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Meritocracy in America
Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend
http://www.economist.com/world/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_…

Dec 29th 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC

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Whatever happened to the belief that any American could get to the top?

THE United States likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of meritocracy: a country where people are judged on their individual abilities rather than their family connections. The original colonies were settled by refugees from a Europe in which the restrictions on social mobility were woven into the fabric of the state, and the American revolution was partly a revolt against feudalism. From the outset, Americans believed that equality of opportunity gave them an edge over the Old World, freeing them from debilitating snobberies and at the same time enabling everyone to benefit from the abilities of the entire population. They still do.

To be sure, America has often betrayed its fine ideals. The Founding Fathers did not admit women or blacks to their meritocratic republic. The country`s elites have repeatedly flirted with the aristocratic principle, whether among the brahmins of Boston or, more flagrantly, the rural ruling class in the South. Yet America has repeatedly succeeded in living up to its best self, and today most Americans believe that their country still does a reasonable job of providing opportunities for everybody, including blacks and women. In Europe, majorities of people in every country except Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia believe that forces beyond their personal control determine their success. In America only 32% take such a fatalistic view.

But are they right? A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.

Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was $1.3m: 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is $37.5m: over 1,000 times the pay of the average worker. In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.

More dynastic than dynamic

Most Americans see nothing wrong with inequality of income so long as it comes with plenty of social mobility: it is simply the price paid for a dynamic economy. But the new rise in inequality does not seem to have come with a commensurate rise in mobility. There may even have been a fall.

The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America`s business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul`s, a posh private school, and Yale—where, like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones society.

Mr Kerry`s predecessor as the Democrats` presidential nominee, Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh private school, St Albans, and then at Harvard. And Mr Kerry`s main challenger from the left of his party? Howard Brush Dean was the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools and unchanging middle names as Mr Bush (one of Mr Bush`s grandmothers was even a bridesmaid to one of Mr Dean`s). Mr Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on New York`s Park Avenue.

The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America`s elite—and its growing grip on the political system—is how little comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is happening throughout American society. Everywhere you look in modern America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.

It`s sticky out there

All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter.

The Economic Policy Institute also argues that social mobility has declined since the 1970s. In the 1990s 36% of those who started in the second-poorest 20% stayed put, compared with 28% in the 1970s and 32% in the 1980s. In the 1970s 12% of the population moved from the bottom fifth to either the fourth or the top fifth. In the 1980s and 1990s the figures shrank to below 11% for both decades. The figure for those who stayed in the top fifth increased slightly but steadily over the three decades, reinforcing the sense of diminished social mobility.

Not all social scientists accept the conclusion that mobility is declining. Gary Solon, of the University of Michigan, argues that there is no evidence of any change in social-mobility rates, down or up. But, at the least, most people agree that the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in social mobility.

Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward mobility was particularly low for black families. On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.

Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility “slightly decreased” in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings.

Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysed family incomes over three decades. They found that 40% of families remained stuck in the same income bracket in the 1990s, compared with 37% of families in the 1980s and 36% in the 1970s. Aaron Bernstein of Business Week points out that, even though the 1990s boom lifted pay rates for low-earners, it did not help them to get better jobs.

There is also growing evidence that America is less socially mobile than many other rich countries. Mr Solon finds that the correlation between the incomes of fathers and sons is higher in the United States than in Germany, Sweden, Finland or Canada. Such cross-national comparisons are rife with problems: different studies use different methods and different definitions of social status. But Americans are clearly mistaken if they believe they live in the world`s most mobile society.

Back to the 1880s

This is not the first time that America has looked as if it was about to succumb to what might be termed the British temptation. America witnessed a similar widening of the income gap in the Gilded Age. It also witnessed the formation of a British-style ruling class. The robber barons of the late 19th century sent their children to private boarding schools and made sure that they married the daughters of the old elite, preferably from across the Atlantic. Politics fell into the hands of the members of a limited circle—so much so that the Senate was known as the millionaires` club.

Yet the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a concerted attempt to prevent America from degenerating into a class-based society. Progressive politicians improved state education. Philanthropists—many of them the robber barons reborn in new guise—tried to provide ladders to help the lads-o`-parts (Andrew Carnegie poured millions into free libraries). Such reforms were motivated partly out of a desire to do good works and partly out of a real fear of the implications of class-based society. Teddy Roosevelt advocated an inheritance tax because he thought that huge inherited fortunes would ruin the character of the republic. James Conant, the president of Harvard in 1933-53, advocated radical educational reform—particularly the transformation of his own university into a meritocracy—in order to prevent America from producing an aristocracy.

Pushy parents, driven brats

The evils that Roosevelt and Conant worried about are clearly beginning to reappear. But so far there are few signs of a reform movement. Why not?

The main reason may be a paradoxical one: because the meritocratic revolution of the first half of the 20th century has been at least half successful. Members of the American elite live in an intensely competitive universe. As children, they are ferried from piano lessons to ballet lessons to early-reading classes. As adolescents, they cram in as much after-school coaching as possible. As students, they compete to get into the best graduate schools. As young professionals, they burn the midnight oil for their employers. And, as parents, they agonise about getting their children into the best universities. It is hard for such people to imagine that America is anything but a meritocracy: their lives are a perpetual competition. Yet it is a competition among people very much like themselves—the offspring of a tiny slither of society—rather than among the full range of talents that the country has to offer.

The second reason is that America`s engines of upward mobility are no longer working as effectively as they once were. The most obvious example lies in the education system. Upward mobility is increasingly determined by education. The income of people with just a high-school diploma was flat in 1975-99, whereas that of people with a bachelor`s degree rose substantially, and that of people with advanced degrees rocketed.

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Roosevelt`s warnings go unheeded
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The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has labelled “soft America”. Soft America is allergic to introducing accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for outstanding pupils. Dumbed-down schools are particularly harmful to poor children, who are unlikely to be able to compensate for them at home.

America`s great universities are increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities. Poorer students are at a huge disadvantage, both when they try to get in and, if they are successful, in their ability to make the most of what is on offer. This disadvantage is most marked in the elite colleges that hold the keys to the best jobs. Three-quarters of the students at the country`s top 146 colleges come from the richest socio-economic fourth, compared with just 3% who come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.

One reason for this is government money. The main federal programme supporting poorer students is the Pell grant: 90% of such grants go to families with incomes below $41,000. But the federal government has been shifting resources from Pell grants to other forms of aid to higher education. Student loans are unrelated to family resources. Federal tax breaks for higher education benefit the rich. State subsidies for higher education benefit rich and poor alike. At the same time, colleges are increasingly using financial aid to attract talented students away from competitors rather than to help the poor.

Another reason may be “affirmative action”—programmes designed to help members of racial minorities. These are increasingly used by elite universities, in the belief that race is a reasonable proxy for social disadvantage, which it may not be. Flawed as it may be, however, this kind of affirmative action is much less pernicious than another practised by many universities: “legacy preferences”, a programme for the children of alumni—as if privileged children were not already doing well enough out of the education system.

In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, “legacies” make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to be admitted than others. The students in America`s places of higher education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial preferences. This is sad in itself, but even sadder when you consider the extraordinary role that the same universities—particularly Conant`s Harvard—played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the 20th century.

All snakes, no ladders

America`s great companies are also becoming less successful agents of upward mobility. The years from 1880 to 1960 were a period of great corporate behemoths. These produced a new class of Americans—professional managers. They built elaborate internal hierarchies, and also accepted their responsibilities to both their workers and their local communities. But since the 1970s the pressure of competition has forced these behemoths to become much leaner—to reduce their layers, contract out some activities, and shift from full-time to part-time employees. It has became harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. And it has also become harder for managers to keep their jobs in a single company.

There are a few shafts of sun on the horizon. George Bush`s No Child Left Behind Act tries to use a mixture of tests and punishments for lousy schools to improve the performance of minority children. Senator Edward Kennedy bangs the drum against legacy preferences. But the bad news outdoes the good. The Republicans, by getting rid of inheritance tax, seem hell-bent on ignoring Teddy Roosevelt`s warnings about the dangers of a hereditary aristocracy. The Democrats are more interested in preferment for minorities than building ladders of opportunity for all.

In his classic “The Promise of American Life”, Herbert Croly noted that “a democracy, not less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must recognise political, economic, and social distinctions, but it must also withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to excessive endurance.” So far Americans have been fairly tolerant of economic distinctions. But that tolerance may not last for ever, if the current trend towards “excessive endurance” is not reversed.


Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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Das katastrophale Versagen des White House bei dem Hurricane Katrina wird in einem Untersuchungsbericht aufgearbeitet.

January 28, 2006
Hurricane Investigators See `Fog of War` at White House
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/national/nationalspecial/2…

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The White House was beset by the "fog of war" in the crucial days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, leaving it unable to respond properly to the unfolding catastrophe, House investigators said Friday after getting the most detailed briefing yet on how President Bush`s staff had handled the events.

The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush`s deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators` requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.

Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.

But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.

The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."

"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government`s response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information — and that had consequences."

Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, who also attended the briefing, acknowledged that all levels of the government had suffered from a lack of clarity about the events as they developed.

"There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels," Mr. Duffy said in an interview on Friday. "That is one of the biggest lessons everyone in emergency preparedness has learned because of the storm."

With the House not yet in session, only one lawmaker from the investigative committee — its chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia — was present for the briefing. Mr. Rapuano told him and the staff investigators that the White House role had been to monitor the situation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, were operationally in charge, he said.

The investigators expressed frustration that the White House did not seem to have been more actively involved. But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."

The committee staff members also asked why it had taken Mr. Bush until the following Saturday, nearly a week after the storm, to order a large number of federal troops to the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Rapuano said that the Pentagon had already started to send troops and that in fact 5,000 of them had arrived by that point.

Louisiana`s governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had asked for many more three days earlier, but Mr. Rapuano said the problem was that she had not provided specifics as to what kind of troops she needed.

If the investigators cannot determine, through either testimony or written correspondence, what various presidential aides knew, and when, it will be hard to pinpoint where failures occurred within the White House, said Mr. Marin, the staff director for the House committee.

"There is a difference between having enough information to find institutional fault, which we have," he said, "and having information to assign individual blame, which in large part we don`t."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 28, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Fed Speaks
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/opinion/28rattner.html

By STEVEN RATTNER

BEN S. BERNANKE picks up the chairman`s baton at the Federal Reserve next week to face an unusual paradox: thanks to the model stewardship of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, monetary policy — the heart of the Fed`s activities — is marching along in good order, while the rest of economic policy mostly begs for reshaping. Mediocre and inadequate policies outside the Fed`s purview have resulted in huge budget and trade deficits, a nonexistent energy strategy, spiraling federal spending, looming pension and Medicare shortfalls, and a tax structure that has contributed to the greatest income inequality in the last half-century.

More so than many past Fed chairmen, Mr. Greenspan opined on such matters and for much of his tenure, his impact outside of the Fed`s pastures was pronounced: President Clinton`s budget package, banking deregulation and the financial crises in Mexico and Asia were all managed with a strong helping hand from Mr. Greenspan. But since the arrival of the Bush administration in 2001, Mr. Greenspan has sometimes been less sensible (most notably, in his tortured backing of the Bush tax cuts) while his constructive thoughts have been largely ignored.

Fed watchers sometimes grumble that Mr. Greenspan should have stuck to interest rates. Mr. Bernanke himself intimated in his confirmation hearings that he was likely to say less about non-monetary matters. That would be unfortunate.

The Fed chairman is the most important economic policymaker on the planet. Mr. Bernanke`s credibility is further heightened by his impeccable academic credentials, previous service at the Federal Reserve and reputation for speaking directly. His unanimous recommendation from the Senate Banking Committee underscores the political capital and goodwill with which he arrives.

Mr. Bernanke should use his influence. But to make the most of it, he must first show he can sustain Mr. Greenspan`s extraordinary record on monetary matters. To that end, he should re-examine his pet philosophy of centering monetary policy on an inflation target.

Mr. Greenspan has spoken out against this narrow approach, a cousin of the old method of setting a target for the size of the money supply (remember M-1?) that he abandoned in favor of basing interest rate decisions on a vast stew of variables, all analyzed in a quest for balance between steady growth and low inflation.

Inflation targeting, which has been used with seeming success in Britain and several other prospering countries, may be a fine idea. But with job and productivity growth in the United States high and inflation low, why do we need to start experimenting?

Even as Mr. Bernanke shows that he can manage monetary policy, he should begin to speak out on other issues, aiming particularly for those that bear on the Fed`s effectiveness, like deficit control.

Wise Fed chairmen, of course, never comment on interest rates and other sensitive matters. Nor do they issue streams of economic prognoses that are not much more likely to be accurate than those of other well-trained economists.

But warning about economic dangers should be fair game, particularly when using Fed policies would not be appropriate, as has been the case with recent asset bubbles — high-flying stocks back in 2000; housing prices today. Mr. Bernanke should reemphasize the deficit`s impact on interest rates and stress that its meaningful reduction requires both curbing spending and raising revenue through taxes or other means. In these matters, Mr. Bernanke`s clear speaking can be put to good use.

Greater transparency about the Fed`s own actions would also increase Mr. Bernanke`s credibility and influence. For starters, the Fed should release the economic forecasts prepared for meetings of its interest rate-setting body (a release that Mr. Bernanke has indicated he favors), clearly explain its interest rate decisions and provide more timely and illuminating summaries of its deliberations.

Because he lacks Mr. Greenspan`s considerable political experience, Mr. Bernanke may seem at a disadvantage if he ventures beyond interest rates. But we are sorely in need of economic wisdom, and perhaps Americans (and the politicians who represent them) are ready to heed a fresh voice.

Steven Rattner is managing principal at the Quadrangle Group, a private investment firm.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January
27

12:38 pm
Hillary: Don’t Run!
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/

Categories: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Elections 2008

In a bitterly divided and partisan nation, is there anything conservatives and liberals can agree on? Yes: Hillary Clinton, please don’t run for president. [urlLone Star liberal Molly Ivins kicked off a wave of anti-Hillary]http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=3&ColumnsName=miv[/url] commentary with a column last week that began, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Sen. Clinton’s primary shortcoming? Ivins believes she isn’t liberal enough: “Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.”

[urlArianna Huffington joined the chorus next]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-chinks-in-the-hillar_b_14330.html[/url], though for a different reason: She thinks Hillary can’t win. Huffington cited [urlMarisa Katz’s New Republic piece]http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20060130&s=katz013006[/url] examining the many differences between the red states in a presidential election and upstate New York. (The [urlWashington Post’s Chris Cillizza]http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2006/01/parsing_the_pol_4.html[/url], the [urlNew York Observer’s Ben Smith]http://www.observer.com/thepoliticker/2006/01/hillarys-upstate-myth.html[/url] and [urlthe New Republic’s Noam Scheiber]http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=6556][/url] all expressed mild disagreement with Katz’s analysis and suggested that the junior senator from New York would have a shot at winning a national election.)

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo counts himself a Hillary Clinton fan, but he proposes a different reason for opposing her likely presidential candidacy: “political dynasticism.” “I think it’s just a bad thing for the republic, period. … George H. W. Bush left office to be followed by two terms of Bill Clinton. He in turn was followed by two terms of Bush’s son. If those two terms of the son are followed by the election of Clinton’s wife, I don’t see where that’s a good thing for this country. It ceases to be a fluke and grows into a pattern.” ([urlMichael Barone]http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/archives/060126/the_coalition_a_1.htm[/url], at his U.S. News blog, says he’s opposed to a Jeb Bush candidacy for the same reason.)

Conservatives are delighted about liberals’ newfound anti-Hillary animus. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attributes the sentiment to Sen. Clinton’s recent moves to the right. “To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place,” [urlhe wrote in his weekly Los Angeles Times column.]http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg26jan26,0,3285168.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions[/url] “[T]here’s something oddly satisfying in the possibility that Clinton being herself is politically disastrous. And, if she’s really just playing one more role according to some classically Clintonian political triangulation, there’s something equally satisfying to the prospect that even her fans aren’t falling for it anymore.”
[urlLink to This]http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=13[/url]

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Viele Links auf der Seite:

An Unhappy Union
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/01/27…

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, January 27, 2006; 2:21 PM

President Bush will have two major audiences when he delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday night, and one of them is a lot more disappointed in him than the other.

But for a few anemic signs of independence, the Republican-controlled Congress seems happy following his lead. Not so the American public.

A slew of polls are out today telling the story of a people who are decidedly dour about Bush`s performance at almost every level. One suddenly mounting area of concern: ethics. His last source of strength: national security. But even that is something of a mixed bag.
Widespread Discontent

Ronald Brownstein writes in the Los Angeles Times that Bush "faces widespread discontent over his job performance and the nation`s direction that could threaten his party in the 2006 election, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found."

Bush`s approval rating came in at 43 percent, his weakest showing ever in that particular poll.

Brownstein writes: "He received even lower marks for his handling of the economy, healthcare and Iraq -- especially from women, who the poll found had turned against him on several fronts. And by a 2-1 ratio, those surveyed said the nation needed to change direction from the overall course Bush had set.

"But most of those surveyed believed Bush`s policies had made the nation more secure. And a plurality say they trusted him more than they did Democrats to protect the country against terrorism -- advantages that could help Republicans defend their House and Senate majorities in November."

You can see some results here.

Fox News finds Bush`s approval at 41 percent.
Wording Matters

Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder write in the New York Times: "Americans are willing to tolerate eavesdropping without warrants to fight terrorism, but are concerned that the aggressive antiterrorism programs championed by the Bush administration are encroaching on civil liberties, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

"In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration`s eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms. . . .

"The results suggest that Americans` view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said."

The Times poll finds Bush`s job approval at 42 percent, up 1 point from early December, "a lackluster rating that could hamper his ability to rally public opinion behind his agenda and push legislation through a divided Congress. Beyond that, nearly two-thirds of the country thinks the nation is on the wrong track, a level that has historically proved to be a matter of concern for a party in power."

Here are a graphic and the complete poll results .

You can track some of the wording used in various eavesdropping-related questions in the past several weeks on PollingReport.com .

The Times acknowledges the importance of how its questions are framed. In short, if you pit civil liberties against fighting terrorism in the public`s mind, terrorism generally wins.

But that`s not actually the central drama here.

Yet, as far as I know, none of these polls ask whether the public thinks Bush was wrong to embark on this program purely on his own executive authority, rather than asking Congress or the courts for their approval.

Critics of the program are not questioning the underlying intent -- to eavesdrop on the communication of suspected terrorists -- they`re challenging Bush`s unilateral authority to do so, without judicial or congressional approval. There`s also a concern that, because of the lack of checks and balances, the program may be straying more widely than has been publicly acknowledged.

If you pit the Constitution against fighting terrorism, who wins?
Ethics

Richard Morin writes for washingtonpost.com this morning: "A strong bipartisan majority of the public believes President Bush should release records of meetings between disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and White House staffers despite administration claims that media requests for details about those contacts amount to a `fishing expedition,` according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

"The survey found that three in four--76 percent--of all Americans said Bush should disclose contacts between aides and Abramoff while 18 percent disagreed. Two in three Republicans joined with eight in 10 Democrats and political independents in favoring disclosure, according to the poll. . . .

"The new poll found that 56 percent of the public disapproved of the way that Bush is handling ethics in government, up seven percentage points in the past five weeks."
Executive Power

Jim VandeHei writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush set limits yesterday on White House cooperation in three political disputes, saying he is determined to assert presidential prerogatives on such matters as domestic eavesdropping and congressional inquiries into Hurricane Katrina.

"In a mid-morning news conference, Bush told reporters he is skeptical of a proposed law imposing new oversights on his use of the National Security Agency to listen in on electronic communications. He also said that he will block White House aides from testifying about the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and that he will not release official White House photos of himself with former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

Bush made it sound like his pictures with Abramoff were purely from assembly-line style receiving lines. But that`s not necessarily so. Some of the pictures appear to have been taken at the more intimate sort of events typically reserved to reward political allies.

VandeHei writes that Bush was also "adamant about not allowing top aides to testify about Hurricane Katrina. Bush, who has moved on several fronts over the past five years to strengthen the power of the presidency, said it would be damaging to him and future presidents if aides feared providing candid advice."

But what kind of advice Bush got is not the central point -- it`s what kind of information he got, and what did he do with it? Isn`t that fair game?
Other Abramoff News

Philip Shenon and Elisabeth Bumiller write in the New York Times: "The investigation of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, took a surprising new turn on Thursday when the Justice Department said the chief prosecutor in the inquiry would step down next week because he had been nominated to a federal judgeship by President Bush. . . .

"The administration said that the appointment was routine and that it would not affect the investigation, but Democrats swiftly questioned the timing of the move and called for a special prosecutor."
Scrubbing Photos?

Blogger Josh Marshall exposes the scrubbing of Abramoff photos at the Web site of Reflections Photography, a studio that does photo shoots for many Republican political events.
Wiretap Fact Check

In today`s Washington Post, Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus go into some detail about "several elements in the NSA spying debate that have been clouded by apparent contradictions and mixed messages from the government since the program was revealed last month. . . .

"Many Democratic lawmakers and legal experts have seized on these and other issues in recent days to argue that the Bush administration has been misleading in its explanations of the NSA program."

For example: "Bush and his top aides have repeatedly stressed that `Congress` had been briefed on the program over the past four years, but have often neglected to mention that the briefings were limited to the `Gang of Eight`: the speaker and minority leader of the House; the majority and minority leaders of the Senate; and the chairmen and ranking Democrats on the two intelligence committees. And they were barred from taking notes or discussing what they heard with other lawmakers or their staffs. . . .

"Yet Dan Bartlett, counselor to Bush and White House communications director, said Monday that the lawmakers who had been briefed `believed we are doing the right thing` and that Democratic leaders `briefed on these programs would be screaming from the mountaintops` if they thought the program was illegally eavesdropping on Americans."
Whopper Watch

James Gordon Meek writes in the New York Daily News: "In speech after speech, President Bush claims that if the National Security Agency could have wiretapped two Al Qaeda operatives living in San Diego, the 9/11 attacks might have been thwarted.

"That`s a whopper, critics say.

"`We didn`t realize they were here plotting the attack until it was too late,` Bush said Wednesday at NSA headquarters.

" `It`s not true,` ex-9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey, president of the New School in Manhattan, told the Daily News. `We knew about those two guys - the CIA lost them.` . . .

" `The problem was the CIA and FBI not communicating and not picking them up,` said Thomas Kean, the commission`s former chairman."
Libby Watch

Carol D. Leonnig writes in The Washington Post: "Attorneys for Vice President Cheney`s former top aide urged a court yesterday to force prosecutors to turn over all the information they obtained from reporters about their confidential conversations with Bush administration sources in the course of a two-year CIA leak investigation. . . .

"The indictment asserted that Libby leaked information about [Valerie] Plame`s CIA role to two reporters but pretended he had learned the information from Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and that he passed it along as unverified reporter chatter.

"The defense`s goal is to show that Libby was not intentionally lying when he testified that many journalists had known about Plame during the spring and summer of 2003, and that he believed he had learned about her from Russert."

Leonnig notes that "the court papers filed by Libby`s team highlighted Bob Woodward, a Washington Post reporter and assistant managing editor, as a crucial witness who could provide exculpatory information that might help Libby avoid a conviction."
Hamas Watch

I wrote in yesterday`s column about Bush`s reaction, in his morning news conference, to the Hamas victory.

Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post: "The upbeat rhetoric belied the fact that the election outcome was the opposite of what the administration had hoped would happen. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials scrambled to survey the wreckage of their Middle East policy."

Steven R. Weisman writes in the New York Times: "The Hamas victory was the fifth case recently of militants` winning significant gains through elections. They included the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a radical president in Iran, and Shiites backed by militias in Iraq.

"As these elections unfolded, there has been increasing criticism in some quarters -- notably among the self-described `realists` in foreign policy, many of them veterans of past Republican administrations -- that President Bush has naively pushed for democracy in countries without the civil society components to support it."

Juan Cole writes in an opinion column in Salon: "The stunning victory of the militant Muslim fundamentalist Hamas Party in the Palestinian elections underlines the central contradictions in the Bush administration`s policies toward the Middle East. Bush pushes for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seems blind to the dangers of right-wing populism. At the same time, he continually undermines the moderate and secular forces in the region by acting high-handedly or allowing his clients to do so. As a result, Sunni fundamentalist parties, some with ties to violent cells, have emerged as key players in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine.

"Democracy depends not just on elections but on a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for the population, and on checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority."
Ducking Objects and Questions

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "The best-laid plans for President Bush`s news conference went awry just 30 seconds into the event. An Associated Press camera and tripod broke free from their bracket on the ceiling and, in view of the TV cameras, dangled menacingly over reporters from Bloomberg News and the New York Daily News."

Milbank`s assessment of the event: "In all, Bush uttered nearly 7,000 words in his 45-minute Q and A. But his message could be summed up with a brief phrase in his least-favorite language: L`Etat c`est moi (I am the state). . . .

"Midway through this Bourbonic performance, the Los Angeles Times`s James Gerstenzang offered an observation on Bush`s surveillance policy: `This seems to sound like something President Nixon once said, which was: `When the president does it, then that means that it`s not illegal.` ` Whispered `oohs` could be heard in the room. Bush gave a look indicating he wished the dangling camera had fallen on Gerstenzang."

John Dickerson , writing in Slate, examines how Bush ducks questions.

"The pause to think gives him away. When he doesn`t punch out a response, he`s not puzzling out the answer. He`s puzzling out the spin."

Among his tactics: "Distract the questioner with something else. Show reporters a sparkly ornament, and hope we`ll forget the tree it`s hanging on. (Talking about Saddam Hussein has served this purpose in ducking tricky Iraq questions.) When talking about Jack Abramoff, Bush focused on the pictures of the two together rather than the larger issue of what influence the lobbyist had with White House officials and what, if anything, he may have gotten in return for all of that campaign cash."

Then there`s the answering-the-question-would-help-the-terrorists dodge.

"This doesn`t avoid the question so much as it makes asking too many pointed ones an act of treachery."
Editorial Watch

Karl Rove`s speech last week seems to have really gotten under the skin of an increasing number of editorial boards.

The Washington Post writes: "The Bush administration`s distortion, for political purposes, of the Democratic position on warrantless surveillance is loathsome. Despite the best efforts of Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, to make it seem otherwise, Democrats are not opposed to vigorous, effective surveillance that could uncover terrorist activity. Nor are the concerns that they are expressing unique to their party. . . .

"Believing there should be constraints on unchecked executive power is not the same as being weak-kneed about the war against terrorism."

The Philadelphia Inquirer writes: "Here`s a statement with which no American concerned about preventing terrorist attacks would quarrel:

" `President Bush believes if al-Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they`re calling and why.`

"Thus said chief presidential adviser Karl Rove last week. True to his partisan form, Rove then went on to claim that `some important Democrats clearly disagree.`

"Rove clearly has that wrong. The objections are not to the idea of spying on al-Qaeda. It`s about the unaccountable, constitutionally dubious way the Bush administration put that idea into practice."

Newsday writes: "In politics, a strong offense may well be the best defense. But in this fight Bush is peddling two false dichotomies.

"First, that the debate is simply Republicans for, Democrats against. It isn`t. Second, that the public must either accept this off-the-reservation electronic snooping or, as Gen. Michael Hayden, the administration`s No. 2 intelligence official intimated, remain vulnerable to terrorist attack. That ignores the fact that there are well-established legal avenues for monitoring suspected terrorists that Bush simply chose to avoid.

"Given Bush`s claimed authority to spy on Americans without court oversight, the nation needs a sober debate on the limits of presidential power. What it doesn`t need is a cynical appeal to partisanship and fear."

The San Francisco Chronicle writes: "President Bush`s public-relations offensive on behalf of his warrantless surveillance program is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. . . .

"The talking point often parroted by Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush allies on Capitol Hill -- `If al Qaeda is calling you, we want to know why` -- is a classic red herring. There is no doubt that such an eavesdropping request would fall within the 99-plus percent the FISA court is approving.

"The question is: Will Congress have the fortitude to rein in a presidency that is acting as if it is above the law?"
Opinion Watch: The Fear Factor

Eugene Robinson writes in his Washington Post opinion column: "Once upon a time we had a great wartime president who told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now we have George W. Bush, who uses fear as a tool of executive power and as a political weapon against his opponents."

Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in his Miami Herald column: "Karl Rove said in a speech last week that this year`s midterm election will be about security. So you know it will be about fear. . . .

"The choice is simple: remain true to the ideals that have guided us for 230 years or surrender them on the altar of expedience because we were too scared to live up to them."
© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zimmerm…
From the Los Angeles Times
Alito`s mythical feel-good America

Alito`s feel-good vision of America before hippies and protests simply isn`t true.

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

By Jonathan Zimmerman
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools."

