helps me talk about it."

Up until now, the best treatment available for veterans with post- traumatic stress disorder has been "exposure therapy," during which a therapist helps the patient re-imagine a traumatic event and then, through talk, attempts to desensitize the patient to it.

But the approach has had only limited success, and the search for better and earlier treatment is part of a change in military culture, which tried to play down combat symptoms like stress and anxiety.

"If you behaved as if you were frightened, you weren`t a good Marine or soldier. We didn`t recognize and appreciate non-normal responses to combat," says psychologist Charles Figley, director of the Florida State University Traumatology Institute and founder of the Green Cross, an organization that provides free mental health services to traumatized veterans.

Post-traumatic stress disorder didn`t emerge as a classified disorder until 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon. "It`s taken us more than 20 years to understand it and learn how to treat and prevent it," says Figley.
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A still from the game shows the virtual conditions that can help troops discuss their experiences and deal with the mental traumas of war.
Image courtesy of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies
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Iraq is the first prolonged war since Vietnam and the first for which military personnel attend pre-deployment sessions to prepare them for combat stress and learn the warning signs of the illness and how to get help, both in the field and when they return.

"This year we added $5 million for new PTSD programs to keep up with the war effort," says Mark Shelhorse, acting deputy chief officer for mental health at the Veterans Health Administration.

The Iraq war is different from previous conflicts in other ways too, one of the most stressful being that the "kill zone" is everywhere, says Barbara Rothbaum, a psychologist in the department of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta and one of the virtual reality study`s principal investigators.

"No place is safe; you can be walking down the street and get hit. You can`t predict where the danger is, and that`s very hard on soldiers," she says.

Spira says the aim of virtual reality treatment is to trigger uncomfortable reactions that correspond to a patient`s real experiences, but without re-traumatizing them. With Frey and other participants in the study, Spira ratchets up the violence in the game gradually, giving them time to adapt. After 20 to 30 minutes, he talks to the participant about how he feels.

Frey believes he is making progress. "It`s definitely helping," he says. "I can sleep now. I still have nightmares, crazy nightmares, but with this and medication, I can sleep at night."

The approach does have its critics, however.

Randall Marshall, director of trauma studies and services at the New York State Psychiatric Institute who is conducting a National Institute of Health- funded study of post-traumatic stress disorder related to the Sept. 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks, says that virtual reality, combined as it usually is with talk therapy, risks over-exposing veterans to trauma.

"Therapy activates memories so that patients experience the powerful emotions they felt at the time of the trauma. In therapy they learn the difference between real trauma and the memory, which can`t hurt them," says Marshall, who is also an associate professor at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.

"I don`t understand why we need another technique to evoke the experience of combat. You don`t need fancy techniques to make memories vivid for trauma victims; the goal is to diminish the vividness."

At this point, there is little hard data about the effectiveness of treating combat stress with virtual reality.

Some small studies involving Vietnam veterans using the game "Virtual Vietnam" showed some improvement among participants, but the studies took place more than 20 years after the war ended. More recent studies have suggested that virtual reality treatment for other disorders, such as claustrophobia and fear of flying, may be more effective than talk-related therapies.

Positive results were shown when virtual reality was used on one patient with post-traumatic stress arising out of the attack on the World Trade Center, according to a report presented last week at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization conference in Croatia on new approaches to diagnosing and treating the disorder. A study involving a small group of New York firefighters and civilians diagnosed with Sept. 11th-related symptoms is ongoing.

And, as the Iraq conflict continues, the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder is likely to increase significantly, say psychologists -- and with it the need for effective treatment for the illness.

"It`s going to be an extraordinary mental health issue," said Figley.



URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/22/M…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Downing Street Is For Liars
Why isn`t the media screaming about the latest proofs of Bush`s war scams? Don`t you know?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
Wednesday, June 22, 2005

This is the white-hot question right now gushing forth from the Far Left, from progressive blogs and liberal patriots and blue staters and angry anti-Bushers alike, and it is like a plea, a rallying call, an indignant stomp of deep frustration. It is this:

Why is the major American media not swarming all over the Downing Street Memos thing? Why is the entire nation not just appalled and disgusted and aghast at finding seemingly irrefutable proofs about what we all already knew, which is that BushCo planned to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and needed to find a way to justify it?

And, we now know, he was even willing to go so far as to rig the intelligence and "fix the facts" and screw the U.S. economy and screw any sort of exit strategy and screw the potential for lost lives and let`s just blindly stomp on in there and bomb the living crap outta Saddam despite the undeniable pre-Iraq evidence that Saddam had zero WMDs and that his nuclear program was "effectively frozen," and despite how BushCo and the CIA and FBI and DOD and the Clinton administration and your grandma all knew it?

This is what the infamous Downing Street Memos allegedly contain, more undeniable proofs in the form of meeting notes with higher-ups in Britain and the U.S., talking about the supposedly "dire" threat of WMDs and nailing Iraq well before Bush was handed the tragic and morose political gift of 9/11 to leverage and whore and turn into his own personal Jesus.

And to be sure, the outcry from the Left is healthy and good and appropriate and only now are a handful of newspapers and magazines (you go, Newsweek) taking up the Downing Street Memo debacle, asking slightly more inflamed questions of BushCo.

So then, why isn`t the media roaring more angrily about this? Why aren`t the major players up in arms and trumpeting banner headlines and screaming for Bush to answer for his obvious and plentiful crimes against the nation and the Earth and peace?

Answer: Because it`s not really news. Not anymore.

Because, to be honest, what the memos actually reveal is not quite as much as the extreme Left wishes they did, and while they certainly do reveal that Bush is a noted liar and distorter of fact and that we can easily deduce that his snarling war hawks torqued the Brits into complicity and mangled the U.N. laws and misled the American people into war perhaps more deviously and violently than any administration in recent American history, well, there is not a single thing in the words you just read that most of us did not already know.

It`s true. There is, unfortunately, nothing here that not already been trumpeted to death by the Left, and therefore to try to trumpet it all again as some sort of irrefutable revelation that should change the face and temperament of the nation is sort of like beating a dead horse we all knew was already dead but that is only now taking on a new dimension of stink.

Look at it this way: The majority of the nation knows Bush lied like a dog to drive us into an unwinnable (but, for his cronies, incredibly profitable) war. The rest either refuse to believe it, or they claim, with equal parts ignorance and blind jingoism, that the ends (ousting a pip-squeak dictator who was no real threat to anyone and who had been successfully contained for 20 years) justify the means ($200 billion, 1,700 dead Americans, over 10,000 wounded and disabled U.S. soldiers, countless tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis, staggering economic debt, the open disrespect -- if not outright contempt -- of the entire international community).

Here is the American cynic`s view: It is almost too late to care about the lies. It is almost pointless to scream and rant and point fingers of blame. We all know who is to blame, and it ain`t Saddam, and it ain`t Osama, and it ain`t "terror," and it ain`t our "freedoms." Bush has driven us so deep into the Iraq hellhole it serves almost no purpose to whine about the obvious deceptions and blatant whorelike pre-9/11 machinations that got us here.

We are now, instead, focused on endurance. On gritting teeth and getting through and getting the hell out of this new Vietnam Bush has imbecilically driven us into, all while surviving 3.5 more years of one of the most abusive, secretive cadres of warmongering leadership in American history.

Oh, and rest assured, Iraq is indeed a new Vietnam. The parallels are undeniable and mounting -- all the elements are in place: staggering civilian death tolls, inmate abuse and torture, international embarrassment, economic pillaging, executive impudence, a vicious drive toward empire and power, a false sense of "victory" and the overpowering sense we are so deeply entrenched in this violent, chaotic quagmire, it will take many more years and many thousands of more U.S. dead and countless more billions before we are anywhere near stabilization.

But oh, you might cry (and this column might regularly wail), shouldn`t Bush be held accountable? Shouldn`t he be made to answer for these lies, these obvious abuses of power?

Answer: You`re goddamn right he should. He should also be strapped to an incredibly uncomfortable chair and made to look at the smoking bones of ten thousand dead Iraqi children. But that`s just me.

The lies that led us into this war are indeed staggering, appalling, make Clinton`s lies about his stupid little affair sound like, well, a stupid little affair. As Dubya`s tanking poll ratings prove, even many moderate Republicans are backing away from calling Iraq a success, or even a necessary action. And Dems have recently begun demanding that BushCo develop some kind of exit strategy to begin pulling out U.S. troops within a year.

BushCo`s answer? No way in hell, bucko. Impossible. And why? Because we are in way too deep. The violence is escalating, not dying down. Every major U.S. general, strategist, policy wonk says we are far too screwed to leave anytime soon. And "Mission accomplished" has become perhaps the most tragic punch line to one of the most bitter jokes ever told in your lifetime.

Let`s just say it outright: Of course Bush deserves to be impeached. But of course Bush will not be impeached, because impeachment requires a massive federal investigation and an act of Congress and the support of countless senators and representatives, and right now the GOP controls Congress with a little iron penis, and therefore any sort of uprising or scandal or suggestion of punishment gets immediately slammed down or scoffed away or buried under an avalanche of shrugs and yawns and neoconservative smugness. Isn`t that right, Mr. Gannon? Mr. DeLay? Abu Ghraib? Gitmo? Saddam? Et al.

BushCo survived the illegal sanctioning of inhumane torture. They survived a gay male prostitute acting as a journalist. They survived Enron and Diebold and the rigging of the first election and they will survive Downing Street simply because all the people who should be on the attack about these atrocities all work for the guys who committed them.

So then, the question is not merely when will the stack of lies, of abuses become so high, so unstable, so inexcusable that the entire nation finally takes notice and the whole house of cards comes crashing to the ground in a big nasty soul-jarring spirit-cleansing patriotism-redefining whoomp and smothers the whole lot of them, but rather, can it be soon enough?


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. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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Jun 23, 2005

Raising the flag on Iraq reparations
By Haider Rizvi
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF23Ak01.html

NEW YORK - The United Nations is being urged to stop paying billions of dollars in reparations from Iraq - one of the world`s most indebted countries - to claimants, many of them from Kuwait, one of the world`s richest nations. The reparations, which are derived from Iraq`s oil revenues, relate to Saddam Hussein`s invasion of that country 15 years ago.

A UN meeting in Geneva next week will decide which claims for war reparations relating to the occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 are to be paid by Iraq, and in what amounts.

So far, the UN Compensation Commission, a body created in 1991 as a subsidiary organ of the 15-member Security Council, has awarded compensation of more than US$52 billion to individuals and businesses who filed claims for losses during the war.

Despite the ongoing US-led occupation of Iraq, the commission has imposed another $33 billion in war reparations against that country, which are yet to be paid. The remaining claims imposed on Iraq - and those yet to be decided - are primarily related to state-owned oil companies, multinational corporations and governments.

Under pressure from the United States and other Western nations, the UN imposed tough economic sanctions against Iraq soon after the end of the invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions continued for about 13 years, until the US invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Realizing the catastrophic effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi civilian population, the UN Security Council passed a resolution in April 1994 that established the oil-for-food program to allow Iraq to purchase humanitarian goods in return for its oil.

Under the program, the UN set aside about 25% of Iraq`s oil revenues toward war reparations. However, these payments did not cease with the end of the oil-for-food program itself. When the Security Council passed a resolution in May 2003 to dissolve the program, it still required that 5% of Iraq`s oil revenues be used to pay reparations.

Those critical of the UN compensation program are now calling for the world body to impose an immediate moratorium on all war payments against Iraq, while demanding measures to eliminate "odious debts" incurred by Saddam`s regime.

"At what point will the Iraqi people no longer be penalized for the unjust act of the Saddam regime?" asked Jubilee Iraq, a Britain-based charity. It noted that in 1979 when Saddam seized power, Iraq not only had no long-term debt, but also held $36 billion in cash reserves.

However, by the eve of the US invasion, Iraq owed about $125 billion to foreign creditors, including $42 billion to the so-called Paris Club of rich nations. Last November the Paris Club agreed to reduce its claims by 80%, but not without imposing a number of conditions. Only 30% of the debt forgiveness came with no strings attached.

Another 30% will only materialize after Iraq agrees to implement significant structural changes to its economy. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has made it clear that in the next three years Iraq must demonstrate its compliance with the conditions attached to the final 20% reduction.

As for Iraq`s remaining $83 billion of debt, more than $67 billion is claimed by countries that are not part of the Paris Club, and $15 billion is owed to private creditors.

In response to the Paris Club`s meeting last year, the interim Iraqi leadership described most of the debt as "odious", and demanded that it must be reduced by 95%, in addition to an end to war reparations.

This week, both the European Union and the United States are hosting a meeting in Brussels to discuss Iraq`s debt. The meeting is expected to draw foreign ministers from 80 nations, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

For their part, in order to build pressure on the Compensation Commission, a number of activists from the US, Britain, Iraq and other countries are on their way to Geneva. Some of them have already started fasting outside the UN offices there to draw attention to their protests.

"Taking Iraqi oil revenue and paying companies in Kuwait is an injustice," said Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness. "The people of Iraq have already suffered so much, from sanctions to bombardment to occupation."

"The commission has no legitimacy for one day longer," Hans von Sponeck, who quit as UN humanitarian coordinator in 2000, said while joining protesters in Geneva last week. "It is not a colonial master."

The commission will begin its three-day meetings next Tuesday.

(Inter Press Service)

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Man muß doch mal feststellen, dass es den Gefangenen in GITMO relativ noch gutgeht gegenüber der Zeit in den Südstaaten vor 40 Jahren.
Richtig human!

Here`s an update on the Congressional lynch mob:

The senate resolution that apologizes for sitting on their asses on the
lynching issue is now up to 89 sponsors and cosponsors, leaving 11 hold-outs.
If my accounting is correct, the remaining Lynch Mob Eleven are:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
Thad Cochran (R-MS) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
John Cornyn (R-TX) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Trent Lott (R-MS) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
Richard Shelby (R-AL) where hundreds (or more) lynchings took place
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)

Once again, Republicans are leading the way ...toward the 16th century.
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Latest Coalition Fatality: Jun 21, 2005
June05: 62


The following is a list of U.S. Fatalities who have died in hospitals in Germany and The United States. Some have claimed that The Department of Defense does not report these deaths, they are obviously mistaken:
[urlU.S. Fatalities who have died in hospitals in Germany and The United States]http://icasualties.org/oif/dow.aspx[/url]


Iraker: Civilian: 333 Police/Mil: 237 Total: 570
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Vorschlag zur Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht in den USA
Tom Friedmans* Lösungsvorschlag
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1457&PHPSESSID=725f89684c1…

von Mike Whitney
ZNet 19.06.2005
Wenn Amerikas wichtigster Politguru und Sprecher des mächtigen CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), Tom Friedman, verkündet, es sei Zeit, die Wehrpflicht wiedereinzuführen, sollte man aufhorchen. Ein diesbezüglicher Kommentar Friedmans ist in seiner Kolumne vom 15. Juni erschienen. Darin prophezeit er zum wiederholten Male, der Irakkrieg sei "noch zu gewinnen", falls "wir es nur richtig anfangen". Dazu brauche es, so Friedman "die doppelte Anzahl Kampfstiefel vor Ort und eine Verdopplung der diplomatischen Bemühungen, um die Sunniten ins Boot zu holen".

"Die doppelte Anzahl Kampfstiefel vor Ort?"

Klingt für mich wie der Ruf nach Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht.

Tom ist kein Dummkopf. Er weiß, dass er jene Amerikaner, die genug haben von diesem Krieg, nicht umpolen kann. Laut einer kürzlichen Gallup-Umfrage haben mittlerweile beeindruckende 59% der Amerikaner die Nase voll vom Irak und wollen den Truppenabzug. Friedmans Botschaft richtet sich folglich nicht an diese Gruppe sondern an jene kleine Minderheit von 10%, die, laut Gallup, für noch mehr Soldaten im Irak plädieren. Zu diesen 10% dürfte die Gruppe der "hartgesottenen" Bush-Anhänger zählen, deren Zahl weiter schwindet - plus jene Nullkommaeinsprozent-Elite, von der Amerika (hinter der Maske einer demokratischen Regierung) in Wirklichkeit regiert wird.

Friedmans Lösungsvorschlag kommt daher dem Ruf nach Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht gleich - ganz direkt. Ihm ist klar, dass der Irak ohne den massiven Einsatz amerikanischer Truppen nicht zu "befrieden" ist. Seine Logik stützt die Schlussfolgerungen General Shinsekis - der seinen Job verlor, weil er dem Kongress mitteilte, Amerika benötige "mehrere hunderttausend Soldaten" zur Sicherung des Irak. Friedmans Logik ist allerdings ein Fehdehandschuh an die Adresse des uneinsichtigen Rumsfeld - der seine Fehler nicht eingesteht und zu einer Fortsetzung der bisherigen Politik, unabhängig von deren katastrophalen Folgen, entschlossen ist. Denn, würde man dem Vorschlag, die Wehrpflicht wiedereinzuführen zustimmen, käme dies einer Bankrotterklärung gleich. Rumsfelds leicht zu kränkende Eitelkeit würde ein Eingeständnis des Scheiterns aber nie zulassen. Die Perspektive ist: Die Moral wird weiter sinken, es gibt große Schwierigkeiten bei der Rekrutierung und zunehmend Anzeichen dafür, dass unser Militär sich (in seinen Aufgaben) überdehnt und zerfasert.

Und wem gibt Friedman die Schuld an unseren Problemen im Irak? Jedem, der auch nur vage mit dem Fiasko in Verbindung zu bringen ist. Die Republikaner seien schuld, weil sie glaubten, es reiche, "zu applaudieren, egal, was das Bush-Team tut". Die Demokraten seien schuld, weil sie "nicht wollen, dass das Bush-Team Erfolge aufweisen kann". Die Iraker seien schuld, denn "sie haben nicht begriffen, welche gigantische Chance sich (ihnen) eröffnet" - und weil sie keinen so starken und unabhängigen Führer vorweisen können wie (kein Witz) "Hamid Karsai". Die größte Schuld liege, so Friedman, bei Donald Rumsfeld. Friedman sieht die Sache so: "Das Kernproblem im Irak ist, dass Rumsfeld entschied, auf die billige Tour in den Irak einzumarschieren". Mit anderen Worten: Friedman hat moralisch nichts gegen den Krieg, sondern kritisiert lediglich, dass der Einmarsch im Sinne der imperialen Ziele nicht effektiv genug verlief.

Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld habe haarscharf zu wenig Truppen reingeschickt "sodass wir verlieren". "Rumsfeld-Doktrin" nennt Friedman das. Kein Wort verliert Friedman jedoch über jene Zehntausenden unschuldigen Iraker, die diesem sinnlosen Akt der Aggression bislang zum Opfer fielen und kein Wort über jene rund 1700 Militärangehörigen, die sterben mussten, damit die Petrokratie der Bushs im Mittleren Osten einen Brückenkopf errichten kann. Das Einzige, was ihn zu interessieren scheint, ist die Frage, ob es gelingt, ein paar kindische Ziele der globalen Eliten einigermaßen erfolgreich umzusetzen.

Friedman verweist in seinem Artikel auf die Risse und Spalten, die mittlerweile in den Zitadellen der US-Macht aufgetreten sind. Offensichtlich glauben viele Leute im Regierungsestablishment inzwischen nicht mehr, dass der plündernde Bush-Clan im Irak noch siegen kann. Friedman allerdings gibt die Hoffnung nicht auf. Stattdessen offeriert er eine letzte verzweifelte Kur, um die ganze Sache, das ganze Debakel, aus der Sackgasse zu bringen: die Wehrpflicht.

Der Konflikt wird weiter an Amerikas Ressourcen zehren - folglich darf man auf das weitere Genörgele der Powerbroker gespannt sein - Genörgele von Leuten, die normalerweise lieber hinter den Kulissen agieren. Die plötzliche Flut an Leitartikeln, in denen unsere Kriegsführung kritisiert wird und das große Angebot an Artikel über das sogenannte Downing-Street-Memo** legen den Schluss nahe, dass einige aus der Gruppe der Eliten plötzlich nervös werden - angesichts der massiven Inkompetenz des Verteidigungsministeriums - und einen Führungswechsel wünschen. Tom Friedman ist die Stimme einer aufkeimenden Gruppe frustrierter Bosse.

Bislang scheint der Streit zwischen den Eliten allerdings im Großen und Ganzen noch oberflächlicher Natur zu sein - so, wie auch die Auseinandersetzung Rumsfeld/Friedman. Die Forderung nach weiteren Soldaten ist eine reine Strategiefrage, die das Grundprinzip einer Kolonialherrschaft unangetastet lässt. Trotz wachsender Unzufriedenheit mit der in den Sand gesetzten Okkupation ist die Unterstützung für eine dauerhafte Präsenz in dieser Region nach wie vor ungebrochen. Es müsste viel (nämlich direkt Bedrohliches für die Männer an der Spitze der Politpyramide) passieren, ehe wir mit einem Politikwechsel rechnen dürfen.

Anmerkung der Übersetzerin

* Thomas Friedman ist Pulitzerpreisträger und Kolumnist der New York Times

** siehe www.downingstreetmemo.com und entsprechende interessante Hinweise in unserem Forum

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Robert Fisk "I think there are going to be more assassinations"
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Copyright © 2005 Australian Broadcasting Corp

Video Real Player:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200506/r50483_134317.ram

Tanscript:
Fisk says Middle East anchored in history
Reporter: Tony Jones


TONY JONES: Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for the Independent and he`s reported and observed politics in that region for more than 25 years. He joins us now from Beirut. Robert Fisk, thanks for joining us again. Can we start with the assassination of George Hawi? Only yesterday in one of your articles, you quoted an old Lebanese friend as saying, "Someone else is going to get killed soon." I mean, you couldn`t have been more prophetic.

ROBERT FISK, WRITER AND JOURNALIST: Sadly, no. In fact, a number of Lebanese have been ringing me up today saying it was a very spooky introduction to my story. I think it was. You see, what is happening in Lebanon, through the parliamentary elections, which were freely held, although there are flaws in them, as the EU Commission of Observers said, is that we`ve reached a new stage where Lebanese can actually, in theory at least, control their own destiny. So how do you - if you`re against the Lebanese doing this or if you resent the Lebanese doing this, the question is: how do you create social, political, economic instability? And obviously, the killing of leading figures in Lebanese society - Samir Kassir, the journalist two or three weeks ago, now George Hawi, a respected man in Lebanon, a man who, as you rightly said, was one of the first people to call for resistance against Israeli occupation in 1982 and yet at the same time was also harshly critical of the Syrian La Habra intelligence services - how do you create this instability? Well, by killing people who have criticised Syria, but people who also have been known to be critical of Israel, because then the people who kill them can say, well, maybe it wasn`t the Syrians, maybe it was the Israelis - in other words, you muddy the waters of the deaths in order to suggest, well, you know, we can`t be sure; it`s outside forces; we don`t know who they are. There`s no doubt that, for example, among the very angry, ferocious crowd that gathered within minutes around George Hawi`s body - and I was there - they believe that it was the work of the Syrian intelligence services. The Syrians of course deny this, which you may have to - it may be a denial you have to take with quite a lot of Syrian Damascus salt on the tongue. But either way, you can be sure that we will not find out who did it in the near future. As usual, the security forces - there`s a very big security force apparatus here in Lebanon - were at the scene picking over the bits of the car. One isn`t quite sure where the evidence will go. You know, we know that after Rafiq Hariri`s assassination on 14 February, evidence was taken from the scene of the crime and later other evidence was planted there. We also know now that Samir Kassir, the journalist who was murdered earlier this month, his car was moved from the scene of the crime and the detonator was lost. The detonator, of course, has numbers and codings on it. I will be interested to see how good the investigation is into Hawi`s murder today.

TONY JONES: Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader, put it very succinctly. He said the life of anyone who wants a democratic Lebanon is in danger and, echoing what you`re saying there, he said that until the security apparatus is actually controlled by a democratic government, there can be no real change.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, the real problem, you see, for the opposition is that the President of Lebanon, who obtained a three-year extra period in power from pro-Syrian parliamentarians last year, is a pro-Syrian. He is a friend of the President of Syria; he effectively is seen as Syria`s man in Lebanon. There doesn`t seem to be a legal way of actually getting him out of office, and one of the problems is that his security apparatus remains very much under his and therefore Syrian influence. It`s quite interesting that as we speak, the UN international commission inquiring into Hariri`s murder is actually interviewing, as we speak, Brigadier General Mustafa Hamdan, head of the Presidential Guards Brigade, who is a close security aide to President Lahoud, Syria`s friend. So you can see how, in a sense, both Syria`s friends are under great pressure - from the international community, from the UN or, by extension, I suppose from the United States and France, which backed the UN resolution calling for the withdrawal of the Syrians - and at the same time pressures are coming upon those people opposed to Syria in a very violent and tragic way.

TONY JONES: Last time we spoke to you was immediately after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, and you raised the spectre of a potential civil war beginning again in Lebanon. Just how painful do you think this transition to democracy in Lebanon is going to be?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I think there are going to be more assassinations, and I haven`t met a Lebanese who doesn`t think so. But I don`t think there will be a civil war. I think that every day that goes by since Hariri`s assassination in which there has not been violence is another good day - further proof that there won`t be. You know, I was only 400m from Hariri`s convoy when it was blown up. When I saw that explosion, all the dead of the civil war started climbing out of their graves for me. But I think now that, you know, so many families sent their children abroad during the war to be educated - to America, to Australia, to Britain, to Switzerland - and they`ve come back and I don`t think they`ve come back imbued with this sense of sectarian violence that existed for their families who remained here. I think one of the reasons why we`ve had so many demonstrations in Lebanon is that they`re young people who are demonstrating, saying, "We will not have another war. We refuse to have another war." That probably is the saving of Lebanon.

TONY JONES: All right. That optimistic note, in a way, brings us to the extraordinary statements by the US Secretary of State in Cairo yesterday when she declared that 60 years of US foreign policy in the Middle East had been a complete failure. How do you rate her chances of turning that failure around by instituting or pushing for democracy throughout the Middle East?

ROBERT FISK: I don`t think there`s going to be democracy in the Middle East and I don`t really think we want democracy. One of the problems of democracy in the Middle East is that, if it really exists, the Arabs may not do what we want them to do, and it`s much more easy to have dictators, generals, businessmen running countries on our behalf, rather than saying, "Let`s have a fair vote", because in many cases, we may find Islamist governments take over, which we don`t want. Remember, originally, the Americans didn`t actually want elections in Iraq. It was only later, when the Shiites of Iraq threatened to join the insurrection with the Sunnis, that suddenly America became a proponent of democracy in Iraq. No, I don`t think the West wants real democracy out here because it may not turn out to be the kind of democracy we want. We are much happier with military governments or shadow military governments, as in Algeria. We didn`t object when the Algerian authorities closed down the second round of elections when they thought that Islamists might take power. It`s constantly the refrain of the Baath Party in Syria, of Mubarak, that if real democracy came to the Middle East, it would be Islamists who would take over, and we don`t want that. We saw what happened in Iran, where, with all the flaws inherent in it, there are real elections.

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt you there? You have to take some of what`s being said here at face value. I mean, she`s saying that the US, in the past, pursued stability...

ROBERT FISK: Are you sure?

TONY JONES: Well, I`m asking you whether you can. The US pursued stability at the expense of democracy, but now things are going to be different. She claims the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty. Now, she seems to be opening up the possibility there that the US would support Islamist governments.

ROBERT FISK: Well, she does, but look, if you live in the Middle East, it doesn`t look like this. The Arab world, which is principally what we`re talking about, would love some of this shiny beautiful democracy which we possess and enjoy. They would love some of it. They would like some freedom. But many of them would like freedom from us - from our armies, from our influence. And that`s the problem, you see. What Arabs want is justice as much as democracy. They want freedom from us, in many cases. And they`re not going to get that. They`re not going to get it in Uzbekistan, which is not apparently in the little circle of democracy which Condoleezza Rice is talking about. I`d like to believe that what the Americans say is true, but living here, I don`t believe it is.

TONY JONES: What do you think the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, made of those statements, though, made at his very doorstep, when he faces the potential of an Islamic party coming up to challenge him?

ROBERT FISK: Well, the Muslim Brotherhood remains banned in Egypt. Mubarak has been told many times before by the Americans and by the British at one point, "We really want democracy in Egypt." He said, "We have democracy. We will have more democracy", and everyone`s clapped and said, "That`s great", and after a year or two we`ve forgotten the speeches and it carries on with the Egyptian Government effectively being a one-party state. You know, Mrs Bush when she was in Egypt said it was a great push in the right direction when Mubarak decided there could be contenders for the presidency; it wouldn`t be just him standing for election next time. But what she didn`t say and what Egyptians know is that the Egyptian governing party has to decide whether those presidential contenders are allowed to stand or not. So it`s not a democracy; it`s another sham. Look, all the Arabs deserve real democracy; they deserve freedom - and freedom from us - but we`re not offering that to them. We continue to support the dictators and we will do so.

TONY JONES: How do you know, though, that a new breed, just as in Lebanon - you`re talking about these young people coming back from many years in the West and changing the way things are done in a country. How do you know that a new breed of young Democrats might not take root and even take heart from these kind of statements in Egypt and in fact right through the Middle East?

ROBERT FISK: Look, it`s nice and it would be lovely to contemplate that this was the case, and I would personally like to see that. I`d love to see democracies all over the Middle East. But the fact of the matter is that we are anchored into history - the Ottoman Empire; the British and French mandates that followed the First World War - and we have created these patriarchal societies in which democracy, our kind of democracy - one man, one vote or one woman, one vote or whatever you like to say - simply largely cannot take root. We have created in Lebanon, for example - there was democracy here, by the way, before the war; we didn`t invent this now. But we`ve created in Lebanon, for example, a totally sectarian society. You cannot be the President of Lebanon unless you`re a Christian Maronite. You cannot be the Prime Minister unless you`re a Sunni Muslim. You cannot be the Speaker of Parliament unless you`re a Shiite Muslim. But we don`t mention this. We talk about democracy. But this is not a modern state. Lebanon, like all the states in the Middle East, is artificial. It was created by us, and it is a tribal state, as is Iraq, as we now know, as is Syria, which is governed by Alawites, which is the Shiite sect where the majority are Sunni. We are not setting up the framework for democracy here. What we are doing is we continue to support the largest tribes while claiming that we want human rights and more proportional representation. What you`ve got in Lebanon, for example, is proportional sectarianism, which is what, if you look at the electoral lists of the last four weeks, has been created. It`s a free vote, but you have to vote for your tribe.

TONY JONES: All right. We`re nearly out of time, I`m afraid to say, because we`d like to talk about this a lot more, but can`t you unmake history? I mean, you talk about not setting up the framework..

ROBERT FISK: Ah, look, you cannot escape from history.

TONY JONES: ..for democracy to take place, but why can`t you set up those frameworks?

ROBERT FISK: It doesn`t work like that. Look, history - I will be very brief; I know you`re running out of time. History for us is easy to cut off from. End of the Second World War, end of Nazism; new world, European Union, Commonwealth - you say what you like. But in the Middle East, people continue to suffer from history. The Palestinians in the refugee camps of Saba and Shakila, which are scarcely 2.5 miles from where I`m speaking, they still look back and say that the Balfour declaration, which was Britain`s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is what drove them into exile. They lived the Balfour declaration, which was made in 1917, last night, one hour before. You cannot ask the Arabs to separate themselves from history, because they live it today.

TONY JONES: Okay, Robert Fisk. We`re living history just talking to you, I think. Thanks very much once again. We`ll see you as soon as we possibly can.

ROBERT FISK: (Laughs).

Copyright: ABC - Australia.

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G8 countries defying arms embargoes, says report
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1511536…

Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday June 22, 2005

Guardian
Arms supplied by G8 countries are being used by regimes that violate human rights, impoverish their people and fight their neighbours, a report by leading development agencies and campaigners warns today.

The report urges G8 leaders, who meet in Scotland next week, to take immediate steps to control the trade and support a British proposal for a global arms trade treaty that will close loopholes allowing governments and dealers to bypass existing controls.

The G8 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US - account for 84% of all worldwide arms supplies, according to the report, published by Amnesty, Oxfam, and the International Action Network on Small Arms and titled The G8: Global Arms Exporters.

"The G8 states have a special responsibility for leadership in addressing the world`s security problems," it says.

Both France and Germany have exported arms to countries which are meant to be subject to an EU arms embargo such as Burma, China, and Sudan. Russia, too, sells arms to Sudan as well as to Ethiopia and Iran.

Canada sells military equipment to the US which uses them in weapons exported to countries, such as Colombia, which the Canadian government would not have approved, says the report.

In other examples, the report notes that despite severe internal repression by the Kenyan police, France has exported tear gas to the country - a trade suspended by Britain. Italy has sold small arms to Algeria, as has Japan, a country which officially "does not export any arms whatsoever".

Japan in fact exports a significant number of small arms, including to Algeria, the Lebanon, and the Philippines, according to the report.

Britain is increasingly approving open-ended arms sales licences, including armoured vehicles to Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - where armed forces and police have committed persistent human rights violations.

The US continues to export a wide rage of military equipment to Israel and is increasing its military assistance to Pakistan despite risking an arms race with India.

Six of the G8 countries are in the top 10 arms exporters in a trade valued at $28.7bn (£15.7bn) a year - "a paltry sum compared to the human, security, and development costs", says the report - and all export large amounts of conventional or small arms.

Many of the G8 countries are large donors to aid programmes in Africa and Asia, notes the report. "However, continuing arms transfers to developing countries undermine their pledges to relieve debt, combat Aids, alleviate poverty, tackle corruption and promote good governance."

Arms sales to to unaccountable and poorly trained military forces are used to suppress human rights, encouraging the brutal exploitation of resources and environmental degradation, it says.

It notes: "Large numbers of women and girls are at risk of armed violence, whether they are directly involved in the fighting or dealing with the emotional, social, and economic consequences of the loss of male relatives."

"Given the effects of weapons misuse, it is shocking how few governments give serious thought to the impact on development and human rights of their arms exports. And for the few that do, it has yet to become a genuine priority."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Als PDF Datei zu vorherigem Posting. Die Waffenlieferungen im Einzelnen:
[urlThe G8: Global Arms Exporters.]http://www.iansa.org/control_arms/documents/g8report/g8-control-arms-paper-en.pdf[/url]

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Published on Wednesday, June 22, 2005 by TomPaine.com
A Moral Transaction
by Bill Moyers
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0622-29.htm

I must be the luckiest man in television for having been a part of the public broadcasting community for over half my life. I was present at the creation. As a 30-year-old White House policy assistant in 1964, I attended the first meeting at the Office of Education to discuss the potential of “educational television,” which in turn led to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. When I left the White House that year to become publisher of Newsday, I did fund-raising chores for Channel Thirteen in New York and appeared on its local newscasts. Then in 1971, through a series of serendipitous events, I came to public television as the correspondent and anchor for a new weekly series called This Week.

Now, a quarter of a century and countless broadcasts later—from "Creativity" and "A Walk Through The Twentieth Century" to "Six Great Ideas With Mortimer Adler" and "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth," from "Amazing Grace" and "All Our Children" to "The Language of Life" and "Fooling With Words," from "The Secret Government" and "The Wisdom of Faith" to "Genesis," "America`s First River," "Becoming American," "On Our Own Terms," "Close to Home," "Trading Democracy" and "Now with Bill Moyers" —I am mindful of what William Temple meant when he said that a person whose life is given to a purpose big enough “to claim the allegiance of all his faculties and rich enough to exercise them is the nearest approach in human experience to the realization of eternity.” Public television has provided me such moments, as well as colleagues and kindred spirits who have inspired and nurtured my aspirations—among them Fred Rogers and Big Bird, Fred Wiseman and Ken Burns, Robert McNeil and David Fanning, Julia Child and Alastair Cooke. I am of course just one fish in the ocean of public television. This is a big, sprawling, polymorphic community: in our best days an extended family; in our worst days, a dysfunctional one. Right now, however, we`re facing some hard choices. Competitive forces are razing the landscape around us and turf wars are breaking out the way they once did between sheepherders and cattlemen. Funds for new programming are hard to come by. And fevered agents of an angry ideology wage war on all things public, including public broadcasting.

All this tumult swirls around a public television community that if not divided is certainly not wholly united in sympathy and aspiration. That`s nothing new. In the first speech I made to the Friends of Channel Thirteen back in 1969, I found myself recalling how George Washington had described the new United States of America created by the Constitutional Convention: “It was for a long time doubtful whether we were to survive as an independent republic, or decline...into insignificant and withered fragments of empire.” The same could be said of public television. From the womb, we seemed offspring of the Hatfields and McCoys.

There is no unanimity now over how public television should respond to the rapid changes occurring in telecommunications; there are differences among us over governance; we don`t see eye to eye on the mission and role of PBS, station representation in the decision-making process, the responsibilities of membership, the balance between local and national, or the question of back-end rights; we can`t even agree on what constitutes core programming. Anyone who proposes solutions for public television winds up with critics on all points of the compass. Perhaps it`s the nature of things; a creative community is no respecter of conformity. But I know that the ultimate measure of any system, any society, or any institution is not how it acts in moments of comfort and convenience but how it responds to challenge and controversy.

The best thing we have going for us is a strong and consistent constituency. Millions of Americans look to us as the best alternative to commercial broadcasting, and even when we let them down, they seem to keep the faith and grant us a second chance. Deep down, the public harbors an intuitive understanding that for all the flaws of public television; our fundamental assumptions come down on their side, and on the side of democracy.

What are those assumptions?

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That public television is an open classroom for people who believe in lifelong learning
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That the medium can dignify life instead of debase it
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That it can help us to see more clearly, understand more deeply, and laugh more joyously
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That human creativity and this incredible technology can provide us with a fuller awareness of the wonder and the variety of the arts and sciences, of scholarship and craftsmanship and innovation, of politics and government and economics and religion and all those mutual endeavors that shape our consciousness
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That commercial broadcasting, having made its peace with “the little lies and fantasies that are the by-products of the merchandising process,” is too firmly fixed within the rules of the economic game to rise more than occasionally above the lowest common denominator
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That Americans are citizens and not just consumers; in the words of the educator Herbert Kohl, “if we do not provide time for the consideration of people and events in depth, we may end up training another generation of TV adults who know what kind of toilet paper to buy, who know how to argue and humiliate others, but who are thoroughly incapable of discussing, much less dealing with, the major social and economic problems that are tearing America apart.”

Those of us who helped launch public broadcasting were not disdainful of commercial television. We ourselves tuned to it for news, diversion and amusement. We knew that it helped to keep the economy dynamic through the satisfaction or creation of appetites. We are a capitalist society, after all. The market is a cornucopia of goods and services, and television programs are part of that market. There is always something to sell, and television can sell. But public television was meant to do what the market will not do. From the outset we believed there should be one channel not only free of commercials but from commercial values; a channel that does not represent an economic exploitation of life; whose purpose is not to please as many consumers as possible, in order to get as much advertising as possible, in order to sell as many products as possible; one channel—at least one—whose success is measured not by the numbers who watch but by the imprint left on those who do.

I keep on my desk a report delivered a few years ago by Gale Metzger of Statistical Research. It found that:

* When people look for a program on science or the arts, or a program their children can watch, they look first to public television.
* We rated higher with people who want to understand issues that are important to society.
* Two-thirds of the people see our news and public affairs as a mixture of political persuasions—they think we are fair.
* As for the charge of elitism, public television rated about the same with people who have a high school education or less as with people who have college degree or higher.
* Most important, two out of three people said it would make a difference to their lives if public television did not exist.

During the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987 my associates and I produced a series about the significance of the Constitution in contemporary life. Several members of the Supreme Court participated as well as legal scholars, historians, philosophers and regular citizens whose defense of their First Amendment Rights had taken them all the way to the highest court in the land. Among the letters we received was one from a housewife in Utah:

I have never written a letter like this before. I am a full-time wife and mother of four children under seven years and I am entirely busy with the ordinary things of family life. However, I want to thank you very much for "In Search of the Constitution." As a result of this series, I am awakened to a deep appreciation of many ideals vital to our democracy. I am much moved by the experience of listening at the feet of thoughtful citizens, justices and philosophers of substance. All these are people with whom I will never converse on my own, and I am grateful to you for having brought these conversations within my sphere. I am aware that I lack eloquence to express the measure of my heart`s gratitude. I can say, however, that these programs are a landmark among my life`s experiences. Among all the things I must teach my children, a healthy interest in understanding the Constitution now ranks very prominently. Thank you.

After all these years, I am convinced that public television could yet be the core curriculum of the American experience. E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know lamented that our schools no longer are teaching young people the essential ingredients of a general education. “To grasp the words on a page,” he said, “we have to know a lot of information that isn`t on the page.” He called this knowledge “cultural literacy,” and described it as “that network of information all competent readers possess.” It`s what enables us to read a book or an article with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications, reaching conclusions: our common information. Some people criticized Hirsch on grounds that teaching the traditional literature culture means teaching elitist information. That is an illusion, he says; literature culture is the most democratic culture in our land; it excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it`s what every American needs to know, not only because knowing it is a good thing but also because other people know it too.

This was the Founders` idea of an informed citizenry: that people in a democracy can be entrusted to decide all-important matters for themselves because they can communicate and deliberate with one another. “Economic issues can be discussed in public. The moral dilemmas of new medical knowledge can be weighed. The broad implications of technological change can become subjects of informed public disclosure,” writes Hirsch. We might even begin to understand how—and for whom—politics really works. A few years ago, we produced a special on money and politics. We showed how private money continues to drive public policy and how our campaigns have become auctions instead of elections. As the broadcast came to a close, we put on the screen the 800 number of a non-partisan group called Project Vote Smart. When you call the number, they send you a printout showing the campaign donors to every representative in Congress. In response to that one broadcast, almost 30,000 Americans got up from their chairs and couches, went over to their phones and dialed the number!

But informing citizens is not all we`re about.

Americans are assaulted on every front today by what the scholar Cleanth Brooks called “the bastard muses”:

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propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth
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entimentaliy, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by and in excess of the occasion
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pornography, which focuses on one powerful drive at the expense of the total human personality.

About that time, Newsweek reported on “the appalling accretion” of violent entertainment that “permeates Americans` life—an unprecedented flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed carnage masquerading as amusement and threatening to erode the psychological and moral boundary between real life and make-believe.”

How do we counter it? Not with censorship, which is always counterproductive in a democracy, but with an alternative strategy of affirmation. Public broadcasting is part of that strategy. We are free to regard human beings as more than mere appetites and America as more than an economic machine. Leo Strauss once wrote, “Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.” He reminded us that the Greek word for vulgarity is apeirokalia , the lack of experience in things beautiful. A liberal education supplies us with that experience and nurtures the moral imagination. I believe a liberal education is what we`re about. Performing arts, good conversation, history, travel, nature, critical documentaries, public affairs, children`s programs—at their best, they open us to other lives and other realms of knowing.

The ancient Israelites had a word for it: hochma , the science of the heart. Intelligence, feeling and perception combine to inform your own story, to draw others into a shared narrative, and to make of our experience here together a victory of the deepest moral feeling of sympathy, understanding and affection. This is the moral imagination that opens us to the reality of other people`s lives. When Lear cried out on the heath to Gloucester, “You see how this world goes,” Gloucester, who was blind, answered, “I see it feelingly.” When we succeed at this kind of programming, the public square is a little less polluted, a little less vulgar and our common habitat a little more hospitable. That is why we must keep trying our best. There are people waiting to give us an hour of their life —time they never get back—provided we give them something of value in return. This makes of our mission a moral transaction. Henry Thoreau got it right: “To affect the quality of the day, is the highest of the arts.

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. This essay appeared in The Washington Post, June 21, 2005.

© 2005 TomPaine.com

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Bush Administration Psychological Warfare Against the U.S.?
Written by Kevin Zeese
http://democracyrising.us/content/view/259/164/

Wednesday, 22 June 2005


An Interview with (ret.) Colonel Sam Gardiner describes "what propaganda literature would refer to as the big lie."



Sam Gardiner has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College. He was recently a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defence College. During Gulf II he was a regular on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as well as on BBC radio and television, and National Public Radio. He authored "The Enemy is Us" an article describing how the Bush Administration used disinformation and psychological warfare - weapons usually used against the `enemy` - against the American public in order to support the war in Iraq. He has done an extensive analysis of the media coverage before the war, during the war and during the occupation as well as of the statements of Administration officials. His conclusions are startling and of great concern. He has put his findings in a report entitled: "Truth from These Podia."




Zeese: Describe your professional background and expertise.

Gardiner: Sure, Kevin. I`m a retired colonel of the US Air Force. When I retired, I was teaching strategy at the National War College in Washington, DC. Since I`ve been retired, I have continued to teach military strategy. I`ve taught for the Naval War College. I`ve taught at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. I also spent a period as a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College in Stockholm.

In addition, I have been doing war games. You may have seen descriptions of some of the games I`ve done. I did one on Iran that was covered in the December 2004 Atlantic Monthly. More recently, I conducted a game addressing North Korea. It was covered in the July/August Atlantic Monthly.

Zeese: What is: [url"Truth from These Podia"?]http://informationclearinghouse.info/article9240.htm[/url] How did you conduct this media analysis?

Gardiner: It is a paper I published on the web that reflected four months of heavy research.

I had followed press reports of the war closely as it unfolded because of a job I had. During the first couple months of Gulf II, I was under contract with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. With another retired colonel, we did an almost daily on-air analysis of how the war was going.

As the war unfolded, I became increasingly uneasy about what was being reported out of the White House, Pentagon and Central Command. I was hearing things that just did not make sense with what I knew and what my intuition was telling me. I began tracking some of the stories. It was just a matter of going over what we were told and connecting that with the truth as it emerged later.

One of the first items that made me uneasy was when I heard we were encountering "terrorist death squads." I was very familiar with the Iraq military forces. There were no terrorist death squads. It became obvious the Pentagon wanted us to connect Iraq with 9/11. Terrorists did 9/11. There are terrorists in Iraq. Iraq must have been behind 9/11.

Zeese: Regarding the management of information about Iraq, I`d like to focus on the build up to the Iraq War initially. There has been growing indications from a series of memoranda and meeting minutes from Great Britain that U.S. intelligence was "fixed" to support the war. In your analysis of media management before the war do you see any indication that the United States Congress and public was manipulated into supporting the invasion of Iraq by misinformation?

Gardiner: Kevin, I find it amazing that there is now a growing interest in the marketing the war. There is absolutely no question that the White House and the Pentagon participated in an effort to market the military option. The truth did not make any difference to that campaign. To call it fixing is to miss the more profound point. It was a campaign to influence. It involved creating false stories; it involved exaggerating; it involved manipulating the numbers of stories that were released; it involved a major campaign to attack those who disagreed with the military option. It included all the techniques those who ran the marketing effort had learned in political campaigns.

Zeese: Can you give some examples of false or exaggerated stories put out by the Bush administration in the build-up to the war?

Gardiner: In the summer of 2003, we know from the Downing Street Memo that the Administration was talking about justifying a war by arguing that Iraq was the nexus of terrorism and WMD.

The terrorism argument was what propaganda literature would refer to as the big lie. The Administration`s objective was to make enough arguments connecting Iraq to terrorism and Bin Laden that the American people would believe Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. They used a technique called the excluded middle. Iraq supports terrorists. The attacks were by terrorists. Iraq must been behind the 9/11 attacks.

We the WMD story fairly well. We know the story of the uranium from Niger. We know about the aluminum tubes that were not for uranium enrichment. We know the biological labs Powell showed to the UN did not exist.

Beyond these there are many exaggerations that have gotten very little notice. Let me mention just a few.

A New York Times reporter was told by the Administration that Iraq was buying excess quantities of atropine to get ready for chemical warfare. It turns out the quantities were consistent with the Iraq use of the substance for routing medical purposes.

The President told us in a speech in Ohio that Iraq had drone aircraft that could possible deliver chemical weapons into the United States. When that facility was found, the officers reported that it looked more like a school project than a serious military program.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations that Iraq had the capability to attack US computers. They did not.

We were lead to believe a Navy pilot shot down during the first Gulf War was alive and being held in Baghdad. He was not.

We were told on the State Department web sit that Iraq was forming units of children to fight the United States. Iraq did not do that.

We were told the French were supplying air defense missiles to Iraq. That was not ture

There were many more.

Zeese: How about information during the war? Did the embedded journalists help give the U.S. a more accurate or less accurate perspective? How did the Pentagon control information?

Gardiner: A number of democratic institutions failed us during the war. Certainly, the press was among those. I attended a conference in London in July 2003 at which one of the PR firms that advised the Pentagon talked about lessons learned from the effort. They were pleased that they were able to dominate the story. That was their objective. The embedded notion had been tested in Afghanistan, and it proved to be effective. The product was lots of coverage with personal stories of soldiers. That was the Pentagon objective. Keep their story on television. Keep people talking about Meals Ready to Eat, and they won`t criticize the war.

As I mentioned, I had done analysis during the major offensive operations. One of the things that the head of this PR firm said at that conference was that in the next war the Pentagon wanted to control context more and not let it be done by retired military people.

Zeese: You spend a lot of time in your article on the story regarding the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch. Why is that important?

Gardiner: Kevin, the Jessica Lynch story touched me personally, and it became representative of the whole effort to manipulate the truth.

From beginning to end, the Lynch story was a press event. It started with the description that the unit was "ambushed." The unit was not ambushed. It got lost and drove into Iraqi lines, and then it retraced its path back through Iraqi lines.

The Pentagon was in such a hurry to get out the story of an individual who had fought off the Iraqi they did so with incomplete information. All of the heroic stuff was really about a soldier in the unit who was killed, not about Lynch.

The Secretary of Defense allowed the story to stay around for days despite knowing the truth and despite the family insisting that the information was not about their daughter.

My father was wounded and captured by the Germans during WW II. He did some heroic things during the period of his capture. The manipulation of the Lynch story was an insult to his heroism.


Zeese: And in the occupation phase? What kind of media control occurred as that phase began? Is it continuing today?

Gardiner: There have been major media strategies during the occupation. For the first year, the same pattern continued. We heard exaggeration and deflection from the press conferences from Baghdad. After the first year, the White House strategy shifted. The idea what that it wanted the American people to forget about the war. They quit having press conferences in Baghdad. Central Command quit having press conferences. The military spokesperson from Iraq became junior officers and enlisted people. The Brigadier Generals disappeared.

The current strategic communications strategy is to make it seem as if there is progress, keep the number of stories down and certainly to continue to hide casualties. You may know that the United States is the only coalition country that did not honor its returning dead.

Zeese: Is the media being fooled by the Administration or is it complicit in this effort to misinform the public?

Gardiner: The media have been fooled. They have been lazy. They have lost sight of the historic calling of journalism. Journalists have been replaced on television by cheerleaders.

Zeese: Was any of this illegal?

Gardiner: Some of it may have been illegal. A case was brought against the Secretary of Defense in a Chicago court by Judicial Watch for violating the law that limits defense money being used for propaganda inside the United States.

There was another illegal dimension. Most people don`t know but the military is the only profession where it is illegal to lie. It is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for an officer to tell a lie. There were some officers who violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice as they marketed for the Administration.

Zeese: You say in "Truth from these Podia:" "In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." Does this mean that if the people of Washington and the United States were told the truth they would not have supported the invasion of Iraq and therefore had to be misled by the Bush administration?

Gardiner: One irony of the whole mess is that the American people (and the British people) would most likely have supported strong actions against Iraq had they been told the truth.

The other irony is that if truth had been valued inside the Administration, we probably would not have gone to war. In very early 2003 I had done an extensive analysis of the likely humanitarian consequences of an invasion of Iraq. I was able to get quite a few mid-level people to review my briefing. I even briefed my results of the National Security Council Staff. The bottom line of my presentation was that the United States was not ready to deal with what was coming. That was clearly not a piece of information anyone wanted.

My efforts and those of others are described in a January 2004 article in the Atlantic Monthly by Jim Fallows, "Blind into Baghdad."

Zeese: How much did this campaign of misinformation cost?

Gardiner: Tough question, Kevin. I don`t think it possible to get a total handle on the effort. I have read one estimate that put the marketing at $200 million. That cost is trivial, however, to the collateral damage that has been done to democracy.

Zeese: What do we do to prevent this from occurring in the future?

Gardiner: Wow, I wish I had an answer to this question. Based upon the initial work done after the offensive phase by those involved in strategic communications, I have to tell you, as I said in my paper, if you think this was bad, wait until the next war. They will be even better at manipulating the story.

Zeese: You conclude "Truth in these Podia" with the "Last Chart" and suggest that we need an investigation to determine the extent of information management and legislation to prevent the people of the United States from being victimized by war propaganda in the future. What type of investigation? What type of legislation?

Gardiner: We need a commission. This one would not be about intelligence. This would be focused on strategic communications. I have been able to uncover some of the manipulation that went on before and during the war, but I think I have only scratched the surface. Some is still classified or buried. For example, who within the US Government told the press that the French gave Saddam Hussein a passport so he could sneak out of Iraq? Who told the press Saddam Hussein was hiding in the Russian embassy?