January 28, 2006

ONCE UPON A TIME, Americans lived by a few simple maxims: God, country and family. Children respected their parents; students listened to their teachers; citizens followed the law. Then along came the 1960s, when liberal elites undermined traditional sources of authority. College kids smoked dope, feminists burned their bras and black militants burned down the cities. So now we have welfare, divorce, crime and a sick society that has lost its moral compass.

That`s the Republican Party line on the 1960s, when everything good turned sour. Well, maybe not everything. Amid the tumult and violence, a few Americans held fast to timeless American values. And that`s where our next prospective Supreme Court justice comes in.

Samuel A. Alito Jr., you see, has become the GOP`s anti-`60s cultural hero. Republican supporters seized eagerly on Alito`s opening remarks at his confirmation hearing, when he compared his traditional upbringing in Hamilton Township, N.J., to the chaos and unrest he encountered at Princeton University.

Hamilton was "an unpretentious, down-to-earth community," Alito recalled, where kids went to school in the morning and played baseball in the afternoon. But at Princeton, where Alito enrolled in 1968, he found something else. "I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly," Alito said at the hearing. "I couldn`t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

Alito`s story meshes perfectly with the larger Republican narrative about the 1960s: A lot of bad things happened, but a few good people resisted them. "Judge Alito is a paragon of the oldfashioned working-class ethic," gushed the New York Times` David Brooks. "In a culture that celebrates the rebel … he respects tradition, order and authority."

To Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, Alito symbolizes the "dutiful people" who adhered to tradition when the "beautiful people" attacked it. "While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein`s apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers," Barone declared, "ordinary people … were going to work, raising their families and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world."

There`s only one problem with this GOP version of postwar history: It isn`t true. The feel-good Republican vision of pre-`60s America is a myth. Urban kids were already using drugs in the 1950s, when J. Edgar Hoover called heroin a menace to American society. The FBI was busily harassing gays, who formed visible communities in many cities. And urban poverty was on the rise, even as most middle-class Americans looked the other away.

Most of all, a vicious racism infected enormous swaths of American society. And not just in the "Jim Crow" South, which is the story we know best, but in the urban North as well. In such cities as Chicago and Detroit, whites organized to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods. They rallied outside city housing agencies to bar black tenants; they picketed white homeowners who sold property to black buyers. Even more, as University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, whites often assaulted and vandalized blacks who did move into white areas. Were all whites racist? Of course not. But we can no longer pretend that they uniformly "respected authority" and "followed the law," as Brooks and Barone maintain.

While turning a blind eye to the problems of the 1950s, Republicans also exaggerate the disorder and conflict of the 1960s. In 1967, the year before Alito came to campus, more than half of Princeton`s students said they supported American involvement in the Vietnam War. Visiting Princeton that spring, New Republic reporter Dotson Rader was shocked at how little political discussion or dissent he encountered.

"I wandered around the campus and heard the band play for the Princeton-Yale game and saw the students with their dates wander toward the stadium," Rader wrote, "as if no war was being fought and no people were in prison for opposing it, as if Harlem and Watts and the Mississippi Delta country did not exist, as if the world were just and men did not die senselessly."

To be sure, student protests would escalate after Alito arrived. In May 1970, as Alito was finishing his sophomore year, students staged a campuswide strike to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

Did some Princeton students behave "irresponsibly," as Alito recalled? Of course they did. Several days after the May 1970 strike, for example, students took over an off-campus office where Princeton faculty members performed defense-related research. They painted the walls with graffiti, set fire to the office`s air-conditioning unit and littered the grounds with trash.

But such incidents were rare. As journalist Don Oberdorfer documents in his history of Princeton, most protest was orderly and peaceful. Campus demonstrations reflected the nation`s best democratic traditions: free speech, debate and, yes, responsibility.

And that brings us back to Alito. Despite his paeans to the decency of his childhood neighbors, did he know that many hard-working white communities were working hard to keep blacks out? And when he indicted Princeton students for behaving irresponsibly, was he including their peaceful protests against the Vietnam War?

Although he doesn`t remember his membership in the conservative Concerned Alumni for Princeton, Alito does remember his youth and college years — indeed, he freely described them in his opening statement. So the rest of us should feel free to inquire about what he actually meant.



Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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State of the Union address vorweggenommen!

``See, I`m the president. My job is to presidate.``
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28.01.06, 12:34 Uhr |
Der angeschlagene US-Präsident könnte seiner Partei in diesem Jahr die Mehrheit im Kongress kosten.

Von FOCUS-Korrespondent Peter Gruber, Washington

Es ist noch gar nicht solange her, da war George W. Bush der unumstrittene Mittelpunkt seiner republikanischen Partei. Senatoren und Abgeordnete ließen sich oft und gerne mit ihm fotografieren, denn die Nähe zum US-Präsidenten symbolisierte Macht und Einfluss in Washington. Doch damit scheint es jetzt zum Auftakt des diesjährigen US-Kongresswahlkampfs vorbei. Eine am Freitagabend veröffentlichte Gallup-Umfrage warnt die Republikaner offen vor einem zu engen Schulterschluss mit Bush. Denn der könnte der „Grand Old Party“ die Mehrheit in beiden Kammern des US-Kapitols kosten.

Senatswahl im Herbst

Mehr als die Hälfte der Amerikaner (51 Prozent) will im Herbst Kandidaten in den Senat und ins Repräsentantenhaus wählen, die die Politik des Präsidenten öffentlich kritisieren, ja sogar bekämpfen. Lediglich 40 Prozent wollen dagegen einen Pro-Bush-Bewerber unterstützen. Da, so glauben Experten, gebe es für die Republikaner nur ein Rezept: Soweit als möglich auf Distanz zum Präsidenten gehen.

54 Prozent unzufrieden mit Bush

Auch Bush selbst hat sich von seinem Stimmungstief bisher kaum erholt: 54 Prozent sind mit seiner Arbeit unzufrieden. 52 Prozent halten seine bisherige Amtszeit, die vor gut fünf Jahren am 20. Januar 2001 begann, für ein einziges Versagen. Solche Zahlen müssen den Strategen des Präsidenten zu denken geben.

„Haben gute Ergebnisse erzielt“

„Wir haben einiges geleistet und dabei gute Ergebnisse erzielt“, verteidigt sich Bush und kündigt zugleich an: „Darauf werde ich mich im Wahlkampf auch konzentrieren. Ich werde der Öffentlichkeit erklären, warum ich bestimmte Entscheidungen getroffen habe und warum diese Entscheidungen notwendig waren, um das amerikanische Volk zu schützen und unsere Wirtschaft zu stärken.“

Problem Irakkrieg

Leicht wird es der Präsident nicht haben, die Wähler zu überzeugen. Denn nicht einmal die Hälfte (49 Prozent) hält ihn für ehrlich und glaubwürdig. Dieses Vertrauensproblem hat laut Gallup vor allem mit dem Irakkrieg zu tun. 53 Prozent sind davon überzeugt, dass die Bush-Regierung die Bedrohung durch Saddam Husseins angebliche Massenvernichtungswaffen vor der Invasion maßlos übertrieb, nur um einen Angriffsgrund zu haben, und die Welt bewusst unter falschen Vorzeichen in die Schlacht führte.

Der Einsatz im Irak, der bisher 2238 US-Soldaten das Leben kostete, ist in diesem Jahr das wichtigste Wahlkampfthema. Fast sechs von zehn Befragten (58 Prozent) setzen es auf Platz 1. Knapp dahinter folgen die Bekämpfung des Terrorismus (57 Prozent), die Gesundheits- und Wirtschaftspolitik (47 bzw. 46 Prozent) sowie der jüngste Korruptionsskandal im US-Kongress (45 Prozent).

Kritik an Wirtschaftspolitik

Überraschend schlechte Noten bekommt der Präsident auch für seine Wirtschaftspolitik. Obwohl die US-Konjunktur im vorigen Jahr um 3,5 Prozent wuchs, erklären 54 Prozent, die wirtschaftliche Lage habe sich weiter verschlechtert. Nach Einschätzung von Experten ist dieses Urteil vor allem auf die steigenden Öl- und Benzinpreise zurückzuführen.

62 Prozent der Amerikaner sind zudem mit der Situation im Land insgesamt unzufrieden. Und fast zwei Drittel (64 Prozent) machen Bush direkt dafür verantwortlich. Seit er im Weißen Haus regiere, sei alles nur schlechter geworden.

Demokraten obenauf

Kein Wunder, dass bei dieser Unzufriedenheit so mancher Republikaner bzw. so manche Republikanerin um seinen bzw. ihren Sitz im Kongress fürchtet. Die aktuelle Gallup-Umfrage gibt den Demokraten denn auch einen klaren Vorsprung von 49 zu 43 Prozent. Den gelte es jetzt allerdings auch bis zu den Kongresswahlen im November zu halten, fordert Demokratenstratege James Carville, der bereits Ex-Präsident Bill Clinton zum Sieg verhalf.

Und wie beurteilt Carville die Chancen seiner Partei? Die Antwort klingt fast etwas verzweifelt: „Wenn wir unter diesen guten Voraussetzungen nicht siegen, dann muss ich mich langsam fragen, ob die Demokraten überhaupt noch irgendeine Wahl gewinnen können.“

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The problem with democracy

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article341462.ece

By Robert Fisk

01/28/06 "The Independent" -- -- Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn`t we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn`t they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!

True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit that they included some warlords and murderers. But then the Iraqis last year elected the Dawa party to power in Baghdad, which was responsible - let us not speak this in Washington - for most of the kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, the car bombing of the (late) Emir and the US and French embassies in Kuwait.

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power. They were supposed to have given their support to the friendly, pro-Western, corrupt, absolutely pro-American Fatah, which had promised to "control" them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them. And, bingo, they have chosen the wrong party again.

Result: 76 out of 132 seats. That just about does it. God damn that democracy. What are we to do with people who don`t vote the way they should?

Way back in the 1930s, the British would lock up the Egyptians who turned against the government of King Farouk. Thus they began to set the structure of anti-democratic governance that was to follow. The French imprisoned the Lebanese government which demanded the same. Then the French left Lebanon. But we have always expected the Arab governments to do what they were told.

So today, we are expecting the Syrians to behave, the Iranians to kowtow to our nuclear desires (though they have done nothing illegal), and the North Koreans to surrender their weapons (though they actually do have them, and therefore cannot be attacked).

Now let the burdens of power lie heavy on the shoulders of the party. Now let the responsibilities of people lie upon them. We British would never talk to the IRA, or to Eoka, or to the Mao Mao. But in due course, Gerry Adams, Archbishop Makarios and Jomo Kenyatta came to take tea with the Queen. The Americans would never speak to their enemies in North Vietnam. But they did. In Paris.

No, al-Qa`ida will not do that. But the Iraqi leaders of the insurgency in Mesopotamia will. They talked to the British in 1920, and they will talk to the Americans in 2006.

Back in 1983, Hamas talked to the Israelis. They spoke directly to them about the spread of mosques and religious teaching. The Israeli army boasted about this on the front page of the Jerusalem Post. At that time, it looked like the PLO was not going to abide by the Oslo resolutions. There seemed nothing wrong, therefore, with continuing talks with Hamas. So how come talks with Hamas now seem so impossible?
Not long after the Hamas leadership had been hurled into southern Lebanon, a leading member of its organisation heard me say that I was en route to Israel.

"You`d better call Shimon Peres," he told me. "Here`s his home number."

The phone number was correct. Here was proof that members of the hierarchy of the most extremist movements among the Palestinians were talking to senior Israeli politicians.

The Israelis know well the Hamas leadership. And the Hamas leadership know well the Israelis. There is no point in journalists like us suggesting otherwise. Our enemies invariably turn out to be our greatest friends, and our friends turn out, sadly, to be our enemies.
A terrible equation - except that we must understand our fathers` history. My father, who was a soldier in the First World War, bequeathed to me a map in which the British and French ruled the Middle East. The Americans have tried, vainly, to rule that map since the Second World War. They have all failed. And it remains our curse to rule it since.

How terrible it is to speak with those who have killed our sons. How unspeakable it is to converse with those who have our brothers` blood on their hands. No doubt that is how Americans who believed in independence felt about the Englishmen who fired upon them.

It will be for the Iraqis to deal with al-Qa`ida. This is their burden. Not ours. Yet throughout history, we have ended up talking to our enemies. We talked to the representatives of the Emperor of Japan. In the end, we had to accept the surrender of the German Reich from the successor to Adolf Hitler. And today, we trade happily with the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians.

The Middle East was never a successor to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, despite the rubbish talked by Messrs Bush and Blair. How long will it be before we can throw away the burden of this most titanic of wars and see our future, not as our past, but as a reality?

Surely, in an age when our governments no longer contain men or women who have experienced war, we must now lead a people with the understanding of what war means. Not Hollywood. Not documentary films. Democracy means real freedom, not just for the people we choose to have voted into power.

And that is the problem in the Middle East.

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Latest Update: #34927 26.01.06 15:42:41 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Jan 28, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2442 , US: 2241 , Jan.06: 61

Iraker: Civilian: 540 Police/Mil: 174 Total: 714
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/editors
Madness of King George
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/editors

[from the February 13, 2006 issue]

Led by White House propaganda czar Karl Rove, the Bush Administration has launched an aggressive campaign claiming that the President`s authorization of massive ongoing electronic surveillance of American citizens is the only appropriate response to "a ruthless enemy." Rove added that criticism of the President`s policy comes from those who don`t understand "the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment."

The Founding Fathers anticipated debates such as the one stemming from George W. Bush`s illegal spying. Well acquainted with the excesses of mad monarchs named George and the excuses for tyranny peddled by their partisans, Benjamin Franklin warned, "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." James Madison understood how seductive the claims of national security could be, pointing out that wartime is "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement."

Contemporary experts as diverse as Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and one of the foremost scholars of the conflict between the demands of national security and the Constitution, and Bruce Fein, a key player in Ronald Reagan`s Justice Department, have identified the Bush Administration`s wiretapping as a dangerous assault on our basic freedoms. Turley says, "What the President ordered in this case was a crime." Fein adds that Bush is claiming "more power than King George III had at the time of the Revolution, in asserting the theory that anything the President thinks is helpful to fighting the war against terrorism he can do."

So far, few prominent Democrats have had the courage to echo these legal scholars, and what is supposed to be the party of opposition has struggled to mount a coherent challenge to the Administration`s abuses. Former Vice President Al Gore`s January 16 address at Constitution Hall in Washington--where he declared that "the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power"--was an exception. Gore called for Congress to take up its constitutionally mandated responsibility to serve as a check on the executive branch. That is, of course, easier said than done, both because of recalcitrance on the part of Republican leaders and reluctance on the part of many Democrats. When Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took up Gore`s call, he was denied an official venue. When Conyers pressed ahead with unofficial hearings in the Capitol basement, at which both Turley and Fein testified, only a half-dozen House Democrats showed up.

We should not allow ourselves to fall into Rove`s trap and let this become a partisan squabble over national security. If we do, the President and his cronies on Capitol Hill are going to win. This is not fundamentally a debate about wiretapping or national security. It is about whether Presidents must obey the law, one of the bedrock principles of a free nation. As Elizabeth Holtzman recently observed in these pages, "A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors." Bush purposely violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, disregarding clear and specific statutory language and the Constitution. If he is not called to account for this grave illegality, the democratic standards to which this and future Presidents are held will have been dramatically lowered, and essential avenues for defending our liberties will have been blocked in precisely the manner that Ben Franklin, James Madison and the other wise Founders feared.

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James E. Hansen, top NASA climate scientist, on Friday at the Goddard Institute in Upper Manhattan.
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[urlDr. Hansen`s Recent Lectures and Papers ]http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/[/url]
[urlDr. Goklany`s Papers on Climate Change ]http://members.cox.net/igoklany/#cc[/url]
Video[urlThe Big Melt]http://nytimes.feedroom.com/?fr_chl=63cd59180e0e4b2cdf887f66130fb34416daca17[/url]


January 29, 2006
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.ht…

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency`s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That`s not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It`s about coordination."

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA`s mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

Dr. Hansen`s supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn`t mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."

The administration`s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.

But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch`s priority.

But she added: "I`m a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That`s not our job. That`s not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal."

Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.

Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch`s supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don`t have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy`s statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred.

"He`s not trying to create a war over this," said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen`s deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public."

Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy`s office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled.

In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation`s leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen`s scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views.

"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world," Dr. Cicerone said. "I`ve heard Hansen speak many times and I`ve read many of his papers, starting in the late 70`s. Every single time, in writing or when I`ve heard him speak, he`s always clear that he`s speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it`s been."

The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Where scientists` points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems.

In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identified the views as his own.

"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff," he wrote, "is because one doesn`t have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Das Gesicht der ehrenwerten Bush-Gesellschaft!
[url]http://nytimes.feedroom.com/?fr_story=9b7e52628316183a49d0d76651b6ed21c3990adc[/url]

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Sticky Scandals, Teflon Directors
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Members of Enron`s board, including, from left, John H. Duncan, Herbert S. Winokur Jr., Robert K. Jaedicke, Charles A. LeMaistre and
Norman Blake Jr., testified on Capitol Hill in May 2002. Unlike the others, Mr. Winocur remains on the boards of public companies.
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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/business/businessspecia…

January 29, 2006

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

THE trial of Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former top executives of Enron, opens tomorrow, putting that company`s epochal collapse squarely back in the news. While the proceedings will focus on the actions of those two men, the trial will also drag former Enron directors back into the spotlight.

That`s a good thing. Shareholders are too removed from the boardrooms of the companies they own, and what happened at Enron is a fine reminder of why they should agitate for power in director elections.

Few would contest the idea that Enron`s board failed its duty to mind the operation on behalf of the owners. This was the board, remember, that suspended Enron`s corporate ethics code so Andrew S. Fastow, its chief financial officer, could head those infamous and personally enriching off-balance-sheet partnerships.

But while being on the bridge during such a shipwreck would be a career-ender for most, directors are different from you and me. Even those involved in notorious corporate debacles can still find a warm welcome in the occasional boardroom.

"Only actors, professional baseball team managers and corporate directors have the luxury of being rehired, at exorbitant salaries, after completely bombing out," said Greg Taxin, chief executive of Glass Lewis, an institutional investor advisory firm in San Francisco. "If the individual failed shareholders once, there is certainly no reason to expect a different outcome the second time, no matter how well intentioned the person is."

To be sure, the past four years have not been easy for outside directors at Enron, or at any scandal-plagued company, for that matter. First come the lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved investors. A year ago, 10 Enron directors, including eight outside directors, agreed to pay $13 million out of their own pockets to shareholders without admitting or denying any liability.

Then there`s the public humiliation. Beginning in early 2002, Enron`s directors also endured a campaign by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Investment fund, a pension fund, to oust them from other public company directorships. "We felt the colossal failure of these directors to protect shareholder interests in the Enron case disqualified them from being renominated to any future public board service," said Brandon J. Rees, assistant director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. office of investment. "In cases in which the board renominated those directors, we urged shareholders to vote no."

When Enron collapsed, 11 of its outside directors held board seats at a total of 21 other companies. Today, two of those former Enron directors hold a total of four directorships. Neither of these two directors paid his own money to settle the shareholders` suit.

One is Herbert S. Winokur Jr., known as Pug. He remains, as he was when Enron failed, a director at the Natco Group, an oil and gas equipment provider in Houston, and at the CCC Information Services Group, an insurance claims processing concern in Chicago. Since 1995, he has been a director of the Holland Balanced fund, a mutual fund in New York.

Mr. Winokur, who is on the witness list for the defense at the Enron trial, did not return a phone call seeking comment. He is chief executive of Capricorn Holdings, a private investment firm in Greenwich, Conn.

Michael Holland, manager of the Holland Balanced fund and its largest shareholder, said the fund`s board had assessed Mr. Winokur`s performance when Enron failed and found no reason to remove him. The decision was supported by outside legal counsel and the fund`s administrator.

"I have never received a single complaint from a shareholder," Mr. Holland said.

Officials at the Natco Group and CCC Information Services did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Another former Enron director who still holds a board seat at a public company is Frank Savage, chief executive of Savage Holdings, a financial services firm in New York, and chairman emeritus of Howard University`s board of trustees. A former chairman of Alliance Capital Management International, Mr. Savage is on the board of Lockheed Martin, a position he has held since 1995.

Displeasure with Mr. Savage has been rising recently among Lockheed Martin shareholders. About 32 percent of Lockheed`s shares outstanding were withheld from Mr. Savage at last year`s annual meeting, up from around 21 percent in 2004. Lockheed requires that its directors receive supporting votes totaling at least 50 percent of its shares outstanding.

Mr. Savage did not return a phone call seeking comment. A Lockheed Martin spokesman said Mr. Savage is a valued director with a long and distinguished association with the company.

The Securities and Exchange Commission tries to bar directors that it feels are unfit to serve because they have been involved in securities law violations. Since 2000, it has gone to court seeking to bar 696 officers and directors. In 2000, it sought to bar 38; last year, 150. A spokesman for the commission said that it does not keep records of how many of the requests were granted by the courts. The S.E.C. has sought bars for Enron officers, but not its directors.

Late last year, the S.E.C. notified three directors and audit committee members at Hollinger International, saying that they may be sued for their failure to spot fraud that prosecutors say was orchestrated there by Conrad M. Black, the company`s chief executive. Two of them, Richard R. Burt, a former United States ambassador to Germany and former national security correspondent for The New York Times, and Marie-Josée Kravis, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization, are directors at other public companies.

Mr. Burt serves on the board of International Game Technology, a computer gambling company in Reno, Nev., and is a director of several UBS mutual funds and three closed-end funds run by Deutsche Asset Management: the European Equity fund, the New Germany fund and the Central Europe and Russia fund.

John D. Moore, Jr., an individual investor in Chicago who has shares in a UBS mutual fund, withheld his vote for Mr. Burt as a director in this year`s election. "Anybody who has served on the Hollinger board should be considered automatically unqualified to serve as a director of a public company in the United States or Canada by virtue of demonstrated incompetence in a fiduciary role," Mr. Moore said.

International Game Technology declined to comment. Richard Q. Armstrong, chairman of UBS funds, said of Mr. Burt: "Rick has kept us updated on his situation and at the present time we feel that there is nothing that we need to do because he continues to do an excellent job. Until the situation is resolved, we will continue in that mode."

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Asset Management said that governance issues were the purview of the funds` directors.

Mr. Burt said that he has been advised not to comment while the regulatory process is under way and added that he had kept all his boards apprised on the Hollinger case.

Mrs. Kravis, also on Hollinger`s audit committee, has served on the Ford Motor Company board since 1995. "We will not comment on any governmental proceeding that is under way, particularly one that does not involve Ford Motor Company," said Tom Hoyt, a spokesman. He called Mrs. Kravis a "valued member" of the board.

Mrs. Kravis will stand for re-election at Ford this year. She declined to comment. But Richard Beattie, managing partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett who represents Mrs. Kravis, said: "I don`t think the audit committee members of Hollinger`s board should be in the same category as Enron. These were good directors who were misled by management and the S.E.C. has publicly acknowledged that."

When problems erupt, it is nigh to impossible, of course, for shareholders of public companies to tell whether their directors were asleep at the switch or being actively misled. Some directors, however, manage to hit the trifecta by serving on boards of several companies that experience problems.

"One of the occurrences that will cause a director to be designated a `problem` is to be associated with a major financial restatement or a bankruptcy," said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a research firm in Portland, Me. "There are some directors who have been involved more than once with these things, whose problems exponentially increase."

Mr. Taxin of Glass Lewis says shareholders should be more vigilant about examining the work their directors do at other companies. "People suffer from looking at companies in isolation," he said. "I don`t think investors are evaluating the quality of a director`s experience at every place they sit."

THIS isn`t easy. Companies don`t always volunteer that their directors were on the scene of a corporate governance mess elsewhere. Mr. Winokur`s biography in Natco Group proxies has not mentioned his Enron post since 2002.

"I think there is greater recognition of the problem that directors have not fulfilled their jobs to protect shareholders," Mr. Rees of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. fund said. "And yet we do not have structural reforms in place to make boards more accountable to shareholders."

Those reforms are not likely to come, alas, unless more shareholders yell about their exclusion from boardroom elections. Proxy season is upon us. For directors who put their shareholders second, withhold should be the word.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Die Unsinnigkeit der Irakinvasion wird von Tag zu Tag immer erkenntlicher.

January 29, 2006
The World
Guess Who Likes the G.I.`s in Iraq (Look in Iran`s Halls of Power)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/weekinreview/29slackman.ht…

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN

NOT long after the collapse of Saddam Hussein`s regime in Iraq in 2003, a top aide to L. Paul Bremer III, then the head of the American occupation authority there, excitedly explained that Iraq had just become the front line in Washington`s effort to neutralize Iran as a regional force.

If America could promote a moderate, democratic, American-friendly alternate center of Shiite Islam in Iraq, the official said, it could defang one of its most implacable foes in the Middle East.

Iran, in other words, had for decades been both the theological center of Shiite Islam and a regional sponsor of militant anti-American Islamic groups like Hezbollah. But if westward-looking Shiites — secular or religious — came to power in southern Iraq, they could give the lie to arguments that Shiites had to see America as an enemy.

So far, though, Iran`s mullahs aren`t feeling much pain from the Americans next door. In fact, officials at all levels of government here say they see the American presence as a source of strength for themselves as they face the Bush administration.

In almost every conversation about Iran`s nuclear showdown with the United States and Europe, they cite the Iraq war as a factor Iran can play to its own advantage.

"America is extremely vulnerable right now," said Akbar Alami, a member of the Iran`s Parliament often critical of the government but on this point hewing to the government line. "If the U.S. takes any unwise action" to punish Iran for pursuing its nuclear program, he said, "certainly the U.S. and other countries will share the harm."

Iranians know that American forces, now stretched thin, are unlikely to invade Iran. And if the United States or Europe were to try a small-scale, targeted attack, the proximity of American forces makes them potential targets for retaliation. Iranians also know the fighting in Iraq has helped raise oil prices, and any attempt to impose sanctions could push prices higher.

In addition, the Iranians have longstanding ties to influential Shiite religious leaders in Iraq, and at least one recently promised that his militia would make real trouble for the Americans if they moved militarily against Iran.

All of those calculations have reduced Iranian fears of going ahead with their nuclear program — a prospect that frightens not just the United States, Europe and Israel, but many of the Sunni Muslim-dominated nations in the region, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In recent days, Iran has moved aggressively to restart its nuclear program, insisting that it is aimed only at research and producing energy. The United States and Europe, who remain suspicious of Iran`s intentions, are trying to block it, with cooperation from Russia and China, and have threatened to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council.

Disagreement between the West and Iran on this issue is not new. But Iran`s apparent confidence that it can move ahead with little risk of serious punishment is. It is part of a change in the way Iran has decided to address the world, abandoning a strategy of diplomatic compromise pursued by the reformist president Muhammad Khatami, who served from 1997 until last year.

The hard-line conservative, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected in June to replace Mr. Khatami, has joined the religious leadership in a policy of confrontation.

With the Americans stuck fighting a protracted, murky war in Iraq, the Iranians felt they were in a position to defy the West even over the nuclear issue.

A Western diplomat based in Tehran said that Iran`s recent behavior has been infuriating, an apparent effort to undermine the diplomatic process. The envoy said that in August, when Europe was about to offer what it called a compromise, the Iranians balked even before seeing the proposal.

"Before we even met, they said: `We know what`s in it. We know what we are looking for is not there,` " the diplomat said, insisting on remaining anonymous so as not to antagonize Iranian authorities.

The West has tried to push back, but Iran has barely budged. Part of the reason, the diplomat said, is that "what was seen as power then may be seen as weakness now," referring to the American presence in Iraq.

This month, Iran welcomed the Iraqi cleric Muktada al-Sadr in a way that helped send just that message. The cleric`s militia, the Mahdi Army, rose up twice in 2004 against the American military. Mr. Sadr and his followers have since joined the political process in Iraq, but during his visit to Tehran he warned that any attack on Iran could inspire a response from his militia.

"If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them," he said in comments reported by The Associated Press. "The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi Army. It was established to defend Islam."

Not all Iranians think their country`s aggressive drive to resume its nuclear program will work as a long-term strategy.

Iran`s influence in Iraq and Afghanistan has limits, said Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a political science professor at Tehran University. "It might work as a deterrent for a military strike against Iran but it is not a deterrent to lift the pressure against Iran`s nuclear program."

Still, there is near unanimity in the government that the nuclear program should not be canceled. Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University who said he has close ties with many in government, said there was a compromise among the core factions over how far to go in the nuclear program. Basically, he said, there is agreement to develop a weapons capability, but not to go as far as building a bomb.

The logic, he said, is based on an assessment that if Iran builds a bomb, it could set off an arms race in the Middle East that could "eventually undermine Iran`s conventional superiority if others, like Syria and Egypt, get the bomb."