The United States needs a robust public diplomacy effort, but I believe we cannot allow government officials to insert non-truth into media that will be seen by Americans. We can`t allow officials to damage democracy in the name of extending democracy.

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Brain atrophy wird zum Markenzeichen der US-Konservativen.

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June 23, 2005
Cruel and Unusual
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/opinion/23herbert.html

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" asked Joseph Welch in his famous confrontation with the pathologically cruel Joe McCarthy. "Have you left no sense of decency?"

More than a half-century later, I would ask the same question of Florida`s governor, Jeb Bush.

In an abuse of power that has been widely denounced, and has even appalled many of his own supporters in the Republican Party, Governor Bush has tried to keep the Terri Schiavo circus alive by sending state prosecutors on a witch hunt against her husband, Michael.

The state attorney who has been pushed by the governor into pursuing this case told me yesterday he has seen nothing to indicate that a crime was committed. Nevertheless, the inquiry continues.

Governor Bush asked Bernie McCabe, the state attorney for Pinellas County, to "take a fresh look" at this already exhaustively investigated case to determine, among other things, whether Michael Schiavo had perhaps waited too long to call for help after discovering that his wife had collapsed early one morning 15 years ago.

Mr. McCabe did not seem particularly enthusiastic about his mission. "I wouldn`t call it an investigation," he told me in a telephone conversation. The word "investigation," he said, "is a term of art in my business."

He then explained: "When I conduct an investigation, it would mean that I have a criminal predicate. In other words, that I have some indication that a crime has occurred. That`s my job.

"In this circumstance, that does not exist at this time. So what I`m attempting to do is respond to the governor`s request by conducting what I`m calling an `inquiry` to see if I can resolve the issues he raised."

He chuckled at his use of the word inquiry. "It may be a distinction without a difference," he said.

Whatever term is used, the governor`s continued pursuit of Mr. Schiavo in the absence of any evidence that he has done anything wrong is a clear example of government power being used as a club to punish someone for political reasons. The unwarranted harassment of an ordinary citizen by the most powerful political figure in his state is an affront to the very idea of freedom that Mr. Bush and his brother in the White House are so fond of preaching.

The political exploitation of this tragic case has been uniquely grotesque. Ms. Schiavo died March 31 following the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube. An autopsy supported Mr. Schiavo`s contention that his wife had been in a persistent vegetative state. She was unaware of anything and incapable of recovering. At her death at age 41, Ms. Schiavo`s withered brain was half the normal size for a woman her age.

Governor Bush was one of the leaders of the pack of politicians who vehemently opposed Mr. Schiavo`s efforts to have his wife`s feeding tube removed. Much of what was said was outrageous. Eleven days before she died, Tom DeLay declared: "Terri Schiavo is not brain dead. She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."

Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican and a physician from Oklahoma, said: "All you have to do is look at her on TV. Any doctor with any conscience can look at her and know that she does not have a terminal disease and know that she has some function."

All agree that Terri Schiavo is now dead, but Governor Bush insists on keeping the craziness going.

Mr. Schiavo has said over the years that his wife collapsed around 4:30 or 5 o`clock in the morning and that he quickly called 911. He has always stressed that he was making a rough estimate about the time. His call to 911 was recorded at 5:40 a.m.

Quick, try to remember with any precision the exact time of a traumatic incident that happened to you or a relative 10 or 15 years ago. Not only is it difficult to do, but the degree of precision deteriorates as the years pass.

Governor Bush`s continued pursuit of Mr. Schiavo is not just pointless, it`s cruel and unconscionable.

I pressed Mr. McCabe, the state attorney. If there`s no evidence that a crime has been committed, I asked, then what is the purpose of the inquiry?

"My purpose," he said, "is simply to respond to the governor. The governor`s asked me to do something, and I`m going to try to do it."

Welcome to power politics, American style.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Informed Comment
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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Thursday, June 23, 2005

Brussels Conference Inconclusive
32 Dead in Guerrilla Violence

The Brussels conference of foreign ministers on Iraq seems to me to have yielded little practical result. The real action will come at the donors` conference in Amman, Jordan, next month. The world community has pledged billions to Iraq, but has only delivered about $2 billion, in large part because the security situation makes it impossible to send teams out to evaluate projects or to actually disburse the funding in a practical way.

The Iraqis say that they are $125 billion in debt (the US government estimates it at $110 billion), and want massive debt relief. Without it, it is difficult to see how the country can get back on its feet. The Europeans will forgive them $40 billion. But a lot of the debt is owed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who are less willing to give up their claims. In fact, neither had up to this point even sent an ambassador to Baghdad. The Kuwaitis suffered enormous damage at the hands of the Iraqi army to their petroleum fields at the end of a brutal Iraqi occupation in 1990-91, and are in no mood to forgive Iraq`s debts or forego reparations.

Some observers suspect that the Saudis are nervous about doing anything that would build back up Iraq too quickly with too much strength until they are assured that the victory of the Shiites in the Jan. 30 elections will not translate into a Baghdad-Tehran axis hostile to Saudi interests. But the Saudis did pledge $1 bn. in reconstruction aid at Brussels, and have promised to send an ambassador. Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait also said they would establish diplomatic missions in Iraq, and Egypt has already done so.

The rest of the world put pressure on the Jaafari government to be more inclusive of the Sunni Arabs. Jaafari is committed to deep debaathification, which punishes Sunni Arabs for simply having been a Baath Party member, regardless of whether he or she had done anything wrong. The guerrilla war, however, is being fueled in part by fears among Sunni Arabs that such attitudes will harm them for the long term. Back in Baghdad, al-Zaman reports that Vice-Premier Ahmad Chalabi visited Shaikh Hareth al-Dhari, leader of the hard line Sunni Association for Muslim Scholars. Chalabi later expressed shock at what he hear from al-Dhari about the excesses committed by Iraqi troops against ordinary Sunnis during the recent Operation Lightning. He promised to convey al-Dhari`s concerns to the cabinet.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi attended, and expressed confidence in the future of Iraq. The Tehran Times reports:


` Turning to economic cooperation with Iraq, Kharrazi said Iran`s project for promotion of tourism and visits to holy shrines for about 100,000 visitors a month to Iraq will generate $500 million annually. Plans are also being worked out for a swap operation of Iraqi oil up to 400,000 barrels per day. Credit facilities up to $1 billion have been allocated by Iran`s credit banks for exports of goods and investments. Iran is preparing to participate in oil and gas projects in Iraq and to invest in the banking and financial sector either bilaterally or through other countries. `



It is obvious that Iranian relations with Iraq are going to be central to the country`s economic development. This reality puts the Bush administration in a bind. They hate the regime in Iran and would dearly love to do something to it. But they need Iranian support for their Iraq venture. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is therefore constrained to say she wants good relations between Iraq and Iran. The Bushies have such a contradictory set of policies in the Middle East that everyone is confused about what they want, exactly.

That Iraq has been captured by leaders of Shiite religious partners was underlined dramatically when Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari declined to shake hands with women at the conference. He is a physician, not a cleric, but as a devoted leader of the Shiite al-Dawa Party, he respects the norms of gender segregation.

As if to remind the world of the real Iraq, guerrillas initiated a bombing wave in the capital. On Thursday morning they detonated three bombs, killing at least three policemen and wounding 15 others. On Wednesday eveing, guerrillas detonated four big bombs in the capital, killing 23 and wounding around 50. Three of the bombs, two at restaurants and one at a bus station in the Shiite Shu`la district, were coordinated and virtually simultaneous. A fourth hit an Iraqi army convoy in a Baghdad suburb. Veteran AP reporter Hamza Hendawi quotes an eyewitness to the restaurant bombings, ` ``The body parts of the dead were scattered everywhere, along with fragments of broken glass from nearby shops and the meat from the meals,`` said police Maj. Musa Abdul Karim, who was at the scene. ``Blood was everywhere.`` `

Perhaps even more significant were the assassinations of Jassim al-Issawi, a law professor and former judge who was a candidate for the committee to draw up a permanent Iraqi constitution. His son, a newspaper editor, was also shot down. The attack appears to have been part of a brutal campaign of intimidation aimed at discouraging Sunni Arabs from cooperating with the new order in Iraq.

Although Sunnis may have been successful in filling out the 25 slots alloted them on the constitution drafting committee, the committee`s work has been postponed for a week. Sabotage has left several Baghdad neighborhoods without water or electricity, and the parliament building is in an affected area, prompting the postponement.

(I have to say that when prospective members of the drafting committee are being shot down, bombs are going off all over the capital, and the parliament can`t meet because basic services have been sabotaged, the constitution drafting process seems a bit surreal and highly unlikely to amount to anything without an end to the guerrilla war.)

In Kirkuk, a major Turkmen leader narrowly escaped assassination. Four of his body guards were wounded.

The day before, 3 US Marines had been killed by guerrillas near Ramadi.

posted by Juan @ [url6/23/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/brussels-conference-inconclusive-32.html[/url]

Questions on UN Option in Iraq

A reader with a US military background writes:


"I noted your recent proposal for increased UN military involvement with some questions.

1. With great oversimplification, the civil war in Iraq is being fought by factions who desire to have the long term control of either the government of the whole country, or their own particular region (ie Kurdistan, or to a lesser extent Sadrist Basra).

To that end, although the violence is extremely messy, violent, and disproportionately affects non-political actors--it is being utilized to the most basic of political ends, and thus has a "motive". Although all of us are revolted to see scenes of bloody children and destroyed markets, the tactic is not "random" and seeks to undermine confidence in the new goverment.

Hence, the idea that UN involvement would reduce the violence due to its [being] relatively less partisan was probably at least partially destroyed with the UN building in August 2003 (where my unit was involved with rescues). No one involved in Iraq, be it the Red Cross, UN, or nearly any other group, can hope to see itself as "neutral", if their presence or actions serve to deter any one faction (particularly the Baathist faction now, but any others would be capable.)

Unlike the sucessful UN operations (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor), in Iraq the factions are fighting because they believe they can win what they want. Iraqi factions (both the ones we`ve met and the ones we haven`t) believe in violence and fear, and the general public has not yet displayed the complete frustration from the violence that in some part enabled the peace process in Bosnia (although the military strength of Croatia certainly helped a lot too).

One article I recently read was from a Baathist who blatently said that their goal was to first throw out the United States, so that they could return to power on the lines of the coups of the 1960s. (the comment on your site on picking the right time for peace processes I found to be particularly instructive.

2. Contributing troops to a UN force will neither end the conflict nor support a negotiated settlement on their own.

Your mandate would be militarily insufficient to end or even limit the hostilities. If the new government of Iraq is to have any legitimacy, it cannot have insurgent armies forming in Anbar and Diyala, and then using civilian vehicles and highways to cause bombings and assasinations in Najaf, Baghdad, and Mosul. It would seem a mandate to "keep the factions" apart would do nothing to the insurgents, but handicap the goverment from any sort of "official" military or police operation, and resort instead to assasinations and bombings of its own. I`m not sure the people in Iraq are willing to wait for their force to be trained during this time, and it doesnt bode well when your government`s security strategy involves SCIRI hit teams (the most dangerous trend in Iraq, in my opinion).

The problems of the original UNPROFOR in Bosnia, which had a similar limited mandate, are well documented. Keeping the sides of a civil conflict like this apart are almost impossible, and a purely defensive UN force would still have to resort to being supplied on the roads. Logistics were severely hampered by the Serbs in Bosnia, and we all know how it works in Iraq.

So much of the violence is fought at a very low level--ie shooting the local guy who works at the tax office--that a generally passive UN mandate would be more of the same in Iraq, or even worse.

Again, if a negotiated settlement is the goal--what sort of negotiated settlement would have any authority when it would be voted down by the guys with the guns? While supporting those who want to participate in the goverment is to be welcomed, its not clear, as you have made clear, that they could carry the day back home.

3. Military force must be backed by political will--my experience with coalition forces from all over requires that. Even if the force is well trained, it has to be allowed to do its job. For instance, when the well-trained South Koreans deployed, they received assurances that they would not be used for offensive operations, even house raids. I`m not sure if that helped the instability in Kirkuk at all. Peacekeeping and enforcement is more than just doing footpatrols and opening new gas stations--it requires national consensus to both take, and sometimes inflict, casualties. India, South Africa, Brazil are some militaries that come to mind, but I`m not sure any would be interested.

If free access to oil didn`t convince countries in March 2003, I`m not sure who it would convince now. Most of the world`s large militaries are designed to operate in their own countries for the purposes of domestic order (with less than democratic ideals), and given some other peacekeeping operations, inviting many of these militaries would make us look back fondly at the mild days of Abu Ghraib. My experience is also that, in general, Iraqis don`t like to be occupied, but they especially won`t like being occupied by the countries of the Third World (a problem of escalating expectations and self image, I guess).

Lastly, supporting any peacekeeping force in Iraq would require an immense logistical effort. Right now, only the United States has the global and transportation resources to manage such a force. In the near term, at the least that would require a large American logistical presence (although things like truck companies could of course be provided by the contributing countries).

4. Your point is an excellent one--and I see it has produced some lively debate already. The question of how to turn over management of the struggle to the Iraqis has not been satisfactorily faced. I`m quite interested to see to what extent your proposal [is taken up]. We who have served in Iraq hope for a political solution that will end the violence and allow opportunity to some great young people--but there are some tough characters out there who are playing for keeps.

Thanks again for your contribution to open-mindedness and free debate in our country."



Cole: These are all excellent and well taken points. The only clarification I would make is that I am not advocating a passive UN "peace-keeping" mission. Rather, I`m arguing for a UN army with an active peace-enforcing mandate. I don`t deny it is a tall order. But then, the US military mission is a tall order as it is. The reader correctly sees that I envisage it as a transitional phase from US military occupation to full Iraqi sovereignty.

posted by Juan @ [url6/23/2005 06:02:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/questions-on-un-option-in-iraq-reader.html[/url]

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Kos Discussion of UN Option

Many thanks to "Mark in San Francisco," who runs a diary at Daily Kos, for provoking an extensive and often acute discussion of my piece on the "UN Option" there.

The first thing I should say is that people shouldn`t get too hung up on the exact composition of a UN force. The UN member states are numerous, and if the UN takes this on, it will be responsible for finding the peace-enforcing troops. It has before, in Cambodia, East Timor, etc. I envisage the US continuing to provide a couple of divisions, as well, until things wind down, under the general UN command.

The main response I have is to the diarists who remain unconvinced that an Iraqi civil war would draw in the neighbors, because the neighbors have too much invested in stability. I was in Lebanon in 1974-75 when everyone said that the troubles would never escalate to a civil war because the Lebanese wealthy classes had too much to lose, and that the neighbors had every reason to want a stable Lebanon. In fact, the various factions began fighting, and if the bourgeoisie objected it was taken out and shot. Mostly it went to Paris. And then virtually everybody in the world began actively intervening in Lebanon, often by backing one faction or another. The US, France, Israel, Syria, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Italy-- you name it, they were there. The Lebanese Civil war led directly to the Israeli invasion of 1982, which involved some actual fighting between the Israelis and the Syrians, though mostly the Syrians stayed out of it. Likewise you had wars of the camps between Palestinians and Shiites. And you eventually had fights between the bourgeois Shiites and the peasant Shiites (Amal and Hizbullah), with the latter backed by Iran. So frankly all this optimism about how an Iraqi civil war won`t break out or won`t involve the neighbors is naive.

Similar international interventions occurred during the Iran-Iraq War, one of which was marked by Donald Rumsfeld`s two visits to Baghdad to make an alliance with Saddam and to assure him it was all right if he gassed the Iranians.

Anyway, here is the beginning of the exchange. The discussions are great.


Juan Cole`s response regarding"the UN Option"

by MarkInSanFran

Wed Jun 22nd, 2005 at 06:58:48 PDT

[urlCross-posted at BoomanTribune.com]http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/6/22/6473/92771[/url]

Recently the noted historian, middle east expert, and blogger opined that a pullout of US troops from Iraq could be accomplished by way of a UN Option. This marks somewhat of a shift from his email response to me a month ago, in which he said that the US would be in Iraq for many years, and I welcome his new thinking.

There has been criticism of this plan, However, or at least the following aspect:
[Cole wrote:] "As for getting anyone over at the UN to take on Iraq, I fear I think there are few third world armies that couldn`t be enticed by a couple of billion dollars-- the kind of money they would probably be rewarded with if they really could help Iraq."

Yesterday I emailed Prof. Cole to ask his perspective on this. He was kind enough to reply and our email exchange is quoted below.

Diaries :: MarkInSanFran`s diary :: :: Trackback ::

My email to Prof. Cole:


Prof. Cole:

I`d like to thank you again for responding to my (and others) request for your views concerning the possibility of the US pulling out of Iraq (my email of 5/22/2005 andthe dailyKos diary ).

There are now comments at dailyKos and BMT concerning your comments today regarding third-world militaries shouldering the burden in Iraq (under UN auspices) in return for financial rewards. I think this is an interesting approach, however many seem to believe that you were seriously advocating this approach rather than simply mentioning the possibility (the latter is my take).

Which is it? I and many others rely on your expertise regarding the middle east and I don`t want to see your credibility damaged by internecine warfare, at which we on the left seem to be very accomplished.

Please let us know, either in your blog or as an email response, which I will post on the blogs mentioned above.

Many thanks for your hard work. You have my vote for Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs (or at least a fat consulting contract) in the next administration.

MarkInSanFran


Prof. Cole`s reply:


Dear Mark:

I have been unable to convince many of my readers of what I know. A US withdrawal could well throw Iraq into civil war. Civil war in Iraq would bring in the Iranians, the Saudis and the Turks. The success of petroleum pipeline sabotage and refinery sabotage in Iraq will suggest it as a tactic to the guerrillas fighting in this Fourth Gulf War.

If Saudi and Iranian petroleum production is sabotaged, gas in this country will go to $20 a gallon and the US will be plunged into the Second Great Depression. The unemployment rate will skyrocket to some 25%. Not only will you and I likely end up unemployed, but the global South will be de-industrialized. Countries making progress like India and Pakistan will be thrown back 30 years.

We already saw petroleum spike to $40 a barrel in the early 80s, in 1980 dollars, which is probably $80 a barrel in our money. Cause? [A run of speculation in the markets prompted by the] Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. Only a kind of MAD prevented Saddam and Khomeini from destroying each others` oil fields; at that, they were sometimes attacked. Guerrillas do not give a rat`s ass about MAD. The oil shock in the 1970s virtually de-industrialized Turkey for a while, and very badly hurt the Caribbean (islands depend on boat transport even for basic foodstuffs). I have seen this kind of scenario. It is not inevitable but it is entirely plausible.

Since the US military seems incapable of winning the guerrilla war in Iraq either militarily or politically, someone else will have to do it if we are to avoid Gulf War [IV] and its consequences. The Europeans cannot do it. They only have a surplus capacity of about 10,000 troops for deployment outside the continent, and they are already in Afghanistan. You could argue that they should reform their militaries so that they did have more troops for external deployment, but that would take time we don`t have.

That leaves a United Nations command leading troops from the global South, with perhaps, one or two remaining US divisions. The Southerners are culturally better suited to negotiating an end to the Iraq hostilities anyway, and some of them have excellent militaries. Gulf War [IV] and Very High Oil Prices would hurt them more than it would hurt the US and Europe, so they have every interest in intervening. Moreover, they will be richly rewarded with billions in future Iraq contracts, which they need more than Texas does.

Some are construing this proposal as me having the poor people in the global South suffer for Bush`s mistakes. But at $60 a barrel they are already suffering for Bush`s mistakes. Do you know how many factories will have to close over this, or will never open in the first place, in Pakistan and India? Factories are very sensitive to energy costs, which have tripled, and could go even higher. Iraq is adding $10 to $15 a barrel to the current price because of uncertainty and speculation, and the removal through sabotage of about 1.5 million barrels a day also contributes to the problem.

I am saying that the UN and the global South can solve the problem, that they have every incentive to solve the problem, and that they will be richly rewarded for solving the problem.

Moreover, this way of proceeding would deeply hurt the whole American nationalist war party. It would be a victory for cosmopolitan multi-lateralism. It would dampen down US militarism by creating an Iraq Complex. It would put two US divisions under a United Nations command, setting a precedent. It would strengthen the United Nations so that the US Right can`t just order around or ignore it the way the Bushes do their kitchen help. It is progressive in every way. And it is a perfect reply to the Right`s insistence that the US has to remain in control until `the job is done.` No, it doesn`t. This is a job for the world.

In other words, it isn`t all about us, in the sense of US. It is about what would be good for the world.

Cheers Juan



I wrote back to him:


Prof. Cole,

Thank you so much for writing back to us. After reading and thinking about your words I have to say that you have convinced me. The regional destabilization that would be risked by a US pullout would indeed be an economic disaster for the world as well as a potential (increased) humanitarian disaster in the middle east.

Offering other nations the possibility of securing Iraq as well as its borders under UN auspices is clearly an excellent approach to legitimizing a foreign security force in Iraq, a force that is currently seen by the vast majority of Iraqis as illegitimate. The internal US political effects that you mention are, of course, additional advantages, both for the administration`s opponents as well as the country in general.

I will argue this on BoomanTribune and dailyKos in diaries that I will post Wednesday morning so as to ensure wide visibility (I got home a bit late to post this tonight).

Cheers to you too!

MarkInSanFran



What do you think?



[urlThe discussion.]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/22/95848/5608[/url]

posted by Juan @ [url6/22/2005 04:12:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/kos-discussion-of-un-option-many.html[/url]

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We shelter behind the myth that progress is being made
By Robert Fisk
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=648…

The Independent

23 June 2005

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 - and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands - Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project.

The Brussels summit was - and of course I quote our good friend Mr Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations - "a clear sign that the international community will be determined and dedicated to [the Iraqis] on the tough walk ahead".

You can say "tough" again. How many suicide bombers have now immolated themselves against the Americans and their mercenaries and the new Iraqi army and the new Iraqi police force and their recruits? The figure appears to stand at around 420. Back in the days of Hizbollah`s war against Israeli occupation in Lebanon, a suicide bomber a month was regarded as phenomenal.

In the Palestinian "intifada", one a week was amazing. But in Iraq, we reach seven a day; Wal-Mart suicide bombing that raises the darkest questions about out ability to crush the uprising.

Condoleezza Rice says she wants more Arab ambassadors in Baghdad. I bet she does. When King Abdullah of Jordan promises to send his man to Iraq "as soon as it is safe", you know that the Arabs have understood the situation in a way the Americans have not. Who wants to be a late ambassador? Who wants to put his head on the block in Baghdad?

The reality - unimaginable for the Americans and their self-deluding allies, tragic for the Iraqis themselves - is that Iraq is a hell-disaster. Visit any Iraqi embassy in Europe, talk to any Iraqi in Baghdad - unless they live in the dubious safety of the pallisaded "Green Zone" - and you will hear their narrative of violence and have to accept that we have failed.

We are to be, so the myth-makers of Brussels claimed yesterday, "a full partner in the emergence of a new Iraq", to prove that "the people of Iraq have plenty of friends". Oh yes indeed. Except that most of these "friends" dare not visit Iraq (like the putative Jordanian ambassador) lest they have their heads chopped off.

American journalists now writing optimistically about the war - or the "insurgency" as we still insist on calling it - either travel with US forces in Iraq or conduct a form of "hotel journalism" from their heavily guarded Baghdad hotel rooms, working their mobile phones to talk to the self-imprisoned people of Iraq or their foreign mentors. A few American reporters still venture out - may they receive their appropriate awards (preferably not in heaven) - but the voice that now speaks of Iraq is that of officialdom, the narrative written by men and women who will, so they fervently hope, never have to visit real Iraq.

The representatives of more than 80 countries are urging the elected Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to reach out to Sunnis - the same Sunnis who are destroying American and Iraqi lives on a shocking scale across the country - but the official line, so cringingly enunciated by the BBC last night, was that "top diplomats" (I like the "top" bit) had "thrown their weight behind US efforts to build a democratic Iraq". Only the word "efforts" suggested the truth.

The reality is that Iraq is more insecure than ever, that no foreigner dare now travel its highways, that few will venture into the streets of Baghdad. And we are told that things are getting better. And still we believe these lies. And still we fool ourselves in the movie-world of the Pentagon and the White House and Downing Street and, these days, the UN.

If all those dignitaries and puffed-up politicos and self-important diplomats were so sure that Iraq was going to be a success story, why didn`t they meet in Baghdad rather than Brussels? And of course, we all know the answer.

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The American discovery of democracy
Wary of military intervention, Washington now wants regime change through popular uprising
Adrian Hamilton
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/adrian_hamil…

The Independent

23 June 2005

Depending on your predilections, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice`s speech in Cairo this week was either the most radical and important statement of Bush`s foreign policy ambitions in his second term or it was an outrageous piece of hypocrisy masking a reversion to all that is worst in his administration.

The tempered response would be to say it was a bit of both. The more direct reaction would be to say that it was neither. There was nothing new in Dr Rice`s embrace of democracy as the moving spirit of America`s foreign policy today. That was outlined by President Bush in a series of speeches before his re-election, when he redefined US foreign policy away from a primary concern with stability of regimes towards supporting the ideals of free expression, equality of women, and elections.

But the fact that the US Secretary of State could come out quite so bluntly in saying that "for 60 years the US pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East - and achieved neither" does mark a further tightening in the rhetoric of democratisation in the region. The fact that she accompanied this by quite open criticism of America`s key allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for suppressing demonstrations in the one case and locking up dissidents in the other is also no accident.

Democracy is now the name of the American game in the Middle East and Washington means to pursue it, even if it entails ruffling the feathers of its allies. And the world ought to applaud that, if for no other reasons than it gives those inside and outside the region a yardstick by which they can measure its actions.

But the world also has a right to ask just what the US means by this redefinition of its objectives and what is its purpose. In the first place, democracy in this case clearly applies to the Middle East. It is not an objective being pursued outside, as we saw from the hesitant and compromised response to the massacre in Uzbekistan. Free elections are something that the US believes should happen in every Arab country, but are not apparently to be mentioned when it comes to talking about China or Pakistan.

This isn`t just a question of hypocrisy. It reflects a fundamental difference in the way the US defines its interests in different regions. Democracy in the Middle East is seen - as neo-con thinkers argue - primarily as a means to an end, that end being our old friend, stability. Liberal democracies are, in the view of the White House, less likely to confront Israel and encourage terrorist acts against America.

And, in the view of the Vice-President Dick Cheney, they are also less likely to constrain oil production and hold America over a barrel on prices and supplies. A democratic Middle East is also a peaceable one.