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January 29, 2006
The World
A Little Democracy or a Genie Unbottled
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/weekinreview/29glanz.html?…

By JAMES GLANZ

THE overwhelming sense among politicians and intellectuals in the Middle East last week was that America`s little chemistry experiment had blown up in its face. President Bush promoted democracy and free elections as his primary solution to the region`s ills — and when Hamas won in a landslide in the Palestinian elections, the president got results that could not have been more inimical to the interests of the United States and its ally, Israel.

Like a powerful catalyst best handled with an eyedropper rather than a ladle, free and fair elections have recently unleashed political forces elsewhere in the region that can hardly be seen as friendly to the United States. The radical Muslim Brotherhood made major gains in Egypt`s parliamentary elections, a Shiite clerical list allied with Iran won a plurality in Iraq and Hezbollah — considered, like Hamas, a terrorist organization by the West — surged in last year`s elections in Lebanon.

From one point of view, one that produces more than a few chortles in the Middle East, the United States has fallen victim to some grand law of unintended consequences. "You might remember the saying, `Beware of what you wish — you might get what you want,` " said Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, well aware that he was tossing a Western saying back in the direction it came. "It`s very much applicable," he said.

But the wider question, Mr. Aly acknowledged, is whether the long-term benefits of democracy are worth the immediate perils. Can it be fine-tuned so it fits each of the volatile and diverse countries of the Middle East? And can a shot of democracy, however jolting at first, be trusted in the end to seduce and tame the forces it has set loose?

Right after the Palestinian elections, Mr. Bush praised the "power of democracy" but did not seem to fully accept the outcome in that case, saying that the United States would not deal with a political party that advocates the destruction of Israel, as Hamas does.

The president did not specifically rule out talking to a government of which Hamas is a part. Still, he did not sound entirely pleased that he had gotten what he wished for. And if democracy continues to produce results that are irksome to the United States, will other Americans call into question the export of their most glorious product, electoral democracy?

"In the short term, there may be people who think that pushing democracy is contrary to our interests," said Robert Pastor, a former American diplomat who is the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University in Washington.

But the choice of tamping down democratic movements once they get started does not really exist, said Mr. Pastor, who negotiated with Hamas to avoid violence during the first Palestinian elections in 1996. The United States would hardly be in the business of stopping a cycle of elections once they start. And the experience of Latin America shows that selectively trying to purge electoral slates of radical groups merely pushes them to carry out violent revolutions.

That is also essentially what happened when military-backed rulers in Algeria canceled parliamentary elections in 1992 after they were swept by the Islamic Salvation Front, an organization determined to govern by Islamic law. Tens of thousands of people died in the conflicts that followed. "If Hamas had been excluded" from the recent elections, Mr. Pastor said, "they would have said that they have no other alternative to violence. And they would be right."

If the catalytic reaction set in motion by elections cannot be stopped once it starts, then a better solution may be to promote democracy in a way that is tailored to the most dangerous realities of each country. Marina Ottaway, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, divides countries into three categories that highlight what can most readily go wrong for Western interests when democracy is thrown into the mix in the Middle East and the wider Arab world.

In one set of countries, including Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, a ruling authoritarian regime is considered ineffectual or corrupt and Islamic opposition parties would probably sweep any wide-open elections as good-government candidates.

In a second set, which includes Iraq and Lebanon, the underlying peril is an ethnically and religiously splintered populace, held together only by an autocrat`s heavy hand, in which the differences threaten to tear the countries apart. Here, rival religious groups often have their own parties and militias.

Open elections in a third group — pro-Western monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait or Bahrain — would probably overturn the existing semi-feudal social order in favor of Islamic rule, Ms. Ottaway said. In these cases, Islam`s appeal is based on a claim that it creates a just social order.

The ascendancy throughout the region of political Islam is, therefore, the first problem that the United States must solve as it pushes democratic reform.

"I don`t think the United States is prepared to deal with the issue of these Islamist parties," Ms. Ottaway said.

Nevertheless, the problem is not as fraught as Americans often make it out to be, she said. The appeal of the Islamist parties is often simply that they are well organized, untainted by the corruption of an entrenched regime, and able to provide things like child care and funeral services to local neighborhoods. Several political experts said that disgust with the inefficient government run by Fatah, the former ruling party in Palestine, and its reputation for corruption, played a much greater role in the Hamas landslide than attitudes about Israel.

"The most important and urgent lesson" of the Hamas victory, said Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, "is that if you do not want these groups to take over in the process of democratization, you have to press the existing regimes to reform their systems."

Even if the radical groups win, there is some hope that the daily pressures of making the country work will wear down the firebrands of the world in a way that looks a lot like moderation, said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq`s ambassador to the United Nations. Until now, "they`ve been able to criticize the governments without actually delivering anything but criticism," Mr. Istrabadi said. "Now they have to govern. Pave roads. Make sure the garbage is picked up on time."

Mr. Aly, of the Al-Ahram center, said that in the early going, at least, the members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who now hold 20 percent of the seats in the Egyptian parliament, have behaved amicably. Some experts, like Amatzia Baram, an Israeli who is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Haifa in Israel, think that Hamas is more likely to maintain a confrontational stance.

In the worst case, that stance could spark a regional war, Mr. Baram said. But even he believes that if the new government does not provide basic services more efficiently than Fatah did, the electorate will give Hamas the boot too.

As for the countries like Lebanon and Iraq that are plagued with sectarian and religious divides, Mr. Baram is another believer that carefully designed forms of democracy will be able to work there. In Lebanon, each group, from the Maronites to the Shiites, is allocated a fixed number of seats, district by district, to prevent sudden shifts in power that could provoke a return to civil war.

"It has to be approached on a country-by-country solution," Mr. Baram said. He said that in Iraq, where the voting produced a Shiite plurality but forced the main clerical party to seek partners in its government, the arrangement could in the long run produce a stable country much like Lebanon appears to have become. Others see in Iraq the potential for a civil war — in the style of what Lebanon went through just 20 years ago — that creates separate Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni regions and generates spinoff conflicts in the entire region.

Many political commentators in the Middle East, including Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist and editor at large at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, say that Mr. Bush`s seemingly contradictory statements show that he is not really serious about pushing democracy. Instead, Mr. Khouri believes, talk of democracy is a cover for an invasion of Iraq that happened for other reasons.

"It rings very hollow around the world," Mr. Khouri said. "Most people laugh."

However it has all happened, said Ziad Abu Amr, an independent candidate supported by Hamas who won re-election last week, there is no backing out once the ballots are cast.

"It`s not good to say democracy is fine and elections are fine but we can`t live with the outcome," Mr. Amr said. "I don`t think the United States should make too many conditions on countries which choose to embrace democracy."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 29, 2006
Editorial
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/opinion/29sun1.html

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.
•

Sept. 11 could have been prevented.

This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation`s guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they`re calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on.

Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal

. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It`s that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us.

Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans` rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn`t like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed.

In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

War changes everything.

Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn`t hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it

. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales`s timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.
•

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Auch bei uns hat die Zukunft schon begonnen.

January 29, 2006
Guest Columnist
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/opinion/29koppel.html

By TED KOPPEL

Washington

NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn`t enough of a cliché, this novel`s hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.
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After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:

The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.

They wander the battlefields of other people`s wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.

The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.

A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life`s imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.

Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC`s dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress.

Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis.

This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause.

Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know.

With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today`s marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.

Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.

Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.

Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.

Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks` foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.

Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.

You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.

No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation`s capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don`t care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.

The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.

Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."

Even Fox News`s product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.

Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers` unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.

What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks` greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.

Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40`s and 50`s and entering their 60`s who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic.

If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It`s regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That`s the way it is."

Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.

Frank Rich is on book leave.

* Copyright 2006The 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/

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Over 30 Killed in Guerrilla Violence
Sadrists Demand any Prime Minister Call for US Troop Withdrawal

[urlAP reports on the ambitions of the Shiite religious parties]http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=4f16058a-bcb2-41ae-81ec-a5926deb1d34&k=54249[/url] to retain control of the Ministry of the Interior security forces (analogous to the US FBI and Secret Service.) AP also reports that some 22 died in Iraq as a result of guerrilla violence, including the macabre bombing of a candy store in a Shiite area of Iskandariyah that killed 11 and wounded 5. The only problem is that an earlier report from Reuters detailed 21 deaths even before the candy store bombing. That would take it to over 30 dead, at least.

A third of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, s… exhibit at least some signs of mental health disorders. Some 14,000 were treated for drug dependencies, and 11,000 for depression. Societies that think that aggressive war is some macho game and that the price is well worth it just have a lot of homeless and limbless people after a while.

The LA Times reports cautiously on the stories of conflicts … especially between Iraqis and foreigners. The article notes that guerrilla attacks are averaging 75 a day, as opposed to 52 a day last year this time, so whatever is going on is not impeding the guerrillas` ability and motivation to strike. In fact, I suspect that to the extent there is fighting among Sunni guerrillas, it is for control of the guerrilla movement, i.e. for the right to decide which targets are hit. It isn`t a matter of not wanting to hit targets.

[urlThe deteriorating security situation in Iraq is driving the country`s physicians, lawyers and businessmen out of the country.]http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/3618997.html[/url] There`s a metric for Mr. Rumsfeld-- when the white collar professionals flee, it isn`t a good situation.

[urlMichael Slackman reports for the NYT from Iran]http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsaction.php?tid=695186&post=34992&smallwin=1&smallwinsize=600&werbung=sendposting&width=600&m=5.1.1.2.3&posting_action=drucken[/url] that Iran`s clerical leaders are cocky about the way the US is bogged down in the Iraq quagmire. Far from moderating the Iranians, the US predicament in Iraq has made them confident it is helpless against them and that they may proceed with their nuclear energy program despite US objections.

[urlKrishna Guha reports from Davos for the FT,]http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9a7f21d2-901c-11da-9e7e-0000779e2340.html[/url] with the following points on Iraq:

1. Deputy Sec. of State Robert Zoellick wants the Gulf states to play a positive role in Iraq. (Yes, those experienced democrats can teach the Iraqis a lot about avoiding authoritarianism-- I except Kuwait from the sarcasm.)

2. Amr Moussa of the Arab League is still hoping to have the Baghdad Conference, a successor to the Cairo Conference, in February or March.

3. Barham Salih says that the Kurds will insist on a government of national unity that includes a major Sunni and a secular party.

4. Salih also says that the US must not use Iraq as a springboard to attack Iran.

5. Humam Hammoudi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who chaired the committee that wrote the constitution, agreed that the Sunni Arabs must be included in the government.

[urlThe Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is still pushing for Adil Abdul Mahdi]http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=3582[/url] to be prime minister. The issue will be decided by an internal vote of the United Iraqi Alliance.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports [Ar.] that Abbas al-Ruba`i, a Baghdad representative of young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, says that the Sadrist bloc has forwarded its platform to the major internal candidates for prime minister in the United Iraqi Alliance. He said that the Sadrists will swing their support to the candidate who most fully commits to implement their platform.

Two planks of the Sadrist platform are the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country and opposition to loose federalism and provincial confederations that might break up the country. The Sadrists also want more attention to providing Iraqis with services and security. It will be interesting to see if any of the major candidates for PM signs on to these first two principles in order to win the Sadrist vote. Al-Ruba`i said that so far the candidate who is closes to Sadrist principles is Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party, the current PM.

The same article says that behind the scenes, UIA candidates for prime minister have been seeking the support of Allawi and his National Iraqi list. [Cole: I can`t see what sense this makes except if they are using the Iraqiyah Party as a channel to the Americans. Otherwise, the prime minister will be chosen inside the UIA by an up and down vote of party parliamentarians, and I should think that being in contact with Allawi would actually hurt a candidate with the other UIA representatives, who code him as a dusted off Baathist and CIA agent. The Sadrists have said they won`t permit Allawi to have a government post.]

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that Bayan Jabr, the minister of the interior in the outgoing Iraqi government and a member of SCIRI is saying that the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite fundamentalists) will seek 19 of the expected 36 cabinet posts, just over half.

Al-Hayat has more on the alliance of the Iraqi Accord Front, the national Dialogue Council, and Allawi`s Iraqi National list, which together will have a bloc of 80 members in parliament.

The problem is that 80 members gets you nothing. It isn`t a third, and so cannot block anything. And if enough Kurds vote with the Shiites on things like loose federalism, the 80 can just be outvoted every time.

Moreover, the likelihood is that the Sunni/secular alliance will split on issues of Islamic law, with the Iraqi Accord Front voting with the Shiite religious parties for shariah or Islamic law. The United Iraqi Alliance could count on its own 128, then 2 from the Message Party (Sadrists), plus 5 from the Kurdish Islamists, plus 44 from the Sunni IAF for any Islamist law or policy, i.e. 179. Since laws are passed by simple majority, the result is a strong Islamist majority in the new parliament for any measure that is not specifically Sunni or Shiite (there are few of those in Islamic law.)

The only thing that the Sunni/secular bloc can agree on is opposition to loose federalism, and on that they could gain some allies from the United Iraqi Alliance, whose Sadrists and Dawa Party members are nervous about it. But can they gain the 58 Shiite defectors necessary to legislate anything on the issue?

posted by Juan @ [url1/29/2006 06:37:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/over-30-killed-in-guerrilla-violence.html[/url] 0 comments


Achcar on Hamas: Guest Editorial



`First Reflections On The Electoral Victory Of Hamas

by Gilbert Achcar; January 27, 2006

1. The sweeping electoral victory of Hamas is but one of the products of the intensive use made by the United States in the Muslim world, since the 1950`s, of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideological weapon against both progressive nationalism and communism. This was done in close collaboration with the Saudi kingdom -- a de facto U.S. protectorate almost from its foundation in 1932. The promotion of the most reactionary interpretation of the Islamic religion, exploiting deeply-rooted popular religious beliefs, led to this ideology filling the vacuum left by the exhaustion by the 1970`s of the two ideological currents it served to fight. The road was thus paved in the entire Muslim world for the transformation of Islamic fundamentalism into the dominant expression of mass national and social resentment, to the great dismay of the U.S. and its Saudi protectorate. The story of Washington`s relation with Islamic fundamentalism is the most striking modern illustration of the sorcerer`s apprenticeship. (I have described this at length in my Clash of Barbarisms.)

2. The Palestinian scene was no exception to this general regional pattern, albeit it followed suit with a time warp. Although the Palestinian guerilla movement came to the fore initially as a result of the exhaustion of more traditional Arab nationalism and as an expression of radicalization, the movement underwent a very rapid bureaucratization, fostered by an impressive influx of petrodollars and reaching levels of corruption that have no equivalent in the history of national liberation movements. Still, as long as it remained -- in the guise of the PLO -- what could be described as a "stateless state apparatus seeking a territory" (see my Eastern Cauldron), the Palestinian national movement could still embody the aspirations of the vast majority of the Palestinian masses, despite the numerous twists, turns, and betrayals of commitments with which its history is littered. However, when a new generation of Palestinians took up the struggle in the late 1980`s, with the Intifada that started in December 1987, their radicalization began in turn to take increasingly the path of Islamic fundamentalism. This was facilitated by the fact that the Palestinian left, the leading force within the Intifada in the first months, squandered this last historic opportunity by eventually aligning itself one more time behind the PLO leadership, thus completing its own bankruptcy. On a smaller scale, Israel had played its own version of the sorcerer`s apprentice by favoring the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a rival to the PLO prior to the Intifada.

3. The 1993 Oslo agreement inaugurated the final phase of the PLO`s degeneration, as its leadership -- or rather the leading nucleus of this leadership, bypassing the official leading bodies -- was granted guardianship over the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This came in exchange for what amounted to a capitulation: the PLO leadership abandoned the minimal conditions that were demanded by the Palestinian negotiators from the 1967 occupied territories, above all an Israeli pledge to freeze and reverse the construction of settlements which were colonizing their land. The very conditions of this capitulation -- which doomed the Oslo agreements to tragic failure as critics very rightly predicted from the start -- made certain that the shift in the popular political mood would speed up. The Zionist state took advantage of the lull brought to the 1967 territories by the Palestinian Authority`s fulfillment of the role of police force by proxy ascribed to it, by drastically intensifying the colonization and building an infrastructure designed to facilitate its military control over these territories. Accordingly, the discredit of the PA increased inexorably. This loss in public support hampered more and more its ability to crack down on the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist movement -- as was required from it and as it began attempting as early as 1994 -- let alone its ability to marginalize the Islamic movement politically and ideologically. Moreover, the transfer of the PLO bureaucracy from exile into the 1967 territories, as a ruling apparatus entrusted with the task of surveillance over the population that waged the Intifada, quickly led to its corruption reaching abysmal levels -- something that the population of the territories hadn`t seen first-hand before. At the same time, Hamas, like most sections of the Islamic fundamentalist mass movement -- in contrast with "substitutionist" strictly terrorist organizations of which al-Qaeda has become the most spectacular example -- was keen on paying attention to popular basic needs, organizing social services, and cultivating a reputation of austerity and incorruptibility.

4. The irresistible rise of Ariel Sharon to the helm of the Israeli state resulted from his September 2000 provocation that ignited the "Second Intifada" -- an uprising that because of its militarization lacked the most positive features of the popular dynamics of the first Intifada. A PA that, by its very nature, could definitely not rely on mass self-organization and chose the only way of struggle it was familiar with, fostered this militarization. Sharon`s rise was also a product of the dead-end reached by the Oslo process: the clash between the Zionist interpretation of the Oslo frame -- an updated version of the 1967 "Alon Plan" by which Israel would relinquish the populated areas of the 1967 occupied territories to an Arab administration, while keeping colonized and militarized strategic chunks -- and the PA`s minimal requirements of recovering all, or nearly all the territories occupied in 1967, without which it knew it would lose its remaining clout with the Palestinian population. The electoral victory of war criminal Ariel Sharon in February 2001 -- an event as much "shocking" as the electoral victory of Hamas, at the very least -- inevitably reinforced the Islamic fundamentalist movement, his counterpart in terms of radicalization of stance against the backdrop of a still-born historic compromise. All of this was greatly propelled, of course, by the (very resistible, but unresisted) accession to power of George W. Bush, and the unleashing of his wildest imperial ambitions thanks to the attacks on September 11, 2001.

5. Ariel Sharon played skillfully on the dialectics between himself and his Palestinian true opposite number, Hamas. His calculation was simple: in order to be able to carry through unilaterally his own hard-line version of the Zionist interpretation of a "settlement" with the Palestinians, he needed two conditions: a) to minimize international pressure upon him -- or rather U.S. pressure, the only one that really matters to Israel; and b) to demonstrate that there is no Palestinian leadership with which Israel could "do business." For this, he needed to emphasize the weakness and unreliability of the PA by fanning the expansion of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, knowing that the latter was anathema to the Western states. Thus every time there was some kind of truce, negotiated by the PA with the Islamic organizations, Sharon`s government would resort to an "extrajudicial execution" -- in plain language, an assassination -- in order to provoke these organizations into retaliation by the means they specialized in: suicide attacks, their "F-16s" as they say. This had the double advantage of stressing the PA inability to control the Palestinian population, and enhancing Sharon`s own popularity in Israel. The truth of the matter is that the electoral victory of Hamas is the outcome that Sharon`s strategy was very obviously seeking, as many astute observers did not fail to point out.

6. As long as Yasir Arafat was alive, he could still use the remnant of his own historical prestige. Contrary to what many commentators have said, the seclusion of Arafat in his last months by Sharon did not "discredit" the Palestinian leader: as a matter of fact, Arafat`s popularity was at an all-time low before his seclusion, and regained in strength after it started. Actually, Arafat`s leadership has always been directly nurtured by his demonization by Israel and his popularity rose again when he became Sharon`s prisoner. This is why the U.S. and Israel`s nominee for Palestinian leadership, Mahmud Abbas, was not able to really take over as long as Arafat was alive. This is also why both the Bush administration and Sharon would not let the Palestinians organize the new elections that Arafat kept demanding as his representativeness was challenged very hypocritically in the name of "democratic reform." The very nature of the "democrats" supported by Washington and Israel under this heading is best epitomized by Muhammad Dahlan, the most corrupt chief of one of the rival repressive "security" apparatuses that Arafat kept under his control on a pattern familiar to autocratic Arab regimes.

7. The electoral victory of Hamas is a resounding slap in the face of the Bush administration. As the latest illustration of the sorcerer`s apprenticeship that U.S. policy in the Middle East has so spectacularly displayed, it is the final nail in the coffin of its neocon-inspired, demagogic and deceitful rhetoric about bringing "democracy" to the "Greater Middle East." It is, of course, too early to make any safe prediction at this point regarding what will happen on the ground. It is possible, however, to make a few observations and prognoses:

Hamas does not have a social incentive for collaboration with the Israeli occupation, at least not in any way resembling that of the PLO-originated PA apparatuses: it has actually been thrown into disarray by its own victory, as it would certainly have preferred the much more comfortable posture of being a major parliamentary opposition force to the PA. Therefore, it takes a lot of self-deception and wishful thinking to believe that Hamas will adapt to the conditions laid out by the U.S. and Israel. Collaboration is all the less likely given that the Israeli government, under the leadership of the new Kadima party founded by Sharon, will continue his policy, taking full advantage of the election result that suits its plans so well, and making impossible any accommodation with Hamas. Moreover, Hamas faces an outbidding rival represented by "Islamic Jihad," which boycotted the election.

In order to try to rescue the very sensitive Palestinian component of overall U.S. Middle East policy that it managed to steer into dire straits, the Bush administration will very likely consider three possibilities. One would be a major shift in the policies of Hamas, bought by and mediated by the Saudis; this is, however, unlikely for the reason stated above and would be long and uncertain. Another would be fomenting tension and political opposition to Hamas in order to provoke new elections in the near future, taking advantage of the vast presidential powers that Arafat had granted himself and that Mahmud Abbas inherited, or just by having the latter resign, thus forcing a presidential election. For such a move to be successful, or meaningful at all, there is a need for a credible figure that could regain a majority for the traditional Palestinian leadership; but the only figure having the minimum of prestige required for this role is presently Marwan Barghouti, who -- from his Israeli jail cell -- made an alliance with Dahlan prior to the election. It is therefore likely that Washington will exert pressure on Israel for his release. A third possibility would be the "Algerian scenario" -- referring to the interruption of the electoral process in Algeria by a military junta in January 1992 -- which is already envisaged, according to reports in the Arab press: the repressive apparatuses of the PA would crack down on Hamas, impose a state of siege and establish a military-police dictatorship. Of course, a combination of the last two scenarios is also possible, postponing the crackdown until political conditions are created, that are more suitable for it.

Any attempt by the U.S. and the European Union to starve the Palestinians into submission by interrupting the economic aid that they grant them would be disastrous for both humanitarian and political reasons and should be opposed most vigorously.

The catastrophic management of U.S. policy in the Middle East by the Bush administration, on top of decades of clumsy and shortsighted U.S. imperial policies in this part of the world, has not yet born all its bitter fruit.


January 27, 2006

Gilbert Achcar is author of Eastern Cauldron (New York : Monthly Review Press, 2004) and The Clash of Barbarisms, new expanded edition coming out soon from Saqi Books (London) and Paradigm Publishers (Boulder, CO). The author thanks Steve Shalom for his editing and very useful suggestions. `

posted by Juan @ [url1/28/2006 12:56:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/achcar-on-hamas-guest-editorial-first.html[/url] 5 comments

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Ein Link aus dem Cole-Blog.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-insurgen…
From the Los Angeles Times
THE WORLD
Deadly Rift Grows Among Insurgents

U.S. hopes to exploit violence between Iraqi militants and foreign fighters, officials say.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-insurgen…

By Louise Roug and Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writers

January 29, 2006

RAMADI, Iraq — Deadly fighting has erupted within Iraq`s insurgency as home-grown guerrilla groups, increasingly resentful of foreign-led extremists, try to assert control over the fragmented anti-American campaign, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Yet there is no evidence that the split here in the Sunni Arab heartland has weakened the uprising, diminished Iraqis` sense of insecurity, or brought any relief to U.S. forces, the officials say.

Tit-for-tat killings among locals and followers of Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi have been reported across western Iraq in recent months, and some U.S. officials see the strife as a positive sign. They have been working to drive a wedge between Zarqawi`s foreign Arab volunteers and Iraqi-led militant groups, and to bring Sunnis who have backed the uprising into Iraq`s political process.

"There`s an opportunity to divide the … insurgency, and we`re starting to see breaks in that now," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mowaffak Rubaie, the Iraqi government`s national security advisor, said a growing body of intelligence indicated that Iraqi-led groups were turning against Zarqawi`s faction, Al Qaeda in Iraq, over a divergence of basic aims.

He believes the shift reflects Iraqis` growing resentment of a foreign-led force whose fundamentalist religious goals and calls for sectarian war against Iraq`s Shiite majority run counter to Iraqi nationalist traditions.

But U.S. military officials concede that the guerrillas` ability to strike anywhere at any time is largely undiminished. They say the insurgency remains a stubborn, elusive and deadly collection of fighting groups that share the aim of ousting American forces.

Their attacks across Iraq averaged 75 per day in December, up from 52 a year earlier, driving the country`s sectarian violence and contributing to a decline in its oil production. U.S. troops died at the same rate last year as in 2004, and most estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties rose.

Reports of clashes among the anti-American fighters began surfacing several months ago.

One outbreak of violence came in mid-January after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey, the top military commander in Iraq, visited this provincial capital to solidify a pact with tribal sheiks. Under the deal, young men from their tribes had been signing up for a municipal police force to replace the one the insurgents had destroyed.

A day after the meeting, one of the sheiks, Nasr Abdul Kareem, a 49-year-old physics professor thought to be an insurgent strategist, was shot dead in an ambush after dropping his sons off at school. Two other sheiks cooperating with U.S. forces here in Al Anbar province were slain the same week.

Outraged by the slayings, insurgents from their tribes have retaliated by killing at least a dozen Zarqawi followers, an Iraqi intelligence official said.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said six "major leaders" of Zarqawi`s network had been killed since September by Iraq-led insurgent groups — "people saying, `Get outta here, we`ve had enough!` "

"The local insurgents have become part of the solution," Lynch said.

The severity of the rift among insurgents is hard to gauge, security specialists say, because the movement has long been fragmented into dozens of loosely coordinated factions, a feature that makes it hard to understand, much less defeat. Estimates of their numbers range from 4,000 to 20,000, a significant minority of them commanded by Zarqawi.

"Because we still lack a clear picture of the insurgency, we can`t assess the full import of this development," said Bruce Hoffman, a leading specialist on terrorism and director of the Rand Corp.`s Washington office. Hoffman said he was skeptical that the clashes point to deep differences among guerrilla groups, suggesting that the killings might simply be examples of traditional Iraqi tribal justice.

Rubaie disagreed. "Al Qaeda in Iraq is at loggerheads with the Islamic Army and the Mujahedin Army," he said, mentioning two home-grown insurgent factions. "This is not infighting and retaliation and revenge between tribes. We are talking about two ideologies."

Working to exploit the division, U.S. diplomats helped persuade the main Sunni political groups, which had boycotted the polls last January, to compete in Iraq`s Dec. 15 election and seek a share of power in Baghdad.

Ignoring threats by Al Qaeda to sabotage the election, Sunni clerics and many insurgent groups mobilized a heavy Sunni voter turnout. The returns gave Sunni parties about one-fifth of the seats in parliament and a chance to bargain for a minority role in a government now dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

U.S. officials said the election had helped thwart an effort by Zarqawi to draw ever greater numbers of Iraqi Sunnis into his terrorist campaign of car bombings and suicide attacks. Army Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander in Iraq, said recently that Zarqawi`s group was in "disarray."

The fallout has spilled across Al Anbar, the cradle of the insurgency and the deadliest battleground for U.S. forces.

Most of Zarqawi`s foreign-led operation in Al Anbar, which smuggles weapons and cash across the border from Syria, is said to be made up of Iraqis. Insurgents who supported the election are also entrenched here — and increasingly at odds with Zarqawi`s fighters.

In one of the earliest reported clashes, insurgents in Qaim, on the Syrian border, fought with Zarqawi`s followers during the summer and eventually drove them out of the city, Iraqi officials said.

Three times in the last month, insurgent groups have battled each other in the streets of Ramadi, U.S. intelligence officers reported.

"It`s much like Mafia dons battling it out over turf," one officer said, with "pinpoint assassinations and gang-on-gang warfare."

Karim Hussein, headmaster of a primary school in Ramadi, said one reason for the clashes is that people object to religious orders that radical insurgents have distributed on leaflets throughout the city, instructing women to cover their faces.

Another source of friction is Al Qaeda`s opposition to the new U.S.-backed police force, to which tribal leaders agreed to recruit their insurgent followers as a way of calming the city and eventually enabling U.S. forces to leave.