This in turn helps explain the glaring differences in US attitudes towards free elections and popular participation in the Middle East. Condoleezza Rice was at it again in her speech. Egypt and Saudi Arabia were chided for not doing enough but they, like Iraq and the Palestinian Authority, were praised (somewhat patronisingly it has to be said) for the steps they had taken. They were on the right lines.

Iran and Syria, however, were dismissed as being tyrannical regimes impervious to popular pressure. Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, all of whom have the most flawed forms of democracy at best, were not mentioned at all, and Jordan only glancingly so.

So, what does Washington mean by democracy here? In one sense, as Dr Rice adumbrated at some length, it means freedom - free speech, equality of the sexes, education for all, and the vote. All the things, in other, words that most people in the Middle East, and elsewhere, yearn for and are beginning to agitate for.

But democracy is also a means of achieving power, and altering it. And this in the end is what Dr Rice, reflecting the White House, seems most concerned with. She doesn`t want to change power in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or for that matter Jordan or most of the Gulf states. She wants the existing regimes to continue but to achieve greater legitimacy, internationally as well as domestically, through elections.

In Iran and Syria, on the other hand, Washington wants regimes to change and, now that experience of Iraq has made it more wary of direct military intervention, it sees popular democratic uprising as the means to do it. Hence the quite different language which President Bush and his Secretary of State and Defence Secretary use when referring to different countries.

Hence, also, Bush`s decision to acclaim Egypt`s decidedly limited moves towards multi-party presidential elections as a giant step in the right direction but to dismiss the current Iranian elections for president as irrelevant.

It may be that the results of the first round of Iranian voting have been manipulated, in which case we should be encouraging the modernisers to make their voices heard for the run off. It may equally be that there is an unexpected strength to the forces of conservatism, in which case we should listen and not dismiss it just because it doesn`t fit what we want.

The Middle East needs the engagement and support of the outside world, from the EU and America, on the items that lead to greater freedom, from open debate to elections. What it does not need is the outside world pushing courses with an unspoken agenda in mind. It`s had too much of that already.

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Iraq creating new breed of jihadists, says CIA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1512597,00.html

Ewen MacAskill, Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday June 23, 2005

Guardian
The war in Iraq is creating a new breed of Islamic jihadists who could go on to destabilise other countries, according to a CIA report.

The CIA believes Iraq to be potentially worse than Afghanistan, which produced thousands of jihadists in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the recruits to Osama bin Laden`s al-Qaida had fought in Afghanistan.

The sobering caution came as a senior British anti-terrorism source warned that those trained in terror techniques in Iraq could use their newly-acquired skills in Britain at the end of the war.

The CIA report, completed last month, remains classified. But a CIA source yesterday confirmed that its broad conclusions, disclosed by the New York Times yesterday, were accurate.

The concern expressed in the CIA report contrasts with the optimism of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when he welcomed the prospect of Iraq as a magnet for jihadists.

The Foreign Office and British security services are sceptical about the CIA assessment that the insurgency could spill into other countries. Security sources said that there was only a "trickle" of recruits from Britain joining the insurgency in Iraq.

If there was to be a spill-over, Saudi Arabia is potentially vulnerable because many of the Arab fighters in Iraq originate from there. Jamal Khashoggi, media adviser to the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday he agreed in part with the US assessment.

"It will be worse than Afghanistan," he said. "We are talking about a very brutal type, a very weird version of Islam in Iraq. It is very scary."

Mr Khashoggi predicted the approach of the Saudi government towards jihadists returning from Iraq will be very different from those returning from Afghanistan and Chechnya. "Any al-Qaida coming back from Iraq will be hunted. It is not like they have gone to Chechnya and will be coming back as heroes. If they come back from Iraq and brag about it, they will be snatched by security in a day or two."

The CIA report suggests the new breed of jihadists will be more deadly than those who fought in Afghanistan. It said that they have learned skills in urban warfare in Iraq.

While the number of Iraq attacks have diminished, they have become more deadly. More than 1,000 Iraqis and 120 US soldiers have been killed since the new Iraqi cabinet was formed in April.

Insurgents once again demonstrated their capacity for inflicting carnage on civilians when they detonated four cars bombs in western Baghdad last night, killing at least 23 people and injuring around 50. At least one was driven by a suicide bomber.

Earlier a bomb attack on a US military patrol killed three civilians. It was claimed by the al-Qaida group led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

There are about 200 individuals in Britain who are suspected of having received training in camps in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Senior anti-terrorist officials suggest many fewer have gone to Iraq.

Ken Jones, the chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers` terrorism committee and chief constable of Sussex, said yesterday Britain would remain a prime target.

"There is an inevitable targeting of the United Kingdom and UK interests abroad," Mr Jones told a conference on terrorism organised by the Royal United Services Institute in London. "The threat will endure for the foreseeable future." But he added: "it is not inevitable that they will succeed."

Mr Jones noted that those involved in terrorism no longer necessarily came from the "excluded and marginalised" but were increasingly "highly intelligent, educated young people". In past terrorist campaigns, he said, there had been a clear goal or aim. The new form of attacks required a different response.

One of the most important ways to combat the growth of terrorism, he suggested, was by encouraging "confident communities" - a clear reference to Britain`s Muslims -that would be aware of suspicious activities and would feel confident in reporting them.

Police in Manchester were last night given another 48 hours to question a 40-year-old man of north African origin, who was arrested under the Terrorism Act on Tuesday. It is believed that the man had shared a house in Moss Side with Idris Bazis, 41, a French-Algerian with a French passport, who blew himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq in February. Anti-terrorist sources say there is no link between the Manchester arrest and recent arrests of 11 men in Spain suspected of being connected with the Iraq insurgency.

Parents of 17 British soldiers killed in Iraq called today in a letter to The Guardian for an independent inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1512412,00.html

The American public is increasingly disillusioned by the Iraq war, and Bush`s triumphalism only makes things worse
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday June 23, 2005

Guardian
On June 21, network news reported that the Pentagon had claimed that 47 enemy operatives had been killed in Operation Spear in western Iraq. Last month, the Pentagon declared 125 had been killed in Operation Matador, near the Syrian border. "We don`t do body counts on other people," Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, stated in November 2003.

On January 29 this year, the day before the Iraqi election, President Bush announced that it was the "turning point". On May 2 2003, he stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln behind a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" and the next day proclaimed that the "mission is completed". On June 2 this year, he declared: "Our mission is clear there, as well, and that is to train the Iraqis so they can do the fighting."

Last week, Bush retreated to his ultimate justification, that Iraq was invaded because Saddam Hussein was involved with the terrorists behind the September 11 attacks, a notion believed by a majority of those who voted for him in 2004: "We went to war because we were attacked ..."

On March 16 2003, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, prophesied: "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators ... I think it will go relatively quickly." Only last month Cheney assured us that the insurgency in Iraq is in "the last throes". On June 18, General William Webster, the US commander in Baghdad, said: "Certainly saying anything about `breaking the back` or `about to reach the end of the line` or those kinds of things do not apply to the insurgency at this point."

The war has reached a tipping point - not in Iraq, but in the US. Every announcement of a "turning point" heightens the rising tide of public disillusionment. Every reference to September 11 strains the administration`s credibility. Every revelation of how "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" for war, as in the Downing Street memo, shatters even Republicans` previously implacable faith.

On June 21, a Gallup poll reported that Bush`s approval rating was collapsing along with support for the war. Only 39% of Americans support it. "The decline in support for the war is found among Republicans and independents, with little change among Democrats." (Since March, Republican support has fallen 11 points to 70%.)

"They`re starting to talk numbers again," Pat Lang remarked to me about the return of body counts. Lang is the former chief at the Defence Intelligence Agency for the Middle East, south Asia and counter-terrorism. "They were determined not to do that. But they can`t provide a measurement to tell themselves they`re doing well. As you know, it means nothing."

Lang, who served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, observes: "For almost all of the war, Vietnam was a better situation than Iraq. During the conduct of the war the security situation was far better than this." The Iraqi elections are "irrelevant to the outcome of the war because the people who voted were the people who stood to gain".

Iran is the long-term winner. "Iran intends to pull the Shia state of Iraq into its orbit. You can be sure that Iranian revolutionary guards are honeycombed throughout Iraq`s intelligence to make sure things don`t get out of hand." About the "euphoria" after the election, especially echoed by the press corps, Lang simply says: "Laughable, comical, pathetic."

Bush`s Iraq syndrome is a reinvention of Lyndon Johnson`s Vietnam syndrome. In December 1967, Walt Rostow, LBJ`s national security adviser, famously declared about the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese: "Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain ... I see light at the end of the tunnel." The official invitation to the New Year`s Eve party at the US embassy in Saigon read: "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel." The Tet offensive struck a month later.

"Even when what happened was really more positive than it seemed to be - the Tet offensive in 1968 was a military disaster for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army - no one believed it because there was no light at the end of tunnel," Harry McPherson, who was President Johnson`s counsel in the White House, told me. For a modern instance, McPherson cited the statement this week by Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska: "The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It`s like they`re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we`re losing in Iraq."

Bush`s light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision can only accelerate the cycle of disillusionment. His instinctive triumphalism inevitably has a counter-productive effect. His refusal to insist on responsibility for blunders - indeed, rewarding and honouring their perpetrators - enshrines impunity and hubris.

His doctrine of presidential infallibility, the election being his only "moment of accountability", can no longer be sustained by reference to September 11. His defence of the abuse and torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other prisons in violation of laws formerly upheld by the US blots out his attempts to explain the purity of his motives.

In The Quiet American, Graham Greene`s 1955 novel on the wages of naive arrogance in Vietnam, the world-weary British journalist Fowler remarks to Pyle, the US agent, with the best of intentions: "Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are ... I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle."

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars

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400 Ausländer haben sich unter den getöteten Aufständischen befunden. Wenn die von den US-Truppen gemeldeten Zahlen über getötete `Aufständige` stimmen, ist das ein Anteil von weit unter 10%.

Who are the foreign fighters in Iraq?
An NBC News analysis finds 55 percent hail from Saudi Arabia
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8293410/

By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 8:39 p.m. ET June 20, 2005

An NBC News analysis of hundreds of foreign fighters who died in Iraq over the last two years reveals that a majority came from the same country as most of the 9/11 hijackers — Saudi Arabia.

Among the suicide bombers was Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a one-time medical student and son of a Saudi diplomat. In December 2004, he climbed into a truck in Mosul and blew himself up.

On an Internet video, another Saudi says goodbye to his mother, then drives an ambulance full of explosives into a building.

They are among more than 400 militants from 21 countries whose deaths were celebrated on Islamic Web sites over the last two years.

"By far the nationality that comes up over and over again is Saudi Arabia," says Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News terrorism expert.

The NBC News analysis of Web site postings found that 55 percent of foreign insurgents came from Saudi Arabia, 13 percent from Syria, 9 percent from North Africa and 3 percent from Europe.

The U.S. military also says Saudi Arabia and Syria are the leading sources of insurgents. An Army official provided a list of the top 10 countries to NBC News but would not release the numbers of foreign fighters from each. The top 10, alphabetically, are: Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

"You have some from poor families, some jobless," says Kohlmann. "You also have individuals that come from wealthy families, that come from a life of privilege and substance and material goods and material wealth."

Why do they go?

Saudis captured in Iraq say it`s because of pictures on Arab television network Al-Jazeera.

"We saw the Americans massacring the Iraqis," says one Saudi prisoner in Iraq via translation.

Radical Saudi clerics urge them to go to Iraq to kill Americans.

"I read the communique of the 26 clerics," says another Saudi prisoner in Iraq.

Saudi officials insist they`ve made great strides in the war on terror and are doing everything possible to stop men from going to Iraq.

"When we have the evidence, we arrest those people and we put them in jail and take them to court because this is illegal," says Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of the Interior.

Monday night, a senior Saudi official expressed skepticism — especially about the Internet eulogies of slain fighters — saying he won`t believe that many Saudis have died in Iraq until he sees the DNA evidence to prove it.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8293410/

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Erst kamen die Japaner, nun sind es die Chenesen, die die $200 Mil sinnvoll anlegen wollen, bevor der Dollar wieder den Bach runtergeht. Lieber dann überbewertete Firmen teuer einkaufen, als die Dollar auf einem Konto verfallen zu lassen.
Es bleibt immer noch die Möglichkeit den US-Mastgänsen unnütze Massenware in den Hals zu stopfen und sich die Dollar wiederzuholen.

THE WORLD
Chinese Oil Firm Bids for Unocal
The $18.5-billion offer, which tops Chevron`s, raises concerns about the potential for foreign ownership of a U.S. energy company.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-unocal2…

By James F. Peltz, Elizabeth Douglass and Evelyn Iritani
Times Staff Writers

June 23, 2005

A major Chinese oil company made a landmark offer to buy California-based Unocal Corp. for $18.5 billion on Wednesday, topping a bid by rival U.S. oil giant Chevron Corp. and setting the stage for an intense political debate over the future of U.S. energy, security and trade policies.

The unsolicited offer by CNOOC Ltd., an arm of state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., was the most dramatic example yet of China`s growing influence in global markets and would be China`s largest foreign acquisition by far.

The proposed buyout could raise hackles in the United States, which is heavily dependent on foreign oil. China`s fast-growing economy is consuming ever-larger amounts of crude, which is helping to drive the price to record heights on world markets, and CNOOC wants to add Unocal`s assets to its energy reserves.

Fu Chengyu, CNOOC`s chairman and chief executive, said his company`s $67-a-share cash bid "is a good offer for Unocal" and "it is good for America."

CNOOC Ltd. • Parent company: State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. • Headquarters: Hong Kong • Main business: Offshore oil and natural gas exploration, development, production and sales • Major production areas: Bohai Bay, Western South China Sea, Eastern South China Sea, East China Sea and off Australia • Reserves: About 2.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent* • Daily average net production: 382,513 barrels of oil equivalent* • Employees: 2,524* • Traded: New York Stock Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong * As of Dec. 31 Source: Company reports

In a telephone interview from Beijing, Fu noted that CNOOC`s proposal to Unocal included several pledges to assuage U.S. concerns, such as keeping most of Unocal`s 6,600 workers and selling its U.S.-produced oil and gas within the United States.

If people "have a better understanding" of CNOOC, "I think there will be less concern both politically and maybe economically," said Fu, who earned a master`s degree in petroleum engineering from USC and once worked for Phillips Petroleum Co., now part of ConocoPhillips.

Still, CNOOC`s proposal is likely to incite a "firestorm" in Congress, said Mikkal Herberg, director of the Asian Energy Security program at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a Seattle think tank.

Herberg predicted that the CNOOC bid would "feed the fear that the Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming," and could further inflame tensions between the two countries over textile trade and currency issues.

One congressman, Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), said he didn`t believe it was "in the best interest of the United States to have Unocal owned by the Chinese national government," adding that the deal could have "disastrous consequences for our economic and national security."

Pombo and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) sent a letter to President Bush last week urging him to look closely at any Chinese bid to acquire U.S. energy assets. Such an attempt "raises many concerns about U.S. jobs, energy production and energy security," their letter said.

C. Richard D`Amato, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional advisory panel that has been sharply critical of U.S. policy toward China, said his group would also ask President Bush to closely review the CNOOC offer.

"When we`re so dependent on foreign suppliers, giving away American sources of petroleum and hydrocarbons doesn`t make sense to me," said D`Amato, an attorney and former member of the Maryland state legislature.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy declined to comment Wednesday on CNOOC`s offer.

Under U.S. law, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — an interagency committee headed by Treasury Secretary John W. Snow — is responsible for reviewing any foreign purchases that could threaten U.S. security.

Herberg, of the National Bureau of Asian Research, said some specific security issues related to a CNOOC-Unocal deal could trigger U.S. concern. Unocal has some "very, very good deep-water exploration skills" developed in projects off Indonesia and Mexico that could have military applications, he said.

Critics are likely to "question letting that technology fall into the hands of the Chinese government," said Herberg, who recently testified on China`s energy strategy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In a conference call with reporters, Fu said the transaction wouldn`t have "any negative impact to the national security interests of the United States…. People need to understand this is a purely commercial transaction, driven by market forces and market considerations."

Chinese analysts and those connected with the government said that CNOOC`s bid for El Segundo-based Unocal was an independent commercial decision made by the company, not a move directed by Beijing.

"Through an acquisition of another company, CNOOC wants to expand their business in Asia," said Han Wenke, vice director of the energy institute affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission, a regulatory agency of the Chinese central government.

CNOOC`s move also could create crosscurrents for the Bush administration and its commitment to increased trade, free commodities markets and U.S. investment in China.

Indeed, Fu said during the conference call that he believed the transaction would prevail "with the U.S. government being the champion of global free trade … and also with so many American companies making investments and acquisitions in China."

In addition to U.S. government approval, any acquisition also must win the favor of Unocal`s stockholders, and some Wall Street analysts said CNOOC`s offer didn`t pass muster.

"That`s not much of a premium over what Chevron`s offering," said Gene Gillespie, an analyst with investment firm Howard Weil Inc. "I don`t think this is attractive to the Unocal shareholders," he said, partly because a portion of the Chevron deal would be tax-free to Unocal`s investors.

Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., said Unocal`s investors might shoot down the deal.

"They should at least have upped it to $72" a share, said Gheit, who owns stock in both Unocal and Chevron. "This is a waste of everyone`s time."

Still, Gheit said, "I would not be surprised if Chevron sweetened the offer one way or another. I think Chevron is committed and interested in Unocal, and it`s not going to let the deal collapse."

The risk of U.S. resistance to the deal was not lost on CNOOC, whose shares trade on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

CNOOC (pronounced see-nook) said the offer was "friendly" and that it hoped to reach a "consensual" deal. The company also said it would continue Unocal`s practice of selling all or most of its U.S.-produced oil and natural gas in the United States, which CNOOC said accounted for less than 1% of total U.S. oil and gas consumption.

However, the majority of Unocal`s oil and gas is produced overseas and is sold to customers around the world. Indeed, CNOOC and Chevron both prize Unocal because of its substantial oil and gas exploration projects in the Asia Pacific region, including Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Chevron, based in San Ramon, Calif., and the second-largest U.S. oil company, behind Exxon Mobil Corp., is offering about $62 a share in cash and Chevron stock — or about $17 billion — under a friendly agreement it reached with Unocal in April. That pact received antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission this month.

Despite the lower price, Chevron said its offer was still superior because it "combines compelling value, regulatory certainty and accelerated timing" for Unocal`s stockholders, while the "CNOOC proposal must undergo an extensive regulatory process in the United States and elsewhere."

Chevron declined to comment on whether it might sweeten its proposal, as some analysts have predicted in the event CNOOC joined the fray. Unocal said that its directors continued to recommend that its stockholders approve the deal with Chevron, but that they would "evaluate the CNOOC proposal" because of their fiduciary duty to investors.

As part of their agreement, Unocal and Chevron have a "breakup" clause under which another acquirer of Unocal would have to pay $500 million to Chevron. The fee is designed to thwart other suitors.

Before CNOOC`s announcement late Wednesday, which had been rumored for days, Unocal`s stock rose a penny to $64.86 a share, while Chevron`s stock fell 51 cents to $58.27.

Unocal, a 115-year-old company that was founded in California, once was known for its Union 76 gasoline. But it sold its retail and refining operations in 1997 to focus on exploration and production.

Unocal also operates in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caspian Sea area, and about 66% of its sales come from foreign sites. Bolstered by high oil and gas prices, Unocal last year earned a $1.2 billion, a record profit for the company, and had sales of $8.2 billion.

The company`s fields are strategically attractive to CNOOC because the Chinese company is aggressively looking for additional reserves. China is now the world`s second-largest consumer of oil, after the United States.

Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management in New York, which owns some Unocal shares, called CNOOC`s offer "gutsy" because the Chinese "realize the political ramifications of making a bid."

"That they would be willing to pay half a billion dollars to Chevron, and to court Senate disapprobation, it shows how desperate China is for oil assets," said Leeb, who also wrote a 2004 book called "The Oil Factor."

CNOOC`s financial advisors on the offer include the U.S. investment firms Goldman, Sachs & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities.

Times staff writer Don Lee in Shanghai contributed to this report.

*

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Bush Faces Hurdles to Rallying Support on Iraq
Barring improvements in security, the president will struggle to reverse the erosion of backing for the war seen in recent polls, experts say.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-iraq…

June 23, 2005

WASHINGTON — President Bush launches a major effort this week to reinvigorate support for the war in Iraq, but he faces a fundamental question: Can his words about the conflict still move public opinion?

Faced with rising criticism of the war, Bush hopes to persuade Americans to stay the course in Iraq.

But many experts believe that events now enormously outweigh arguments in shaping U.S. attitudes about the conflict. That means that unless security in Iraq improves, Bush may find it extremely difficult to reverse the steady erosion of support for the war evident in recent public opinion polls.

"If you look historically at polling numbers on [extended] military operations — leaving aside the second World War, which had sustained high support — the long-term trend is deterioration," said Eric V. Larson, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp. and author of a new study for the U.S. Army on public opinion and war.

"It is hard to imagine that long-term trend being reversed anytime in the immediate future [on Iraq], particularly based solely on rhetoric. "

After Bush`s reelection last year, discussion about Iraq in Washington receded, as the White House and congressional Democrats focused primarily on the president`s domestic agenda. But this spring`s wave of bombings in Iraq is provoking a growing clamor on Capitol Hill.

Democrats remain divided on the war and uncertain how aggressively to challenge Bush.

But earlier this month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) called the war "a grotesque mistake." And about 50 House liberals recently formed an "Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus."

On Tuesday, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) accused the administration of a "credibility chasm" in misrepresenting progress in the war and urged renewed efforts to secure more international assistance. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats met in an unusual caucus intended to begin developing a sharper party position on the war.

Most Republican lawmakers continue to support Bush on the conflict.

But in recent weeks, Bush has faced challenges from Republicans such as Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, who has called for setting a date to begin withdrawing American troops, and Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who has accused the White House of being "completely disconnected from reality" in its assessments of conditions.

This restiveness forms a key part of the backdrop for Bush`s new political offensive.

Today, the administration will dispatch Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top military officials to defend the war before the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

On Friday, Bush will appear at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. Next Tuesday, to mark the one-year anniversary of the installation of the interim Iraqi government, Bush plans a major speech on the war, possibly in prime time.

"We are making a concerted effort to have the president put into context what people are seeing," said one senior White House official, who requested anonymity when discussing Bush`s strategy.

Larson, in his study on public opinion, concluded that two factors best predicted the level of public support for a military engagement: whether the public thought the U.S. had "important stakes" in the situation, and whether it believed the U.S. was making progress toward its goals.

White House officials say they do not expect Bush to announce new policies on Iraq. But he is likely to emphasize arguments that aim directly at the two keys Larson identified.

In an interview on MSNBC`s "Hardball" this week, Karl Rove, Bush`s chief political advisor, previewed the case that the president may make to persuade Americans they have a continuing stake in stabilizing Iraq.

"I read, like you, the newspapers and watch the television, and it is not a pleasant sight seeing people die," Rove said. "But having said that, that`s not the real question. The question is, `Is it in the American interest, will the world be safer, will the world be more peaceful if America and our coalition partners stand with the people of Iraq and move toward a democracy, or will we be better off if we turn tail and run?` "

Another Republican familiar with White House thinking said Bush would confront the "progress" issue by highlighting the continuing steps toward the writing of a constitution and election of a permanent Iraqi government.

"What`s driving public opinion polls right now is the security situation," said the strategist, who requested anonymity when discussing White House matters. "But … part of our job is to make sure [Americans] take into account other metrics, including the political metric."

In this effort, though, the White House faces two large hurdles, analysts in both parties agree.

If Bush seems too upbeat while Americans are seeing almost daily carnage in Iraq, he could appear out of touch or disingenuous — inspiring more of the criticism that Biden and Hagel recently leveled.

The bigger risk is that ongoing violence in Iraq could wash away any gains the president makes with public opinion, the way waves wash away writing in the sand.

"People know he`s a man of strong convictions, and they also believe that it`s better to have an Iraqi democracy than not to have one," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "But they judge everything based on performance."

Indeed, over the last two years, support for the war has spiked upward in most polls around distinctive events, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, and the Iraqi election in January.

But each of those gains eventually dissipated as the violence continued.

In CNN/USA Today/Gallup and ABC/Washington Post national surveys this month, about two-fifths of Americans said they thought the war was worth fighting. That`s the lowest level of support either poll has recorded for the war. Nearly 60% in the Gallup survey also said they wanted to withdraw at least some American troops, the highest level recorded for that question.

The erosion of public support for the war since January`s highly praised Iraqi election suggests that even continued political progress in Iraq, unless it prompts a reduction in violence, may not create lasting support for the mission.

Perhaps the biggest uncertainty is whether sustained public anxiety over the war will affect the president`s policies.

White House officials insist that Bush will not change direction, even if his new effort fails to rally public support. Larson, the Rand researcher, said that support for Iraq was actually holding up better than he expected. He noted that America kept troops in Vietnam for five years after the war had lost majority support in polls.

And although the Democratic and Republican officials uneasy about the war are criticizing Bush more sharply, most have been reluctant to propose significant shifts in his policies, like setting a date to withdraw U.S. troops. Biden, for instance, condemned that idea this week.

"This is like 1968 or 1969, when the political elite has concluded this is, in fact, an unwinnable war but … has decided it cannot make the obvious call for withdrawing for fear of seeming weak," said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council aide to President Clinton.

"I don`t think we are going to change policies in Iraq until someone puts on the table a changed policy in Iraq. But who are the ones who are going to do it?"



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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MAX BOOT ist das, was man allgemein als NeoCon bezeichnet. Er ist einer der intelligenteren Neocons, wenn das nicht in sich ein Paradoxon wäre.
Er hebt sich erfreulich von manche Äußerungen ab, die man hier im Forum zu diesen Themen liest. Seine Posting haben eine Logik, auch wenn man die Schlußfolgerungen nicht teilt.
Er leidet auch nicht an dem Gedächtnisschwund, der so manche Irak-Kriegverteidiger überfallen hat.
Ich habe schon öfter von ihm Artikel eingestellt. Seine Kolumne erscheint einmal die Woche in der LATimes.
Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times..

MAX BOOT
Why the Rebels Will Lose
Max Boot
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-boot2…

June 23, 2005

No wonder public support for the war is plummeting and finger-to-the-wind politicians are heading for the exits: All the headlines out of Iraq recently have been about the rebels` reign of terror. But, lest we build up the enemy into 10-foot-tall supermen, it`s important to realize how weak they actually are. Most of the conditions that existed in previous wars won by guerrillas, from Algeria in the 1950s to Afghanistan in the 1980s, aren`t present in Iraq.