The conflict escalated after a suicide bomb attack Jan. 5 in Ramadi amid a crowd of men lining up to join the new force, killing about 70 people. Zarqawi, one resident said, suddenly became the city`s "No. 1 enemy."

Tribal leaders and local insurgents have since vowed to drive Zarqawi`s militants out of Al Anbar. Three Ramadi-based Islamist guerrilla factions once financed by Zarqawi have broken with him, making it harder for his forces to operate in the city.

It is unclear who is winning this fight. Undeterred by the Jan. 5 bombing, hundreds of new volunteers have joined Ramadi`s police force. But a Pentagon official called the subsequent execution-style slayings of cooperative tribal leaders a "devastating" blow that demonstrated Al Qaeda`s continuing ability to intimidate its rivals.

What is certain is that insurgent violence rages unabated in Ramadi, as in much of Iraq.

During a recent 10-day stretch, insurgents staged 113 attacks on U.S. troops here. Mortar rounds rain down almost daily on their base. Marine snipers sit atop the governor`s office, dueling with masked men in black who shoot through broken windows of abandoned buildings across the street.

One plausible explanation for the undiminished violence against U.S. forces is that Sunnis might be hedging their bets, continuing to foment violence even as they collaborate with the Americans and bargain for a place in the government.

A counterinsurgency expert at the Pentagon suggested that the Sunnis had adopted a model similar to the Sinn Fein wing of the Irish Republican Army, forming a separate political movement as it continued to wage war. Rubaie, Iraq`s security advisor, said he concurred with this view.

Although Sunni party leaders deny that they speak for the guerrillas, they press many of the same demands, including a withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In Ramadi, Sunni residents close to the Iraqi-led insurgents sounded determined to fight on two fronts — against the Americans and Zarqawi`s followers.

"We`re sick and tired of the extremist insurgents, but not of the honorable resistance that targets the occupiers," said Hussein, the schoolmaster. "We still believe in jihad, and fighting the occupiers is jihad."

Jeffrey White, a former U.S. intelligence officer now with the independent Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, concluded that "even if we can exploit this rift" between rebel groups, "it doesn`t mean they stop fighting us."

Rather than ease pressure on U.S. forces, the insurgents` internal battles here have added a layer of violence to one of Iraq`s most embattled cities.

Zarqawi`s extremists "started killing everybody — Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers — all these guys are from tribes, and tribes retaliate," said Mohammed Abdullah Shahawani, head of Iraqi intelligence.

"They are on the run," he said. "First of all, they have difficulties hiding now. And secondly, someone is chasing them."

*

Roug reported from Ramadi and Boudreaux from Baghdad. A Times special correspondent in Ramadi, staff writers Mark Mazzetti and Doyle McManus in Washington, and staff writers Raheem Salman, Chris Kraul and Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad contributed to this report.


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-predato…
From the Los Angeles Times
THE NATION
CIA Expands Use of Drones in Terror War

`Targeted killing` with missile-firing Predators is a way to hit Al Qaeda in remote areas, officials say. Host nations are not always given notice.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-predato…

By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

January 29, 2006

WASHINGTON — Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.

The CIA`s failed Jan. 13 attempt to assassinate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri in Pakistan was the latest strike in the "targeted killing" program, a highly classified initiative that officials say has broadened as the network splintered and fled Afghanistan.

The strike against Zawahiri reportedly killed as many as 18 civilians, many of them women and children, and triggered protests in Pakistan. Similar U.S. attacks using unmanned Predator aircraft equipped with Hellfire missiles have angered citizens and political leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.

Little is known about the targeted-killing program. The Bush administration has refused to discuss how many strikes it has made, how many people have died, or how it chooses targets. No U.S. officials were willing to speak about it on the record because the program is classified.

Several U.S. officials confirmed at least 19 occasions since Sept. 11 on which Predators successfully fired Hellfire missiles on terrorist suspects overseas, including 10 in Iraq in one month last year. The Predator strikes have killed at least four senior Al Qaeda leaders, but also many civilians, and it is not known how many times they missed their targets.

Critics of the program dispute its legality under U.S. and international law, and say it is administered by the CIA with little oversight. U.S. intelligence officials insist it is one of their most tightly regulated, carefully vetted programs.

Lee Strickland, a former CIA counsel who retired in 2004 from the agency`s Senior Intelligence Service, confirmed that the Predator program had grown to keep pace with the spread of Al Qaeda commanders. The CIA believes they are branching out to gain recruits, financing and influence.

Many groups of Islamic militants are believed to be operating in lawless pockets of the Middle East, Asia and Africa where it is perilous for U.S. troops to try to capture them, and difficult to discern the leaders.

"Paradoxically, as a result of our success the target has become even more decentralized, even more diffused and presents a more difficult target — no question about that," said Strickland, now director of the Center for Information Policy at the University of Maryland.

"It`s clear that the U.S. is prepared to use and deploy these weapons in a fairly wide theater," he said.

Current and former intelligence officials said they could not disclose which countries could be subject to Predator strikes. But the presence of Al Qaeda or its affiliates has been documented in dozens of nations, including Somalia, Morocco and Indonesia.

High-ranking U.S. and allied counter-terrorism officials said the program`s expansion was not merely geographic. They said it had grown from targeting a small number of senior Al Qaeda commanders after the Sept. 11 attacks to a more loosely defined effort to kill possibly scores of suspected terrorists, depending on where they were found and what they were doing.

"We have the plans in place to do them globally," said a former counter-terrorism official who worked at the CIA and State Department, which coordinates such efforts with other governments.

"In most cases, we need the approval of the host country to do them. However, there are a few countries where the president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government."

The CIA and the Pentagon have deployed at least several dozen of the Predator drones throughout Iraq, Afghanistan and along the borders of Pakistan, U.S. officials confirmed. The CIA also has sent the remote-controlled aircraft into the skies over Yemen and some other countries believed to be Al Qaeda havens, particularly those without a strong government or military with which the United States can work in tandem, a current U.S. counter-terrorism official told The Times.

Such incursions are highly sensitive because they could violate the sovereignty of those nations and anger U.S. allies, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego, is a slender craft, 27 feet long with a 49-foot wingspan. It makes a clearly audible buzzing sound, and can hover above a target for many hours and fly as low as 15,000 feet to get good reconnaissance footage. They are often operated by CIA or Pentagon officials at computer consoles in the United States.

The drones were designed for surveillance and have been used for that purpose since at least the mid-1990s, beginning with the conflict in the Balkans. After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush ordered a rapid escalation of a project to arm the Predators with missiles, an effort that had been mired in bureaucratic squabbles and technical glitches.

Now the Predator is an integral part of the military`s counter-insurgency effort, especially in Iraq. But the CIA also runs a more secretive — and more controversial — Predator program that targets suspected terrorists outside combat zones.

The CIA does not even acknowledge that such a targeted-killing program exists, and some attacks have been explained away as car bombings or other incidents. It is not known how many militants or bystanders have been killed by Predator strikes, but anecdotal evidence suggests the number is significant.

In some cases, the destruction was so complete that it was impossible to establish who was killed, or even how many people.

Among the senior Al Qaeda leaders killed in Predator strikes were military commander Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Qaed Sinan Harithi, a suspected mastermind of the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, in 2002. Last year, Predators took out two Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan: Haitham Yemeni in May and Abu Hamza Rabia in December, one month after another missile strike missed him.

The attack on Rabia in North Waziristan also killed his Syrian bodyguards and the 17-year-old son and the 8-year-old nephew of the owner of the house that was struck, according to a U.S. official and Amnesty International, which has lodged complaints with the Bush administration following each suspected Predator strike.

Another apparent Predator missile strike killed a former Taliban commander, Nek Mohammed, in South Waziristan in June 2004, along with five others. A local observer said the strike was so precise that it didn`t damage any of the buildings around the lawn where Mohammed was seated. At the time, the Pakistani army said Mohammed had been killed in clashes with its soldiers.

Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA`s special unit hunting Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, said he was aware of at least four successful targeted-killing strikes in Afghanistan alone by November 2004, when he left the agency.

In the attack on Zawahiri, word spread quickly that a U.S. plane had been buzzing above the target beforehand. Afterward, villagers reportedly found evidence of U.S. involvement.

The missiles intended for Bin Laden`s chief deputy incinerated several houses in Damadola, a village near Pakistan`s northwestern border with Afghanistan. But Zawahiri was not there, U.S. officials now believe. Pakistan said it was investigating whether the strikes killed other high-ranking militants.

There were some well-publicized failures before the Zawahiri strike. In February 2002, a Predator tracked and killed a tall man in flowing robes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The CIA believed it was firing at Bin Laden, but the victim turned out to be someone else.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. government had targeted Bin Laden in at least one Cruise missile strike. But the CIA was reluctant to engage in targeted killings because it said the laws regarding assassinations were too vague and the agency could face criminal charges.

Even today, documents and interviews suggest that the U.S. policy on targeted killings is still evolving.

Some critics, including a U.N. human rights watchdog group and Amnesty International, have urged the Bush administration to be more open about how it decides whom to kill and under what circumstances.

A U.N. report in the wake of the 2002 strike in Yemen called it "an alarming precedent [and] a clear case of extrajudicial killing" in violation of international laws and treaties. The Bush administration, which did not return calls seeking comment for this story, has said it does not recognize the mandate of the U.N. special body in connection with its military actions against Al Qaeda, according to Amnesty International.

"Zawahiri is an easy case. No one is going to question us going after him," said Juliette N. Kayyem, a former U.S. government counter-terrorism consultant and Justice Department lawyer. "But where can you do it and who can you do it against? Who authorizes it? All of these are totally unregulated areas of presidential authority."

"Paris, it`s easy to say we won`t do it there," said Kayyem, now a Harvard University law professor specializing in terrorism-related legal issues. "But what about Lebanon?"

Paul Pillar, a former CIA deputy counter-terrorism chief, said the authority claimed by the Bush administration was murky.

"I don`t think anyone is dealing with solid footing here. There is legal as well as operational doctrine that is being developed as we go along," Pillar said. "We are pretty much in uncharted territory here."

Pillar, who was also the CIA`s National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia before retiring in mid-2005, said there had long been disagreement within the intelligence community over whether targeted killings were legally permissible, or even a good idea.

Before Sept. 11, Pillar said, CIA officers were issued vaguely worded guidelines that seemed to give them authority to kill Bin Laden, but only during an attempt to capture him.

The 9/11 commission investigating the attacks in New York and Washington concluded that such vaguely worded laws and policies gave little reassurance to those who might be pulling the trigger that they would not face disciplinary action — or even criminal charges.

Although presidents Ford and Reagan issued executive orders in 1976 and 1981 prohibiting U.S. intelligence agents from engaging in assassinations, the Bush administration claimed the right to kill suspected terrorists under war powers given to the president by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It is the same justification Bush has used for a recently disclosed domestic spying program that has the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants, and a CIA "extraordinary rendition" program to seize suspected terrorists overseas and transport them to other countries with reputations for torture.

Strickland, like some other officials, said the Predator program served as a deterrent to foreign governments, militias and other groups that might be harboring Al Qaeda cells.

"You give shelter to Al Qaeda figures, you may well get your village blown up," Strickland said. "Conversely, you have to note that this can also create local animosity and instability."

The CIA`s lawyers play a central role in deciding when a strike is justified, current and former U.S. officials said. The lawyers analyze the credibility of the evidence, how many bystanders might be killed, and whether the target is enough of a threat to warrant the strike.

Other agencies, including the Justice Department, are sometimes consulted, Strickland said. "The legal input is broad and extensive," he said.

Scheuer said he believed the process was too cumbersome, and that the agency had lost precious opportunities to slay terrorists because it was afraid of killing civilians.

But others said they had urged the Bush administration to adopt a multi-agency system of checks and balances similar to that used by Israel, which for decades has convened informal tribunals to assess each proposed targeted killing before carrying it out.

Amos N. Guiora, a senior Israeli military judge advocate who participated in such tribunals, said that although the failed Zawahiri strike itself appeared to be justifiable, the result suggested a lack of adequate deliberations on the quality of the intelligence.

"I think [the] attack was a major screw-up, because so many kids died. It raises questions about the entire process," said Guiora, who now a professor at Case Western Law School and director of its Institute for Global Security Law and Policy.

"It shows the absolute need to have a well-thought-through and developed process that examines the action from a legal perspective, an intelligence perspective and an operational perspective. Because the price you pay here is that you are going to have to be hesitant the next time you pull the trigger."


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kapla…
From the Los Angeles Times
Powell is America`s nowhere man
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kapla…

By Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan is the national security columnist for Slate.

January 29, 2006

IT`S BEEN ONE YEAR since Colin L. Powell left high office. Where did he go?

So sad, even tragic, is the tale of this man`s evaporation. Once, he might have made a serious run for president, under either party`s banner. Just a few years ago, he ranked among the most-admired Americans: a proud Jamaican immigrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, rose through the Army`s ranks to general, then to White House assistant, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and finally the first black secretary of State.

It was from this pinnacle that he crashed and burned. Outmaneuvered at every turn by the tag team of Cheney & Rumsfeld, shut out of policy on the major issues of the day, bamboozled by false intelligence on Iraq and ordered to link his credibility to the public case for a war he didn`t believe in, Powell left office in tatters after George W. Bush`s first term. Republicans viewed him as too dovish. Democrats considered him untrustworthy. His pals on the Euro-diplomatic circuit saw that they had been dealing with a nowhere man, that his whispered assurances of moderation had reflected only his own views, not his government`s.

In his final weeks as secretary, Powell started venting his frustration. He clearly had been a key source for his old friend Bob Woodward, whose 2004 book "Plan of Attack" detailed what Powell had been saying and even thinking about Iraq. Now he was going on the record. He told one reporter that he might not have supported the war had he known Saddam Hussein didn`t have weapons of mass destruction. He told another that the Iraqi insurgency was stronger than anyone anticipated.

He quickly retracted those remarks. But it looked as if the warrior-diplomat might not go gently into his good night. Some of his friends were relieved that he might finally speak out on all the things he had kept coiled inside. Book agents and publishers lined up with lucrative offers for kiss-and-tell memoirs.

One year later, debates rage over Iraq and a dozen other matters of foreign and military policy. Powell is uniquely positioned to play a major role in those debates. Why isn`t he engaged?

Last June, Powell went on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It was one of his first TV guest spots since leaving office. Stewart is famous for his barbed attacks on Bush and the war. Surely Powell wouldn`t be appearing on this show unless he had something to say.

But no, he had nothing. Explicit jabs at his old tormenters might have been beyond all expectations, but he refrained from the slightest criticism — not so much as a wink, a nudge or a suggestive giggle. Stewart left him wide openings, but Powell took none of them. Sure, there were disagreements, Powell conceded, but hey, that`s true in any administration. The president`s the boss, and he`s a swell guy. Why, he and Laura were just over at the house for dinner the previous week.

The common explanation for Powell`s reticence is that he`s a "good soldier" and loyal to the Bush family. But this won`t hold. He removed his uniform long ago, and a decent interval has elapsed since he took off the pinstripes too. His former colleague and another retired Army general, Brent Scowcroft, has still deeper loyalties, but they haven`t kept him from inveighing against the president`s policies. Then again, they have made him persona non grata at the White House. Surely this couldn`t be what Powell fears — that George and Laura won`t pop by for barbecue anymore?

Powell has considerable resources. He is a strategic limited partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. He is actively involved with the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at City College of New York. He is on the boards of Howard University, the United Negro College Fund, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the Children`s Health Fund. He also has no political future to risk.

Why can`t he act like an independent man? For starters, why doesn`t he tell the American people, in an open forum, the same things he told Woodward in his home over cocktails?

Earlier this month, Powell was among the former secretaries of State and Defense who met with the president to "exchange views" on the war. Powell said nothing. Some reporters wrote that his silence "spoke volumes."

No, it didn`t. It spoke nothing. He came off, like all the others who leapt at the chance to sit in the Cabinet Room again, as a prop in Bush`s photo-op.


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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Die Meldung ist zwar nicht neu, aber ich glaube das erste Mal von einer großen Zeitung bestätigt.

Exclusive: Direct Talks—U.S. Officials and Iraqi Insurgents
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11079548/site/newsweek/

Newsweek

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - American officials in Iraq are in face-to-face talks with high-level Iraqi Sunni insurgents, NEWSWEEK has learned. Americans are sitting down with "senior members of the leadership" of the Iraqi insurgency, according to Americans and Iraqis with knowledge of the talks (who did not want to be identified when discussing a sensitive and ongoing matter). The talks are taking place at U.S. military bases in Anbar province, as well as in Jordan and Syria. "Now we have won over the Sunni political leadership," says U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. "The next step is to win over the insurgents." The groups include Baathist cells and religious Islamic factions, as well as former Special Republican Guards and intelligence agents, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the talks. Iraq`s insurgent groups are reaching back. "We want things from the U.S. side, stopping misconduct by U.S. forces, preventing Iranian intervention," said one prominent insurgent leader from a group called the Army of the Mujahedin, who refused to be named because of the delicacy of the discussions. "We can`t achieve that without actual meetings."

U.S. intelligence officials have had back-door channels to insurgent groups for many months. The Dec. 15 elections brought many Sunnis to the polls and widened the split between Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi`s foreign jihadists and indigenous Sunni insurgents. This marks the first time either Americans or insurgents have admitted that "senior leaders" have met at the negotiating table for planning purposes. "Those who are coming to work with [the U.S.] or come to an understanding with [the U.S.], even if they worked with Al Qaeda in a tactical sense in the past—and I don`t know that—they are willing to fight Al Qaeda now," says a Western diplomat in Baghdad who has close knowledge of the discussions. An assortment of some of Iraq`s most prominent insurgent groups also recently formed a "council" whose purpose, in addition to publishing religious edicts and coordinating military actions, is to serve as a point of contact for the United States in the future. "The reason they want to unite is to have a public contact with the U.S. if they disagree," says the senior insurgent figure. "If negotiations between armed groups and Americans are not done, then no solutions will be found," says Issa al-Addai al-Mehamdi, a sheik from the prominent Duleimi tribe in Fallujah. "All I can say is that we support the idea of Americans talking with resistance groups."

They have much to discuss. For one, Americans and Iraqi insurgent groups share a common fear of undue Iranian influence in Iraq. "There is more concern about the domination by Iran of Iraq," says a senior Western diplomat, "and that combination of us being open to them and the dynamics of struggle for domination of violence has come together to get them to want to reach an understanding with us." Contacts between U.S. officials and insurgents have been criticized by Iraq`s ruling Shiite leaders, many of whom have longstanding ties to Iran and are deeply resented by Sunnis. "We haven`t given the green light to [talks] between the U.S. and insurgents," says Vice President Adel Abdel Mehdi, of the Shiite party, called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Negotiations are risky for everyone—not least because tensions between Al Qaeda and Iraq`s so-called patriotic resistance is higher than ever. Two weeks ago, assassins killed Sheik Nassir Qarim al-Fahdawi, a prominent Anbar sheik described by other Sunnis as a chief negotiator for the insurgency. "He was killed for talking to the Americans," says Zedan al-Awad, another leading Anbar sheik. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, continues to gain territory in the Sunni heartland, according to al-Awad: "Let me tell you: Zarqawi is in total control of Anbar. The Americans control nothing." Many, on both sides, are hoping that talks could change that.

—Scott Johnson, Rod Nordland and and Ranya Kadri
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11079548/site/newsweek/

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Amerikas neuer Feind im Aufstieg
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1718

von John Pilger
New Statesman / ZNet 11.11.2005
Ich stieg in Paradiso aus, dem letzten Mittelstandsgebiet vor dem hispanischen Wohnviertel La Vega, das sich wie durch die Kraft der Gravitation in eine Schlucht ergießt. Es waren Stürme vorhergesagt, und die Leute waren nervös, weil sie sich an die Schlammlawinen erinnerten, die 20.000 Menschen das Leben gekostet hatten. „Warum sind Sie hier?“ fragte der Mann, der mir in dem vollbepackten Jeep auf dem Weg den Hügel hinauf gegenüber saß. Wie so viele andere in Lateinamerika schien er älter zu sein, als er war. Ohne auf meine Antwort zu warten, zählte er die Gründe auf, weshalb er den Präsidenten Chavez unterstützte: Schulen, Kliniken, erschwingliche Lebensmittel, „unsere Konstitution, unsere Demokratie“ und „zum erstenmal geht das Ölgeld an uns“. Ich fragte ihn, ob er der MRV angehöre, Chavez’ Partei, “nein, ich war noch nie einer politischen Partei; ich kann Ihnen nur erzählen, wie mein Leben verändert wurde, so wie ich es mir nie erträumt hätte.“

Es ist dieser reine Augenzeugenbericht, den ich in Venezuela immer wieder gehört habe, der den einseitigen Spiegel zwischen dem Westen und einem im Aufstieg befindlichen Kontinent zum Bersten bringt. Mit Aufstieg meine ich das Phänomen von Millionen von Menschen, die wieder einmal in Bewegung sind, „wie Löwen nach dem Schlaf/unüberwindbar in Zahl“, schrieb der Dichter Shelley in Die Maske der Anarchie. Das hat nichts mit Romantik zu tun; ein Epos entfaltet sich in Lateinamerika, welches unsere Aufmerksamkeit fordert, jenseits von den Sterotypen und Clichés, die ganze Gesellschaften auf ihren Grad an Ausbeutbarkeit und Ersetzbarkeit reduzieren.

Für den Mann im Bus und für Beatrice, deren Kinder geimpft werden und zum erstenmal in Geschichte, Kunst und Musik unterrichtet werden, und Celedonia, in ihren Siebzigern, die zum erstenmal Lesen und Schreiben lernt, und Jose, dessen Leben mitten in der Nacht von einem Arzt gerettet wurde, dem ersten Arzt, den er je gesehen hatte, ist Hugo Chavez weder ein „Heißsporn“ noch ein „Autokrat“, sondern ein Menschenfreund und Demokrat, der fast zwei Drittel der Stimmen besitzt und sich durch nicht weniger als neun Wahlsiege akkreditiert hat, im Vergleich zu einem Fünftel der britischen Wähler, die Blair wieder eingesetzt haben, einen echten Autokraten.

Chavez und der Zuwachs der sozialen Volksbewegungen von Colombia bis hinunter nach Argentinien steht für unblutige, radikale Veränderung, die sich durch den ganzen Kontinent zieht; inspiriert durch die großen Unabhängigkeitskämpfe, die mit Simon Bolivar begannen, der in Venezuela geboren wurde und die Gedanken der Französischen Revolution in Gesellschaften trug, die durch den spanischen Absolutismus unterdrückt wurden. Bolivar, wie Che Guevara in den 60er Jahren und Chavez heute, verstand den neuen Kolonialherren im Norden. „Die USA“, sagte er 1819, „scheinen vom Schicksal dazu bestimmt, Amerika im Namen der Freiheit mit Unglück zu plagen.“

Beim Gipfeltreffen von Nord-, Süd- und Mittelamerika in Quebec 2001 verkündete George W Bush die letzte Plage im Namen der Freiheit in Form eines Freihandelszonenabkommens für Amerika. Dieses würde den Vereinigten Staaten erlauben, ihren ideologischen „Markt“, Neo-Liberalismus, endlich allen lateinamerikanischen Ländern aufzupfropfen. Es war der natürliche Nachfolger zu Bill Clinton’s nordamerikanischem Freihandelsabkommen, das Mexico zu einem amerikanischen Ausbeutungsbetrieb machte. Bush brüstete sich damit, daß es bis 2005 Gesetz wäre.

Am 5. November kam Bush beim Gipfeltreffen von 2005 in Mar del Plata in Argentinien an, nur um sich sagen lassen zu müssen, seine FTAA stünde nicht mal auf der Tagesordnung. Unter den 34 Staatsoberhäupten befanden sich neue, unbeugsame Gesichter und hinter allen von ihnen standen Bevölkerungen, die nicht länger gewillt waren, von den USA unterstützte Geschäftstyranneien zu akzeptieren. Noch nie zuvor haben lateinamerikanische Regierungen ihre Völker bei derlei Pseudo-Vereinbarungen konsultieren müssen; aber jetzt müssen sie es.

In Bolivien haben soziale Bewegungen in den letzten fünf Jahren gleichermaßen Regierungen wie fremde Konzerne abgesetzt, wie zum Beispiel den vielfüßigen Bechtel Konzern, der bemüht war, das, was die Leute total locura capitalista – den totalen kapitalistischen Blödsinn – die Privatisierung von fast allem, besonders Erdgas und Wasser, durchzusetzen. Nach Pinochets Chile sollte Bolivien ein neo-liberales Labor sein. Den Ärmsten der Armen wurden bis zu zwei Drittel ihres Hungerlohns für Regenwasser berechnet.

Während ich auf den ebenförmig grauen, eiskalten Kopfsteinpflasterstraßen von El Alto stand, 14.000 Fuß hoch in den Anden, oder in den Leichtbetonhäusern früherer Bergarbeiter und Campesinos saß, die von ihrem Land getrieben wurden, hatte ich politische Diskussionen, wie sie in Großbritannien und den USA selten entfacht werden. Sie sind direkt und redegewandt. „Warum sind wir so arm,“ sagen sie, „wenn unser Land so reich ist? Warum lügen die Regierungen und vertreten fremde Mächte?“ Sie sprechen von 500 Jahren der Eroberung, als sei sie gegenwärtig, was sie auch ist, und folgen den Spuren einer Reise, die mit dem spanischen Raub von Cerro Rico beginnt, einem Silberhügel, der von ansässigen Bergarbeitern in Sklavenarbeit abgebaut wurde und das spanische Imperium über drei Jahrhunderte finanzierte. Als es kein Silber mehr gab, war da noch Zinn, und als die Bergwerke in den 70er Jahren im Auftrag von IMF privatisiert wurden, brach der Zinnabbau und mit ihm 30.000 Jobs, zusammen. Als das Zinn durch das Cocablatt ersetzt wurde – in Bolivien kaut man es, um den Hunger zu stillen -, begann die bolivianische Armee, von den USA dazu gezwungen, die Cocaernte zu vernichten und die Gefängnisse zu füllen.

Im Jahr 2000 brach offene Rebellion gegen die weißen Geschäftsoligarchen und das amerikanische Konsulat aus, dessen Festung wie ein Vatikan der Anden im Zentrum von La Paz steht. So etwas hatte es noch nie gegeben, denn sie ging von der Mehrheit der indigenen Bevölkerung aus, um „unsere einheimische Seele zu schützen“. Nackter Rassismus gegen indigene Völker in ganz Lateinamerika gehört zum spanischen Erbe. Sie wurden verachtet oder waren unsichtbar, oder Kuriositäten für Touristen: die Frauen mit ihren Filzhüten und farbenfrohen Röcken. Jetzt nicht mehr. Angeführt von Visionären wie Oscar Olivera umzirkelten die Frauen mit Filzhüten und bunten Röcken die zweitgrößte Stadt des Landes, Cochabamba, und legten sie still, bis ihr Wasser wieder in die Hände des Staates zurückgegeben war.

Seitdem kämpfen die Leute jedes Jahr einen Krieg für Wasser oder Gas: im wesentlichen einen Krieg gegen Privatisierung und Armut. Nachdem sie 2003 den Präsidenten Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada vertrieben hatten, stimmten die Bolivianer in einem Referendum für echte Demokratie. Durch die sozialen Bewegungen forderten sie eine verfassungsgebende Versammlung ähnlich der, die Chavez’ bolivianische Revolution in Venezuela gegründet hatte, zusammen mit der Ablehnung der FTTA und all den anderen „Freihandel“- Übereinkommen, die Ausschließung der transnationalen Wasserwerke und eine 50-prozentige Steuer auf die Ausbeutung aller Energieressourcen.

Als der stellvertretende Präsident, Carlos Mesa, sich weigerte, das Programm durchzuführen, wurde er gezwungen, abzudanken. Im nächsten Monat wird es Präsidentschaftswahlen geben, und die Opposition, Bewegung für den Sozialismus (MAS), könnte sehr wohl die alte Ordnung über den Haufen werfen. Ihr Anführer ist ein einheimischer ehemaliger Cocabauer, Evo Morales, den der amerikanische Ambassodor mit Osama Bin Laden verglichen hat. In Wahrheit ist er ein Sozialdemokrat, der in den Augen vieler, die Cochabamba versiegelt haben und von El Alto den Berg herunter marschierten, zu gemäßigt ist.

„Das wird nicht leicht werden“, sagte mir Abel Mamani, der einheimische Präsident des El Alto Gemeindeauschusses. „Die Wahlen werden nicht die Lösung sein, selbst wenn wir gewinnen. Was wir gewährleisten müssen ist die verfassungsgebende Versammlung, von der wie eine Demokratie aufbauen, die nicht auf dem basiert, was die USA wollen, sondern auf sozialer Gerechtigkeit.“ Der Schriftsteller Pablo Solon, Sohn des großen politischen Wandmalers Walter Solon, sagte, „die Geschichte Boliviens ist die Geschichte der Regierung hinter der Regierung. Die USA können eine finanzielle Krise heraufbeschwören; aber für sie ist das in Wirklichkeit ideologisch; sie sagen, sie werden keinen zweiten Chavez akzeptieren.“

Die Menschen jedoch werden keinen zweiten Washington Quisling akzeptieren. Die Lektion ist Ecuador, wo ein Hubschrauber Lucio GutiErrez rettete, als er im letzten April dem Präsidentspalast entfloh. Nach einem Machtsieg in Allianz mit der indigenen Pachakutik Bewegung war er der „ecuadorianische Chavez“, bis er in einem Korruptionsskandal unterging. Für gewöhnliche Lateinamerikaner ist Korruption in hohen Positionen nicht mehr länger verzeihlich. Das ist einer von zwei Gründen, weshalb die Arbeiterparteiregierung von Lula in Brasilien kaum auf der Stelle tritt; der andere ist, daß ein Wirtschaftsplan der IMF höhere Priorität hat als seine Leute. In Argentinien haben soziale Bewegungen 2001 und 2002 fünf pro Washington Präsidenten verabschiedet. Auf der anderen Seite des Wassers in Uruguay, hat die Frente Amplio, sozialistische Nachfolger der Tupamaros, den Guerrillas der 70er Jahre, die eine der bösartigsten Terroraktionen der CIA bekämpft hat, letztes Jahr eine Volksherrschaft gebildet.

Die sozialen Bewegungen sind mittlerweile ein entscheidender Faktor in jedem lateinamerikanischen Land – selbst in dem Staat der Angst, dem Columbien von Alvaro Uribe Velez, dem treusten Vassalen von Bush. Im letzten Monat marschierten indigene Bewegungen durch jede der 32 columbianischen Provinzen und forderte ein Ende des Übels, das „so gut im Schießen“ ist: Neoliberalismus. In ganz Lateinamerika ist Hugo Chavez der neue Bolivar. Die Leute bewundern seine politische Weitsicht und seinen Mut. Nur er hatte den Mut, die Vereinigten Staaten als die Ursache des Terrorismus und Bush als Senor Peligro (Mr. Danger, d.h. Gefahr) zu bezeichnen. Er unterscheidet sich sehr von Fidel Castro, den er respektiert. Venezuela ist eine außergewöhnlich offene Gesellschaft mit einer uneingeschränkten Opposition – die reich und immer noch mächtig ist. Auf der Linken befinden sich jene, die gegen den Staat sind, aus Prinzip, die glauben, seine Reformen hätten ihre Grenzen erreicht, und die wollen, daß die Macht direkt von der Gemeinschaft ausgeübt wird. Das sagen sie vehement, aber sie unterstützen Chavez. Ein redegewandter junger Anarchist, Marcel, zeigte mir die Klinik, wo die beiden kubanischen Ärzte das Leben seiner Freundin gerettet haben könnten. (Im Gegenzug für Ärzte gibt Venezuela Öl an Kuba ab.)

Am Eingang jedes barrio, jedes Wohnviertels, ist ein staatlicher Supermarkt, wo alles, von Grundnahrungsmitteln bis zu Abwaschmitteln 40 Prozent weniger kostet als in kommerziellen Geschäften. Trotz trügerischer Beschuldigungen der Regierung, sie habe die Zensur eingeführt, sind die meisten Medien nach wie vor leidenschaftlich anti-Chavez: ein großer Teil davon in den Händen von Gustavo Cisneros, der Murdoch Lateinamerikas, der den letzten gescheiterten Versuch unterstützte, Chavez zu stürzen. Bemerkenswert sind die regionalen Radiosender, die überall aus dem Boden schießen und in dem Coup vom April 2002 eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Rettung Chavez spielten, indem sie die Menschen aufriefen, einen Protestmarsch nach Caracas mitzumachen.

Während die Welt auf Iran und Syrien blickt und die nächste Bush-Attacke dort vermutet, wissen die Venezuelaner genau, sie könnten die nächsten sein. Am 17. März berichtete die Washington Post, daß Feliz Rodriguez, „ein ehemaliger CIA Agent mit guten Verbindungen zur Bush-Familie“ an dem Plan zum Mordanschlag gegen den Präsidenten von Venezuela beteiligt war. Am 16. September sagte Chavez, „ich habe Beweise, daß es Pläne zur Invasion von Venezuela gibt. Des weiteren haben wir Dokumente: wie viele Bombenflugzueuge am Tag der Invasion Venezuela überfliegen werden…die USA führen Manöver auf Curacao Island durch, die sogenannte Operation Balboa.“ Seitdem haben interne Dokumente des Pentagon, die den Medien zugespielt wurden, Venezuela als eine „post-Irak Drohung“ identifiziert, die Planung „im vollen Ausmaß“ erfordere.

Der alte-junge Mann im Jeep, Beatrice und ihre gesunden Kinder und Celedonia mit ihrem „neuen Respekt“ sind in der Tat eine Bedrohung – die Bedrohung durch eine alternative, anständige Welt, die einige als nicht mehr möglich beweinen. Aber sie ist möglich, und sie verdient unsere Unterstützung.

Übersetzt von: Gesine Stone | Orginalartikel: " The Rise Of America`s New Enemy"

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Die Bushwerte nähern sich wieder neuen Tiefstpunkten.
Einmal der Time Poll
"In general, do you approve or disapprove of the way President Bush is handling his job as president?"

+++++++++++++++Approve++Disapprove++Unsure
% % %
1/24-26/06++++++41+++++++55+++++4
Das ist der schlechteste Wert der für Bush von Time gemessen wurde!

Dann der ABC/Post Poll
Poll: Weak Ratings Confront Bush Ahead of State of Union
War Fatigue, Ethics Concerns Impact Approval Rating
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=1549959

By GARY LANGER

Jan. 29, 2006 — - A weakened George W. Bush faces the nation in his 5th State of the Union address beset by war fatigue, persistent discontent on the economy and other domestic issues, ethics concerns and rising interest in Democratic alternatives in this midterm election year.

Bush`s bottom-line job rating -- 42 percent of Americans approve of his work, 56 percent disapprove -- is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since Watergate hammered Richard Nixon. And Bush`s is not a single-issue problem: More than half disapprove of his work in eight out of nine areas tested in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, from Iraq to immigration to health care.

Sampling, data collection and tabulation for this poll were done by TNS.

Some views look better for Bush. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the country`s safer now than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, in many ways the fundamental demand of his presidency. Fifty-three percent still believe the war in Iraq has improved long-term U.S. security, its most basic rationale. And the president has won himself some daylight on the issue of warrantless wiretaps; 56 percent now call them justified.

But his challenges are many. Bush`s overall approval rating has failed to sustain a slight gain last month from his career lows last fall -- it`s 10 points lower than a year ago, on the eve of his second inauguration.

Start of Sixth-Year Approval Ratings
Job Approval Rating
President:
Bush 42%
Clinton: 60%
Reagan 65%
Nixon 26%
Eisenhower 58%
Truman 45%

On Iraq, 55 percent say the war was not worth fighting and 60 percent disapprove of how Bush is handling it. On the deficit, 64 percent disapprove of his work; on health care 60 percent; on immigration 57 percent; on ethics 56 percent (see separate Jan. 27 analysis on ethics). Six in 10 say the economy`s hurting. Six in 10 don`t think Bush understands their problems. Fifty-three percent don`t see him as honest and trustworthy.

OPPOSITION -- Bush`s problems clearly benefit the opposition: Americans -- by a 16-point margin, 51 to 35 percent -- now say the country should go in the direction in which the Democrats want to lead, rather than follow Bush. That`s a 10-point drop for the president from a year ago, and the Democrats` first head-to-head majority of his presidency.

The Republican Party is feeling the pinch as well. The Democrats lead them by 14 points, 51 to 37 percent, in trust to handle the nation`s main problems, the first Democratic majority on this question since 1992. And the Democrats hold a 16-point lead in 2006 congressional election preferences, 54 to 38 percent among registered voters, their best since 1984.

Independents -- quintessential swing voters -- prefer the Democrats` direction over Bush`s by 51 to 27 percent, and favor the Democrat over the Republican in congressional races by 54 to 31 percent (the latter result is among independents who`re registered to vote.).

Whether this shifts many seats in the elections 10 months off is far from assured. Not only are the powers of incumbency immense, there`s also no broad anti-incumbency sentiment in the country; indeed 64 percent approve of their own representative`s work.

Still, some underlying shifts may give the Republicans pause, perhaps less for 2006 than for 2008 (admittedly a political lifetime away). The Democrats have narrowed the gap as the party with stronger leaders, now trailing by six points versus 16 points last fall. They lead by 16 points as the party with "better ideas." And they`ve held or improved their advantage over the Republicans in public trust to handle issues as disparate as the economy (now an 18-point Democratic lead), Iraq and lobbying reform.

Handling the nation`s response to terrorism is still the Republicans` best issue -- both Bush`s and his party`s -- albeit by far less of a margin than in the past: Fifty-two percent now approve of Bush`s work on terrorism (pale compared with his career-average 68 percent) and the Republicans hold a scant five-point lead over the Democrats in trust to handle it (down from a peak 36-point lead three years ago).

Even with these weaker assessments, dealing with terrorism remains the wellspring of the president`s support (and it`s clearly the issue that got him re-elected). When he addresses the nation Tuesday night -- and when his party goes to the people in November -- it`s certain to be central to their message.

ISSUES -- It helps Bush and his party that terrorism continues to be one of the top items on the public`s agenda; 59 percent say it should be one of the highest priorities for Bush and Congress, putting it alongside the situation in Iraq, cited by 60 percent. There are vast partisan differences in those two top issue choices: Seventy-nine percent of Republicans call terrorism a "highest priority" issue; that falls to about half of independents and Democrats alike (53 and 49 percent, respectively). And 70 percent of Republicans call Iraq top priority, compared with 51 percent of Democrats.

Rated the Highest Priority
All Dems. Ind. Repub.
Iraq 60% 51% 63% 70%
Terrorism 59% 49% 53% 79%
Health care 53% 58% 57% 43
Economy 52% 54% 54% 44%
Education 47% 53% 47% 38%
Less govt. spending 43% 41% 48% 41%
Social Security 41% 50% 41% 31%
Budget deficit 38% 42% 40% 32%
Disaster Prep. 36% 41% 35% 30%
Rx for elderly 32% 39% 34% 18%
Immigration 27% 22% 27% 34%
Taxes 27% 32% 28% 19%
Global Warming 26% 36% 30% 10%
Lobbying Reform 16% 17% 18% 13%
Democrats, by contrast, are much more likely than Republicans to give top-priority mention to domestic issues such as social security, education, health care and prescription drug benefits. Lobbying reform, it`s worth noting, comes out last on the list. That doesn`t mean it`s unimportant, just not a "highest" priority, probably because people are less apt to see it as impacting them directly.

IRAQ -- In one notable change, approval of Bush`s performance on Iraq has dropped back after a short-lived gain following the recent elections there. His approval rating went from 36 percent before the mid-December elections to 46 percent immediately afterward; now it`s back down to 39 percent. The change came mainly among Republicans; their approval of Bush`s handling of Iraq is down 11 points in this poll.

NSA -- A better result for Bush, noted above, is the apparent lack of traction for critics of the warrantless NSA wiretaps. A clear majority now says such wiretaps are acceptable, 56 percent, compared with 43 percent who call them unacceptable. That compares with a closer 51 to 47 percent split earlier this month.

In what may be a related result, there`s also been an advance, albeit just to 50 percent, in the number of Americans who express confidence in the government`s ability to prevent future terrorist attacks. This confidence is far higher among Republicans (71 percent) than it is among either independents or Democrats (45 and 40 percent, respectively.)

Still, the change on NSA wiretaps came equally among Republicans and independents; both now are eight points more likely to call such wiretaps acceptable. It`s a small gain for Bush and his party -- but one of the few they have cause to celebrate.

Methodology

This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Jan. 23-26, 2006, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. The results have a three-point error margin. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by TNS of Horsham, Penn.

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Mich würde so langsam mal interessieren, was dran ist an der Meldung, dass im März der Iran seine eigene Ölbörse aufmachen wird und ob da wirklich in Euro gehandelt werden wird und wie sich dann Rußland und noch einige andere Staaten verhalten werden.

VANCOUVER, IRAN, RUSSIA, EUROPE
Jim Willie CB January 26, 2006
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_05/willie012506pv.html

For specific detailed analysis of the Gold, USDollar, Treasury bonds, and inter-market dynamics with the US Economy and Fed monetary policy, see instructions for subscription to my newsletter research reports, which include stock recommendations positioned to rise in the commodity bull market.

VANCOUVER GOLD SHOW
The Cambridge House Vancouver Gold Show, put on by the intrepid team led by Joe Martin, was a resounding success with over 7000 passing the gates. Once again, a gorgeous setting. The high volume numbers are a sign of the times, and indication of the heightened interest in gold. My duties were completed, impressions were gathered, people at key companies were engaged, some subscribers were met, a few fellow writer analysts were joined, a superstar CEO dined me, and one of the most exquisite Investor Relations people on the planet displayed her considerable charms.

The biggest surprise to me was what went unsaid, except by me. It seemed not a single speaker, analyst, or writer cited the heightened risk connection between the Iran nuclear confrontation and the defense of the Petro-Dollar with the inauguration of the Iranian Oil Exchange in March. All three topics are integrally related. They see it only as a geopolitical stress point and conflict which has drawn several key world players in an energy region. Nobody sees the Iranian sale in euros as connected to the claimed nuclear threat. My view is that Iran has years to go before it can conduct the necessary steps on the scientific laboratory front, regardless of what the International Atomic Energy Commission has stated. Recall just three years ago, certain agencies were strongarmed into claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Wake up and smell the disinformation branded coffee!!! Huge steps must be accomplished before peaceful nuclear fueled electric generation can jump to the weapons grade processing for bombs. And then there is missile delivery system. A bigger problem for the US & West is that Iran can defend its coast with missile batteries, unlike Iraq since its "No Fly Zone" was imposed. Beware of closure of the Persian Gulf itself, whose narrow passageway is the Strait of Hormuz. This is the ultimate pressure point, the carotid artery in the neck whose blood leads to the brain, for those who have a brain.

THE IRAN THREAT
The bigger threats in my view are two-fold. The real nuclear threat might be from Russia in defense of Iran, if attacked. Last summer, Russian President Putin promised a military response to any outside aggression against Iran. This creates a standoff with the United States, and helps to explain why the USGovt has appealed to the for UN sanctions. Let it be known that when it came to Iraq, the USGovt leaders proclaimed the extreme irrelevance and corruption of the United Nations generally. Now the UN is critical to US interests? No way! In my view, the US is hamstrung and frustrated to respond to Iran, which is working with Russia on nuclear technology. Last March 2005, Putin promised that Russian processor plants would treat all spent nuke plant fuel, to assure that any weapons grade material would not fall into Iranian hands. That gesture seemed to defuse the entire Iran problem for the entire spring, summer, and autumn. So why is Iran suddenly so important? That is an easy question to answer, at least for those who are naturally suspicious.

The Iranian Oil Exchange opens for business in March, to sell oil in euro currency denomination. That is what! Iran intends to do what Saddam did, to sell oil for euros and to undermine the US-centric world banking system. This is so strange. Ben Laden pronouncements identified the financial vulnerability of the West, yet when a choke point is threatened, nobody seems aware of it.

My contacts in Zurich inform me of recent pressure by banks to shut down Iranian bank accounts. So a nuclear problem in Iran has seen a bank response. Bull. The proper viewpoints is that Iran represents an assault on the banking system, so a bank response was the first volley. Naturally, since the real threat is to the Petro-Dollar. By accepting euros in transactions to sell oil, and soon natural gas and more, once again the world banking system superstructure is shaken. The year 2006 will go down as the one when the USDollar lost its tight grip on the commercial transaction world.

THE DEFACTO USDOLLAR OIL STANDARD
Let`s back track a bit. In 1945, the world embraced a USDollar Gold Standard. Not labeled as such, the 1971 abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement by Richard Nixon represented a US Treasury default. Charles DeGaulle demanded gold for the seemingly minor trade surplus that France enjoyed bilaterally with the United States. Nixon basically said "F.U." to France, and told him to go eat our USTB paper rather than to wallow in our gold. The US then began to enjoy the extreme benefits of a world financial system which catered to our debt production. Sadly, the biggest exports out of the USEconomy these past few years are jobs and debt securities. After the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the world put in place a defacto USDollar oil standard. That is the important point. The USDollar has a defacto backing which receives far too little publicity. The US-Saudi security alliance has sealed the Petro-Dollar standard. The USDollar is not backed by oil. Oil is backed by the USDollar via that alliance. If anything, the USDollar is nowadays backed by a powerful military and permission to have access to the US marketplace, i.e. shopping malls, retail chains, and car dealer showrooms.

The Petro-Dollar meant the Persian Gulf oil producers would recycle their oil revenues into the US financial system, bonds and stocks, even real estate property. The Petro-Dollar system meant the US Military would protect the Arab sheikdoms and their royal governments. The Petro-Dollar system also meant that global nations would accumulate US Treasurys to pay for large oil transactions. The world banking system, and in particular the central bank currency reserves system, would be US$-centric.

The Iranian Oil Exchange challenges the Petro-Dollar. This time it is different. Iran aint Iraq. Iran has two big friends who have a good memory of recent heavy-handed dealings. When the United States invaded Iraq, established the reconstruction, and began to install a new government, it did so with little resistance. In the process two big events took place, not mentioned much by the lapdog US press & media. Russia got screwed out of multiple billion$ in Iraqi debt. China got screwed out of multiple billion$ in large contracts for Iraqi oil.

MOTIVES FOR THE IRAQ WAR
The American public was once led to believe the Iraq War was all about removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and spreading democracy in the Persian Gulf. These are lofty goals held as high ideals in the US historically. My view was the former was pure smoke screen intended for the uneducated (scared, patriotic) masses to devour, and the latter was an impossibility in a Moslem nation whose religious factions are openly hostile to each other. Behind the scenes, six motives for the Iraqi War can hardly be minimized or dismissed, all of which are financial in nature. At best, these are coincidental add-on benefits. At worst, these are hidden motives. You be the judge. It is not for me to say. The editorial world has an inherent responsibility to report the news, and offer analysis of it. The US media sorely falls short in providing balanced reporting, possibly due to conglomerate ownership of the media networks by large corporations, a factor which was not the case during the VietNam era, and not during the Watergate era.

While we hear in the media like an endless drumbeat the benefits of WMD removal and democratic reform, we hear next to nothing about the six other major potential motives.

1. Stop the world market sale of crude oil in euro denomination by Saddam Hussein, which benefited Iraq as they held a rising euro currency instead of a falling USDollar currency
2. Guarantee the United States "first in line" position for purchasing Iraqi crude oil output, at a time when locking in supply chains became critical to economic health, and major oil field production was on the decline
3. Establish low-cost US Military bases in the strategically centered Iraq, next door to Saudi Arabia, after repeated requests that the Saudis were uncomfortable with large US presence on their soil
4. Corner the entire oil services contracts with US corporations for rebuilding Iraqi oil operations, securing multi-year multi-billion dollar deals, shutting out European firms
5. Cancel and rescind all oil purchase contracts with China extending to future years
6. Put France, Germany, and Russia in secondary positions for bargaining on Iraqi debts, which would be paid from future Iraqi oil revenue controlled by the US

These are not small factors, yet they receive little attention. They drive home the point that military activity might be the ultimate fixed investment, clearing the path for future business activity. A friend hoots about his big Halliburton (symbol `HAL`) stock gains. Each factor could fill a book with consequences to economies, corporations, banking, business contracts, geopolitics, and military implications. The sale of Persian Gulf crude oil for three years has been brisk, in USDollar terms. The investment to preserve the US Treasury Bond system has been successful. Nevermind that half of all USTBond purchases come from overseas by foreign hands, the embodiment of a massive transfer of wealth. The Iranian Oil Exchange threatens the Persian Gulf sales on the eastern flank, the flank more tied to former Soviet republics where China has made huge inroads, the flank where the big important new oil pipeline is located, connected to the Central Asian republics.

Iraq, Russia and China remember well their Iraqi debt loss. They remember well their energy contract loss. With Iran, it is their second chance to halt any second shock & awe thrust executed by the USA. By raising the defense, the US must raise the stakes. We see it.

BACK TO IRAN
By enlisting Russian and Chinese assistance militarily, Iran has won some effective defense. Clearly, Russia is the key participant, but not without China supplying key Silkworm missiles themselves. Recall Putin is a master chess player. Russia recently announced the sale of world class missile systems to Iran. Be sure that overtaking Iraq was akin to taking the lunch pail from a 7-yr old boy sitting for a school bus. Overtaking Iran bears no resemblance to Iraq. Iran has over 70 million people, as opposed to Iraq`s 23 million. Iran has no easy borders and no friendly neighbor for the US to base an attack. The "shock & awe" was mere target practice and an exercise of advanced weaponry on largely undefended sites. Iran is not that 8-yr old undefended schoolboy. The bear and the dragon walk to the boy`s left and right, like body guards. Iraq was not the Luftewaffe, the Panzers, or Werrmacht from the powerful Germany Military in World War II. This Iran is much more formidable an adversary. The failure to influence Iranian national elections has led to a gathering storm in Iran. My view is that the storm is to widen the crack on the Petro-Dollar, and the winds are to shake its foundation in the banking sector.

Iran does not have a solid mandate and consensus for a stable mullah-led Islamic government. They have bigtime problems. My few Moslem friends laugh about how seriously the USGovt leaders and the American public took the calls for Iran to wipe Israel off the map. Teheran leaders have a challenge of their own, to distract the public from the economic troubles in their country, and to defuse the resentment for the draconian rules imposed by mullahs on daily life. We in the United States mistakenly regard their election of Ahmadinejad as a wide mandate with a majority. It is easy to win a loud majority when the opposition is forbidden to appear on the ballot for the election. In the US high schools, we have a lovely custom of meeting on Friday late afternoons a little early before the closing bell for the clear purpose of whipping up the student body emotions. The football coach and certain important teachers will stir up the young kids to a frenzy, as that night a football game is to be played. The emotions are directed toward the other team, the other school, urging the varsity squad good guys to kick the butts from the opposition, to run their noses into the ground. School unity is easy to achieve. Ahmadinejad had the same purpose, to whip up the crowds in national unity. Israel and the United States are the easy targets, with Israel the less risky target. My Moslem friends point to US high school pep rallies as being very similar. Recall that so many of Iran`s population are under the age of 30 years.

The entire nuclear story is the disinformation about Iran. Can anyone remember the incessant drumbeat of Weapons of Mass Destruction concerning Iraq? Have we learned anything?It is a sad observation for me that Americans and their leaders do not learn from history, when it comes to bubbles, to dealing with tyrants who opposed communism, to misunderstanding cultures abroad. We were made fools (not me) about WMD in Iraq. We are being made fools about nuclear proliferation in Iran now. Few even at the Vancouver Gold Show seemed to identify the vast disinformation on the Iranian threat. The threat is to the Petro-Dollar superstructure banking system.

RUSSIA WANTS A STRONGER EURO
In 2004 and 2005, it became clear that the Saudi-led OPEC ministers were increasingly uncomfortable with the declining USDollar as legal tender for oil sales incoming revenues. It seemed to me that OPEC had enlisted the only other military power with a vested interest in selling oil in euro denomination for political alliance and help, Russia. Behind the scenes, it seemed to me that Russia has become the spearhead to fracture the Petro-Dollar. Iraq was all about defense of the Petro-Dollar. Iran is all about the fracture of the Petro-Dollar. That fracture will be enforced by military means, or brought about with military support behind the levered pressure.

With over 80% of its energy product sales to Europe, Russia has a vested interest to sell in euros. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for the US to purchase Canadian oil in Japanese yen transactions. Soon we might purchase Canadian oil with Canadian Dollars! Putin might have tweaked the nose of Europeans with a Ukrainian finger to gain the attention of Europeans to constructively engage Iran. It is my belief that Putin eagerly wants Europe to engage, secure, and conduct business with Iran for the purchase of oil & natural gas products in euro transactions, SO THAT CHINA WILL NOT LOCK UP IRANIAN OUTPUT. Remember that Putin and the Russians have more European blood coursing their veins that the Chinese genetic variety. The ties from Russia to Europe might have a long history of conflict, but that history is full of long tentacles and deep embraces. Russia might see China as an eventual adversary, since their eyes are open. USGovt leaders still see China as a low-cost supplier and credit supplier. With undue focus on Iraq to fight terrorism, the US leaders might be outflanked by Russia and China in Iran. In no way does a UN assault complete any Pincer maneuver.

THE WIND AT EUROPE`S BACK
Today, the German IFO business confidence index came out, a favorable rise for the third consecutive month. It registered the highest level in over five years. In the US financial sphere, confidence measures are the fluffy concepts whose statistics are closely tied to stock indexes, probably responding to the S&P index and not leading it. In Germany, the business confidence index is a more important reflection of their economy, their exports, and a leading indicator on the euro currency. Even without help, the EU currency is pointed toward a nice recovery in 2006. My standing Hat Trick Letter forecast is for the euro to hit 125 by midyear, and 129 by year end. These might be easy forecast hits, achieved in spring for 125.

Notice how the euro has risen with the crude oil price jump last week on the Iran news. The 20-week moving average has turned upward. The 50-week MA is stopped its decline and is flattening nicely. The 125 mark is within easy reach. Recall how FOREX traders called for 115 as the next stop this winter. They might have hoped to lead sheep to sell the euro as they bought. The chart indicates "the euro is a running" and is now in overbought territory. Recall just a month ago, in "T/A: Euro Bullish Divergence" a warning was given by this pen that the euro is about to go running to the northern plains, to graze, to feed off the bloated USDollar pastures.

The European Union has a trade surplus, a fact lost on the US intrepid sleep press & media. The Euro Central Bank probably has much more gold in their vaults to back their euro currency than the USA has in its vaults to back the USDollar. Their EU economy limps along at 1% GDP growth, roughly equal to any "untreated & unmassaged" US GDP growth after distortions, exaggerations, and other negligence are removed.

Here is a tidbit to display vividly why the US GDP is nowhere near 4.0% growth. This past autumn, competent economists proclaimed the twin hurricane damage would inflict a 1.0% to 1.1% hit on the economic growth. Instead, we saw a 0.5% upward adjustment to Q3 growth and will probably see a similar distorted lift in reported Q4 growth. Most, if not all, of US claimed economic growth is improperly unadjusted price inflation, labeled as growth. The lie is at least 3%, and likely 4% or more. Our growth is nothing but price inflation.

My point all along is that with an absurdly under-stated Consumer Price Index, and an even lower misrepresented Deflator series (used to remove price inflation), the US GDP is perhaps 3% lower than reported. Yes, the EU and USA have a similar 1% GDP economic growth rate. They tell the truth in Europe, while the USA lies through its teeth. In fact, we lie on all important economic statistics, which any young teenager can discern with the tools learned in school. We lie on GDP growth, lie on CPI inflation, lie on unemployment rate, lie on productivity, and lie on savings. This is a grand disappointment for me personally, to realize my nation has such engrained institutional lying, apart from politics. Such statements have no bearing on personal patriotism or lack thereof. Any such accusation flies in the face of freedom of speech, and freedom to think for that matter. Of course, a job requirement for our politicians is to play fast & loose with the truth and also be well connected to big corporations.

THE 2006 YEAR AHEAD
The 2005 year saw Wall Street dead wrong about the energy price, but for weather reasons. The 2006 year will see Wall Street dead wrong about the energy price, but for geopolitical reasons. As the global economy heaves from the stress of extended asset bubbles, astronomical imbalances, and gargantuan USGovt federal deficits, that stress will be felt increasingly on the geopolitical stage. The continued subsidies to the USEconomy cannot continue. The continued shun of China from the G10 Finance Minister Meetings cannot continue. The table needs at least one more seat.

The United Nations will soon come center stage. China and Russian hold seats on the important Security Council, where they can veto sanctions and other initiatives. Iran has made two important friends. Iran holds the controlling button on their national crude oil output, and appears willing to use it as a weapon. They command 4.1 million oil barrels per day in output, and export 2.5 mb/day. The crude oil price jumped $3 last Friday when the Iranian leader threatened to respond to UN sanctions with a 1 million barrel daily cutback. The oil price has relaxed since. The Dow Jones Industrial index gave up over 200 points. Volatility is back, a catch phrase for 2006. Iran is all about using military leverage, with nuclear overtones, to fracture and bring an end to the Petro-Dollar. Perhaps one should hope, in nuclear language of yesteryear, for a new era of peaceful co-existence for both a Petro-Dollar and Petro-Euro. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is not a viable option. The Western world must adapt to the arrival of the Shanghai Coop Group, whose store front will be the Iranian Oil Exchange. Move over, International Petroleum Exchange (London) and New York Mercantile Exchange. An Asian kid wants a store front, removed from Western influence, whose influence has too much history of heavyhandedness.