The rebels lack a unifying organization, ideology and leader. There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro or Mao Tse-tung. The top militant is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has alienated most of the Iraqi population, even many Sunnis, with his indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

Support for the insurgency is confined to a minority within a minority — a small portion of Sunni Arabs, who make up less than 20% of the population. The only prominent non-Sunni rebel, Muqtada Sadr, has quietly joined the political process. The 80% of the population that is Shiite and Kurdish is implacably opposed to the rebellion, which is why most of the terror has been confined to four of 18 provinces.

Unlike in successful guerrilla wars, the rebels in Iraq have not been able to control large chunks of "liberated" territory. The best they could do was to hold Fallouja for six months last year. Nor have they been able to stage successful large-scale attacks like the Viet Cong did. A major offensive against Abu Ghraib prison on April 2 ended without a single U.S. soldier killed or a single Iraqi prisoner freed, while an estimated 60 insurgents were slain.

The biggest weakness of the insurgency is that it is morphing from a war of national liberation into a revolutionary struggle against an elected government. That`s a crucial difference. Since 1776, wars of national liberation have usually succeeded because nationalism is such a strong force. Revolutions against despots, from Czar Nicholas II to the shah of Iran, often succeed too, because there is no way to redress grievances within the political process. Successful uprisings against elected governments are much rarer because leaders with political legitimacy can more easily rally the population and accommodate aggrieved elements.

Look at Sri Lanka, the Philippines, El Salvador or Colombia, all fragile democracies that have endured major uprisings that recruited a larger percentage of the population and controlled more territory than the Iraqi rebels — without winning. Other democracies, such as Israel, Turkey and Britain, have also survived brutal insurgencies.

This does not mean that the Iraqi uprising will be quickly or easily defeated. Although most guerrilla movements fail in a democracy, a few thousand or even a few hundred dedicated killers can set off bombs indefinitely. And even if the Iraqi insurgents can`t take over the entire country, they might be able to carve out a jihadist mini-state or spark all-out civil war.

The coalition military forces cannot hope to achieve a military victory in the near future. All they can do is provide breathing space for local institutions to take root so Iraqis can take over the fight for their own freedom.

So far, progress has been rapid on the political front and not-so-rapid in the deployment of security forces, which the coalition didn`t emphasize until last year. We are finally seeing the emergence of some impressive Iraqi units, such as the Wolf Brigade commandos, who pursue insurgents all over the country, and the 302nd National Guard Battalion, which has pacified Haifa Street, a onetime insurgent stronghold in Baghdad.

The biggest advantage the insurgents still have, aside from their total disdain for human life, is that they can get reinforcements from abroad to make up for their heavy losses. The coalition needs to do a better job of policing the Syrian border and pressuring Damascus to crack down on the influx of jihadis.

But even if the border gets sealed, pacifying Iraq will be a long, hard slog that will ultimately be up to the Iraqis. The U.S. needs to show a little patience. If we don`t cut and run prematurely, Iraqi democracy can survive its birth pangs.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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NO. 3 TERRORIST ACTUALLY NO. 9, BIN LADEN SAYS
Madman Unveils Organizational Chart in Latest Terror Tape

In a new terror tape broadcast today, al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden dismissed the importance of an al-Qaeda terrorist currently in U.S. custody, claiming that the terrorist, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was not the No. 3 man in al-Qaeda but was actually only No. 9.

Mr. bin Laden took to the airwaves of the Arabic-language al-Jazeera network to downplay Mr. al-Libbi’s capture, saying that the terrorist had been demoted from No. 3 to No. 9 last autumn and that his role in the international terror group was “largely administrative.”

Using a PowerPoint presentation of al-Qaeda’s organizational chart, the world’s most wanted man offered viewers a rare glimpse into the structure of the highly secretive terror network.

According to the chart, Mr. al-Libbi had no terrorists of any consequence reporting to him and had been given the somewhat nebulous title of “community liaison.”

“Furthermore, Abu Faraj al-Libbi no longer has an al-Qaeda expense account and does not get reimbursed for mileage,” Mr. bin Laden said.

But in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned Mr. bin Laden’s tepid appraisal of Mr. al-Libbi’s importance, saying that if the captured terrorist was not in fact No. 3, he was “at least No. 5 or No. 6.”

Supporting his position, Mr. Rumsfeld added, “We have credible intelligence indicating that Mr. al-Libbi was al-Qaeda’s Employee of the Month in April.”

Elsewhere, in the latest development in the Schiavo case, medical experts said that the brain of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was half the size of a normal one.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/default.asp

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Tomgram: Arlie Hochschild on the Bush Empathy Squeeze
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=3779

In October 2003, Arlie Hochschild wrote a piece for Tomdispatch, Let Them Eat War, on the way President Bush might play war and terror fears as his trump card and win enough of the blue-collar vote to take the 2004 presidential election. He did and he won. Now, looking back, Hochschild, the author of The Time Bind and The Second Shift and a sociologist who knows a great deal about how the lives of all us have been squeezed in recent years, suggests another factor in the Bush victory and in Republican politics: an empathy squeeze. In the piece that follows she explains how, as Bush used his war policies to create votes, so he converted an economic program aimed at strip-mining America into a program for winning blue-collar hearts and minds. This piece will appear in print in the July issue of The American Prospect magazine.

Tom

The Chauffeur`s Dilemma
By Arlie Hochschild

Let`s consider our political moment through a story. Suppose a chauffeur drives a sleek limousine through the streets of New York, a millionaire in the backseat. Through the window, the millionaire spots a homeless woman and her two children huddling in the cold, sharing a loaf of bread. He orders the chauffeur to stop the car. The chauffeur opens the passenger door for the millionaire, who walks over to the mother and snatches the loaf. He slips back into the car and they drive on, leaving behind an even poorer family and a baffled crowd of sidewalk witnesses. For his part, the chauffeur feels real qualms about what his master has done, because unlike his employer, he has recently known hard times himself. But he drives on nonetheless. Let`s call this the Chauffeur`s Dilemma.

Absurd as it seems, we are actually witnessing this scene right now. At first blush, we might imagine that this story exaggerates our situation, but let us take a moment to count the loaves of bread that have recently changed hands and those that soon will. Then, let`s ask why so many people are letting this happen.

*On average, the 2003 tax cut has already given $93,500 to every millionaire. It is estimated that 52% of the benefits of George W. Bush`s 2001–03 tax cuts have enriched the wealthiest 1% of Americans (those with an average annual income of $1,491,000).

*On average, the 2003 tax cut gave $217 to every middle-income person. By 2010, it is estimated that just 1% of the benefits of the tax cut will go to the bottom 20% of Americans (those with an average annual income of $12,200).

*During at least one year since 2000, 82 of the largest American corporations -- including General Motors, El Paso Energy, and, before the scandal broke, Enron -- paid no income tax.

In the meantime, the poor are being bled. Long-term unemployment has risen while the Bush administration has cut long-term unemployment benefits. Most American cities are looking at 15% cuts in already bare-boned budgets, which will close more libraries, cancel more after-school and esl programs, and limit access to health clinics.

Proposed budget cuts beginning in 2006 are threatening the funding given to low-income programs. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, with these cuts in place, low-income programs will be significantly reduced over the next five years. By 2010, elementary and secondary education funding will be cut by $4.6 billion, or 12%; 670,000 fewer women and children will receive assistance through the Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program; Head Start, which currently serves about 906,000 children, will serve 100,000 fewer children; and 370,000 fewer low-income families, elderly people, and people with disabilities will receive rental assistance with rental vouchers. Bush proposes to cut housing and community-development aid by more than 30% in 2006 alone.

It`s not hard to understand why the millionaire, with the power to satisfy so many desires, might want to claim another`s bread. But why does the chauffeur open the door? Why do about half of lower- and middle-income Americans approve of tax cuts that favor the rich and budget cuts that deprive the poor?

***

We often hear two explanations for this. First, George W. Bush has deflected public attention from the bread transfer at home to political enemies abroad. Second, Americans have been repeatedly told over the last three decades that the government -- military spending aside -- is grossly wasteful and hopelessly inefficient. So why not pocket a little money yourself, no matter who gets the lion`s share, if it`s being wasted anyway?

But, by itself, can anti-government propaganda -- added to war fever -- explain why so many Americans are rolling over in the face of such an extraordinary transfer from poor to rich? Most Americans used to believe, after all, that the government could help people achieve the American dream. In 1970, when America had far fewer homeless children and millionaires, it helped people more, and taxpayers begrudged it less. Most people were proud that the United States was a middle-class society, without much in the way of an overclass or an underclass. They credited their government for fostering this ideal. Many Christians among them thought taxes on the rich and programs for the poor expressed a vital Christian ideal: sharing.

But three things have changed since 1970: attitudes toward governmental redistribution, economic times, and the shape of empathy. Attitudes toward redistribution are different -- even among those who would stand to benefit the most. When asked in a 2003 Hart and Teeter poll, "Do you think this (Bush) tax plan benefits mainly the rich or benefits everyone?" 56% of blue-collar men (those without a college degree) who answered "yes"(the plan favors the rich) still favored the plan. For blue-collar men living on annual family incomes of $30,000 or less, half supported it. Apart from the super-rich, who overwhelmingly vote Republican, an interesting pattern emerges: Even many of those with a fragile grip on the American dream go along with taking bread from the poor and giving it to the rich.

What is being forged, then, is a strange, covert moral deal between the millionaire and the hard-pressed chauffeur, sealed by the right-wing church. It is a deal that says, in essence, "Let`s ignore the needy at home, exacerbate the class divide, wage war after war abroad, and sustain the idea that all this is morally good."

The Empathy Squeeze

What is happening in the heart of the chauffeur? He has himself known hard times, and is as capable as anyone else of compassion. What about his circumstances, his religious beliefs, and Bush`s manipulation of these might lead him to harden his heart?

For some time now, many families have felt squeezed between high hopes and declining prospects. Most Americans strongly believe in working hard and moving up the ladder of success. They "identify up" with people more rich, famous, and lucky than they, rather than "identifying down" with people more poor, obscure, and unlucky. However underpaid, our chauffeur dreams of becoming a millionaire more than he dreads lying homeless in the street. If others can rise to the top, he figures, why can`t he?

And in decades past, he had good reason to aim high. For every decade in the 150 years before 1970 -- including the decade of the Great Depression -- real earnings rose. As University of Massachusetts economist Rick Wolff points out, however tough a man`s job or long his hours, he could usually look forward to a bigger paycheck.

But after 1970, the real earning power of male wages -- and I focus here on men, for they are the closer fit to the profile of the chauffeur -- stopped rising. Their dream was linked, it turned out, to jobs in an industrial sector that been automated out or outsourced abroad. Their old union-protected, high-wage, blue-collar jobs began to disappear as new nonunion, low-wage, service-sector jobs appeared. Indeed, the man with a high-school diploma or a few years of college found few new high-opportunity jobs in the much-touted new economy while the vast majority ended up in low-opportunity jobs near the bottom. As jobs in the middle have become harder to find, his earning power has fallen, his benefits have shrunk, and his job security has been reduced.

As a result, Wolff argues, two things happened. First, life at home became tougher. Wives took paid jobs -- and this in a society that had given little thought to paid parental leave or family-friendly policies. For men as well as women, hours of work have increased. From 1973 to 1996, average hours per worker went up 19%. Since the 1970s, increases have occurred in involuntary job loss, in work absences due to illness or disability, and in debt and bankruptcy. The proportion of single mother families rose from 12% in 1970 to 26% in 2003.

Tougher times have led, in turn, to an "empathy squeeze." That is, many people responded to this crisis by withdrawing into their own communities, their own families, themselves. If a man gets fired or demoted, if he can`t make his house payments, if his wife is leaving him, or if his son is failing in school, he feels like he`s got enough on his hands. He can`t afford to feel sorry for so many other people. He`s trying to be a good father, a helpful neighbor, and friend to people he knows who themselves need more help. He localizes empathy. He narrows his circle of empathy in a way that coincides with George W. Bush`s hourglass America. Pay a tax to help a homeless mother in another city? Forget it. Charity begins at home.

Despite this, many people who voted for Bush may feel real qualms about the homeless mother and her hungry children. They experience the chauffeur`s dilemma. In his heart of hearts, the chauffeur feels bad that he has put such space between himself and the homeless woman`s plight. If he goes to a Christian church, he wants to be a good, giving, sharing Christian.

And here is where Bush and his social-issues team make a stealthy empathy grab. How? They "privatize" the chauffeur`s morality, and in two ways. They do it first by redefining "good" as a matter not of giving or of sharing but of judging. The chauffeur is offered the chance to feel good by disapproving of homosexuals and of economic failures while quietly setting aside the idea of helping the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. Second and more importantly, Bush proposes the idea of giving through private, religious channels, and thus offers moral cover for the idea of giving less. We will stop giving to the less fortunate as citizens through our government and start giving as parishioners through our churches. But, quite apart from this as a bid to expand the fold, it is a way of offering a moral free pass to the act of replacing a lake with a drop of water.

Rather than fixing the problems that make people anxious, Bush takes advantage of the very feelings of anxiety, frustration, and fear that insecurity creates -- and that his policies exacerbate -- while deflecting hopes away from government help. He makes life quietly harder at home while pointing a finger of blame at one enemy after another abroad. He is, I think, deregulating American capitalism with one hand while regulating the resulting anxiety with the other. And to do this, he has enlisted powerful allies on the corporate and religious right.

The Chauffeur and the Rapture

This leads me to a second effect of economic distress that Wolff notes: rising membership in nontraditional Protestant churches. Among these are some churches that promote the belief that the world is coming to an end, and that, following this, Christians will ascend to heaven in a Rapture while all others will suffer in hell. Those who hold to these beliefs are not a minor group. According to a recent Gallup Poll, 36% of Americans believe that the world is coming to an end. The 12-volume Left Behind series of Christian novels has sold more than 62 million copies.

We can understand the appeal of the idea of a Rapture, though not, or not only, in the believer`s terms. There is a world literally coming to an end -- the industrial world of the well-paid blue-collar worker. It is a world to which the workingman and woman have already sacrificed much time and from which the promised rewards are disappearing. Belief in the Rapture provides, I would speculate, an escape from real anxiety over this very great earthly loss. Internet images of the Rapture often portray thin, well-dressed white people rising up into heaven to join awaiting others. The excluded are welcomed. The rejected are accepted. The downwardly mobile become upwardly mobile. The Rapture creates a celestial split between haves and have-nots, with no one in the middle. And in this vision, those caught in a social class squeeze are at last securely on top. The Rapture absorbs the sting of being hardworking losers in the harsh and rigged winner`s culture of the radical right.

In a just society, of course, there need be no permanent economic losers. It is well within the capacity of a wisely led American government to restore a living wage to every worker. The power of the people once pointed in that direction. Popular uprisings in the 1930s led to massive demonstrations, strikes, and eventually Works Progress Administration projects, unemployment insurance, and our Social Security system.

But today`s impulse to protest goes into blockading abortion clinics and writing Darwin out of school textbooks. The inner-city homeless, children in overcrowded public schools, unemployed in need of job retraining, and the 18% of American children who don`t get enough to eat each day become part of the glimpsed world the chauffeur passes by, and his church can only do so much for them.

Like many others, I felt moved by the Christians who knelt in prayer for the family of the late Terri Schiavo, the comatose patient on life support in Florida. But it made me wonder why we don`t see similar vigils drawing attention to near-comatose victims of winter living on city sidewalks. They`ve been taken off life support, too.

The chauffeur knows this and wants to do the moral thing. But he`s worse off himself. He feels he has less to give. Bush offers him a way to feel good about giving less -- make a general ethic of giving less. He can downsize his conscience and still feel good. This deal, first struck between right-wing anti-tax interests and evangelicals back in the 1970s, offers a way to satisfy the chauffeur`s better angel while getting his OK to take the bread. If right-wing ministers have talked our chauffeur into believing in the Rapture, this belief, too, can become just another reason to drive on.

In a sense, Bush is exploiting the common man twice over -- once by ignoring his own plight and that of the poor and twice by covering it over with military drums and tin-man morality. We really need to turn both things around. But to do that, we need to remind the chauffeur, wherever he is, that it`s within his power to stop the car -- tax the millionaire, help the homeless, and offer new hope to those in between. Otherwise, the deal Bush is brokering between millionaire and chauffeur will impoverish the chauffeur -- in his pocketbook and in his soul.

Arlie Hochschild is a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley and the author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life as well as The Time Bind and The Second Shift.

This article appears in the July issue of The American Prospect magazine (Vol. 16, No. 7).

Copyright 2005 Arlie Hochschild

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posted June 23, 2005 at 11:15 am

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Thursday, June 23, 2005
War News for Thursday, June 23, 2005

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Thirty-eight Iraqis killed by seven car bombs in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers killed in fighting near Ramadi.

Bring `em on: Seven insurgents killed in Baghdad street fighting.

Bring `em on: Turkmen politician escapes assassination attempt in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi policeman killed, seven civilians wounded by car bomb near Tuz Khormato.

Bring `em on: Two insurgents killed in premature detonation of tractor bomb near Tikrit.

Bring `em on: US checkpoint near Ramadi attacked.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi child killed, two wounded by roadside bomb near Baquba.

Early deployment. "Major units within the 1st Armored Division could be headed to Iraq earlier than expected. In January, soldiers received an official e-mail from 1st AD headquarters telling them to expect to deploy between Nov. 1, 2005 and January 2006. But 1st AD spokesman Maj. Michael Indovina said Tuesday that the 2nd Brigade Combat Team from Baumholder, Germany, now expects to deploy `in the fall,` which he described as anytime between September and November. That could be up to two months earlier than previously reported… A Pentagon release in February listed Europe-based units that would deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa between April and January 2006. However, no 1st AD units were on that list. Another unit not on the list, the 1st Military Intelligence Battalion from Wiesbaden, left for Iraq last week. The unit left `early,` Patton said, because they had been home for 10 months, not the full year most units get after a deployment."

Reconstruction:

At the moment in Baghdad, the power is off for four hours, then on for only two. Even those lucky enough to own generators struggle to find the power to run vital air conditioning units.

In the southern city of Basra there were protests about the situation this week.
The temperature there can rise to 50C with 98% humidity. It can be almost unbearable.

The Iraq budget for US-Aid alone, since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, has been more than $5bn. But most Iraqis simply have not seen a difference.
On one job creation project, there is a budget of $88m. It has paid for a series of training centres, like one I visited in the impoverished Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad.

I found trainers teaching Iraqis computer skills. In another room, two classes of women were learning to use Chinese-made sewing machines.
They are popular classes. But the day I visited, nothing was moving. The power was down once again.


Corruption Provisional Authority. "The inspector general monitoring reconstruction in Iraq told Congress yesterday that he has presented evidence of three potential fraud cases to federal prosecutors in Alexandria. The cases stem from an audit released last month that found that nearly $100 million intended for reconstruction projects in south-central Iraq could not be properly accounted for. The audit reported that criminal investigators were looking into the matter. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said publicly for the first time yesterday that his office gave the information to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Bowen would not provide details of the cases, which have the potential to set precedents in the largely untested legal realm of crimes committed by U.S. civilians in Iraq."

Wanker of the Day. "It`s unfortunate that we have lost 2.1 soldiers per day. It`s also a terrible truth that more people are killed each day in America by automobiles. It might be better to keep a running account of the number of people killed in auto accidents over a period of two years than to keep a tally on soldiers killed. This is what we pay soldiers for--to protect American citizens and our freedom."

Walter L. Brown
Spotsylvania

Recruit pool. "Army recruiting quotas are not being met. Now, in this time of need, the nation`s focus should rightfully focus on the clerics of the religious right: Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, Parsley, etc. Can they focus? Can they refocus? Can they get the job done? Perhaps many of these clerics are hesitant to focus on military recruiting because they are former unfocused draft-dodgers. They need to get past their unfocused youthful follies. They need to refocus their focus on military recruiting. According to religious-right reports (not propaganda), at least two to three million potential recruits have attended taxpayer-funded meetings, where they have `signed` one of the most important of all pledges: No sex before marriage. These are ideal military recruits. Certainly, the clerics can make changes where the lady pledges can focus on appropriate gender-specific tasks under the focus of their natural masters. This clerical focus should focus exclusively on the Army and Marine Corps, where all the killing is focused. Let those other people (you know who I mean) populate the Navy and the Air Force." Link via Big Brass Blog.

Commentary

Editorial:

It is nice that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team feel as if they have achieved closure on their prisoner abuse issues and are ready to move on. The problem is, they are still in deep denial. The Bush administration has not only refused to face the problem squarely, but it is also enabling a pervasive lack of accountability.

The most recent evidence of this sad state of affairs came this week in an article in The New York Times by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, who reported that the Pentagon believes the Abu Ghraib scandal has receded enough in the public`s mind that Rumsfeld is considering a promotion for Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who was commander of American forces in Iraq at the time of the disaster.

We can see why Sanchez would expect a promotion; Bush has rewarded the people who drafted the policies that led to the illegal detention, abuse, humiliation and, ultimately, torture and even killing of prisoners at the hands of American military forces. A couple were nominated to the federal appeals court. One became attorney general. Rumsfeld still has his job.

And we feel Sanchez`s pain. As the army`s own investigation showed, he lacked the experience to command the forces in Iraq. Once given that job, he labored under Rumsfeld`s obsession for waging war with too few troops inadequately equipped. For months, Bush and Rumsfeld were pretending the war was over, while Sanchez faced a mushrooming insurgency. He ordered his soldiers to start getting tough with prisoners to get intelligence.


Analysis:

Between the moment in late 2003 when I wrote "The Time of Withdrawal" and today, Iraq has, in fact, crept ever closer to some kind of civil war - it may already have begun; western Iraq has been transformed into a "haven" for terrorists and jihadis; American "credibility" has collapsed not just in the Middle East but globally; the Bush push for "democracy" does look embattled; and oil prices, which in 2003 were surely hovering around $30 a barrel, are now up at close to double that price, while Iraq is almost incapable of exporting significant amounts of oil and "instability" in the Gulf has risen significantly.

A similar situation played itself out in Vietnam back when nightmarish visions of what might happen if we withdrew ("the bloodbath") became so much a part of public debate that the bloodbath actually taking place in Vietnam was sometimes overshadowed by it. Prediction is a risky business. Terrible things might indeed happen if we withdrew totally from Iraq, or they might not; or they might - but not turn out to be the ones we`ve been dreaming about; or perhaps if we committed to departure in a serious way, the situation would actually ease. We don`t know. That`s the nature of the future. All we know at the moment, based on the past two years, is what is likely to happen if we stay - which is more and worse of the very nightmares we fear if we leave.

The most essential problem in such thinking is the belief that, if we just hang in there long enough, the US will be capable of solving the Iraqi crisis. That is inconceivable, since the US presence is now planted firmly at the heart of the crisis to be solved.

One guarantee: the Bush administration won`t hesitate to deploy such fantasies of future disaster to paralyze present thinking and planning. Expect it. And it will be all too easy to take our eyes off this disastrous moment and enter their world of grim future dreams. After all, they already live in a kind of ruling fantasy world. They step to the podium regularly, their hands dipped in blood, call it wine or nectar, and insist that the rest of the world drink. They will be eager to trade in their best future nightmares so that the present nightmare can continue. (They argue, by the way, for the use of torture, under whatever name, in quite a similar fashion, proposing future nightmares - let`s say we held a terrorist who had knowledge of an impending nuclear explosion in a major American city and you only had two hours to get that information from him, what would you do? - in order to justify the ongoing horrors at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and other places.)



Downing Street Memos

Analysis:

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun `spikes of activity` to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn`t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn`t retaliate. They didn`t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.


Opinion:

Like many of you, during the entire lead-up to the war with Iraq, I thought the whole thing was a set-up. I raise this point not to prove how smart we are but to emphasize that I followed the debate closely and probably unconsciously searched for evidence that reinforced what I already thought. Most people do that.

I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It`s my job.

But when I read the first Downing Street memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. It was news to me, and as I have tried to indicate, I`m no slouch at keeping up. Yes, it has long seemed to me that the administration had been planning the war for months before it began its public relations campaign to scare a skeptical public.

That was no easy task. Public opinion was still evenly divided at the time we invaded. The administration actually said it could invade another country without even consulting Congress or the United Nations. Pretty much everything that followed was a charade.


Consequences: "A young boy, his left leg missing from below the knee, sat on the sidewalk near a mangled bicycle, screaming as a man tried to comfort him. The force of the blasts blew off store shutters, and the surrounding sidewalks were covered with debris, including shattered glass, concrete slabs and charred vegetables and fruit."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Indiana soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Connecticut soldier killed in Iraq.
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[urlPART 1
The coming trade war and global depression]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GF16Dj01.html[/url]

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[/TABLE]THE COMING TRADE WAR, Part 2
Dollar hegemony
against sovereign credit
By Henry C K Liu
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GF24Dj01.html


Global trade has forced all countries to adopt a market economy. Yet the market is not the economy. It is only one aspect of the economy.

A market economy can be viewed as an aberration of human civilization, as economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) pointed out. The principal theme of Polanyi`s Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (1945) was that market economy was of very recent origin and had emerged fully formed only as recently as the 19th century, in conjunction with capitalistic industrialization. The current globalization of markets that followed the fall of the Soviet bloc is also of recent post-Cold War origin, in conjunction with the advent of the electronic information age and deregulated finance capitalism. A severe and prolonged depression could trigger the end of the market economy, when intelligent human beings are finally faced with the realization that the business cycle inherent in the market economy cannot be regulated sufficiently to prevent its innate destructiveness to human welfare and are forced to seek new economic arrangements for human development. The principle of diminishing returns will lead people to reject the market economy, however sophisticatedly regulated.

Prior to the coming of capitalistic industrialization, the market played only a minor part in the economic life of societies. Even where marketplaces could be seen to be operating, they were peripheral to the main economic organization and activities of society. In many pre-industrial economies, markets met only twice a month. Polanyi argued that in modern market economies, the needs of the market determined social behavior, whereas in pre-industrial and primitive economies the needs of society determined market behavior. Polanyi reintroduced to economics the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution in human interaction, which were the original aims of trade.

Reciprocity implies that people produce the goods and services they are best at and enjoy producing the most, and share them with others with joy. This is reciprocated by others who are good at and enjoy producing other goods and services. There is an unspoken agreement that all would produce that which they could do best and mutually share and share alike, not just sold to the highest bidder or, worse, to produce what they despise to meet the demands of the market. The idea of sweatshops is totally unnatural to human dignity and uneconomic to human welfare. With reciprocity, there is no need for layers of management, because workers happily practice their livelihoods and need no coercive supervision. Labor is not forced and workers do not merely sell their time in jobs they hate, unrelated to their inner callings. Prices are not fixed but vary according to what different buyers with different circumstances can afford or what the seller needs in return from different buyers. The law of one price is inhumane, unnatural, inflexible and unfair. All workers find their separate personal fulfillment in different productive livelihoods of their choosing, without distortion by the need for money. The motivation to produce and share is not personal profit, but personal fulfillment, and avoidance of public contempt, communal ostracism, and loss of social prestige and moral standing.