Unfortunately, the USDollar world reserve system has been wickedly used and exploited by the USGovt and US Economy to obtain a free ride amidst what can be loosely described as an extortion ring. See my "Petro-Dollar & Protection Racket" from April 2005 for a wake-up call. Three decades have wrought tremendous abuse and enormous resentment. The US has obtained a free ride on the highway of power and wealth. We get rich via inflation without a sweat operating clean inflationary machinery, while Asia works in dirty factories and spoils its environment, Europe struggles within the confines of its own nettlesome social networks, and the Persian Gulf & Central Asia suffers as a war zone.

The implications to gold are tremendous and not to be minimized. If central bankers around the world, not just in Asia and the Persian Gulf, decide to diversify their massive foreign reserves, they will grab more gold for their vaults. It protects them from declines even as it fortifies their banking systems. It is curious to me that the Petro-Dollar implications extending from Iran to the oil market linkage to bonds and currencys is lost on many analysts. However, the specter of central bank diversification of US$-based reserves is fully understood and DREADED. The concepts are extensions of each other, lost on the financial press. Iran stands as a direct assault on the Petro-Dollar superstructure system.

My view is that removal of the Petro-Dollar system could mean an increase of 2% to long-term US interest rates, a 2% increase to long-term US mortgage loan rates, a 20% decline in the USDollar exchange rates, a 20% decline in the S&P500 index, and a 20% decline in US housing prices. The end, or even the sunset, of this system would mean a gigantic lift to the gold price and crude oil price, likely to rise by at least 50%.

Look for trade war to render most financial market and economic forecasts wrong in 2006. Trade war is always on my monitor. Just when one thought China might be the key player on trade protection and sanctions and tariffs, enter Iran with its oil card. With Iran, WE HAVE THE LOUDEST OF TRADE WAR. Not to be outdone, China has responded to the failed Unocal acquisition deal. When the US Congress nixed the Unocal deal, and declared "your US$-based money is no good," China responded by locking down the deposits from the entire nation of Kazakhstan, gained a foothold in Nigeria, and fortified its Iranian contracts. The message is clear: China will secure Central Asia and leave the United States to struggle for what it used to obtain without a struggle. Watch as the fringe of OPEC splinters.

These important events and concepts are examined from an inter-market viewpoint in the monthly newsletter referenced below. Huge opportunities exist for personal investment profit.

THE HAT TRICK LETTER COMBINES MACRO ANALYSIS WITH INVESTMENTS.

Jim Willie CB is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His career has stretched over 24 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials. Visit his free website to find articles from topflight authors at www.GoldenJackass.com . For personal questions about subscriptions, contact him at [e-mail]

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January 30, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Lost Children
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30herbert.html

By BOB HERBERT

The times — as a fellow named Dylan sang more than 40 years ago — they are a-changin`.

This time it`s not the emergence of the tie-dyed 60`s and the flowering of the boomer generation. But the changes are at least as fundamental.

A generation from now non-Hispanic whites will make up less than 60 percent of the U.S. population, and by 2050 they will be just half. Nine out of 10 American students currently attend public schools. It is likely that within a decade fewer than half of the public school students will be white.

The dramatic changes in public school enrollment will not be a result of white flight, according to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University: "It is because of a changing population structure created by differential birth rates and age structures and a largely nonwhite international flow of millions of immigrants. Since whites are older, marry at later ages, have smaller families and account for a small fraction of immigrants, these changes are almost certain to continue."

So, with these changes in mind, what`s happening with the black and Latino students who already account for more than a third of the public school population, and who should be expected to play an increasingly important role in shaping American society?

Not much that is good.

When Bob Dylan first came on the scene, it was very possible for a young man or woman with energy and a dream and a high school diploma (or less) to actually build a decent life. That`s pretty much over.

We are now in a time when a college education is a virtual prerequisite for achieving or maintaining a middle-class lifestyle. "Only the kids who get a postsecondary education are even keeping even in terms of income in their lives, and so forth," said Gary Orfield, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Civil Rights Project. "The rest are falling behind, year by year. Only about a twelfth of the Latino kids and maybe a sixth of the black kids are getting college degrees. The rest of them aren`t getting ready for anything that`s going to have much of a future in the American economy."

One of the weirder things occurring in American education is the disappearance of kids — especially black and Hispanic kids — from high school. The San Antonio Express-News, reporting last March on a study by a local research association, said that "more than a third of Texas high school freshman students are disappearing from the system or otherwise failing to obtain a high school diploma in four years."

The Los Angeles Times, for a feature article that same month, interviewed a 17-year-old named Nancy Meza who had quickly made friends with dozens of classmates when she arrived at the Boyle Heights campus of Roosevelt High School. Four years later, as her senior class gathered for its graduation photo, only four of her friends were there. Nearly all of the others had dropped out.

"It really struck me today," said Nancy. "All of my friends are gone."

This is an underrecognized, underreported crisis in American life. Far from preparing kids for college, big-city high schools in neighborhoods with large numbers of poor, black and Latino youngsters are just hemorrhaging students. The kids are vanishing into a wilderness of ignorance. If the dropout rate were somehow reversed in a city like Los Angeles, there wouldn`t be enough schools to accommodate the kids.

"The high dropout rate has been built into the regular order of school facilities in our big cities," said Professor Orfield. "They expect that the classes will just shrivel as the kids go through the grades."

Nationally, just two-thirds of all students — and only half of all blacks and Latinos — who enter ninth grade actually graduate with regular diplomas four years later.

This state of affairs in so many of the nation`s high schools is potentially calamitous, not just for the students but for society as a whole. "It`s really very sad what`s going on," said Professor Orfield. "And there`s been very little effort to reform it."

Youngsters who drop out of high school are much less likely to be regularly employed, or to escape poverty, even if they work full time. They are less likely to be married and less likely to have a decent home and a decent school for their kids. Their chances of ending up in prison — especially for the African-American and Latino boys — are much higher.

These kids will not be part of the cadre of new leadership for America in the 21st century. They will have a hard enough time just surviving.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 30, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A False Balance
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30krugman.html

By PAUL KRUGMAN

"How does one report the facts," asked Rob Corddry on "The Daily Show," "when the facts themselves are biased?" He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that "facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda," and therefore can`t be reported.

Mr. Corddry`s parody of journalists who believe they must be "balanced" even when the truth isn`t balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as "bipartisan."

Let`s review who Mr. Abramoff is and what he did.

Here`s how a 2004 Washington Post article described Mr. Abramoff`s background: "Abramoff`s conservative-movement credentials date back more than two decades to his days as a national leader of the College Republicans." In the 1990`s, reports the article, he found his "niche" as a lobbyist "with entree to the conservatives who were taking control of Congress. He enjoys a close bond with [Tom] DeLay."

Mr. Abramoff hit the jackpot after Republicans took control of the White House as well as Congress. He persuaded several Indian tribes with gambling interests that they needed to pay vast sums for his services and those of Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide. From the same Washington Post article: "Under Abramoff`s guidance, the four tribes ... have also become major political donors. They have loosened their traditional ties to the Democratic Party, giving Republicans two-thirds of the $2.9 million they have donated to federal candidates since 2001, records show."

So Mr. Abramoff is a movement conservative whose lobbying career was based on his connections with other movement conservatives. His big coup was persuading gullible Indian tribes to hire him as an adviser; his advice was to give less money to Democrats and more to Republicans. There`s nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican connections.

Yet over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post`s ombudsman to the "Today" show`s Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn`t given a penny to Democrats. But in each case they claimed that this is only a technical point, because Mr. Abramoff`s clients — those Indian tribes — gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans, money the news organizations say he "directed" to Democrats.

But the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. A study commissioned by The American Prospect shows that the tribes` donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word "directed," Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them.

True, some Democrats who received tribal donations before Mr. Abramoff`s entrance continued to receive donations after his arrival. How, exactly, does this implicate them in Mr. Abramoff`s machinations? Bear in mind that no Democrat has been indicted or is rumored to be facing indictment in the Abramoff scandal, nor has any Democrat been credibly accused of doing Mr. Abramoff questionable favors.

There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal.

Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn`t. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.

More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff`s web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform.

So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It`s not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Bush`s Choice on Iran
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01…

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, January 30, 2006; A17

The debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable for the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran, or with those of a unilateral American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities?

President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his State Department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb "intolerable" while building a diplomatic coalition that won`t tolerate a military solution. But two of our more principled senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct: "There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-armed Iran."

It`s easy to see why the Bush administration prefers ambiguity to McCain`s decisive judgment. After all, both options are terrible, and everyone can agree that diplomacy is worth a try. Yet Bush and both parties in Congress ought to be thinking through their own answers to the Iranian Choice, for two reasons. First, it looks more likely than not that the United States will, in the end, have to make that decision; and, second, the answer to the question ought to shape how the coming diplomatic phase is managed.

One driver of the choice is the ranting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust -- which, contrary to what a Western secular sensibility might suggest, is not necessarily a bluff. As Lieberman put it in his "Face the Nation" appearance a week ago, "if we should have learned one thing from 9/11 . . . it is that when somebody says over and over again, as Osama bin Laden did during the `90s, `I hate you and give me the chance, I will kill you,` they may mean it and try to do it." If the West is going to gamble that it can contain a religious fanatic who possesses nuclear weapons and vows to wipe Israel from the map, it should do so knowingly, and not because it failed to provide for the possibility that an extremist would not respond to conventional diplomacy.

Another decision forcer is that, for all the talk among Iran watchers about opposition within the regime to Ahmadinejad, there is no evidence that anyone in Tehran disagrees with his judgment about negotiations with the West -- which is that Iran has no need to make a deal. Iranian leaders were universally dismissive of the offer made last summer by the European Union. There is no indication that any senior leader or faction favors giving up uranium enrichment, under any circumstances. Not even the democratic opposition wants it.

So the United States must approach the coming maneuvering in and outside the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency board, and any last-minute negotiations in Vienna, Moscow or Tehran, the way the Iranians probably do: not as an end in itself but as a prelude to more meaningful action. If the ultimate intent is to contain, rather than attack, the Iranian nuclear program, then dilatory and fruitless negotiations -- like those of the past two years -- are worthy and even desirable. Not only do they slow Iran`s bomb-building but they help to cement a global coalition that might be able to deter the regime from actually using an eventual weapon over a long twilight era, Cold War-style.

If this is the choice, then aggressive efforts to support the Iranian democratic opposition also make sense, since over time the regime might be undermined from within. Russia and China should be courted. Brinkmanship -- like interrupting Iranian oil exports, or prompting Tehran to do so -- is to be avoided, since there is no military option to fall back on if the mullahs don`t blink.

On the other hand, if McCain is right, then the current diplomatic campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show that the United States has tried them. That`s because the timeline for military action is much shorter than that of containment: While it might not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years, according to most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass what Israel calls the "point of no return" far sooner. After that point, when Tehran will have acquired all the means it needs to manufacture a bomb, it would be considerably more difficult to stop the Iranian program by force. So, if military action is preferable to containment, then brinkmanship is called for, while promotion of Iranian democracy, or painstaking cultivation of Russia and China, is a waste of time.

So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to drag on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to nothing to help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of sanctions that, if imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also laying the groundwork for long-term containment. Perhaps the president has decided what course he will choose if Iranian uranium enrichment proceeds in spite of negotiations, U.N. resolutions or even sanctions. If so, his administration`s current tactics show no sign of it.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Tomgram: The State of Disunion

Gorilla Empire?

A Global State of Disunion

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=54078

By Tom Engelhardt

This Tuesday, the presidential State of the Union Address rolls around yet again. Only four Januaries have passed since the President used a State of the Union Address to brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet -- as a World-War-II-style "axis of evil." It was the first great State of Disunion deception of the Bush administration`s regal reign of error. Only three Januaries ago came the second. The President stood before Congress and pronounced those sixteen little words on his bum`s rush to war with Iraq: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

How time flies. Now, thanks to the decision to terrify and manipulate Congress and the American people into this administration`s much desired, unprovoked invasion of Iraq (and everything that followed from it), almost two-thirds of that "axis of evil" -- Iran and southern Iraq as well as the newly elected government in Baghdad`s Green Zone -- have become something like an "axis" of two democratically elected, theocratic Shiite powers; while the third member of that putative axis is now a genuine, no-holds-barred nuclear "axis" of one. In the meantime, those sixteen words morphed into another kind of administration catastrophe -- the Joseph Wilson op-ed on Saddam`s missing Niger uranium; the conspiracy inside the administration to smear Wilson; the outing of his CIA agent/wife, Valerie Plame; the coming into being of the Plame case; and the appointment of a dogged prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, as Special Counsel to investigate an administration which prided itself on controlling everything in its path but couldn`t, in the end, control the career officials in the Justice Department who managed to make the appointment. Now, sixteen words, so many secret meetings, leaks, smears, lies, obfuscations, obstructions, baroque press briefings, and plots later, Fitzgerald works doggedly in the wings, the bureaucracy`s avenging angel in its war with this administration. Having lopped off the Vice President`s good right arm, I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Fitzgerald seems to be preparing to take out the President`s "brain," Karl Rove and then check the landscape for other candidates.

Now, here we are, at the President`s fifth State of the Union Address. Last year, of course, he brought forward his -- lucky for us all -- DOA social security overhaul. "Fixing" social security was what he called it, but putting in the fix on that classic safety-net program might better have caught the spirit of the moment -- or, if you want to get the full picture, just imagine the hurricane Katrina rescue effort applied to the world of retirement. This year, Richard W. Stevenson of the New York Times writes, the President will focus on health care (hold your hats), spending restraint (every speech needs a laugh line), illegal immigration, and "the nation`s international economic competitiveness" (okay, two laugh lines).

You have to wonder: Which sixteen words will it be this time? Will it be National Security Agency spying assurances ("As I stand here right now, I can tell the American people the program`s legal, it`s designed to protect civil liberties..."), the Abramoff denials ("I`ve had my picture taken with a lot of people..."), the complete-victory-in-Iraq pronouncements, or more bogus reassurances to the elderly and sickly in our society? It`s your guess -- and while you`re considering the matter, I have another urge. As I think back on this administration`s record, on this country (call me "homeland," Bill Bailey), and on this planet in its edgy state of disunion, I`d like to tote things up for a moment.

You know how every couple of months the New York Times produces that not particularly inspiring Iraq scorecard (thanks to the Brookings Institution) -- how much electricity available 2003, 2004, 2005; how many Iraqi "security personnel" stood up; how much crude oil produced; how many insurgent attacks or suicide bombings? Well, I`ve had the urge lately to produce an equivalent Bush administration scorecard. You know, the trillion dollar invasion, occupation, and war; the multimultibillion dollar hurricane; the $67 going on $130 barrel of crude oil; the war on terror that somehow has managed not to pick up Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, or the anthrax killer; that ever thinning "green line" of a Bushed and broken Army; our busted government; those every-child-left-behind educational "reforms"; the Medicare prescription drug plan that couldn`t shoot straight; the liberated-from-terror country that now produces not just enough opium but enough heroin to inject us all, and so on and so forth.

It really doesn`t matter what the crisis is. The response these days is predictably the same. You have thirteen men stranded in a mine disaster in West Virginia? Think of it as the Katrina rescue operation gone underground. Rescue teams were once mandated to be located at mines. Under this President, they can be up to two hours away. As it happens, the team heading for the Sago mine took a mere six hours to get itself together and arrive, while the trapped miners wrote their goodbye notes and all but one slowly died. No surprise there. After all, in recent years the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration has been FEMAted, and heck-of-a-job-Brownie-ized. Then again, what hasn`t?

You want a working federal government for tomorrow`s crisis in your neck of the woods? Where have you been these last years? Or maybe you`ve already had your crisis and you`re waiting for the federal government to pitch in. Remember how, when it came to Iraq, the Bush administration constantly cited our rebuilding efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II (not to say in all of Europe via the Marshall plan)? Well, "reconstruction" turns out to have another meaning these days. It means funds down the tubes or into friendly pockets in Iraq or here. Our reconstruction program has essentially deconstructed Iraq, and when it comes to New Orleans or the ravaged parts of Mississippi, the power of prayer better prove effective indeed for Bush and friends because there are only four months to go until hurricane season begins and it remains reconstruction nada-time on our southwest coast.

Even the right-wing experts agree. Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, offered this observation on disaster housing policy in the area: "It just doesn`t seem to be well organized… Things in some respects have gotten more confused than they were a couple weeks after the storm." As Oklahoma`s Republican Senator Tom Coburn pointed out, when it came to post-storm clean-up efforts, "The worst fears of many policymakers are being realized… Bureaucratic delays have caused the recovery effort to be appallingly slow and inefficient." Heck of a job, Brownies all!

Whatever the term might be for having a knack for being incapable of governing, the record thus far indicates that the Bush administration has a corner on the market, both at home and, when it comes to ruling as a global superpower, abroad. What its top officials are, however, intensely capable of -- so much so that some critics have claimed this to be their intent -- is sowing chaos everywhere. They arrive, guns literally (or metaphorically) blazing; bring in their cronies, corporate buddies, and former lobbyists for various industries or institutions about to be overseen; seed confusion; strip mine the neighborhood; dump tons of money into "security" that only generates more insecurity; create -- whether inside Baghdad`s Green Zone or at their dream agency, the Department of Homeland Security -- the bureaucracies from hell; and then more or less abandon ship. And you don`t have to be an Iraqi to notice this phenomenon, either.

Take the administration`s drug plan for seniors (so confusing that no one can make heads or tails of it) -- think of it as Katrina in a drug store. It`s only "benefit" seems to be that now you can`t get your meds on time or at a reasonable cost. As Jyoti Thottam of Time magazine summed it up, "Republicans realize that after Katrina, they cannot risk another crisis in which the government appears to be abandoning its most vulnerable citizens. Some are already making that connection. Aniela Toscano, 56, a New Yorker living in a shelter, has run up $885 in credit-card debt thanks to a brand-new bill for drugs and is worried that she can no longer afford her seizure medication. ‘What happened in New Orleans?` she says. ‘They let those people die. Why not us?`"

Another – seemingly opposite -- phenomenon is wedded to the administration`s sowing of chaos. Any time the chaos factor kicks in and an ever more imperial government works ever less well, mobilizing itself ever more inefficiently, generating yet more confusion and suffering, it turns out to be yet another opportunity for George, Dick, and their advisers to gather in ever more power, creating yet more of the trappings of an unfettered, "commander-in-chief" presidency. Of course, the model for all this -- itself caused in part by administration inattention, inefficiency, and general incompetence -- was the assaults of September 11, 2001. The administration promptly leapt on the 9/11 tiger and rode it for all it was worth, rode it through the USA PATRIOT Act, through the creation of Guantanamo, through the institution of secret spying programs on Americans, through invasion, war, and occupation in Iraq, through kidnappings, torture, and secret CIA prisons worldwide, through data mining and illegal detention. It was, you might say (with a bow to Iraq) the Ur-crisis of our times. But other crises followed a similar pattern. New Orleans, for instance, brought on plans to increase the role of the Pentagon`s new U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) in civilian life. Each crisis and disaster only sucked further power, further prerogatives, into the developing cult of the imperial presidency.

"His aides portray Mr. Bush as undaunted by the plague of setbacks last year that loosened his grip on his party and drove down his poll numbers," wrote Richard W. Stevenson on the front page of the New York Times. But let`s not think of it that way -- as just one year`s "plague of setbacks" (not in the very week of the Hamas-ific triumph of democracy in Palestine, the very month that a largely Shiite theocratic government will again be taking up the reins of... well, can you call it power?... in Baghdad). This administration is now guaranteed to have a very special relationship to "setbacks." No crisis -- a new round of fierce storms, an upsurge of guerrilla attacks in Iraq, a "nuclear" confrontation with Iran, a terrorist attack in the United States, the arrival of the avian flu on our shores or [fill in your crisis of choice] -- is likely to prove anything but a roiling disaster without end in a universe of Brownies, and yet each is likely to present Bush`s people, especially his well-armed Veep, with but another chance to grab more power for the presidency. This disconnect between the garnering of potentially staggering powers to rule without restraint and the incapacity to use them for the well-being of just about anyone on the planet (other than a few friends and cronies) is now a major part of our domestic landscape.

Meanwhile, abroad, the Bush administration remains the 8,000 pound gorilla in the global living room -- and a crazed gorilla at that. Think of Kong before Peter Jackson turned him into a moonstruck softie. Back in the days of Vietnam, when things were so totally different (except, of course, for an endless war, massive illegal spying on Americans, presidential smearing and lies, prosecutors banging on White House doors, and the word "impeachment" somewhere in the ether), our imperial President of the moment, Richard M. Nixon, proposed a novel way to end his war -- not that it worked, of course. He put it this way to his aide Bob Haldeman (as related in Haldeman`s memoirs, The Ends of Power):

"I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I`ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We`ll just slip the word to them that `for God`s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can`t restrain him when he`s angry -- and he has his hand on the nuclear button` -- and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

So here`s a difference between the two eras. We now have a President who wouldn`t think of propounding a Madman Theory of the presidency, but whom much of the world considers a madman, capable of doing just about any mad thing that crosses his imperial mind. He still has his finger on that same nuclear button (which his administration has been working hard to upgrade); and thanks to the Pentagon of former Nixon staffer Donald Rumsfeld, he even has an operational "global strike force" empowered to launch an attack "preemptively" against hostile countries developing weapons of mass destruction anywhere on Earth "in half a day or less," using conventional or nuclear weapons. So the "nuclear option" remains open to Bush and while, to the sane-minded, it might seem like an inconceivable one to exercise -- so was the invasion of Iraq. Against every bit of sane advice (even from his own father`s top advisers), he`s already committed an act of global madness in Iraq and followed it up by sowing chaos in the greater Middle East -- with a guarantee of so much more to come. Now, he`s implicitly threatening Iran, even though an attack on that country would drive global energy prices through the roof.

So the world deals with the Bush administration and the U.S. exactly as though it were indeed that 8,000 pound Kong out there in the street smashing elevated subways and tossing cars about at will. The leaders of other states tiptoe around the U.S. in part out of fear that George and pals could, in honor of the State of Disunion 2006 or 2007, drop another sixteen words of seasoning into their already boiling-over stew pot and burn everyone in sight. They tiptoe less from straightforward military fears -- after all a relatively low-level guerrilla war in Iraq has stopped the exceedingly high-tech U.S. military dead in its tracks -- than from fear of what the administration might do economically just by, say, launching that insane strike on Iran, the very hint of which might drive crude oil prices toward the $100 a barrel barrier, and possibly wreck the global economy.

In the short run, for instance, China`s leaders have probably been pouring into the streets of the Forbidden City every morning these last years to dance, sing, and thank nameless gods that Bush administration policy in Iraq has so far trumped any China-as-super-enemy policy possibilities. But they also have to be painfully aware that their country`s prosperity is based on an expanding bubble economy based largely on export to the United States, and so any mad choice by this President could take them down too. They certainly know that. The Europeans certainly know it as well. The question is: Does George? Does Dick? Does Don? Does Condi?

Behind this lies an odd thought: Do you remember that period in 2002-03 when the neocons and their various supporters and clustering pundits were proclaiming us quite literally the New Rome and speaking of a Pax Americana that would last forever and a day? Neocon writers and thinkers like Robert Kaplan were, in fact, intent on describing a world of growing anarchy on the global peripheries, a jungle world of failed states that needed an imperial power like... well, us... for order. That, of course, was before the Bush administration managed so brilliantly to bring a jungle world of chaos and anarchy to Iraq and so to the very heart of the heartlands of the global energy system -- and, stunned by the results, they all fell imperially, resoundingly silent on the subject.

So I`ve been wondering in their stead, what sort of empire are we? Empires are usually settled and ruled areas, not -- except at their peripheries -- jungle worlds. But what exactly does our imperial presidency, with all its power, rule over? If, say, the Congo or Afghanistan is a failed state, are we a failed empire of some sort? Do we rule anything?

Yes, our military planners continue to put on the drawing boards staggering new kinds of high-tech imperial weapons of domination: electromagnetic rail guns for as early as 2010, the new FB-22 fighter bomber by 2015, and the B-3 Long Range Strike Platform in the years after 2030, to mention only three. Yes, our ever-shifting military bases -- our military "footprint," as the Pentagon likes to call it in the singular, invoking an image of a Kong-like creature so large that only one foot at a time can fit on the planet -- is stamped on this globe from Okinawa and Kyrgyzstan to Qatar, Morocco, and Great Britain. Our gunboats patrol the oceans and, soon enough, an array of space weaponry like those wonderfully nicknamed "Rods from God" may indeed be circling the weaponized heavens asserting "full spectrum dominance" over the planet. But despite our military posture, are we an empire at all -- or are we just Kong wild about that town? I don`t know that I have the answer, but I thought I`d raise the question for us to think about as the President offers his next set of James-Frey-like Disunion fictions on Tuesday night without a stern Oprah in sight.

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. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt


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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, January 30, 2006

Bombings of Churches
Bush and Blair Plotted to Ignore Security Council

Who woulda thunk it? [urlBush and Blair plotted to go to war against Iraq]http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=147192006[/url] even if the UN Security Council declined to authorize it. The Scotsman summarizes findings of Phillipe Sands: "Prof Sands` book, entitled Lawless World, claims that president Bush had earlier displayed open contempt for the UN during the summit, made wild threats against Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein and displayed astounding ignorance of the likely post-war problems." Now Bush will come out on television Tuesday night and lie about the situation in Iraq to his gullible followers.

Guerrillas set off car bombs outside churches in Baghdad and Kirkuk on Sunday, and also targeted a Vatican office. The 8 bombs killed 3 and wounded 17. Many of Iraq`s originally 750,000 Christians have already fled, mainly to Syria or Detroit, and some observers fear the community will dwindle to virtually nothing if these attacks continue. Although Iraq`s Christians are among the oldest such communities in the world, and are indigenous, radical Muslim guerrillas often code them as "foreign" or allied to the largely Christian American occupiers. There was also other guerrilla violence in Iraq on Sunday, which left altogether at least 25 dead.

Some 1500 Shiites demonstrated in the southern port city of Basra (pop. 1.3 mn.) against the British authorities. They were upset about British arrests of policemen that London believes were connected to puritan militias that sometimes acted as death squads. The elected governor of Basra province last Friday threatened to cease cooperating with the British over the arrests.

Al-Zaman reports that [Ar.] Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim began their deliberations, in a meeting characterized by much formal protocol, on Sunday evening. The negotiations, to be continued on Monday, are expected to take weeks to conclude.

Hadi al-Amiri, secretary general of the paramilitary [Shiite fundamentalist] Badr Corps, announced that "The United Iraqi Alliance considers [its possession of] the ministry of the interior a red line that cannot be crossed." [The Iraqi Interior is like the US FBI.] He told al-Zaman that the UIA "Gives the utmost importance to security in Iraq. Prominent personalities in the UIA had been victims during the extinct regime of the former security apparatus. For this reason, we cannot consider stepping down from the ministry of the interior."

Amiri revealed that he had been visited by Sunni Arab secular leader Salih al-Mutlak in connection with discussions on forming the new government, but said that he did not know if al-Mutlak had asked the UIA to join them in a national unity government.

Young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr`s bloc in parliament will give him increased clout in the new government, the CSM points out. Amatzia Baram points out that he will push for puritanism and anti-Americanism, and will also reach out to fundamentalist Sunni Arabs.

[urlIraq`s oil ministry is again leaderless and in turmoil,]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KAR948618.htm[/url] at a time when the industry can afford neither. [urlDespite engineering feats accomplished by American teams,]http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16025134&BRD=2288&PAG=461&dept_id=474107&rfi=6[/url] the Iraqi petroleum industry is a mess.

[urlNumber of US military personnel just forced to serve extended duty: 50,000.]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N196487.htm[/url]

Number by which junior enlisted soldiers [urlhave declined in the US military since 2001: 19,000.]http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1089773.php/19000_fewer_young_soldiers_than_in_2001[/url]

New cap on interest rate on government student loans, [urlwhich Republicans are raising in order to pay for the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina: 6.9%.]http://www.netxnews.net/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/01/29/43dc22b82301e[/url]

The US military`s practice of taking suspected guerrilla lea… will backfire, according to expert observers.