This motivation, albeit distorted today by the dominance of money, is still fundamental in societies operating under finance capitalism. But in a money society, the emphasis is on accumulating the most financial wealth, which is accorded the highest social prestige. The annual report on the world`s richest 100 as celebrities by Forbes is clear evidence of this anomaly. The opinions of figures such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are regularly sought by the media on matters beyond finance, as if the possession of money itself represents a diploma of wisdom. In the 1960s, wealth was an embarrassment among the flower children in the US. It was only in the 1980s that the age of greed emerged to embrace commercialism.

In a speech on June 3 at the Take Back America conference in Washington, DC, Bill Moyers drew attention to the conclusion by the editors of The Economist, all friends of business and advocates of capitalism and free markets, that "the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society". A front-page editorial in the May 13 Wall Street Journal concluded that "as the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth - or that a rich child will fall into middle class - remain stuck ... Despite the widespread belief that the US remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity." The New York Times ran a 12-day series this month under the heading "Class Matters" that observed that class is closely tied to money in the US and that "the movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to." The myth that free markets spread equality seems to be facing a challenge in the heart of market fundamentalism.

People trade to compensate for deficiencies in their current state of development. Free trade is not a license for exploitation. Exploitation is slavery, not trade. Imperialism is exploitation by systemic coercion on an international level. Neo-imperialism after the end of the Cold War takes the form of neo-liberal globalization of systemic coercion. Free trade is hampered by systemic coercion. Resistance to systemic coercion is not to be confused with protectionism. To participate in free trade, a trader must have something with which to trade voluntarily in a market free of systemic coercion. All free trade participants need to have basic pricing power that requires that no one else commands monopolistic pricing power. That tradable something comes from development, which is a process of self-betterment. Just as equality before the law is a prerequisite for justice, equality in pricing power in the market is a prerequisite for free trade. Traders need basic pricing power for trade to be free. Workers need pricing power for the value of their labor to participate in free trade.

Yet trade in a market economy by definition is a game to acquire overwhelming pricing power over one`s trading partners. Wal-Mart, for example, has enormous pricing power both as a bulk buyer and as a mass retailer. But it uses its overwhelming pricing power not to pay the highest wages to workers in factories and in its stores, but to deliver the lowest price to its customers. The business model of Wal-Mart, whose sales volume is greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of many small countries, is anti-development. The trade-off between low income and low retail price follows a downward spiral. This downward spiral has been the main defect of trade deregulation when low prices are achieved through the lowering of wages. The economic purpose of development is to raise income, not merely to lower wages to reduce expenses by lowering quality. International trade cannot be a substitute for domestic development, or even international development, although it can contribute to both domestic and international development if it is conducted on an equal basis for the mutual benefit of both trading partners. And the chief benefit is higher income.

The terms of international trade need to take into consideration local conditions, not as a reluctant tolerance but with respect for diversity. The former Japanese vice finance minister for international affairs, Eisuke Sakakibara, in a speech titled "The End of Market Fundamentalism" before the Foreign Correspondent`s Club in Tokyo on January 22, 1999, presented a coherent and wide-ranging critique of global macro-orthodoxy. His view, that each national economic system must conform to agreed international trade rules and regulations but need not assimilate the domestic rules and regulations of another country, is heresy to US-led, one-size-fits-all globalization. In a computerized world where output standardization has become unnecessary, where the mass production of customized one-of-a-kind products is routine, one-size-fits-all hegemony is nothing more than cultural imperialism. In a world of sovereign states, domestic development must take precedence over international trade, which is a system of external transactions made supposedly to augment domestic development. And domestic development means every nation is free to choose its own development path most appropriate to its historical conditions and is not required to adopt the US development model. But neo-liberal international trade since the end of the Cold War has increasingly preempted domestic development in both the center and the periphery of the world system. Quality of life is regularly compromised in the name of efficiency.

This is the reason the French and the Dutch voted against the European Union constitution, as a resistance to the US model of globalization. Britain has suspended its own vote on the constitution to avoid a likely voter rejection. In Italy, cabinet ministers suggested abandoning the euro to return to an independent currency in order to regain monetary sovereignty. Bitter battles have erupted among member nations in the EU over national government budgets and subsidies. In that sense, neo-liberal trade is being increasingly identified as an obstacle, even a threat, to diversified domestic development and national culture.

Global trade has become a vehicle for exploitation of the weak to strengthen the strong both domestically and internationally. Culturally, US-style globalization is turning the world into a dull market for unhealthy McDonald`s fast food, dreary Wal-Mart stores, and automated Coca-Cola and bank machines. Every airport around the world is a replica of a giant US department store with familiar brand names, making it hard to know which city one is in. Aside from being unjust and culturally destructive, neo-liberal global trade as it currently exists is unsustainable, because the perpetual transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is no more sustainable than drawing from a dry well is sustainable in a drought, nor can stagnant consumer income sustain a consumer economy. Neo-liberal claims of fair benefits of free trade to the poor of the world, both in the center and the periphery, are simply not supported by facts. Everywhere, people who produce the goods cannot afford to buy the same goods for themselves and the profit is siphoned off to invisible investors continents away.

Trade and money
Trade is facilitated by money. Mainstream monetary economists view government-issued money as a sovereign-debt instrument with zero maturity, historically derived from the bill of exchange in free banking. This view is valid only for specie money, which is a debt certificate that entitles the holder to claim on demand a prescribed amount of gold or other specie of value. Government-issued fiat money, on the other hand, is not a sovereign-debt but a sovereign-credit instrument, backed by government acceptance of it for payment of taxes. This view of money is known as the State Theory of Money, or Chartalism. The US dollar, a fiat currency, entitles the holder to exchange for another dollar at any US Federal Reserve Bank, no more, no less. Sovereign government bonds are sovereign debts denominated in money. Sovereign bonds denominated in fiat money need never default since sovereign government can print fiat money at will. Local government bonds are not sovereign debt and are subject to default because local governments do not have the authority to print money. When fiat money buys bonds, the transaction represents credit canceling debt. The relationship is rather straightforward, but of fundamental importance.

Credit drives the economy, not debt. Debt is the mirror reflection of credit. Even the most accurate mirror does violence to the symmetry of its reflection. Why does a mirror turn an image right to left and not upside down as the lens of a camera does? The scientific answer is that a mirror image transforms front to back rather than left to right as commonly assumed. Yet we often accept this aberrant mirror distortion as uncolored truth and we unthinkingly consider the distorted reflection in the mirror as a perfect representation. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? The answer is: your backside.

In the language of monetary economics, credit and debt are opposites but not identical. In fact, credit and debt operate in reverse relations. Credit requires a positive net worth and debt does not. One can have good credit and no debt. High debt lowers credit rating. When one understands credit, one understands the main force behind the modern finance economy, which is driven by credit and stalled by debt. Behaviorally, debt distorts marginal utility calculations and rearranges disposable income. Debt turns corporate shares into Giffen goods, demand for which increases when their prices go up, and creates what US Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan calls "irrational exuberance", the economic man gone mad.

If fiat money is not sovereign debt, then the entire financial architecture of fiat-money capitalism is subject to reordering, just as physics was subject to reordering when man`s world view changed with the realization that the Earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe. For one thing, the need for capital formation to finance socially useful development will be exposed as a cruel hoax. With sovereign credit, there is no need for capital formation for socially useful development in a sovereign nation. For another, savings are not necessary to finance domestic development, since savings are not required for the supply of sovereign credit. And since capital formation through savings is the key systemic rationale for income inequality, the proper use of sovereign credit will lead to economic democracy.

Sovereign credit and unemployment
In an economy financed by sovereign credit, labor should be in perpetual shortage, and the price of labor should constantly rise. A vibrant economy is one in which there is a persistent labor shortage and labor enjoys basic, though not monopolistic, pricing power. An economy should expand until a labor shortage emerges and keep expanding through productivity rises to maintain a slight labor shortage. Unemployment is an indisputable sign that the economy is underperforming and should be avoided as an economic plague.

The Phillips curve, formulated in 1958, describes the systemic relationship between unemployment and wage-pushed inflation in the business cycle. It represented a milestone in the development of macroeconomics. British economist A W H Phillips observed that there was a consistent inverse relationship between the rate of wage inflation and the rate of unemployment in the United Kingdom from 1861 to 1957. Whenever unemployment was low, inflation tended to be high. Whenever unemployment was high, inflation tended to be low. What Phillips did was to accept a defective labor market in a typical business cycle as natural law and to use the tautological data of the flawed regime to prove its validity, and made unemployment respectable in macroeconomic policymaking, in order to obscure the irrationality of the business cycle. That is like observing that the sick are found in hospitals and concluding that hospitals cause sickness and that a reduction in the number of hospitals will reduce the number of the sick. This theory will be validated by data if only hospital patients are counted as being sick and the sick outside of hospitals are viewed as "externalities" to the system. This is precisely what has happened in the United States, where an oversupply of hospital beds has resulted from changes in the economics of medical insurance, rather than a reduction of people needing hospital care. Part of the economic argument against illegal immigration is based on the overload of non-paying patients in a health-care system plagued with overcapacity.

Nevertheless, Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow led an army of government economists in the 1960s in using the Phillips curve as a guide for macro-policy trade-offs between inflation and unemployment in market economies. Later, Edmund Phelps and Milton Friedman independently challenged the theoretical underpinnings by pointing out separate effects between the "short-run" and "long-run" Phillips curves, arguing that the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of money wages, or real wages, would adjust to make the supply of labor equal to the demand for labor, and the unemployment rate would rest at the real wage level to moderate the business cycle. This level of unemployment they called the "natural rate" of unemployment. The definitions of the natural rate of unemployment and its associated rate of inflation are circularly self-validating. The natural rate of unemployment is that at which inflation is equal to its associated inflation. The associated rate of inflation is that which prevails when unemployment is equal to its natural rate.

A monetary purist, Friedman correctly concluded that money is all-important, but as a social conservative, he left the path to truth half-traveled by not having much to say about the importance of the fair distribution of money in the market economy, the flow of which is largely determined by the terms of trade. Contrary to the theoretical relationship described by the Phillips curve, higher inflation was associated with higher, not lower, unemployment in the US in the 1970s and, contrary to Friedman`s claim, deflation was associated also with high unemployment in Japan in the 1990s. The fact that both inflation and deflation accompanied high unemployment ought to discredit the Phillips curve and Friedman`s notion of a natural unemployment rate. Yet most mainstream economists continue to accept a central tenet of the Friedman-Phelps analysis that there is some rate of unemployment that, if maintained, would be compatible with a constant rate of inflation. This they call the "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU), which over the years has crept up from 4% to 6%.

NAIRU means that the price of sound money for the US is 6% unemployment. The US Labor Department reported the "good news" that in May 7.6 million persons, or 5.1% of the workforce, were unemployed in the United States, well within NAIRU range. Since low-income people tend to have more children than the national norm, that translates to households with more than 20 million children with unemployed parents. On the shoulders of these unfortunate, innocent souls rests the systemic cost of sound money, defined as having a non-accelerating inflation rate, paying for highly irresponsible government fiscal policies of deficits and a flawed monetary policy that leads to skyrocketing trade deficits and debts. That is equivalent to saying that if 6% of the world population dies from starvation, the price of food can be stabilized. And unfortunately, such are the terms of global agricultural trade. No government economist has bothered to find out what would be the natural inflation rate for real full employment.

It is hard to see how sound money can ever lead to full employment when unemployment is necessary to keep money sound. Within limits and within reason, unemployment hurts people and inflation hurts money. And if money exists to serve people, then the choice between inflation and unemployment becomes obvious. The theory of comparative advantage in world trade is merely Say`s Law internationalized. It requires full employment to be operative.

Wages and profits
And neo-classical economics does not allow the prospect of employers having an objective of raising wages, as Henry Ford did, instead of minimizing wages as current corporate management, such as the Ford Motor Co, routinely practices. Henry Ford raised wages to increase profits by selling more cars to workers, while the Ford Motor Co today cuts wages to maximize profit while adding to overcapacity. Therein resides the cancer of market capitalism: falling wages will lead to the collapse of an overcapacity economy.

This is why global wage arbitrage is economically destructive unless and until it is structured to raise wages everywhere rather than to keep prices low in the developed economies. That is done by not chasing after the lowest price made possible by the lowest wages, but by chasing after a bigger market made possible by rising wages. The terms of global trade need to be restructured to reward companies that aim at raising wages and benefits globally through internationally coordinated transitional government subsidies, rather than the regressive approach of protective tariffs to cut off trade that exploits wage arbitrage. This will enable the low-wage economies to begin to be able to afford the products they produce and to import more products from the high wage economies to move toward balanced trade.

Eventually, certainly within a decade, wage arbitrage will cease to be the driving force in global trade as wage levels around the world equalize. When the population of the developing economies achieves per capita income that matches that in developed economies, the world economy will be rid of the modern curse of overcapacity caused by the flawed neoclassical economics of scarcity. When top executives are paid tens of million of dollars in bonuses to cut wages and worker benefits, it is not fair reward for good management; it is legalized theft. Executives should only receive bonuses if both profit and wages in their companies rise as a result of their management strategies.

Sovereign credit and dollar hegemony
In an economy that can operate on sovereign credit, free from dollar hegemony, private savings are needed only for private investment that has no clear socially redeeming purpose or value.

Savings are deflationary without full employment, as savings reduce current consumption to provide investment to increase future supply. Savings for capital formation serve only the purpose of bridging the gap between new investment and new revenue from rising productivity and increased capacity from the new investment. With sovereign credit, private savings are not needed for this bridge financing. Private savings are also not needed for rainy days or future retirement in an economy that has freed itself from the tyranny of the business cycle through planning.

Say`s Law of supply creating its own demand is a very special situation that is operative only under full employment, as eminent post-Keynesian economist Paul Davidson has pointed out. Say`s Law ignores a critical time lag between supply and demand that can be fatal to a fast-moving modern economy without demand management. Savings require interest payments, the compounding of which will regressively make any financial system unsustainable by tilting it toward overcapacity caused by overinvestment. Religions forbade usury for very practical reasons. Yet interest on money is the very foundation of finance capitalism, held up by the neo-classical economic notion that money is more valuable when it is scarce. Aggregate poverty, then, is necessary for sound money. This was what US president Ronald Reagan meant when he said that there are always going to be poor people.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated that as of the end of 2004, the notional value of global OTC (over the counter) interest-rate derivatives is about US$185 trillion, with a market risk exposure of more than $5 trillion, which is almost half of 2004 US GDP. Interest-rate derivatives are by far the largest category of structured finance contracts, taking up $185 trillion of the total $250 trillion of notional values. The $185 trillion notional value of interest-rate derivatives is 41 times the outstanding value of US Treasury bonds. This means that interest-rate volatility will have a disproportioned impact of the global financial system in ways that historical data cannot project.

Fiat money issued by government is now legal tender in all modern national economies since the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates linked to a gold-backed US dollar. Chartalism holds that the general acceptance of government-issued fiat currency rests fundamentally on government`s authority to tax. Government`s willingness to accept the currency it issues for payment of taxes gives the issuance currency within a national economy. That currency is sovereign credit for tax liabilities, which are dischargeable by credit instruments issued by government, known as fiat money. When issuing fiat money, the government owes no one anything except to make good a promise to accept its money for tax payment.

A central banking regime operates on the notion of government-issued fiat money as sovereign credit. That is the essential difference between central banking with government-issued fiat money, which is a sovereign-credit instrument, and free banking with privately issued specie money, which is a bank IOU that allows the holder to claim the gold behind it.

With the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the US attitude toward the rest of the world changed. It now no longer needs to compete for the hearts and minds of the masses of the Third and Fourth Worlds. So trade has replaced aid. The US has embarked on a strategy to use cheap Third/Fourth World labor and non-existent environmental regulation to compete with its former Cold War allies, now industrialized rivals in trade, taking advantage of traditional US anti-labor ideology to outsource low-paying jobs, playing against the strong pro-labor tradition of social welfare in Europe and Japan. In the meantime, the US pushed for global financial deregulation based on dollar hegemony and emerged as a 500-pound gorilla in the globalized financial market that left the Japanese and Europeans in the dust, playing catch-up in an unwinnable game. In the game of finance capitalism, those with capital in the form of fiat money they can print freely will win hands down.

The tool of this US strategy is the privileged role of the dollar as the key reserve currency for world trade, otherwise known as dollar hegemony. Out of this emerges an international financial architecture that does real damage to the actual producer economies for the benefit of the financier economies. The dollar, instead of being a neutral agent of exchange, has become a weapon of massive economic destruction (WMED) more lethal than nuclear bombs and with more blackmail power, which is exercised ruthlessly by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on behalf of the Washington Consensus. Trade wars are fought through volatile currency valuations. Dollar hegemony enables the United States to use its trade deficits as the bait for its capital account surplus.

Foreign direct investment under dollar hegemony has changed the face of the international economy. Since the early 1970s, FDI has grown along with global merchandise trade and is the single most important source of capital for developing countries, not net savings or sovereign credit. FDI is mostly denominated in dollars, a fiat currency that the US can produce at will since 1971, or in dollar derivatives such as the yen or the euro, which are not really independent currencies. Thus FDI is by necessity concentrated in exports-related development, mainly destined for US markets or markets that also sell to US markets for dollars with which to provide the return on dollar-denominated FDI. US economic policy is shifting from trade promotion to FDI promotion. The US trade deficit is financed by the US capital account surplus which in turn provides the dollars for FDI in the exporting economies. A trade spat with the EU over beef and bananas, for example, risks large US investment stakes in Europe. And the suggestion to devalue the dollar to promote US exports is misleading for it would only make it more expensive for US affiliates to do business abroad while making it cheaper for foreign companies to buy dollar assets. An attempt to improve the trade balance, then, would actually end up hurting the FDI balance. This is the rationale behind the slogan: a strong dollar is in the US national interest.

Between 1996 and 2003, the monetary value of US equities rose around 80% compared with 60% for Europeans and a decline of 30% for Japanese. The 1997 Asian financial crisis cut the values of Asian equities by more than half, some as much as 80% in dollar terms even after drastic devaluation of local currencies. Even though the United States has been a net debtor since 1986, its net income on the international investment position has remained positive, as the rate of return on US investments abroad continues to exceed that on foreign investments in the US. This reflects the overall strength of the US economy, and that strength is derived from the US being the only nation that can enjoy the benefits of sovereign-credit utilization while amassing external debt, largely due to dollar hegemony.

In the US, and now also increasingly so in Europe and Asia, capital markets are rapidly displacing banks as both savings venues and sources of funds for corporate finance. This shift, along with the growing global integration of financial markets, is supposed to create promising new opportunities for investors around the globe. Neo-liberals even claim that these changes could help head off the looming pension crises facing many nations. But so far it has only created sudden and recurring financial crises like those that started in Mexico in 1982, then in the United Kingdom in 1992, again in Mexico in 1994, in Asia in 1997, and Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey subsequently.

The introduction of the euro has accelerated the growth of the EU financial markets. For the current 25 members of the European Union, the common currency nullified national requirements for pension and insurance assets to be invested in the same currencies as their local liabilities, a restriction that had long locked the bulk of Europe`s long-term savings into domestic assets. Freed from foreign-exchange transaction costs and risks of currency fluctuations, these savings fueled the rise of larger, more liquid European stock and bond markets, including the recent emergence of a substantial euro junk bond market. These more dynamic capital markets, in turn, have placed increased competitive pressure on banks by giving corporations new financing options and thus lowering the cost of capital within euroland. How this will interact with the euro-dollar market is still indeterminate. Euro-dollars are dollars outside of US borders everywhere and not necessarily Europe, generally pre-taxed and subject to US taxes if they return to US soil or accounts. The term also applies to euro-yen and euro-euros. But the idea of French retirement accounts investing in non-French assets is both distasteful and irrational for the average French worker, particularly if such investment leads to decreased job security in France and jeopardizes the jealously guarded 35-hour work-week with 30 days of paid annual vacation that has been part of French life.

Take the Japanese economy as an example, the world`s largest creditor economy. It holds more than $800 billion in dollar reserves. The Bank of Japan (BOJ), the central bank, has bought more than 300 billion dollars with yen from currency markets in the past two years in an effort to stabilize the exchange value of the yen, which continued to appreciate against the dollar. Now, the BOJ is faced with a dilemma: continue buying dollars in a futile effort to keep the yen from rising, or sell dollars to try to recoup yen losses on its dollar reserves. Japan has officially pledged not to diversify its dollar reserves into other currencies, so as not to roil currency markets, but many hedge funds expect Japan to run out of options soon.

Now if the BOJ sells dollars at the rate of $4 billion a day, it will take some 200 trading days to get out of its dollar reserves. After the initial two days of sale, the remaining unsold $792 billion reserves would have a market value of 20% less than before the sales program began. So the BOJ would suffer a substantial net yen paper loss of $160 billion. If the BOJ continues its sell-dollar program, every day 400 billion yen will leave the yen money supply to return to the BOJ if it sells dollars for yen, or the equivalent in euros if it sells dollars for euros. This will push the dollar further down against the yen or euro, in which case the value of its remaining dollar reserves will fall even further, not to mention a sharp contraction in the yen money supply, which will push the Japanese economy into a deeper recession.

If the BOJ sells dollars for gold, two things may happen. There may not be enough sellers because no one has enough gold to sell to absorb the dollars at current gold prices. Instead, while the price of gold will rise, the gold market may simply freeze, with no transactions. Gold holders will not have to sell their gold; they can profit from gold derivatives on notional values. Also, the reverse market effect that faces the dollar would hit gold. After two days of Japanese gold buying, everyone would hold on to his gold in anticipation of still-higher gold prices. There would be no market makers. Part of the reason central banks have been leasing out their gold in recent years is to provide liquidity to the gold market.

The second thing that may happen is that the price of gold will skyrocket in currency terms, causing a great deflation in gold terms. The US national debt as of June 1 was $7.787 trillion. US government gold holding is about 261 million ounces. The price of gold required to pay back the national debt with US-held gold is $29,835 per ounce. At that price, an ounce of gold would buy a car. Meanwhile, the market price of gold as of June 4 was $423.50 per ounce. Gold peaked at $850 per ounce in 1980 and bottomed at $252 in 1999 when oil was below $10 a barrel. At $30,000 per ounce, governments would have to make gold trading illegal, as US president Franklin Roosevelt did in 1930, and we would be back to Square 1. It is much easier for a government to outlaw the trading of gold within its borders than it is for it to outlaw the trading of its currency in world markets. It does not take much to conclude that anyone who advises any strategy of long-term holding of gold will not get to the top of the class.

Heavily indebted poor countries need debt relief to get out of virtual financial slavery. Some African governments spend three times as much on debt service as they do on health care. Britain has proposed a half-measure that would have the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sell about $12 billion worth of its gold reserves, which have a total current market value of about $43 billion, to finance debt relief. The United States has veto power over gold decisions in the IMF. Thus the US Congress holds the key. However, the mining-industry lobby has blocked a vote. In January, a letter opposing the sale of IMF gold was signed by 12 US senators from western mining states, arguing that the sale could drive down the price of gold. A similar letter was signed in March by 30 members of the House of Representatives. Lobbyists from the National Mining Association and gold-mining companies such as Newmont Mining and Barrick Gold Corp persuaded the congressional leadership that the gold proposal would not pass in Congress, even before it came up for debate.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reports that gold derivatives took up 26% of the world`s commodity derivatives market, yet gold only composes 1% of the world`s annual commodity production value, with 26 times as many derivatives structured against gold as against other commodities, including oil. The Bush administration, at first apparently unwilling to take on a congressional fight, began in April to oppose gold sales outright. But President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced on June 7 that the US and UK are "well on their way" to a deal that would provide 100% debt cancellation for some poor nations to the World Bank and African Development Fund as a sign of progress in the Group of Eight (G8) debate over debt cancellation.

Jude Wanniski, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, commenting in his "Memo on the margin" on the Internet on June 15, on the headline of Pat Buchanan`s syndicated column of the same date, "Reviving the foreign-aid racket", wrote:

This not a bailout of Africa`s poor or Latin American peasants. This is a bailout of the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank ... The second part of the racket is that in exchange for getting debt relief, the poor countries will have to spend the money they save on debt service on "infrastructure projects", to directly help their poor people with water and sewer lines, etc, which will be constructed by contractors from the wealthiest nations ... What comes next? One of the worst economists in the world, Jeffrey Sachs, is in charge of the United Nations scheme to raise mega-billions from Western taxpayers for the second leg of this scheme. He wants $25 billion a year for the indefinite future, as I recall, and he has the fervent backing of the New York Times, which always weeps crocodile tears for the racketeers. It was Jeffrey Sachs, in case you forgot, who with the backing of the NY Times persuaded Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev to engage in "shock therapy" to convert from communism to capitalism. It produced the worst inflation in the history of Russia, caused the collapse of the Soviet federation, and sank the Russian people into a poverty they had never experienced under communism.

The dollar cannot go up or down more than 20% against any other major currencies within a short time without causing a major global financial crisis. Yet, against the US equity markets, the dollar appreciated about 40% in purchasing power in the 2000-02 market crash. And against real-estate prices between 2002 and 2005, the dollar has depreciated 60% or more. According to Greenspan`s figures, the Fed can print $8 trillion more fiat dollars without causing inflation. The problem is not the money-printing. The problem is where that $8 trillion is injected. If it is injected into the banking system, then the Fed will have to print $3 trillion every subsequent year just to keep running in place. If the $8 trillion is injected into the real economy in the form of full employment and higher wages, the US will have a very good economy, and much less need for paranoia against Asia or the EU. But US wages cannot rise as long as global wage arbitrage is operative. This is one of the arguments behind protectionism. It led Greenspan to say on May 5 he feared what appeared to be a growing move toward trade protectionism, saying it could lessen the ability of the US and the world economy to withstand shock. Yet if democracy works in the US, protectionism will be unstoppable as long as free trade benefits the elite at the expense of the voting masses.