The complexities of Iraq are underlined by the [urlincreasingly flourishing condition of the holy Shiite city of Najaf south of Baghdad]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/34383c3cc7455699c1c1a69b0aa152b2.htm[/url], which is fairly secure and peaceful. Its pharmacies have medicines, it has 20 hours of electricity a day, and US troops withdrew last September to a base well away from the city, reducing the chance of provocations. Plans are going forward for an airport. Some 3 million pilgrims a year are already coming, mostly from Iran but also from Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan and elsewhere, to visit the shrine of Imam Ali. The combination of resources from Iran and from the wealthy merchants and shopkeepers of the city, the calming influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who resides there, the loyalty of the tribal levies to Sistani, the induction of members of the Badr Corps paramilitary into the provincial police and government military, and the defeat of the radical Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in August 2004 by the joint efforts of Sistani, the other grand ayatollahs and the US Marines, have all contributed to this current flourishing situation. Ironically, Najaf`s success is a rebuke to Paul Bremer, who once cancelled an election there because he feared Iranian influence in the city. In the end, Iran wins this one.

AP explains the long relationship between the Iraqi Shiites …

Here`s hoping Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt pull through. We talk about people getting blown up every day in Iraq, but when it is someone you feel you know and admire through television, it is personal.

posted by Juan @ [url1/30/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/bombings-of-churches-bush-and-blair.html[/url] 0 comments

Beeman Guest Editorial: US to Blame for Iranian Nuclear Program

United States Instigated Iran`s Nuclear Program 30 Years Ago

William O. Beeman
Brown University



` The White House staffers, who are trying to deny Iran the right to develop its own nuclear energy capacity have conveniently forgotten that the United States was the midwife to the Iranian nuclear program 30 years ago. Every aspect of Iran`s current nuclear development was approved and encouraged by Washington in the 1970s. President Gerald Ford offered Iran a full nuclear cycle in 1976, and the only reactor currently about to become operative, the reactor in Bushire, was started before the Iranian revolution with U.S. approval.

Kenneth Timmerman, in Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran presents a misleading description of this plant, claiming again and again that the facility might be used to produce nuclear fuel.

As the late Tom Stauffer and I wrote in June, 2003, the Bushire (Bushehr) reactor--a "light water" reactor--does not produce weapons grade Plutonium. It produces Pu 240, Pu241 and Pu242. Although these isotopes could theoretically be weaponized, the process is extremely long and complicated, and also untried. To date no nuclear weapon has ever been produced with plutonium produced with the kind of reactor at Bushire. Moreover, the plant would have to be completely shut down to extract the fuel rods, making the process immediately open to detection and inspection. (The plant IS shut down to change the fuel rods, but only every 30-40 months to provide longer and better energy generation)

By contract, the Dimona reactor in Israel--a "heavy water" reactor--is an example of a reactor that is ideal for producing weapons fuel. It produces Pu239 and the fuel rods can be extracted "on the fly." without any need to shut down the plant or alter its operation. The fuel rods are exchanged every few weeks.

The full original article with much more detailed analysis and reader commentary [urlcan be found at this URL.]http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=1b68abecee07b0cb8cf9ed0bc9de5954[/url]

It is paired with a companion piece explaining why nuclear power makes perfect sense for the Iranian economic situation. [urlThis article can be found here.]http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7188562b68f4f8f71e7b57ee599db3f5[/url]

A number of former officials have questioned the proposition that the United States fostered Iran`s nuclear development. Certainly it is inconvenient for their present course of action to have to admit that an American hand was present in the gestation of the program.

Professor Ahmad Sadri, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College in Illinois was a young man in Iran when the United States was touting nuclear power facilities to the government of the Shah. He reminisces:

The image that came to me was the late sixties` lavish exhibit of the United States in Tehran`s annual International Exhibit that was fashioned as a nuclear reactor complete with a white dome. Easily the most popular exhibit in the entire international gala, the American exhibit sported by far the longest snaking lines of eager visitors. It was dedicated to the single theme of extolling the virtues of atomic energy and the feasibility of its transfer to Iran. White clad attendants offered inspiring tours to small flocks of the overawed visitors and encouraged them to emulate atomic researchers by lifting small cubes and pyramids laying behind thick Plexiglas walls with the use of mechanical hands. That image found its companion a few days ago as I soaked in the hot tub of my local gym in one of the northern burbs of Chicago with a gentleman that turned out to be Octave J. Du Temple, executive director emeritus of the American Nuclear Society. He fondly reminisced about half a dozen trips in early seventies to Tehran and Shiraz in order to participate in conferences and summits on "transfer of nuclear technology." For whatever it`s worth, this native`s account is
awash in images that confirm a fair amount of enthusiasm on behalf of the United States for Iran`s nuclear program in the 1970`s.

Washington International Lawyer Donald Weadon points out that after 1972, and the oil crisis, the United States was rabidly pursuing investment opportunities in Iran, including selling nuclear power plants. He writes:


` . . . utilizing the good offices of the Hoover Institution and the
self-interest of Bechtel and other U.S. A&E contractors who found
significant profit in Nuclear Power Plants at home and overseas (e.g, Taiwan), the Iranians were wooed hard with the prospect of nuclear power from trusted, U.S.-backed suppliers, with the prospect of the reservation of significant revenues from oil exports for foreign and domestic investment (this was not solely and Iranian pipe dream, as the Kuwaitis had targeted by 1980 to be obtaining half of their GNP from investment income, not sales of wasting assets like oil). Obviously, the principal benefit from the U.S. perspective was the significant absorption of petrodollars, NOT Iran`s fiscal and national best interest. `



Despite current White House denials of U.S. instigation of the program, there is absolutely no question that the United States did not oppose Iran`s nuclear development in the 1970`s--even to the point of facilitating training for Iran`s senior engineers at MIT, CalTech and other U.S. institutions. Nor is it in question that the Bushire plant was started before the revolution with the United States` blessing.

American dissimulation on this point reveals some interesting motives on Washington`s part. Iran under the Shah was as much of a threat to its neighbors (including Iraq) as it might be said to be today. Its nuclear ambitions then could have been inflated and denigrated in exactly the same way they are being inflated and denigrated today, but the U.S. was blissfully unconcerned. The big, big difference is that Iran is now perceived to be a threat to Israel, and that is why we see retired military as consultants to the news media bandying about plans to bomb multiple sites over an area the size of California, Arizona and Nevada (Good luck!) .

Even those who admit that the United States helped start Iran`s current nuclear development claim that two factors make a difference in how Iran should be treated today as opposed to the 1970`s: Iran`s concealment of nuclear energy development activities in the past and President Ahmadinejad`s remarks on Israel.

What White House officials never tell the American public is that President Ahmadinejad`s remarks have little or no connection with any probable action on Iran`s part regarding Israel (or "the Zionist regime" to be strictly accurate regarding his reference). President Ahmadinejad has no effective power in this area, and his remarks aren`t even embraced by Iran`s clerical leaders. His remarks are widely understood as a clumsy attempt to pander to his own right-wing base in an attempt to shore up his faltering power within the Iranian government.

However, the second proposition is equally specious. It is fruitful to examine the now conventional wisdom that Iran had "regularly hidden information about its nuclear program" etc. as if this in and of itself was proof of a nuclear weapons program. Of course, it is not, although many breathlessly cite it as the principal smoking gun.

First of all, much of what the United States has called "concealment" was never concealed at all when the reports of the United Nations inspection team are examined. Many of the charges about removing topsoil and bulldozing material at some of the research sites never took place. However, even if one concedes that Iran did conceal some processes, whatever concealment of whatever activity started 18-20 years ago when the Revolution was still young and Ayatollah Khomeini was still alive.

There was, of course, a different Iranian administration than is in power today, or that was in power when the nuclear question became an issue. If George W. Bush were to be held responsible for things that happened 18 years ago, or even 8 years ago, there would be howling in the Capitol. The myth of a monolithic unchanging government in Iran is indeed very powerful, overwhelming all common sense and reason.

Second, whatever Iran did or didn`t do in the past, they are in compliance with the NNPT at present. Indeed, there would be no way to accuse them of anything if they were not so compliant.

Third, it is essential to emphasize that there are many countries who have concealed their nuclear activities (Israel, India, Pakistan, Brazil, North Korea), and some who still do--it is an open secret. Mohammad Elbaradei gave a half-dozen plausible reasons why Iran might have felt it prudent to conceal its activities (the U.S. embargo, the ran-Iraq war, the U.S. actions in Gulf War I and II right next door, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan`s possession of nuclear weapons-again right next door, the hidden weapons program in Israel, etc. etc. ). This didn`t excuse the concealment, but neither is it proof that Iran has a weapons` program at present. In fact, no one has shown that such a weapons program exists.

The mantra "Iran must not get nuclear weapons" has been repeated so often now that most people have come to believe that Iran has them or is getting them. Has anyone stopped to think that this only became an issue when the neoconservative agenda to "remake" the Middle East--including Iran-became actualized? The Iran nuclear crisis is truly a manufactured crisis, based on the flimsiest of evidence and reasoning. I can only hope that soberer minds rethink this position.

The tragedy would be that in the end, the U.S. may goad Iran in to a real nuclear weapons program. The Iranians may reason that since they are being punished for the crime anyway, they might as well commit it. `



William O. Beeman
Brown University

posted by Juan @ [url1/30/2006 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/beeman-guest-editorial-us-to-blame-for.html[/url] 0 comments

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01/29/2006
Success is elusive in Iraq`s oil fields after two years of cost overruns
http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16025134&BRD…

Farah Stockman
The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - After two years of cost overruns and attacks, American construction workers in Iraq are finally completing a stretch of pipeline deemed the country`s most critical piece of oil infrastructure.

But their success is just one small victory in the larger struggle over the fate of the oil industry in Iraq, where sophisticated acts of sabotage are threatening the country`s economic survival and eroding the $1.8 billion US investment in Iraq`s oil infrastructure, US officials and energy specialists say.

Three years after Bush administration officials predicted that oil revenues would fund the country`s reconstruction, the industry is in turmoil. Attacks that knocked out pipelines in the north have combined with bad weather in the south to drive Iraq`s oil exports last month to their lowest level since September 2003, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

The oil industry, which accounts for about 60 percent of Iraq`s gross national product and more than 90 percent of government revenue, has been hit with nearly 300 major attacks since 2003, according to Iraq Pipeline Watch, an arm of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based energy think tank. In July, Iraqi government officials estimated that the attacks had cost the fledgling government $11 billion in lost revenue.

In northern Iraq, where pipelines snake like rusty veins from the oil fields of Kirkuk, engineers and insurgents battle daily over pipelines that will determine the future of the country.

"Good guys fix it. Bad guys blow it up. That struggle continues almost every day," said Robert Maguire, a US embassy official in Baghdad who focuses on Iraq`s oil sector.

Nowhere is that battle more apparent than at the Tigris River crossing, in the heart of the deadly Sunni Triangle, where a US airstrike during the invasion destroyed the Al Fatha bridge but inadvertently damaged the crucial pipelines that run beneath it.

The crossing connects the oil fields of Kirkuk - which account for 40 percent of Iraq`s reserves - to Baiji, Iraq`s largest refinery. It is also the gateway to a 600-mile pipeline that carries crude to Turkey, one of Iraq`s two main channels for export to the West.

When the Army Corps of Engineers discovered the damage, they deemed the crossing "the most critical piece of oil infrastructure in Iraq," according to a publication by the corps` Restore Iraqi Oil mission.

The corps mended the crossing temporarily but were forced to lay the pipes above ground across the destroyed bridge, making the site a vulnerable target for insurgent attacks. Now, US-funded workers are in the final stages of finishing a $118 million, two-year project to build a fortified conduit for the pipes to cross the river, correcting what US officials describe as the "weakest link" in the struggle to get oil to Turkey and to Baiji.

US officials hope that the new submerged crossing will make it possible to reopen the pipeline to Turkey, which handled 800,000 barrels of crude a day prior to the invasion but which has been virtually shut down due to sabotage at the Tigris River and elsewhere.

Some of the officials assert that the new crossing will add 200,000 barrels of production capacity per day to the 1.8 million barrel average that Iraq is now producing, mostly from oil fields in southern Iraq. Iraq`s oil ministry, which also suffers from old equipment and outdated practices, has consistently fallen short of its goal of 2.5 million barrels per day, the amount Iraq produced under Saddam Hussein.

But US officials acknowledge that increase will only happen if Iraqis can protect the entire pipeline.

"If you could repair it faster than they could destroy it, you`d win the battle. But you can`t," said Lowell Feld, analyst with the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the US Department of Energy.

Sabotage has wreaked havoc on domestic oil consumption, as well.

In December, the refinery in Baiji shut down for about a week because the pipeline was down and there was no way to transport the refined fuel to Baghdad, where residents use it for cars, cooking stoves, and electric generators. Early in January, the Iraqi military provided an escort for terrified truck drivers, but insurgents ambushed the convoy anyway, destroying 20 out of about 60 trucks, according to Reuters.

Fuel shortages contributed to eight-hour-long lines for gasoline that sparked riots across the country and further embittered residents who were already angry about state-imposed price hikes on oil.

In addition to costing Iraq billions in lost revenues, the sabotage threatens to permanently damage the Kirkuk fields. Even when the pipeline is cut, the fields must keep pumping - "like a heart," Maguire said - so engineers must put the oil back into the ground, a practice that ruins the oil fields` underground reservoirs.

Amid all the frustrations, the saga of the Tigris River crossing has become an inspirational tale for US officials.

"It`s an incredible, heroic engineering story," Maguire said by telephone from Baghdad. "They beat Mother Nature. They beat the insurgents."

But the project suffered many setbacks.

First, Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., and two subcontractors were hired to dig a hole under the riverbed for the pipes, despite concerns that the gravel-like quality of the soil would make such work nearly impossible, according to a Washington-based US official and Randy Duncan, project manager for A&L Underground, the Kansas-based company eventually brought in to finish the job.

Indeed, it became an engineering nightmare that ran so over budget that the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction conducted an assessment that will be released later this month. A Kellogg Brown & Root spokesman said the soil problems could not have been anticipated and that the rising price of security increased the project cost.

Originally budgeted at $76 million, the US government ultimately paid Kellogg Brown & Root $88 million, but canceled the contract before it had been completed.

In 2004, US officials agreed to pay about $30 million more to A&L to finish the job by digging a ditch across the riverbed and laying the concrete-encased pipes inside it. But workers had to endure continued attacks on their camp and three spectacular sabotage explosions on the pipeline, Duncan said in a telephone interview from the site.

In one case, an insurgent crawled 120 feet inside a newly installed pipeline to set an explosion that took two weeks to fix, Duncan said.

In October 2005, an improvised bomb placed under one active pipeline sparked a massive explosion that lit the river on fire and burned for a week, Duncan said. After that, 38 out of 120 workers assembled from around the world left their jobs because of the danger.

Four more left when they were injured driving over an improvised explosive device, Duncan said. But the firm didn`t gave up. A few weeks ago, they finally dragged the last pipes up the other side of the river bank.

In February, if all goes well, Duncan will walk off the site with little fanfare, returning to Texas to celebrate a job well done with a bottle of Jack Daniel`s, he said.

But he worries about the pipeline that he will leave behind.

"These insurgents are still around just looking for something to blow up," he said. "They can`t blow it up here, because we have put it in under the river. But I`m sure once they start the pipeline back up, they are going to have problems" with other locations.

Maguire concedes that, as long as attacks continue, oil exports won`t dramatically increase. But he says they will rise gradually, perhaps over a period of many years, as Iraqis begin to protect the pipeline more aggressively.

For him, the new crossing is a small but important victory in the war between engineers and assassins, builders and demolishers, tho

who would protect the pipeline and those who destroy it.

"Chaotic people want to cut that pipe," he said. "But we have to believe that civilization is going to win. If you believe that, then what you are doing is worthwhile."

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Damit entfällt die Behauptung, dass Chirac oder Schröder irgendetwas durch ihre Haltung am Beginn des Irakkrieges hätten ändern können.

Blair and Bush `conspired to go to war regardless of United Nations`
PM knew President was only going through the diplomatic motions, claims new edition of book
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article341740.e…

By Marie Woolf, Political Editor
Published: 29 January 2006

Tony Blair knew that George Bush was only "going through the motions" of offering support for a second UN resolution in the run-up to the Iraq war, it was claimed last night.

According to reports in The Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister and the US President decided to go to war regardless of whether they obtained UN backing. The allegations will undermine claims that the final decision to go to war was not made until MPs voted in the Commons a day before military action. It will also bolster claims that the President and Mr Blair decided to go to war months before military action began.

An updated edition of a book by Philippe Sands QC, a leading human rights barrister and Professor of Law at London University, to be published in Britain this week, is expected to strengthen claims that President Bush decided to go to war with or without UN backing, and that he had Mr Blair`s support.

The book is expected to produce fresh evidence that President Bush only went through the motions of giving a wholehearted endorsement to Mr Blair`s attempts to gain full UN approval for military action.

At a meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Bush at the White House on 31 January 2003, Mr Blair urged the President to try to obtain a second UN resolution giving specific backing for the war. Mr Bush gave qualified support for going down the UN route. But, according to The Mail on Sunday, President Bush was only going through the motions - and, the paper adds: "Mr Blair not only knew it, but went along with it."

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain`s former ambassador to Washington, had claimed in his memoirs that Britain failed to use its influence to hold back the American march to war against Iraq. In his book, he describes that meeting between the President and Tony Blair.

"We are all milling around in the State dining room as Bush and Blair put the final touches to what they were going to say to the media," he wrote.

"Bush had a notepad on which he had written a form of words on the second resolution. He read it out ... There was silence. I waited for Blair to say he needed something as supportive as possible. He said nothing. I waited for somebody on the No 10 team to say something. Nothing was said.

"I cursed myself afterwards for not piping up. At the press conference, Bush gave only a perfunctory and luke-warm support for a second resolution.

"It was neither his nor Blair`s finest performance."

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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Blake Miller sits with his wife, Jessica, and Candi at the home where she grew up in Virgie, Ky. The couch is theirs, the flag blanket from his grandmother Mildred.
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Ein Krieg hinterläßt nur Opfer.

THE WAR WITHIN
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/29/M…

- Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 29, 2006

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The photo of the ‘Marlboro Man’ in Fallujah became a symbol of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004.
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Pike County, Ky. -- BATTLE SCARS: The photo of the ‘Marlboro Man’ in Fallujah became a symbol of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004. Now the soldier has returned home to Kentucky,where he battles the demons of post-traumatic stress
The photograph hit the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a U.S. Marine in Iraq, his face smeared with blood and dirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes.

It was an instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing the anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man."

The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.

He`s quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can`t look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers.

The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

His life in Kentucky, before and after the clicking shutter, says as much about hundreds of thousands of new American war veterans as his famous photograph said about that one bad day in Fallujah -- a photo Miller cannot see as an icon.

"I don`t see a whole lot," he said. "I see a day I won`t care to remember, but that I`ll never forget."
James Blake Miller was born in Pike County in the hills of eastern Kentucky, where Daniel Boone is said to have walked and where moonshine is still consumed. An average family here makes about $24,000; the only decent-paying jobs are down at the coal mine.

Miller got his first name from his father, who got it from his and back into family history. But folks called him Blake, the middle name his parents heard on the television show "Dynasty."

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Blake Miller, who received an honorable discharge after two tours of duty in Iraq, walks the property he grew up on in Jonancy, Ky.,
a small town in the eastern part of the state.
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His paternal grandfather was a Marine in `53; a heavy smoker, like most of the men in the family, he died of cancer before he was 40. The man Miller grew up calling "Papaw" was his grandmother`s second husband, an Army vet of Vietnam.

Sometimes, Papaw would get crying drunk and start telling the story about the boy who came into the camp in Vietnam one night, and how they had to shoot him. Then he would stop speaking, and look at the little boys hanging on his every word. "You`ve had enough, Joe Lee," his wife would say then. "It`s time to go to bed."

"It wasn`t that he liked to drink -- that was how he dealt with it," Miller said.

Miller grew up in Jonancy, a tiny hamlet 20 miles from the county seat of Pikeville. He got his first job -- washing cars at the local auto dealership -- at age 13, about a year after he took up smoking.

Before long, he began working in a body shop, where the owner told him the most extraordinary thing: Miller could get his auto body repair certification for free -- just by joining the military. A Marine recruiter offered more: insurance, housing, college money.

"I thought, `Well, damn, that`s amazing,` " Miller said. "Hell, here I am, 18 years old -- I can have all this in the palm of my hands just by giving them four years."

Following his grandfather`s footsteps, he went infantry, and left for boot camp in November 2002. Four months later, the war in Iraq broke out.

"Before I knew it," Miller said, "I was thrown into the mix without even thinking about it."

Miller was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment of the 2nd Marine Division, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C.

"Right before we got ready to leave for Iraq, I guess I was a little nervous. I started smoking more -- I went from about a pack-and-a-half a day to 2 1/2 packs a day," he said. "When we got to Iraq ... I was smoking 5 1/2 packs."
For a while, Iraq didn`t seem all that bad. Miller and his fellow Marines settled into a routine in Anbar province in western Iraq, setting up hiding places among the palms and sand, and watching for the white pickups that insurgents would use to plant bombs and fire mortars.
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Miller has reduced his habit to a pack-and-a-half a day, the same as before the military. He increased to two-and-a-half packs right before
going to Iraq and more than five in the battle one.
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There also was time for candy and laughter with the Iraqi children who came running to see the American troops. Miller felt like he was helping.

Then, on Nov. 5, 2004, in the middle of a sandstorm, the Marines got the word that they might be heading for an assault on Fallujah -- at the time, the capital of the Iraqi insurgency.

No American forces had gone inside the city in months. And now Miller would be among the first. He had been a Marine for less than two years.

"It puts butterflies in my stomach right now," he said. "I don`t know if you can describe it. I don`t think words can."

The days before the assault were an intense blur of training, preparation and fear. But there was one bright spot, when Miller ran into a good friend in the chow hall -- Demarkus Brown, a 22-year-old from Virginia.

Miller met Brown in infantry school, when the smiling African American introduced himself to the white Kentucky native with a grinning, "What`s up, cracker?"

Miller quickly realized Brown didn`t mean the word seriously -- didn`t mean much of anything seriously. Brown liked to party all hours and go dancing, then call Miller to come pick him up.

"It didn`t matter what you told him or how s -- ty it was," Miller said. "He was always the one guy who had a smile on his face."

But one thing Brown took seriously was music: He loved raves and techno music, and Miller played bluegrass on bass and guitar. Their styles somehow harmonized, and they became close friends.

Now they were together outside Fallujah.

The night before U.S. forces went into the city, Miller gathered with his fellow Marines and led them by memory through a passage from the Bible, John 14:2-3.

"In my Father`s house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for you, so that where I may be, you may be also."

The assault on Fallujah began Nov. 8, 2004, when U.S. planes, using a combination of high explosives and burning white phosphorus, hammered the city in advance of the artillery push. Miller was under fire from the moment he stepped out of the personnel carrier.

It lasted into Nov. 9 -- the day that, for a while, would make Miller`s face the most famous in Iraq.
As Miller remembers that day, he was on a rooftop taking fire and calling for support on his radio - a 20-pound piece of equipment that he had to lug around along with nine extra batteries, hundreds of extra rounds of ammunition, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes.

As insurgent bullets from a nearby building pinged off the roof, a horrified Miller heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. He raised his rifle -- and barely had time to halt when he saw it was embedded Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco.

Miller returned to his radio, guiding two tanks to his position. When they opened fire, he said, the thunder left his body numb -- but the building housing the attackers had collapsed. Later, he said, they would find about 40 bodies in the rubble.

"I was never so happy in all my life to take that handset away from my head," Miller said. "I lit up a f -- cigarette."

His ear was bleeding from the sound of the tank firing -- Miller still can`t hear out of his right ear. His nose bled from a nick he took when his rifle scope and radio got tangled up midfire. He looked at the sunrise and wondered how many more of those he would see.

He was vaguely aware that elsewhere on the rooftop, Sinco was taking pictures.

At a briefing the next day, Miller`s gunnery sergeant walked up to him, grinning, and said: "Would you believe you`re the most famous f -- Marine in the Marine Corps right now? Believe it or not, your ugly mug just went all over the U.S."

The Marines wanted to pull him out of Fallujah at that point, Miller said, not wanting the very public poster boy to die in combat. But he stayed.

He won`t talk about the weeks that followed. He only mentions moments, like still frames from a film. The day his column barely survived an ambush, escaping through a broken door as bullets struck near their feet. The morning he woke up to discover that a cat had taken up residence in the open chest cavity of an Iraqi body nearby, consuming it from within.

The day he discovered that Demarkus Brown had been killed.

"When we found out, I told a couple of my buddies who were close to him, too. We just sat around, and we didn`t say much at all," Miller said. "You didn`t have the heart to cry."

But it wasn`t those terrible benchmarks that affected him the most, Miller said. It was the daily chore of war: the times he had to raise his rifle, peer through the scope and squeeze the trigger to launch a bullet, not at a target, not at a distant white truck, but at another human being.

"It`s one thing to be shot at, and you shoot a couple rounds back, just trying to suppress somebody else," Miller said. "It`s another thing when you see a human being shooting a round at you, knowing that you`re shooting back with the intent to kill them. You`re looking through a scope at somebody. It`s totally different. You can make out a guy`s eyes."
When Miller returned to America, he brought back a big duffel bag packed with numerous letters and gifts from those who had seen his photo. It was only later that he discovered he`d brought home some of the war, too.

None of the Marines talked much about the strain that war puts on one`s emotions, Miller said. The "wizards" -- military psychologists -- gave the returning troops a briefing on the subject, but nobody paid much attention. Even guys who were taking antidepressants to help them sleep didn`t think much about the long-term consequences.

"What the hell are those people going to do once they get out? They ride it out until they get an honorable discharge, and then they`re never diagnosed with anything," Miller said. "How the hell are you going to do anything for them after that? And that`s how so many of these guys are ending up on the damn streets."
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Blake and Jessica Miller head for his psychiatric evaluation
at the veterans hospital in Huntington, W. Va. Miller suffers
from post-traumatic stress disorder.
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Miller dismissed the early signs, too. When he and his buddies reacted to a truck backfire by dropping into a combat stance and raising imaginary rifles, well, that was to be expected. And when his wife, Jessica -- the childhood sweetheart whom Miller had married in June -- told him he was tightening his arm around her neck in the night, that was strange, but he figured it would pass. So would the nightmares he began to have about Iraq, things that had happened, things that hadn`t.

Then one day, while visiting his wife at her college dorm in Pikeville, Miller looked out the window and clearly saw the body of an Iraqi sprawled out on the sidewalk. He turned away.

"I said, `Look, honey, I just got to get out of here.` I couldn`t even tell her at the time what had happened," he said. "(I thought), `Well, that`s it. That`s my little spaz I`m supposed to have that the psychiatrists were talking about ... I`m glad I got it out of the way."

But he hadn`t. Jessica, a psychology student, tried to help with a visualization technique. But when he looked inside himself, Miller found a kind of demonic door guarded by a twisted figure in a black cloak. Under the cloak`s hood, he spotted the snarling face of the teufelhund, a Marine Corps icon -- the devil dog.

"So I come out again, without closing the door," he said. "After all this happened, my nightmares started getting a lot f -- ing worse."

Finally, Miller went to a military psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Miller thought that meant he could not be deployed. But in early September, he joined a group of Marines headed to police New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"I really didn`t want to go. ... There was a possibility we would be shooting people," he said. "We could be going into another (urban warfare) environment just like Iraq, except this would actually be U.S. citizens.

"Here we go, Fallujah 2, right here in the states."

Not long after they arrived, as Hurricane Rita bore down on them, the Marines were packed into the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima to wait out the storm offshore. And one day, as Miller headed for the smoke deck with a Marlboro, a passing sailor made a whistling sound just like a rocket-propelled grenade.

"I don`t remember grabbing him. I don`t remember putting him against the bulkhead. I don`t remember getting him down on the floor. I don`t remember getting on top of him. I don`t remember doing any of that s -- ," Miller said. "That was like the last straw."

On Nov. 10, 2005 -- the Marine Corps` 230th birthday and one year to the day after the Marlboro Man picture appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Miller was honorably discharged after a medical review. His military career was over.
Miller returned to eastern Kentucky, the place he had spent years trying to escape. He wanted the familiarity and safety of the people and land he`d known since birth.

"Maybe it made me think twice about what I had lost," he said. "What I was really missing."

In a way, though, his family is still missing Blake Miller -- the Miller who left Kentucky for Iraq a couple of years ago.

The man who left was easygoing, quick to laugh, happy to sit in a relative`s house and eat and smoke and talk. The man who came back is quick to anger, they say, and is quiet. He still smiles often but does not easily laugh.

And when he takes a seat in his adoptive grandmother`s home, amid her collection of ceramic Christ figurines, it is in a chair that faces the door.

Mildred Childers, who owns those figurines, sees Miller`s difficulties as a crisis of faith. She still remembers Miller`s call just before the assault on Fallujah, and his terrible question: "How can people go to church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?"