Fiat money is sovereign credit
Money is like power: use it or lose it. Money unused (not circulated) is defunct wealth. Fiat money not circulated is not wealth but merely pieces of printed paper sitting in a safe. Gold unused as money is merely a shiny metal good only as an ornamental gift for weddings and birthdays. The usefulness of money to the economy is dependent on its circulation, like the circulation of blood to bring oxygen and nutrients to the living organism. The rate of money circulation is called velocity by monetary economists. A vibrant economy requires a high velocity of money. Money, like most representational instruments, is subject to declaratory definition. In semantics, a declaratory statement is self-validating. For example: "I am king" is a statement that makes the declarer king, albeit in a kingdom of one citizen. What gives weight to the declaration is the number of others accepting that declaration. When sufficient people within a jurisdiction accept the kingship declaration, the declarer becomes king of that jurisdiction instead of just his own house. When an issuer of money declares it to be credit it will be credit, or when he declares it to be debt it will be debt. But the social validity of the declaration depends on the acceptance of others.

Anyone can issue money, but only sovereign government can issue legal tender for all debts, public and private, universally accepted with the force of law within the sovereign domain. The issuer of private money must back that money with some substance of value, such as gold, or the commitment for future service, etc. Others who accept that money have provided something of value for that money, and have received that money instead of something of similar value in return. So the issuer of that money has given an instrument of credit to the holder in the form of that money, redeemable with something of value on a later date.

When the state issues fiat money under the principle of Chartalism, the something of value behind it is the fulfillment of tax obligations. Thus the state issues a credit instrument, called (fiat) money, good for the cancellation of tax liabilities. By issuing fiat money, the state is not borrowing from anyone. It is issuing tax credit to the economy.

Even if money is declared as debt assumed by an issuer who is not a sovereign who has the power to tax, anyone accepting that money expects to collect what is owed him as a creditor. When that money is used in a subsequent transaction, the spender is parting with his creditor right to buy something of similar value from a third party, thus passing the "debt" of the issuer to the third party. Thus no matter what money is declared to be, its function is a credit instrument in transactions. When one gives money to another, the giver is giving credit and the receiver is incurring a debt unless value is received immediately for that money. When debt is repaid with money, money acts as a credit instrument. When government buys back government bonds, which is sovereign debt, it cannot do so with fiat money it issues unless fiat money is sovereign credit.

When money changes hands, there is always a creditor and a debtor. Otherwise there is no need for money, which stands for value rather than being value intrinsically. When a cow is exchanged for another cow, that is bartering, but when a cow is bought with money, the buyer parts with money (an instrument of value) while the seller parts with the cow (the substance of value). The seller puts himself in the position of being a new creditor for receiving the money in exchange for his cow. The buyer exchanges his creditor position for possession of the cow. In this transaction, money is an instrument of credit, not a debt.

When private money is issued, the only way it will be accepted generally is that the money is redeemable for the substance of value behind it based on the strong credit of the issuer. The issuer of private money is a custodian of the substance of value, not a debtor. All that is logic, and it does not matter how many mainstream monetary economists say money is debt.

Economist Hyman P Minsky (1919-96) observed correctly that money is created whenever credit is issued. He did not say money is created when debt is incurred. Only entities with good credit can issue credit or create money. Debtors cannot create money, or they would not have to borrow. However, a creditor can only be created by the existence of a debtor. So both a creditor and a debtor are needed to create money. But only the creditor can issue money, the debtor accepts the money so created, which puts him in debt.

The difference with the state is that its power to levy taxes exempts it from having to back its creation of fiat money with any other assets of value. The state when issuing fiat money is acting as a sovereign creditor. Those who take the fiat money without exchanging it with things of value are indebted to the state; and because taxes are not always based only on income, a taxpayer is a recurring debtor to the state by virtue of his citizenship, even those with no income. When the state provides transfer payments in the form of fiat money, it relieves the recipient of his tax liabilities or transfers the exemption from others to the recipient to put the recipient in a position of a creditor to the economy through the possession of fiat money. The holder of fiat money is then entitled to claim goods and services from the economy. For things that are not for sale, such as political office, money is useless, at least in theory. The exercise of the fiat money`s claim on goods and services is known as buying something that is for sale.

There is a difference between buying a cow with fiat money and buying a cow with private IOUs (notes). The transaction with fiat money is complete. There is no further obligation on either side after the transaction. With notes, the buyer must either eventually pay with money, which cancels the notes (debt), or return the cow. The correct way to look at sovereign-government-issued fiat money is that it is not a sovereign debt, but a sovereign-credit good for canceling tax obligations. When the government redeems sovereign bonds (debt) with fiat money (sovereign credit), it is not paying off old debt with new debt, which would be a Ponzi scheme.

Government does not become a debtor by issuing fiat money, which in the US is a Federal Reserve note, not an ordinary banknote. The word "bank" does not appear on US dollars. Zero maturity money (ZMM), which grew from $550 billion in 1971, when president Richard Nixon took the dollar off gold, to $6.63 trillion as of May 30, 2005, is not a federal debt. It is a federal credit to the economy acceptable for payment of taxes and as legal tender for all debts, public and private. Anyone refusing to accept dollars within US jurisdiction is in violation of US law. One is free to set market prices that determine the value, or purchasing power, of the dollar, but it is illegal on US soil to refuse to accept dollars for the settlement of debts. Instruments used for settling debts are credit instruments. When fiat money is used to buy sovereign bonds (debt), money cannot be anything but an instrument of sovereign credit. If fiat money is sovereign debt, there is no need to sell government bonds for fiat money. When a sovereign government sells a sovereign bond for fiat money issues, it is withdrawing sovereign credit from the economy. And if the government then spends the money, the money supply remains unchanged. But if the government allows a fiscal surplus by spending less than its tax revenue, the money supply shrinks and the economy slows. That was the effect of the Bill Clinton surplus, which produced the recession of 2000. While runaway fiscal deficits are inflationary, fiscal surpluses lead to recessions. Conservatives who are fixated on fiscal surpluses are simply uninformed on monetary economics.

For euro-dollars, meaning fiat dollars outside the United States, the reason those who are not required to pay US taxes accept them is dollar hegemony, not because dollars are IOUs of the US government. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil and all other key commodities. When the Fed injects money into the US banking system, it is not issuing government debt; it is expanding sovereign credit that would require higher government tax revenue to redeem. But if expanding sovereign credit expands the economy, tax revenue will increase without changing the tax rate. Dollar hegemony exempts the US dollar, and only the US dollar, from foreign-exchange implication on the State Theory of Money. To issue sovereign debt, the Treasury issues Treasury bonds. Thus under dollar hegemony, the United States is the only nation that can practice and benefit from sovereign credit under the principle of Chartalism.

Money and bonds are opposite instruments that cancel each other. That is how the Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC) controls the money supply, by buying or selling government securities with fiat dollars to set a Fed Funds Rate target. The Fed Funds Rate is the interest rate at which US banks lend to each other overnight. As such, it is a market interest rate that influences market interest rates throughout the world in all currencies through exchange rates. Holders of a government bond can claim its face value in fiat money at maturity, but the holder of a fiat dollar can only claim a fiat-dollar replacement at the Fed. Holders of fiat dollars can buy new sovereign bonds at the Treasury, or outstanding sovereign bonds in the bond market, but not at the Fed. The Fed does not issue debts, only credit in the form of fiat money. When the FOMC buys or sells government securities, it does so on behalf of the Treasury. When the Fed increases the money supply, it is not adding to the national debt. It is increasing sovereign credit in the economy. That is why monetary easing is not deficit financing.

Money and inflation
It is sometimes said that war`s legitimate child is revolution and war`s bastard child is inflation. World War I was no exception. The US national debt multiplied 27 times to finance the nation`s participation in that war, from $1 billion to $27 billion. Far from ruining the United States, the war catapulted the country into the front ranks of the world`s leading economic and financial powers. The national debt turned out to be a blessing, for government securities are indispensable as anchors for a vibrant credit market.

Inflation was a different story. By the end of World War I, in 1919, US prices were rising at the rate of 15% annually, but the economy roared ahead. In response, the Federal Reserve Board raised the discount rate in quick succession, from 4% to 7%, and kept it there for 18 months to try to rein in inflation. The discount rate is the interest rate charged to commercial banks and other depository institutions on loans they receive from their regional Federal Reserve Bank`s lending facility - the discount window. The result was that in 1921, 506 banks failed. Deflation descended on the economy like a perfect storm, with commodity prices falling 50% from their 1920 peak, throwing farmers into mass bankruptcies. Business activity fell by one-third; manufacturing output fell by 42%; unemployment rose fivefold to 11.9%, adding 4 million to the jobless count. The economy came to a screeching halt. From the Fed`s perspective, declining prices were the goal, not the problem; unemployment was necessary to restore US industry to a sound footing, freeing it from wage-pushed inflation. Potent medicine always came with a bitter taste, the central bankers explained.

At this point, a technical process inadvertently gave the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which was closely allied with internationalist banking interest, pre-eminent influence over the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, the composition of which represented a more balanced national interest. The initial operation of the Fed did not use the open-market operation of purchasing or selling government securities to set interest-rate policy as a method of managing the money supply. The Fed could not simply print money to buy government securities to inject money into the money supply because the dollar was based on gold and the amount of gold held by the government was relatively fixed. Money in the banking system was created entirely through the discount window at the regional Federal Reserve banks. Instead of buying or selling government bonds, the regional Feds accepted "real bills" of trade, which when paid off would extinguish money in the banking system, making the money supply self-regulating in accordance with the "real bills" doctrine to maintain the gold standard. The regional Feds bought government securities not to adjust money supply, but to enhance their separate operating profit by parking idle funds in interest-bearing yet super-safe government securities, the way institutional money managers do today.

Bank economists at that time did not understand that when the regional Feds independently bought government securities, the aggregate effect would result in macroeconomic implications of injecting "high power" money into the banking system, with which commercial banks could create more money in multiple by lending recycles based on the partial reserve principle. When the government sold bonds, the reverse would happen. When the Fed made open-market transactions, interest rates would rise or fall accordingly in financial markets. And when the regional Feds did not act in unison, the credit market could become confused or disaggregated, as one regional Fed might buy while another might sell government securities in its open-market operations.

Benjamin Strong, first president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, saw the problem and persuaded the other 11 regional Feds to let the New York Fed handle all their transactions in a coordinated manner. The regional Feds formed an Open Market Investment Committee, to be run by the New York Fed for the purpose of maximizing overall profit for the whole system. This committee became dominated by the New York Fed, which was closely linked to big-money central-bank interests, which in turn were closely tied to international financial markets. The Federal Reserve Board approved the arrangement without full understanding of its implication: that the Fed was falling under the undue influence of the New York internationalist bankers. For the United States, this was the beginning of financial globalization. This fatal flaw would reveal itself in the Fed`s role in causing and its impotence in dealing with the 1929 stock market crash.

The deep 1920-21 depression eventually recovered by the lowering of the Fed discount rate into the Roaring Twenties, which, like the New Economy bubble of the 1990s, left some segments of the US economy and the population in them lingering in a depressed state. Farmers remained victimized by depressed commodity prices and factory workers shared in the prosperity only by working longer hours and assuming debt with the easy money that the banks provided. Unions lost 30% of their membership because of high unemployment in boom times. The prosperity was entirely fueled by the wealth effect of a speculative boom in the stock market that by the end of the decade would face the 1929 crash and land the nation and the world in the Great Depression. Historical data showed that when New York Fed president Strong leaned on the regional Feds to ease the discount rate on an already overheated economy in 1927, the Fed lost its last window of opportunity to prevent the 1929 crash. Some historians claimed that Strong did so to fulfill his internationalist vision at the risk of endangering the national interest. It is an issue of debate that continues in the US Congress today. Like Greenspan, Strong argued that it was preferable to deal with post-crash crisis management by adding liquidity than to pop a bubble prematurely with preventive measures of tight money. It is a strategy that requires letting a bubble pop only inside a bigger bubble.

The speculative boom of easy credit in the 1920s attracted many to buy stocks with borrowed money and used the rising price of stocks as new collateral for borrowing more to buy more stocks. Brokers` loans went from under $5 million in mid-1928 to $850 million in September of 1929. The market capitalization of the 846 listed companies of the New York Stock Exchange was $89.7 billion, at 1.24 times 1929 GDP. By current standards, a case could be built that stocks in 1929 were in fact technically undervalued. The 2,750 companies listed in the New York Stock Exchange had total global market capitalization exceeding $18 trillion in 2004, 1.53 times 2004 GDP of $11.75 trillion.

On January 14, 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time high to date at 11,723, not withstanding Greenspan`s warning of "irrational exuberance" on December 6, 1996, when the DJIA was at 6,381. From its August 12, 1982, low of 777, the DJIA began its most spectacular bull market in history. It was interrupted briefly only by the abrupt and frightening crash on October 19, 1987, when the DJIA lost 22.6% on Black Monday, falling to 1,739. That represented a 1,021-point drop from its previous peak of 2,760 reached less than two months earlier on August 21. But Greenspan`s easy-money policy lifted the DJIA to 11,723 in 13 years, a 674% increase. In 1929 the top came on September 4, with the DJIA at 386. A headline in the New York Times on October 22, 1929, reported highly respected economist Irving Fisher as saying, "Prices of stocks are low." Two days later, the stock market crashed, and by the end of November, the New York Stock Exchange shares index was down 30%. The index did not return to the September 3, 1929, level until November 1954. At its worst level, the index dropped to 40.56 in July 1932, a drop of 89%. Fisher had based his statement on strong earnings reports, few industrial disputes, and evidence of high investment in research and development (R&D) and in other intangible capital. Theory and supportive data not withstanding, the reality was that the stock-market boom was based on borrowed money and false optimism. In hindsight, many economists have since concluded that stock prices were overvalued by 30% in 1929. But when the crash came, the overshoot dropped the index by 89% in less than three years.

Money and gold
When money is not backed by gold, its exchange value must be managed by government, more specifically by the monetary policies of the central bank. No responsible government will voluntarily let the market set the exchange value of its currency, market fundamentalism notwithstanding. Yet central bankers tend to be attracted to the gold standard because it can relieve them of the unpleasant and thankless responsibility of unpopular monetary policies to sustain the value of money. Central bankers have been caricatured as party spoilers who take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.

Yet even a gold standard is based on a fixed value of money to gold, set by someone to reflect the underlying economic conditions at the time of its setting. Therein lies the inescapable need for human judgment. Instead of focusing on the appropriateness of the level of money valuation under changing economic conditions, central banks often become fixated on merely maintaining a previously set exchange rate between money and gold, doing serious damage in the process to any economy temporarily out of sync with that fixed rate. It seldom occurs to central bankers that the fixed rate was the problem, not the dynamic economy. When the exchange value of a currency falls, central bankers often feel a personal sense of failure, while they merely shrug their shoulders to refer to natural laws of finance when the economy collapses from an overvalued currency.

The return to the gold standard in war-torn Europe in the 1920s was engineered by a coalition of internationalist central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic as a prerequisite for postwar economic reconstruction. Lenders wanted to make sure that their loans would be repaid in money equally valuable as the money they lent out, pretty much the way the IMF deals with the debt problem today. President Strong of the New York Fed and his former partners at the House of Morgan were closely associated with the Bank of England, the Banque de France, the Reichsbank, and the central banks of Austria, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium, as well as with leading internationalist private bankers in those countries. Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England from 1920-44, enjoyed a long and close personal friendship with Strong as well as an ideological alliance. Their joint commitment to restore the gold standard in Europe and so to bring about a return to the "international financial normalcy" of the prewar years was well documented. Norman recognized that the impairment of British financial hegemony meant that, to accomplish postwar economic reconstruction that would preserve prewar British interests, Europe would "need the active cooperation of our friends in the United States".

Like other New York bankers, Strong perceived World War I as an opportunity to expand US participation in international finance, allowing New York to move toward coveted international-finance-center status to rival London`s historical pre-eminence, through the development of a commercial paper market, or bankers` acceptances in British finance parlance, breaking London`s long monopoly. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 permitted the Federal Reserve Banks to buy, or rediscount, such paper. This allowed US banks in New York to play an increasingly central role in international finance in competition with the London market.

Herbert Hoover, after losing his second-term US presidential election to Franklin D Roosevelt as a result of the 1929 crash, criticized Strong as "a mental annex to Europe", and blamed Strong`s internationalist commitment to facilitating Europe`s postwar economic recovery for the US stock-market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression that robbed Hoover of a second term. Europe`s return to the gold standard, with Britain`s insistence on what Hoover termed a "fictitious rate" of US$4.86 to the pound sterling, required Strong to expand US credit by keeping the discount rate unrealistically low and to manipulate the Fed`s open market operations to keep US interest rate low to ease market pressures on the overvalued pound sterling. Hoover, with justification, ascribed Strong`s internationalist policies to what he viewed as the malign persuasions of Norman and other European central bankers, especially Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank and Charles Rist of the Bank of France. From the mid-1920s onward, the United States experienced credit-pushed inflation, which fueled the stock-market bubble that finally collapsed in 1929.

Within the Federal Reserve System, Strong`s low-rate policies of the mid-1920s also provoked substantial regional opposition, particularly from Midwestern and agricultural elements, who generally endorsed Hoover`s subsequent critical analysis. Throughout the 1920s, two of the Federal Reserve Board`s directors, Adolph C Miller, a professional economist, and Charles S Hamlin, perennially disapproved of the degree to which they believed Strong subordinated domestic to international considerations.

The fairness of Hoover`s allegation is subject to debate, but the fact that there was a divergence of priority between the White House and the Fed is beyond dispute, as is the fact that what is good for the international financial system may not always be good for a national economy. This is evidenced today by the collapse of one economy after another under the current international finance architecture that all central banks support instinctively out of a sense of institutional solidarity. The same issue has surfaced in today`s China where regional financial centers such as Hong Kong and Shanghai are vying for the role of world financial center. To do this, they must play by the rules of the international financial system which imposes a cost on the national economy. The nationalist vs internationalist conflict, as exemplified by the Hoover vs Strong conflict of the 1930s, is also threatening the further integration of the European Union. Behind the fundamental rationale of protectionism is the rejection of the claim that internationalist finance places national development as its priority. The Richardian theory of comparative advantage of free trade is not the issue.

The issue of government control over foreign loans also brought the Fed, dominated by Strong, into direct conflict with Hoover when the latter was secretary of commerce. Hoover believed that the US government should have right of approval on foreign loans based on national-interest considerations and that the proceeds of US loans should be spent on US goods and services. Strong opposed all such restrictions as undesirable government intervention in free trade and international finance and counterproductively protectionist. Businesses should be not only allowed but encouraged to buy when it is cheapest anywhere in the

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COMMENTARY
The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
By Michael Smith
Michael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-smith23…

June 23, 2005

It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.

At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He`d given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year`s British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair`s war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

I did not then regard the now-infamous memo — the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting — as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."

But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun `spikes of activity` to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn`t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn`t retaliate. They didn`t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.




Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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"terroRice": Alternate spelling of terrorize.
[urlGrant Gerver]http://www.seriouskidding.com/[/url]
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Jun. 23, 2005. 06:25 AM

Detainee medical records are being used to design more effective interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, says a new report.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thes…

TANYA TALAGA AND KAREN PALMER
STAFF REPORTERS

Medical records compiled by doctors caring for prisoners at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay are being tapped to design more effective interrogation techniques, says an explosive new report.

Doctors, nurses and medics caring for the approximately 600 prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are required to provide health information to military and CIA interrogators, according to the report in the respected New England Journal of Medicine.

"Since late 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists (at Guantanamo) have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behaviour-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives," it states.

Such tactics are considered torture by many authorities, the authors note.

Medical personnel belonging to the U.S. military`s Southern Command have also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be valuable, the report adds.

The report was published ahead of schedule last night on the journal`s website "because of current public interest in this topic," the journal says.

The report`s authors — Dr. Gregg Bloche, a physician who is also a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and Jonathan Marks, a London lawyer who is currently a fellow in bioethics at Georgetown`s law centre — say that while Guantanamo veterans are ordered not to discuss what goes on there, making it difficult to know how, exactly, military intelligence personnel have used medical information for interrogation, they`ve been able to assemble part of the picture.

They suggest that interrogators at the camp, set up in 2001 to detain prisoners captured in Afghanistan and later Iraq, have had access to prisoners` medical records since early 2003.

That contradicts Pentagon statements that there is a separation between intelligence-gathering and patient care.

William Winkenwerder, U.S. assistant secretary of defence for health affairs, said in a memo made public in May that Guantanamo prisoners` medical records are considered private — as are American citizens`.

However, "this claim, our inquiry has determined, is sharply at odds with orders given to military medical personnel and with actual practice at Guantanamo," the authors write.

Using medical records to devise interrogation protocols crosses an ethical line, said Peter Singer, director of the University of Toronto`s Joint Centre for Bioethics.

"The goal for the physician is to care for the sick, not to aid an interrogation," he said. "Patients are patients and prisoners are prisoners and mixing those two things on the part of physicians who work in prisons is actually quite dangerous. Physicians are there for the benefit of patients and if they are seen to be there for some other purpose, it really blurs what they`re doing."

An Amnesty International Canada spokesman said the report gives serious pause to anyone who is following what happens at Guantanamo.

"This reinforces the necessity for a full, independent commission of inquiry into the detentions. What is going on and what rules are being violated," John Tackaberry said from Ottawa.

"The American government needs to accept its responsibility to expose what is actually happening and show the world they are following standards that are acceptable in terms of international law," he said.

According to the authors, a previously unreported U.S. Southern Command policy statement dated Aug. 6, 2002, instructs health-care providers that communications from "enemy persons under U.S. control" at Guantanamo "are not confidential and are not subject to the assertion of privileges" by detainees.

That policy memorandum also tells medical personnel they should "convey any information concerning ... the accomplishment of a military or national security mission ... obtained from detainees in the course of treatment to non-medical military or other U.S. personnel who have an apparent need to know the information," the authors found. The only limit on the policy is that caregivers cannot themselves act as interrogators, the authors say. But since the policy calls on caregivers to hand over information they think might be valuable, they are, in effect, part of Guantanamo`s surveillance network and "dissolving the Pentagon`s purported separation between intelligence gathering and patient care," they write.

"An internal, May 24, 2005, memo from the Army Medical Command, offering guidance to caregivers responsible for detainees, refers to the `interpretation of relevant excerpts from medical records` for the purpose of `assistance with the interrogation process.`"

The authors obtained the memo from a military source.

The article states that at Guantanamo, the "fear-and-anxiety" approach to interrogation was often favoured.

"The cruel and degrading measures taken by some, in violation of international human rights law and the laws of war, have become a matter of national shame," Bloche and Marks observe.

"The global political fallout from such abuse may pose more of a threat to U.S. security than any secrets still closely held by shackled internees at Guantanamo Bay," they add.

Canada`s only known detainee in Guantanamo Bay is 18-year-old Omar Khadr. Documents filed in a Canadian court this week included two psychiatric assessments that concluded the teenager has a serious mental disorder and is at a high risk for suicide.

Khadr is the second youngest son of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was considered before his death in 2003 to be Canada`s highest-ranking Al Qaeda financier with close ties to Osama bin Laden.

Omar Khadr was 15 when he was shot three times and captured at a suspected Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in July 2002, following a gun battle with U.S. troops.

In February, his U.S. lawyer told reporters the teenager had been used as a human mop to clean urine on the floor and had been beaten, threatened with rape and tied up for hours in painful positions at Guantanamo Bay.

Khadr`s Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney said yesterday he has regularly raised concerns with Ottawa about the teen`s treatment at Guantanamo and use of his client`s medical records.

"This conduct is a blatant disregard by both Canada and the U.S. to recognize the special status international treaties and human rights law accords children and youths," Edney said yesterday.

On Tuesday, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has already launched 10 major investigations into allegations of abuse and the system was working well.

Mulugeta Abai, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture in Toronto, wasn`t surprised by the journal report. "This is practised globally," he said. "This is very frustrating. A superpower that is considered a leader in many ways is losing its moral authority now, completely."

The New England Journal of Medicine is the second respected journal to criticize U.S. interrogation techniques.

The British medical journal The Lancet reported in August, 2004, that U.S. military doctors violated medical ethics as part of the interrogation regime at Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison.

"Not only were (they) aware of human rights abuses, they were actually complicit in them," University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles, who wrote the report, told the Toronto Star`s Sandro Contenta. A Lancet editorial urged health-care workers to "now break their silence."

with files from Michelle Shephard

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Dahr Jamail`s Iraq Dispatches
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June 23, 2005
Censorship
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000256.…

At long last, the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq is upon us. As a witness providing testimony, like the other witnesses I’m being interviewed by many outlets. Today, one of them was by reporters for one of the larger newspapers in Turkey, the Yeni Safak Newspaper.

I’ll leave the reporters nameless, for reasons you’ll soon see.

The newspaper has been translating various articles of mine into Turkish and running them, particularly those concerning the most recent Fallujah massacre. The report who was interviewing me today told me that the former American consulate here, Eric Edelman, asked the Prime Minister of Turkey to pressure his paper to not run so many of my stories.

“Why did he do this,” I asked him.

“Edelman said it was the wrong news,” he told me with a smile.

Turns out Edelman also asked that articles by Robert Fisk and Naomi Klein not be run so often in Yeni Safak either.

He smiled at me while he watched the wheels turning in my head before I smiled back and said, “That makes me very happy, it means I’m doing my job as a journalist.”

We laughed heartily together at this, as did everyone else at the table.

Reminds me of the obtuse hate mails I sometimes receive-confirmation that I am doing my job-they always make me smile.

So the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/un-informed about the goings on in Iraq. If the American government is attempting to censor the news in foreign countries, you can imagine what they are doing at home.

Because people like Edelman don’t want citizens of the United States to know that events like the massacre of Fallujah or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib are not isolated incidents.

People like Edelman don’t want people to know what one of my sources in Baquba just told me today.

His email reads:

“Near the city of Buhrez, 5 kilometers south of Baquba, two Humvess of American soldiers were destroyed recently. American and Iraqi soldiers came to the city afterwards and cut all the phones, cut the water, cut medicine from arriving in the city and told them that until the people of the city bring the “terrorists” to them, the embargo will continue.”

The embargo has been in place now for one week now, and he continued:

“The Americans still won’t anyone or any medicines and supplies into Buhrez, nor will they allow any people in or out. Even the Al-Sadr followers who organized some help for the people in the city (water, food, medicine) are not being allowed into the city. Even journalists cannot enter to publish the news, and the situation there is so bad. The Americans keep asking for the people in the city to bring them the persons who were in charge of destroying the two Humvees on the other side of the city, but of course the people in the city don’t know who carried out the attack.”

People like Edelman don’t want people to know about the recent US attacks in Al-Qa’im and Haditha either. Attacks that Iraqis are describing as just as bad as the massacre of Fallujah.

On Haditha and Al-Qa’im, an Iraqi doctor sent me this email yesterday:

“Listen…we witnessed crimes in the west area of the country of what the bastards did in Haditha and Al-Qa’im. It was a crime, a really big crime we have witnessed and filmed in those places and recently also in Fallujah. We need big help in the western area of the country. Our doctors need urgent help there. Please, this is an URGENT humanitarian request from the hospitals in the west of the country. We have big proof on how the American troops destroyed one of our hospitals, how they burned the whole store of medication of the west area of Iraq and how they killed a patient in the ward…how they prevented us from helping the people in al-Qa’im. This is an URGENT Humanitarian request. The hospitals in the west of Iraq ask for urgent help…we are in a big humanitarian medical disaster…”

People like Edelman don’t want the public to know that the same tactics used in Fallujah by the US military-posting snipers around the city to shoot anyone who moves, targeting ambulances, impeding medical care, or the detaining of innocent civilians en masse.

After all, Fallujah is the model. Fallujah is our Guernica. And now, Haditha, Al-Qa’im can be added to the list, with Baquba and Buhrez under deconstruction.

Posted by Dahr_Jamail at June 23, 2005 10:38 PM

©2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

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Iraq creating new breed of jihadists, says CIA

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U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative
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American Character Gets Mixed Reviews
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Released: 06.23.05

Für den ganzen Bericht siehe hier:
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=247

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Navigate this report
Introduction: 16-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey
I: Image of the United States
II: Image of the American People
III: Opinions of U.S. Policies
IV: Views of America`s Role in the World
V: Other Findings
Country Factsheets
Questionnaire

Introduction: 16-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey

Anti-Americanism in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which surged as a result of the U.S. war in Iraq, shows modest signs of abating. But the United States remains broadly disliked in most countries surveyed, and the opinion of the American people is not as positive as it once was. The magnitude of America`s image problem is such that even popular U.S. policies have done little to repair it. President George W. Bush`s calls for greater democracy in the Middle East and U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Asia have been well-received in many countries, but only in Indonesia, India and Russia has there been significant improvement in overall opinions of the U.S.

Attitudes toward the U.S. remain quite negative in the Muslim world, though hostility toward America has eased in some countries. Many Muslims see the U.S. supporting democracy in their countries, and many of those who are optimists about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East give at least some credit to U.S. policies. But progress for America`s image in these countries is measured in small steps; solid majorities in all five predominantly Muslim countries surveyed still express unfavorable views of the United States.

The polling in Western Europe, conducted in the weeks leading up to the decisive rejection of the European Union constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands, finds pockets of deep public dissatisfaction with national conditions and concern in several countries over immigration from the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

There are no signs, however, that Euro-skepticism about the EU has fueled a desire for a closer trans-Atlantic partnership. On the contrary, most Europeans surveyed want to take a more independent approach from the U.S. on security and diplomatic affairs.

Indeed, opinion of the U.S. continues to be mostly unfavorable among the publics of America`s traditional allies, except Great Britain and Canada. Even in those two countries, however, favorable views of the U.S. have slipped over the past two years. Moreover, support for the U.S.-led war on terror has plummeted in Spain and eroded elsewhere in Europe.
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Japan, France and Germany are all more highly regarded than the United States among the countries of Europe; even the British and Canadians have a more favorable view of these three nations than they do of America. Strikingly, China now has a better image than the U.S. in most of the European nations surveyed.

Attitudes toward the U.S. in the former Soviet bloc nations of Poland and Russia are much more positive than in most of Western Europe. In Russia, favorable opinion of its former Cold War adversary has swelled from 36% in 2002 to 52% currently. Opinions of the U.S. in Poland have declined since 2002, but still remain relatively positive (62%).

The latest survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted among nearly 17,000 people in the United States and 15 other countries from April 20-May 31, finds that America`s image is strongest in India. Fully 71% in India express a positive opinion of the United States, compared with 54% three years ago.

Positive opinions of the U.S. in Indonesia, which had plummeted to as low as 15% in 2003, also have rebounded to 38%. The U.S. tsunami aid effort has been widely hailed there; 79% of Indonesians say they have a more favorable view of the U.S. as a result of the relief efforts. With the exception of Christian opinion in Lebanon, views of the U.S. in other predominantly Muslim nations are more negative and have changed little. In Turkey, hostility toward the U.S. and the American people has intensified. Nearly half of Turks (46%) say they have a very unfavorable view of Americans, up from just 32% a year ago.

Yet there is modest optimism among Muslims that the Middle East will become more democratic. And even in countries like Jordan and Pakistan, where people have low regard for the U.S., many who believe the region will become more democratic give some credit to U.S. policies for making this possible. Roughly half of respondents in Jordan ­ and nearly two-thirds of Indonesians ­ think the U.S. favors democracy in their countries. About half of the public in Lebanon also takes that view. But on this question and others relating to opinions of the U.S., Lebanon`s Muslim majority (about 60% of the population) is far more negative than its minority Christian population.

The survey finds that while China is well-regarded in both Europe and Asia, its burgeoning economic power elicits mixed reactions. Majorities or pluralities in France and Spain believe that China`s growing economy has a negative impact on their countries. Respondents in the Netherlands and Great Britain have much more positive reactions to China`s economic growth. Public opinion in the U.S. on this issue is divided ­ 49% view China`s economic emergence as a good thing, while 40% say it has a negative impact on the U.S.

Whatever their views on China`s increasing economic power, European publics are opposed to the idea of China becoming a military rival to the U.S, despite their deep reservations over American policies and hegemony. Solid majorities in every European nation ­ except Turkey ­ believe that China`s emergence as a military superpower would be a bad thing. In Turkey and most other predominantly Muslim countries, where antagonism toward the U.S. runs much deeper, most people think a Chinese challenge to American military power would be a good thing.

Nonetheless, there is considerable support across every country surveyed, with the notable exception of the U.S., for some other country or group of countries to rival the United States militarily. In France, 85% of respondents believe it would be good if the EU or another country emerged as a military rival to the U.S.

Most Western Europeans want their countries to take a more independent approach from the U.S. on diplomatic and security affairs than it has in the past. The European desire for greater autonomy from the U.S. is increasingly shared by the Canadian public; 57% of Canadians favor Canada taking a more independent approach from the U.S., up from 43% two years ago. The American public, by contrast, increasingly favors closer ties with U.S. allies in Western Europe.

As in the past, the perception that the United States conducts a unilateral foreign policy is widely shared across the surveyed countries. Overwhelming percentages of people in Europe and the Middle East believe that the United States does not take their countries` interests into account when making foreign policy. Yet there are a few notable exceptions. Majorities in India (63%) and China2 (53%) believe the U.S. takes their respective countries` interests into account at least a fair amount. The percentage in Indonesia expressing that view has more than doubled since 2003 (from 25% to 59%), probably reflecting the overwhelmingly positive reaction in response to U.S. tsunami relief in that country.

The U.S. tsunami relief effort led to more favorable views of the U.S. for most nations surveyed. But goodwill generated by U.S. tsunami relief has been largely offset by the negative reactions to Bush`s re-election and the continuing war in Iraq. Roughly three-quarters of the publics in Germany (77%), Canada (75%) and France (74%) say Bush`s re-election has made them feel less favorable toward the U.S. And particularly in Western Europe, most of those who express an unfavorable view of the U.S. mostly blame Bush, rather than a more general problem with America.

The war in Iraq continues to draw broad international opposition, and there is scant optimism that the elections in that country this past January will foster stability. Even the American public now has diminished expectations that the January elections held in Iraq will lead to a more stable situation there. The United States and India are the only countries surveyed in which pluralities believe Saddam Hussein`s removal from power has made the world a safer place.

While the war in Iraq is as unpopular in Europe as it was in 2003 and 2004, there is still majority support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism among Western publics that are otherwise highly critical of the U.S., notably in Germany and France. But support for the war on terrorism has all but evaporated in Spain since 2003 and, notably, Canadian opinion on the American-led war on terror is now evenly divided.

Mixed Views of the American People

The new poll finds Canadians holding increasingly negative views of both the U.S. and the American people.

In most Western countries surveyed, majorities associate Americans with the positive characteristics "honest," "inventive" and "hardworking." At the same time, substantial numbers also associate Americans with the negative traits "greedy" and "violent." Canadians, who presumably have the greatest contact with Americans, agree with Europeans on the negatives, but are less likely to view Americans as honest. And Canada is the only Western nation in which a majority (53%) regards Americans as rude.

Muslim publics, including Indonesians, are highly critical of Americans in many respects. In particular, they are much more likely than others to view the American people as immoral. Yet people in predominantly Muslim countries also see Americans as hardworking and inventive.

The Chinese are also largely critical of Americans. They are the least likely of these 16 publics to consider Americans hardworking (44%) and just over a third (35%) see Americans as honest. A majority of Chinese associate Americans with being violent (61%) and greedy (57%). The one positive trait most Chinese associate with Americans is inventive (70%).

By contrast, Indians hold largely positive views of the American people. Clear majorities see Americans as inventive, hardworking and honest (86%, 81% and 58% respectively). None of the negative traits is linked with Americans by a majority in India.

The American people`s self assessment also identifies both virtues and faults. With respect to the latter, a large percentage of the U.S. public (70%) characterizes the American people as greedy, and many also see their countrymen as violent (49%).

The biggest gap between the way Americans are seen by other Western countries, and the way they see themselves, is with respect to religion. Majorities in France and the Netherlands and pluralities in Great Britain and Germany see the U.S. as too religious. By contrast, a 58% majority of Americans say their country is not religious enough. On this point, Muslims find themselves in rare agreement with the American public; majorities in Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Turkey all believe the U.S. is not religious enough.

America`s international image problem is not lost on its own people. Just 26% of the U.S. public thinks the country is well-liked by people around the world. Only the Turks and Russians come close in seeing their country as internationally unpopular (30% and 32% well-liked, respectively). Canadians stand out for their nearly universal belief (94%) that other nations have a positive view of Canada.

The American public also looks at U.S. conduct in the world much differently than do publics in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In response to a hypothetical question, Americans overwhelmingly (73%) see the U.S. as the major power most likely to come to the aid of people threatened by genocide. Only Poles, Canadians and Germans see the U.S. this way in any significant numbers. America evokes even less confidence with respect to the global environment. Fewer than one-in-ten Western Europeans surveyed most trust the U.S. in this regard. But 59% of Americans say they most trust the U.S. to do the right thing in protecting the world`s environment.

Roadmap to the Report

The first section of the report analyzes how the people in other countries of the world view the United States and each other. Section II focuses on attitudes toward the American people. Second III examines opinions of U.S. policies with special focus on the potential for democracy in the Middle East, anti-terrorism efforts and the war in Iraq. Section IV explores views of America`s role as the world`s military and economic superpower. A final section analyzes attitudes on a variety of global issues including attitudes toward China`s economic and military emergence and views about immigration.

A description of the Pew Global Attitudes Project and a list of the countries surveyed immediately follows. A summary of the methodology can be found at the end of the report, along with complete results for all countries surveyed.

About the Pew Global Attitudes Project

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is a series of worldwide public opinion surveys encompassing a broad array of subjects ranging from people`s assessments of their own lives to their views about the current state of the world and important issues of the day. The Pew Global Attitudes Project is co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, currently principal, the Albright Group LLC, and by former Senator John C. Danforth, currently partner, Bryan Cave LLP. The project is directed by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" in Washington, DC, that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The Pew Global Attitudes Project is principally funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided a supplemental grant for the 2002 survey.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project was originally conceived with two primary objectives: to gauge attitudes in every region toward globalization, trade and an increasingly connected world; and to measure changes in attitudes toward democracy and other key issues among some of the European populations surveyed in the 13-nation 1991 benchmark survey, the Pulse of Europe (also directed by Dr. Albright and Mr. Kohut). After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the scope of the project was broadened to measure attitudes about terrorism, the intersection between the Islamic faith and public policy in countries with significant Muslim populations, and to probe attitudes toward the United States more deeply in all countries. Recent Global Attitudes surveys have gauged worldwide opinion about international news developments, including the war in Iraq. Over time, the project has surveyed more than 90,000 people in 50 countries.

The inaugural effort of this project was a worldwide survey in 24 countries of 275 opinion leaders (influential people in politics, media, business, culture and government). The survey, entitled "America Admired, Yet its New Vulnerability Seen as Good Thing, Say Opinion Leaders," was released December 19, 2001. The first multinational public opinion survey was conducted in the summer of 2002 in 44 nations. The first major report, "What the World Thinks in 2002," was released December 4, 2002. It focused on how people view their own lives, their countries and the world, as well as attitudes toward the United States. It was followed by a smaller release on the importance of religion worldwide (December 19, 2002) and a new nine-country survey on the eve of the Iraq war ("America`s Image Further Erodes, Europeans Want Weaker Ties," March 18, 2003). The second major release of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Views of a Changing World, June 2003" focused on a changing world, specifically with respect to globalization, democratization, modernization and, in countries with significant Muslim populations, the role of Islam in public policy. It included a survey of 21 populations conducted in May 2003, as major hostilities ended in Iraq. In March 2004, at the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a 9-nation survey entitled "Mistrust of America in Europe ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists." This report, "U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative; American Character Gets Mixed Reviews," is the ninth Global Attitudes survey release.

Other Pew Global Attitudes Project team members include Bruce Stokes, an international economics columnist at the National Journal; Mary McIntosh, president of Princeton Survey Research Associates International; Wendy Sherman, principal at The Albright Group LLC, and Jodie T. Allen, Nicole Speulda, Paul Taylor, Carroll Doherty, Carolyn Funk, Michael Dimock, Elizabeth Mueller Gross and others of the Pew Research Center. The International Herald Tribune is the international newspaper partner of the Global Attitudes Project.

Secretary Albright and Senator Danforth co-chair the Pew Global Attitudes Project international advisory board, consisting of policy experts and business leaders. In addition, the Pew Global Attitudes Project team consulted with survey and policy experts, academic regional and economic experts, activists and policy-makers. Their expertise provided tremendous guidance in shaping the surveys.

Following each release, the data will be examined in greater detail for a series of in-depth discussions and publications of several of the varied topics covered in these surveys. The Pew Global Attitudes Project is a unique, comprehensive, internationally comparable series of surveys that will be available to journalists, academics, policymakers and the public.

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June 24, 2005
Iraqis Tallying Range of Graft in Rebuilding
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/international/middleeast/2…
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 - Allegations of widespread corruption have dogged the Iraqi government since the invasion in 2003, when billions of dollars for reconstruction and training began pouring into the country. Many programs had far less impact than expected, but persistent rumors that money was being siphoned by corrupt officials were largely impossible to pin down.

Now, an office originally set up by the American occupation to investigate corruption in Iraq has accumulated the first solid estimates of the problem. The results are likely to fuel the most pessimistic concerns over where the money has gone.
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The abuses range from sweetheart deals on leases, to exorbitant contracts for things like garbage hauling, to payments for construction that was never done.

Since it began doing business in earnest last July, the office, now run by the Iraqi government and called the Commission on Public Integrity, has looked into more than 814 cases of potential wrongdoing, producing 399 investigations that were still open at the end of May. So far, arrest warrants have been issued for 44 Iraqi government employees.

The open cases include investigations into several ministries in the government of the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and warrants for two of his ministers, said Ali al-Shabot, spokesman for the commission, who provided the data during interviews this week.

The cases touch not just the executive branch but sprawl across provincial and city governments. Mr. Shabot declined to give extensive details on individual cases, citing pending litigation. But a check with some agencies that have sent complaints to the commission disclose some apparent rackets that would not surprise anyone familiar with governmental corruption in the west, especially big-city corruption.

In one case, said Mazin A. Makkia, head of the Baghdad City Council, the cost for a garbage-hauling job shot up fivefold in one year, even though the original contract was already far overpriced. In cases involving American money, Mr. Makkia said, the council is looking into what appear to be phantom rebuilding projects - expenditures that have left a paper trail but no trace on the landscape of the city.

"It`s so clear where the money goes," he said, smiling wearily.

But beyond suggesting that contractors and city officials had enriched themselves, Mr. Makkia said he would not point fingers until the investigations were completed.

The commission, formed by the former chief American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, is legally allowed to investigate governmental corruption as far back as 1968. But many of the most prominent cases concern the Allawi government, prompting the former prime minister to claim that political bias is at work, a charge the commission stoutly denies.

"We are not targeting the ex-prime minister," Mr. Shabot said. "It`s not true and it`s incorrect."

Other cases reported, especially in a nation whose health-care system is stretched far beyond its limits, raise eyebrows even among the most cynical observers of official graft. In Kut, a city in the south, an official is accused of taking kickbacks in a case involving a public hospital that was improperly leased to a well-connected private cooperative for 1,000 Iraqi dinars (about 70 cents) a year, said Abdul Jaleel al-Shemari, the deputy health minister.
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Yet another involves possible overpricing and incorrect technical specifications on a large shipment of ambulances from Canada, Dr. Shemari said. The two former cabinet officials in Dr. Allawi`s government are also suspected of manipulating contracts of various kinds.

"They`ve wasted the public money," said Mr. Shabot of those officials, whom he identified as the former minister of labor, Layla Abdul Lateef, and the former minister of transportation, Louay Hatem al-Eris. "Misuse of authority," Mr. Shabot said, ticking off the charges. "Misusing their post for personal interest."

Ms. Lateef, who had to submit to a police raid on her house, declined through a relative to comment. Mr. Eris was believed to be traveling abroad and could not be reached.

The former housing minister, Omar al-Farouk al-Damluji, said in an interview that he was also the target of an investigation by the commission and he professed his innocence.

In past statements that were often little noticed at the time, the head of the commission, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has also hinted that Dr. Allawi`s ministries of defense, interior, electricity and health may be investigated. The issue of corruption was brought to Western attention this week during an international meeting in Brussels, when Hussain al-Shahristani, the influential deputy speaker of the National Assembly, said that corruption had reached "disastrous proportions" since 2003 and that some countries had been unwilling to send financial aid as a result. Dr. Shahristani made his comments to Reuters.

Few Iraqi officials deny that corruption at some level is a fact of life in their government. Even Dr. Allawi concedes that when he was in office, he ordered corruption investigations into three of his own ministers after receiving complaints.

All three of the ministers are among those that have been mentioned as targets or potential targets of the commission, Dr. Allawi said in an interview. But he said he had insisted that the investigations be secret, unlike the practice at the commission, which has occasionally spoken freely to the Arab press.

Dr. Allawi said that during his tenure, he was appalled to learn of the commission`s investigation into Mr. Damluji from a radio report. Then, after he stepped down, there was the raid on Ms. Lateef`s house.

"Do you know what they did?" Dr. Allawi said. "They sent police to break into her house. You know, it reminded me of Saddam`s days. And her neighbors, and most of them are ministers, they came to her rescue."

Dr. Allawi, a secular Shiite politician and member of the opposition in a National Assembly dominated by a Shiite party with a heavy clerical influence, insists there is more than a slight political tinge to the commission`s work. But as an independent body, the commission did not change personnel with the arrival of the new government, possibly weakening that claim.

Mr. Shabot also points out that the commission can only investigate allegations and collect evidence, ultimately referring criminal cases to the courts. Many cases originate with inspectors general in the ministries and are sometimes sent back to the same officials if an administrative rather than a criminal punishment is called for. Nearly 130 cases have been handled in that way, Mr. Shabot said.

But Dr. Allawi and his supporters question the assertion that there is no bias. While the makeup of the commission has not changed, a number of inspectors did come in with the new government, said Nesreen M. Siddeek Berwari, the public works minister under both Dr. Allawi and the current government. She says those officials have shown political bias in their work. The new inspector in her own ministry is a Shiite closely linked with the new government, said Ms. Berwari, a Kurd who is under no suspicion of wrongdoing.

The new inspector has so far focused almost exclusively on cases involving Sunni Arabs and Kurds, she said, illustrating what she sees as a larger problem with the commission.

"I`m afraid that the current cases are politically motivated," Ms. Berwari said. "The new question - how uncorrupt is the public integrity office?"

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 24, 2005
We Are All French Now?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/opinion/24friedman.html?

Ah, those French. How silly can they be? The European Union wants to consolidate its integration and France, trying to protect its own 35-hour workweek and other welfare benefits, rejects the E.U. constitution. What a bunch of antiglobalist Gaullist Luddites! Yo, Jacques, what world do you think you`re livin` in, pal? Get with the program! It`s called Anglo-American capitalism, mon ami.

Lordy, it is fun poking fun at France. But wait ...wait ... what is that noise I hear coming from the U.S. Congress? Is that ... is that members of the U.S. Congress - many of them Democrats - threatening to reject Cafta, the Central American Free Trade Agreement? Is that members of the U.S. Congress afraid to endorse a free-trade agreement, signed over a year ago, with El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic? Mon Dieu! I am afraid it is. And for many of the same reasons France has resisted more integration: a protectionist fear of competition in a world without walls.

Yes, we are all Frenchmen now.

Well, not quite. But that is where we are heading in the U.S. if we let the combination of the sugar lobby, which wants to block more imports from Central America; the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which doesn`t like any free trade agreements; and Democrats who just want to defeat Cafta so they can make President Bush a lame duck have their way and block Cafta ratification. I understand Democrats want to stick it to Mr. Bush, but could they please defeat him on a policy he is wrong about (there are plenty) and not on expanding free trade in this hemisphere, which he is right about.

The French economic instinct is not one we want to start emulating now, just as the global playing field is being flattened, bringing in more competitors from Poland to China to India. This is a time to play to our strengths of openness, flexibility and willingness to embrace creative destruction, and lead on free trade.

The McKinsey Global Institute just published a study of how both Germany and France have suffered, compared with the U.S., by trying to put up walls against outsourcing and offshoring. It noted: "A new competitive dynamic is emerging: early movers in offshoring improve their cost position and boost their market share, creating new jobs in the process. Companies who resist the trend will see increasingly unfavorable cost positions that erode market share and eventually end in job destruction. This is why adopting protectionist policies to stop companies from offshoring would be a mistake. Offshoring is a powerful way for companies to reduce their costs and improve the quality and kinds of products they offer consumers, allowing them to invest in the next generation of technology and create the jobs of tomorrow."

Cafta is critical for enabling U.S. and Central American textile firms to compete with China. U.S. firms specialize in the more sophisticated work of making dyes, designing patterns and manufacturing specialized yarns, threads and fabrics, and the Cafta countries specialize in the labor-intensive sewing. Because the Cafta countries are right next door, U.S. retailers can respond quickly to changes in the marketplace, which far-off Chinese factories cannot do as easily. That`s also why, explains Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, that a shirt that says "Made in Honduras" might contain 60 percent U.S. content, while a similar shirt that says "Made in China" most likely would have none.

Finally, there is geopolitics. In the 1980`s, we were worried Central America was going to go communist. Now we are worried it is going to go capitalist? We spent billions fighting communism there. Now we have a chance to help consolidate these fragile democracies by locking in a trading relationship with the U.S. that is critical for their development. Shame on us if we balk.

But President Bush needs to spend some political capital and sell this deal in these terms. "The administration has to get out and connect the dots for people," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a thoughtful new book on foreign policy, "The Opportunity: America`s Moment to Alter History`s Course." "Otherwise the vocal minority will trump the interests of the majority. We should not assume that this backlash [against free trade] that is going around is just a French malaise or Dutch elm disease. It could happen here." But if we think we can indulge protectionism and not worry about the geopolitical spillovers in our own backyard, that is a real illusion. "The world is not Las Vegas," added Mr. Haass. "What happens there will not stay there."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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June 24, 2005
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/opinion/24krugman.html

VIENNA

In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.

America`s founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That`s why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.

But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn`t turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won`t be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.

Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.

The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there`s plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.

And then there`s the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister`s meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn`t get much clearer than that.

The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn`t. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn`t inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.

Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they`re wrong: it`s crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.

Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.

In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq`s W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.

Once the media catch up with the public, we`ll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

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* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Rumsfeld claims Iraq is not a quagmire
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story…

24 June 2005

As Baghdad reeled from a deadly new spate of bombings, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, insisted that the US was not losing the war in Iraq. But the top US regional commander said the insurgency was undiminished, and ever more foreign fighters were entering the country.

In sombre and sometimes highly charged exchanges with a key congressional panel yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld rejected demands that the Bush administration set a timetable for the withdrawal of the 140,000 US troopsin Iraq.

"Timing in war is never predictable; there are never any guarantees," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. A timetable would play into the hands of the resistance. "Those who say we are losing this war are wrong. We are not." Mr Rumsfeld was flanked at the witness table by the Pentagon`s most senior uniformed officials, including General John Abizaid, in overall charge of operations in the Gulf. Their appearance came as the Bush administration`s Iraq policy faces unprecedented difficulties, amid rising violence on the ground, growing US casualties and dwindling public support for the war.

More than 30 people have died in eight bombings in Iraq in the past 36 hours, while a leaked CIA report has warned the country is turning into an even more effective training ground for terrorists than Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Pentagon commanders are worried about the growing sophistication of the bombs and other devices used against US troops. More than 1,700 US soldiers have died in Iraq, and more than 10,000 have been wounded, while hardly a day passes without new reports of problems in attracting new recruits to bolster an overstretched military.

The fiercest questioning yesterday came from Democrats, led by Edward Kennedy. "Isn`t it time for you to resign?" asked the Massachusetts senator, blaming Mr Rumsfeld for a series of "gross errors and mistakes" that had made an "intractable quagmire".

The Defence Secretary and his colleagues vehemently rejected the dreaded "Q word", so redolent of Vietnam. But "more foreign fighters are coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," General Abizaid conceded, implicitly contradicting Vice-President Dick Cheney`s recent assertion that the insurgency was "in its last throes".

Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, seized on the discrepancy, claiming it as further proof the administration was refusing to face facts. "I don`t know that I would make any comment about that other than to say there`s a lot of work to be done," was all General Abizaid could say.

Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned: "The security situation has got worse rather than better, and the President has got to level with the American people. More jihadists, more al- Qa`ida operatives, are crossing the Syrian border into Iraq."

The United States could still win in Iraq, he added, "but only if the White House corrects course, rather than just promising to `stay the course`."

Mr Biden, who has all but declared he will run for the presidency in 2008, was speaking after a meeting with the visiting Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who holds talks with President Bush today.

Several leading Republicans too have accused the administration of painting an over-rosy picture of events in Iraq.

Public disillusion over Iraq has driven Mr Bush`s approval ratings down to little over 40 per cent, the lowest of any second-term president since Richard Nixon. He is expected to make a major speech on Iraq early next week, to mark the first anniversary of the handover of government to Iraqis.


24 June 2005 09:26

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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