"He was raised where that`s one of the Ten Commandments, do not kill," she said. "I think it`s hard for a soldier to go to war and have that embedded in them from small children up, and you go over there and you`ve got to do it to stay alive."

Recently, some of his Marine buddies have been calling Miller up, crying drunk, and remembering their war experiences. Just like Papaw Joe Lee used to do when Miller was a boy.

"There`s a lot of Vietnam vets ... they don`t heal until 30, 40 years down the road," Miller said. "People bottle it up, become angry, easily temperamental, and hell, before you know it, these are the people who are snapping on you."

Jessica interrupted. "You`re already like that," she said.

She recalled her own first glimpse of the Marlboro Man -- an image seen through tears of relief that he was alive, and misery at how worn he looked.

"Some people thought it was sexy, and we thought, `Oh, my God, he`s in the middle of a war, close to death.` We just couldn`t understand how some people could look at it like that," she said. "But I guess for some people it was glory, like patriotism."

She looked at her quiet husband through the smoke drifting from his right hand.

"But when it comes out and there`s actually a personality behind that picture, and that personality, he has to deal with all the war, and all he`s done, people don`t want to know how hard it actually is," she said.

"This is the dark side of the reality of war. ... People don`t want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD."
Miller stood outside his father`s home in Jonancy, looking over the beaten mobile homes, the rows of corn, potatoes and cabbage. For a change, he wasn`t smoking - he`s down to a pack-and-a-half a day.

"There ain`t a goddamn thing around here," he said. "My whole life, all I did was watch my old man bust his ass."

It was why he joined the Marines -- why part of him wishes he could go back.

"My whole life, all I`ve ever known is working on cars, doing body work, cutting grass, manual labor, you know? It was something different," he said. "You always hear those commercials -- it`s not just a job, it`s an adventure. It was, you know?"

On the other hand, Miller isn`t sure he`d want to go back to combat -- nor sure he`d ever let any kid of his enlist. He has mixed feelings about the oversize copy of the Marlboro Man picture proudly displayed in the lobby of the Marine recruiting station in Pikeville.

Some of his relatives and friends are against the war; others see it as a fight against terrorism.

Miller himself seems torn -- proud of the troops fighting for freedom, but wondering whether there was a peaceful way, to find terrorists in Iraq without invading.

There was no time for such questions in Fallujah. But now, at night, when he can`t sleep, Miller thinks of the men he saw through his rifle scope, and wonders: Were they terrorists fighting against America? Or men fighting to protect their homes?

"I mean, how would we feel if they came over and started something here?" he asked. "I`m glad that I fought for my country. But looking back on it, I wouldn`t do it all over again."

It helps, sometimes, to talk about it -- last week, Miller did what he hopes other veterans do: He had his first visit with a Veterans Administration counselor.

"I`ve got my whole life ahead of me," he said. "I`m too young to lay down and quit; too young to let anything beat me."

Down the road, Miller hopes to start a business. For now, he is waiting for his disability benefits to kick in. Maybe then, he and Jessica can afford the big wedding they had always wanted. She already has her white wedding dress. He still intends to wear his Marine Corps blues.
Veterans and stress

Post-traumatic stress disorder is an ailment resulting from exposure to an experience involving direct or indirect threat of serious injury or death. Symptoms include recurrent thoughts of a traumatic event, reduced involvement in work or outside interests, hyper alertness, anxiety and irritability.

About 317,000 veterans diagnosed with the disorder were treated at Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers and clinics in fiscal year 2005. Nearly 19,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were seen for the disorder in veterans` medical centers and Vet Centers from fiscal year 2002 to 2005.

A recent study of soldiers and Marines who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan found that about 17 percent met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or generalized anxiety disorder. Of those whose responses were positive for a mental disorder, 40 percent or fewer actually received help while on active duty.

For more information, contact your local veterans facility, call (877) 222-VETS or visit one of the following Web sites:

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: www.ncptsd.va.gov/

San Francisco Chronicle Guide for Returning Veterans: www.sfgate.com/returningvets/

Sources: Department of Veterans Affairs, New England Journal of Medicine

E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/29/M…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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It`s a hard time. Was würde dabei rauskommen, wenn Bush seine Rede an die Nation selbst schreiben würde?

George W. Bush, in his own write
e.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/29…

- Jaime O`Neill
Sunday, January 29, 2006

Politicians don`t write their own speeches, although there was a time when they did, or at least played a greater role in the writing. Think of Lincoln`s second inaugural, or Kennedy`s first, and you`ll get an idea of the kind of soaring public rhetoric that has been lost since the task has largely been given over to committees of behind-the-scenes scribblers.

But what if George W. Bush cut out the scribblers and decided to construct Tuesday night`s State of the Union address out of things he`s already said? Such a speech might look like the one below, crafted entirely from the things he has contributed thus far to the public record, according to the Bushisms Web site. All the words are the president`s own:

Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens:

This is historic times.

The past is over. There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we`re going to do it again. Our nation must come together to unite. A leadership is someone who brings people together. When you`re marching to war, it`s not a very optimistic thought, is it? In other words, it`s the opposite of optimistic when you`re thinking you`re going to war. Presidents, whether things are good or bad, get the blame. I understand that.

I think the American people -- I hope the American -- I don`t think, let me -- I hope the American people trust me.

This is historic times.

There`s no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead, but I know something about being a government. And you`ve got a good one. Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work because I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.

This is historic times.

The true strength of America is found in the hearts and souls of people who are willing to love their neighbor, just like they would like to love themselves. Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they`d like to be called themselves. Families are where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.

There`s no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country. See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don`t attack each other. Free nations don`t develop weapons of mass destruction. There`s no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world`s worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world`s worst weapons. It`s in our country`s interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm`s way.

This is historic times.

See, we love -- We love freedom. That`s what they didn`t understand. They hate things; we love things. They act out of hatred; we don`t seek revenge, we seek justice out of love. The goals for this country are peace in the world. And the goals for this country are a compassionate American for every single citizen.

I think war is a dangerous place, but we ended the rule of one of history`s worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure. Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat. My views are one that speaks to freedom.

This is historic times.

The vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice. These have been tough weeks in that country. I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region, but security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.

I understand there`s a suspicion that we -- we`re too security-conscience. We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make -- it would hope -- put a free press`s mind at ease that you`re not being denied information you shouldn`t see.

This is historic times.

I`m not going to accept a lousy bill out of the United Nations Senate. I look forward to working with the United Nations Senate to preserve these national heritages. Any time we`ve got any kind of inkling that somebody is thinking about doing something to an American and something to our homeland, you`ve just got to know we`re moving on it, to protect the United Nations Constitution, and at the same time, we`re protecting you.

This is historic times.

I`m going to spend a lot of time on Social Security. I enjoy it. I enjoy taking on the issue. I guess, it`s the Mother in me, but I repeat, personal accounts do not permanently fix the solution. We are making steadfast progress.

The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society. But rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning? How do you know if you don`t measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through? Laura and I really don`t realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis.

This is historic times.

Reading is the basics for all learning. The true greatness of America are the people, but the illiteracy level of our children are appalling. You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

And so, in my last State of the -- my State of the Union -- or state -- my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation -- I asked Americans to give 4,000 years -- 4,000 hours over the next -- the rest of your life -- of service to America. That`s what I asked -- 4,000 hours.

This is historic times.

I believe we are called to do the hard work to make our communities and quality of life a better place. Over 75 percent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 percent of Hispanics and African Americans don`t own their home.

I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans. It`s a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life. For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three nonfatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It`s just unacceptable. And we`re going to do something about it.

We`re making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end. You`re free. And freedom is beautiful. My views are one that speaks to freedom. I love to bring people into the Oval Office -- right around the corner from here -- and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person. And, you know, it`ll take time to restore chaos and order -- order out of chaos. But we will. I`m a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values.

This is historic times.

Thank you, and God bless America.

This is, most assuredly, not the speech we`ll be hearing in two days. We`ve already heard this speech, of course, though not in one sitting. It remains to be seen whether the president`s speechwriters will give us a truer account of the State of the Union than can be found in the president`s words.

Jaime O`Neill is a writer and former community college teacher who lives in Magalia (Butte County). Readers who might wish to try their hand at crafting a George W. Bush State of the Union Address from the president`s own words can find the basic ingredients at politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm, which lists hundreds of his less-successful public utterances. Contact us at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Vielleicht hätte ich im vorigen Posting besser geschrieben: It is a hard work.

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Satire) - During his State of the Union Speech, President Bush set the official government Doomsday Clock to midnight and then declared that "the end times are here". Mr. Bush said it has been his sworn duty to carry out God`s will by deregulating the oil industry and refusing to control greenhouse gases and just let the world perish in a [urlcatastrophe brought upon by global warming.]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4660938.stm[/url]
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Jan 31, 2006

A high-risk game of nuclear chicken
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA31Ak02.html

By F William Engdahl

In the past weeks, media reports have speculated that Washington is "thinking the unthinkable", namely, an aggressive, preemptive nuclear bombardment of Iran, by either the United States or Israel, to destroy or render useless the deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

The possibility of war against Iran presents a geostrategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proved complicated enough for the US. We try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war.

The dramatis personae include the Bush administration, most especially the Dick Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condoleezza Rice.

It includes Iran, under the new and outspoken President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. It includes President Vladimir Putin`s Russia, a nuclear-armed veto member of the UN Security Council. It includes a nuclear-armed Israel, whose acting premier, Ehud Olmert, recently declared that Israel could "under no circumstances" allow Iranian development of nuclear weapons "that can threaten our existence". It includes the European Union, especially Security Council permanent member, France, and the weakening President Jacques Chirac. It includes China, whose dependence on Iranian oil and potentially natural gas is large.

Each of these actors has differing agendas and different goals, making the issue of Iran one of the most complex in recent international politics. What`s going on here? Is a nuclear war, with all that implies for the global financial and political stability, imminent? What are the possible and even probable outcomes?

The basic facts
First the basic facts as can be verified. The latest act by Ahmadinejad in announcing the resumption of suspended work on completing a nuclear fuel enrichment facility along with two other facilities at Natanz, sounded louder alarm bells outside Iran than his inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric earlier, understandably so.

Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize-winning head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body, has said he is not sure if that act implies a nuclear weapons program, or whether Iran is merely determined not to be dependent on outside powers for its own civilian nuclear fuel cycle. But, he added, the evidence for it is stronger than that against Saddam Hussein, a rather strong statement by the usually cautious ElBaradei.

The result of the resumption of research at Natanz appears to have jelled for the first time a coalition between US and the EU, including Germany and France, with China and even Russia now joining in urging Iran to desist. Last August, President George W Bush announced, in regard to Iran`s announced plans to resume enrichment regardless of international opinion, that "all options are on the table". That implied in context a nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

That statement led to a sharp acceleration of EU diplomatic efforts, led by Britain, Germany and France, the so-called EU-3, to avoid a war. The three told Washington they were opposed to a military solution. Since then we are told by German magazine Der Spiegel and others the EU view has changed, to appear to come closer to the position of the Bush administration.

It`s useful briefly to review the technology of nuclear fuel enrichment. To prepare uranium for use in a nuclear reactor, it undergoes the steps of mining and milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. These four steps make up the "front end" of the nuclear fuel cycle.

After uranium has been used in a reactor to produce electricity it is known as "spent fuel", and may undergo further steps, including temporary storage, reprocessing and recycling before eventual disposal as waste. Collectively these steps are known as the "back end" of the fuel cycle.

The Natanz facility is part of the "front end" or fuel-preparation cycle. Ore is first milled into uranium oxide (U3O8), or yellowcake, then converted into uranium hexaflouride (UF6 ) gas. The uranium hexaflouride then is sent to an enrichment facility, in this case Natanz, to produce a mix containing 3-4% of fissile U-235, a non-weapons-grade nuclear fuel. So far, so good, more or less in terms of weapons danger.

Iran is especially positioned through geological fortune to possess large quantities of uranium from mines in Yazd province, permitting Iran to be self-sufficient in fuel and not having to rely on Russian fuel or any other foreign imports for that matter. It also has a facility at Arak which produces heavy water, which is used to moderate a research reactor whose construction began in 2004.

That reactor will use uranium dioxide and could enable Iran to produce weapons-grade plutonium, which some nuclear scientists estimate could produce an amount to build one to two nuclear devices per year. Iran officially claims the plant is for peaceful medical research. The peaceful argument here begins to look thinner.

Nuclear enrichment is no small item. You don`t build such a facility in the backyard or the garage. France`s large Tricastin enrichment facility provides fuel for the nuclear electricity grid of Electricite de France (EDF), as well as for the French nuclear weapons program. It needs four large nuclear reactors, just to provide more than 3,000MWe (megawatts electrical) power for it. Early US enrichment plants used gaseous diffusion. Enrichment plants in the EU and Russia use a more modern centrifuge process that uses far less energy per unit of enrichment. The latter or centrifuge process is also the Iranian type.

To make weapons-grade uranium requires more than conventional civilian electric power-grade uranium fuel. "Unmaking" weapons-grade uranium today is also a geopolitically interesting process, not irrelevant to the current dispute over Iran. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, under agreements designed to ensure that the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be converted to peaceful uses, military weapons uranium came on to the civilian market under a US-Russian agreement.

Today more than half of all the uranium used for electricity in the US nuclear power plants comes from Russian military stockpiles. Currently, 20% of all electricity produced in the US is nuclear-generated, meaning that Russian uranium fuels some 10% of all US electricity.

In 1994, a US$12 billion contract was signed between the US Enrichment Corporation (now USEC Inc) and Russia`s Techsnabexport (Tenex) as agents for the US and Russian governments. USEC agreed to buy a minimum of 500 tonnes of weapons-grade uranium over 20 years, at a rate of up to 30 tonnes/year beginning in 1999. The uranium is blended down to 4.4% U-235 in Russia. The USEC then sells it to its US power utility customers as fuel. In September this program reached its halfway point of 250 tonnes, or elimination of 10,000 nuclear warheads.

Worldwide, one sixth of the global market of commercial enriched uranium is supplied by Russia from Russian and other weapons-grade uranium stocks. Putin has many cards to play in the showdown over Iran`s nuclear program.

The issue of whether Iran was secretly building a nuclear weapon capability first surfaced from allegations by an Iranian exile opposition group in 2002.

Natanz has been under the IAEA`s purview since suspicions about Iran`s activities surfaced. It was prompted by reports from an Iranian opposition organization, National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and led ElBaradei to tour Iran`s nuclear facilities in February 2002, including the incomplete plant in Natanz about 500 kilometers south of Tehran.

The NCRI is the political arm of the controversial People`s Mujahideen of Iran, which both the EU and US governments officially brand terrorist but unofficially work with increasingly against the Tehran theocracy.

Possible Iranian strategy
It`s undeniably clear that Ahmadinejad has a more confrontational policy than his predecessor. The Iranian ambassador to Vienna, speaking at a conference in Austria where this author was present last September, shocked his audience by stating essentially the same line of confrontational rhetoric: "If it comes to war, Iran is ready ..."

Let`s assume that the Western media are correctly reporting the strident militant speeches of the president. We must also assume that in that theocratic state, the ruling mullahs, as the most powerful political institution in Iran, are behind the election of the more fundamentalist Ahmadinejad. It has been speculated that the aim of the militancy and defiance of the US and Israel is to revitalize the role of Iran as the "vanguard" of an anti-Western theocratic Shi`ite revolution at a time when the mullahs` support internally, and in the Islamic world, is fading.

Let`s also assume Ahmadinejad`s actions are quite premeditated, with the intent to needle and provoke the West for some reason. If pushed against the wall by growing Western pressures, Ahmadinejad`s regime has apparently calculated that Iran has little to lose if it hit back.

He is also no rogue agent in opposition to the Iranian clergy. According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn of January 24, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, secretary of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, stressed Iran`s determination to assert its "inalienable" rights: "We appreciate President Ahmadinejad because he is following a more aggressive foreign policy on human rights and nuclear issues than the former governments of [Mohammed] Khatami and [Hashemi] Rafsanjani," the ayatollah reportedly said. "President Ahmadinejad is asking, `why only you [Western powers] should send inspectors for human rights or nuclear issues to Iran - we also want to inspect you and report on your activities`."

The paper`s Tehran correspondent added, "The mood within the country`s top leadership remains upbeat and the general belief was that it would be possible to ride out international sanctions - if it comes to that."

In this situation, some exile Iranians feel it would bolster Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs to be handed a new UN sanction punishment. It could be used to whip up nationalism at home and tighten their grip on power at a time of waning revolutionary spirit in the country.

Ahmadinejad has been taking very provocative, and presumably calculated measures including breaking nuclear-facility seals, and announcing a major conference that would question evidence that the Nazis conducted a mass murder of European Jews during World War II. Yet he also has stressed several times publicly that in accord with strict Islam law, Iran would never deploy a nuclear device, a weapon of mass destruction, and that it is only asserting its right as a sovereign nation to an independent full-cycle civilian nuclear program.

The history of Iran`s nuclear efforts should be noted. It began in 1957 when Reza Shah Pahlevi signed a civilian Atoms for Peace agreement with Dwight D Eisenhower`s administration. Iran received a US research reactor in 1967. Then in 1974 after the first oil shock, the shah created the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, explicitly tasked to develop civilian nuclear power to displace oil, freeing more oil for export, and for developing a nuclear weapon.

The Bushehr reactor complex of civilian power reactors was begun by West Germany in the 1970s under the shah, the same time Iran began buying major shares of key German companies, such as Daimler and Krupp. After his 1979 ascent to power, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered all work on the nuclear program halted, citing Islamic beliefs that weapons of mass destruction were immoral.

In 1995, the Russian Foreign Ministry signed a contract with the Iranian government to complete the stalled Bushehr plant, and to supply it with Russian nuclear fuel, provided Iran agreed to allow IAEA monitoring and safeguards. According to an article in the March 2004 MERIA Journal, that 1995 Russia-Iran deal included potentially dangerous transfers of Russian technology, such as laser enrichment from Yefremov Scientific Research Institute. Iran`s initial deal with Russia in 1995 included a centrifuge plant that would have provided Iran with fissile material. The plant deal was then canceled at Washington`s insistence.

The monitoring of Bushehr continued until the reports from the NCRI of secret nuclear weapons facilities in 2002 led to increased pressure on Iran, above all from Bush, who labeled Iran one of a three-nation "axis of evil" in his January 2002 State of the Union speech. That was when the Bush administration was deeply in preparation of regime change in Iraq, however, and Iran took a back seat, not least as Washington neo-conservatives such as Ahmad Chalabi had convinced the Pentagon his ties to Tehran could aid their Iraq agenda.

Since that time, relations between Washington and Tehran have become less than cordial. Iran has been preparing for what it sees as an inevitable war with the US. Brigadier General Mohammad-Ali Jaafari, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, told the official IRNA news agency on October 9: "As the likely enemy is far more advanced technologically than we are, we have been using what is called `asymmetric warfare` methods. We have gone through the necessary exercises and our forces are now well prepared for this." This presumably includes terrorist attacks and the use of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, ballistic missiles.

On January 20, Iran announced it had decided to withdraw investments from Europe. This was the same week UBS Bank in Zurich announced it was closing all Iranian accounts. According to US Treasury reports, Iran has an estimated $103 billion in dollar-denominated assets alone. There is potential to cause short-term financial distress, though likely little more should Iran sell all dollar assets abruptly.

What seems clear is that Iran is defiantly going ahead with completion of an independent nuclear capability and insists it is abiding by all rules of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the IAEA.

Iran also apparently feels well-prepared to sit out any economic sanctions. The country is the second-largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil producer (4.1 million barrels per day in 2005) next to Saudi Arabia (9.1 million.) Russia with 9.5 million bpd production in 2005 takes claim to being the world`s largest oil-producing country.

Iran has also accumulated a strong cash position from the recent high oil price, earning some $45 billion in oil revenue in 2005, double the average for 2001-03. This gives it a war chest cushion against external sanctions and the possibility to live for months with cutting its oil exports, all or partly. That is clearly one of the implicit weapons Iran knows it holds and would clearly use in event the situation escalated into UN Security Council economic sanctions.

In today`s ultra-tight oil supply market, with OPEC producing at full capacity, there would be no margin to replace 4 million Iranian barrels a day. A price shock level of $130 to $150 is quite likely in that event.

Iran now has decisive influence within the Shi`ite-dominated new Iraqi government. The most influential figure in Iraq is Shi`ite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the 75-year-old cleric born in Iran. On January 16, after the new Iraqi government offered Sistani Iraqi citizenship, he replied, "I was born Iranian and I will die Iranian." That also gives Tehran significant leverage over political developments in Iraq.

The Israeli options
Israel has been thrown into political crisis at just this time of Iran`s strident moves, with the removal of the old warrior, Ariel Sharon, from the scene following his illness. Israeli elections will be held on March 28 for a new government. Contenders include the current acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Israeli media report that Bush has decided to do what he can to try and ensure that Olmert, standing in for the incapacitated Sharon, is elected to be full-time prime minister. Rice has invited Olmert to visit Washington, probably some time next month.

Other reports are that the vice president, we might say the "spiritual leader" of the US hawks, Cheney, has been covertly aiding the Benjamin Netanyahu candidacy as new head of the right-wing Likud. Netanyahu is also directly tied to the indicted US Republican money-launderer, Jack Abramoff, during the time Netanyahu was Sharon`s finance minister.

Washington journalists report that Cheney, and his advisers David Addington and John Hannah, are working behind the scenes to ensure that former premier Netanyahu succeeds Olmert. Cheney is working to defeat the more moderate Kadima Party formed by Sharon and his more moderate ex-Likud allies.

Bush has not come out with direct vocal support for Olmert, but Olmert has stressed that he will continue to work with America to realize a Palestinian state. Israeli media report the new middle-of-the-road (Israeli middle) party of Olmert and Sharon-Kadima will probably win a landslide - to the dismay of Cheney`s and Karl Rove`s Christian Right and the neo-conservative base.

According to the Palestine newspaper, al-Manar, the Bush administration is conducting secret contacts with the Palestinian Authority and Arab countries in an effort to have them help strengthen Olmert`s stature. The US reportedly informed them that it was interested in having Olmert head Kadima and "continue the process that Sharon began to solve the Palestinian-Israel conflict".

The paper further reports that Washington feels that Olmert is a "smart leader who will be able, with his advisors, to lead the peace process and rebuff the political machinations against him".

The Bush White House even informed Olmert, according to the paper, that it would like him to keep Sharon`s advisors on his team, especially Dov Weisglass and Shimon Peres. Weisglass, Sharon`s personal lawyer and broker of ties to Washington, recently said he was in almost daily contact with Rice.

On January 22, Olmert addressed the issue of Iran. According to Israeli State Radio, he said Iran was trying to engage Israel in the conflict surrounding Tehran`s ongoing nuclear enrichment efforts, and that he concurred with Sharon`s position that Israel would not lead the battle against Iran. He said that "responsibility falls first and foremost on the United States, Germany, France and the Security Council. We do not have to be the leaders".

By contrast, his defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, stated Israel would not tolerate Iran achieving nuclear independence, a statement that analysts feel signals a military action by Jerusalem is possible, with or without official US sanction.

This all would indicate that there is a definite split within Israel between a future Olmert government not eager to launch a preemptive military strike on Iran`s nuclear facilities versus the ever-hawkish, neo-conservative-tied Netanyahu. Notably, prominent Washington neo-conservative, Kenneth Timmerman, told Israeli radio in mid-January that he expected an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran "within the next 60 days", ie just after Israeli elections or just before.

Timmerman is close to Richard Perle, the indicted Cheney chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith and Michael Ledeen.

The question is whether ordinary Israelis are war weary, whether with Palestine or with Iran, and seek a compromise solution. Polls seem to indicate so. However, the very strong showing of Hamas in the January 25 Palestine elections could change the Israeli mood. The day after their vote success, Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahhar claimed that his movement would not change its covenant calling for the destruction of Israel, reported the Israeli online news portal Ynet.

Last week, a new element appeared in the chemistry of the long-standing Israeli Likud-US Congress influence nexus. Larry A Franklin, a former Pentagon Iran analyst and close friend of leading Pentagon neo-conservatives, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail for sharing classified Pentagon information with pro-Israel lobbyists through an influential Washington-based lobby organization, AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

AIPAC has been at the heart of ties between the Israeli right-wing Likud and members of the US Congress for years. It is regarded as so powerful that it is able to decide which Congressmen are elected or re-elected. Previously it had been considered "untouchable". That is no longer true it seems.

Franklin pleaded guilty last October to sharing the information with AIPAC lobbyists and Israeli diplomat, Naor Gilon. Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were fired from AIPAC in 2004 in the affair, are facing charges of disclosing confidential information to Israel, apparently about Iran. The sentencing is causing major shock waves throughout leading US Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B`nai Brith. The conviction has hit a vital lobbying tool of AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups, namely, expenses-paid trips for US Congressmen to Israel. Hundreds of politicians are taken to Israel every year by non-profit affiliates of groups such as AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee - trips Jewish leaders say are a vital tool in pro-Israel lobbying.

The Bush administration had tried to bury the Franklin case, unsuccessfully. It could only delay the trial until after the November 2004 US elections. The Franklin scandal as well as the Abramoff lobbying affair have both hit severe blows to the suspicious money network between Likud and the White House, potentially fatally weakening the Israeli hawk faction of Netanyahu.

The Russian factor in Iran
The role of Putin`s Russia in the unfolding Iran showdown is central. In geopolitical terms, one must not forget that Russia is the ultimate "prize" or endgame in the more than decade-long US strategy of controlling Eurasia and preventing any possible rival from emerging to challenge US hegemony.

Russian engineers and technical advisers are in Iran constructing the Bushehr nuclear plant, involving at least 300 Russian technicians. Iran has been a strategic cooperation partner of the Putin government in terms of opposing US-United Kingdom designs for control of Caspian oil. Iran has been a major purchaser of Russian military hardware since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in addition to buying Russian nuclear technology and expertise.

In March, Iran-Russia relations took a qualitative shift closer when Moscow agreed to the sale of a "defensive" missile system to Tehran, worth up to $7 billion when taking future defense contracts into account. In 2000, Putin had announced Russia would no longer continue to abide by a secret US-Russia agreement to ban Russian weapons sales to Iran that the government of Boris Yeltsin had concluded. Since then, Russian-Iranian relations have become more entwined, to put it mildly.

Moscow currently says it is in talks with Iran to build five to seven additional nuclear power reactors on the Bushehr site after completion of the present reactor. Russia expects to get up to $10 billion from the planned larger Bushehr reactors deal and additional arms sales to Iran.

It is currently building the reactor on credit to be paid by Iran only after the completion of the project. Sanctions and admonitions will not change Russia`s relationship with one of the most demonized states in America`s "axis of evil". Iran has become a major counterweight for Moscow in the geopolitical game for Washington`s total domination over Eurasia, and Putin is shrewdly aware of that potential.

A look at the map will reveal how geopolitically strategic Iran is for Russia, as well as for Israel and the US. Iran controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the choke point for oil from the Persian Gulf to Japan and the rest of the world. Iran borders the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Significantly, on January 23, the Russian daily Kommersant reported that Armenia, sandwiched between Iran and Georgia, had agreed to sell a 45% control of its Iran-Armenia gas pipeline to Russia`s Gazprom. The Russian daily added, "If Russia takes over this [Iran-Armenia] pipeline, Russia will be able to control transit of Iranian gas to Georgia, Ukraine and Europe."

That would be a major blow to the series of Washington operations to insert US-friendly pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organization governments in Georgia as well as Ukraine. It would also bind Iran and Russian energy relations. While the Armenian government denies it has agreed, negotiations continue, with Gazprom holding out the prospect of demanding double the price or $110 per 1,000 cubic meters rather than the present $54 unless Armenia agree to sell the stake to Gazprom.

Russia is pursuing a complex strategy regarding its cooperation with Iran. Minatom, the Russian nuclear energy group, announced some time back that Russia was in discussion with Tehran to increase Iran`s nuclear capacity by 6,000 megawatts by 2020. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed a year ago that Moscow would supply Iran with fuel for the Bushehr reactor, even if it did not sign the IAEA Additional Protocols.

While Putin has assured the world that Iran must demonstrate full NPT compliance before the Russian nuclear transfers occur, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated previously that the IAEA`s failure to condemn Iran opened the door for Russia to help build future reactors in that country.

Putin has managed to put Russia square in the middle of the present global showdown over Iran, a position which clearly tells some in Moscow that Russia is indeed again a global player. Undoubtedly more.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in a January 18 discussion with the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, stated: "It is not profitable for Russia to impose sanctions on Iran, since we just recently signed an agreement to sell them nearly $1 billion worth of medium-range anti-aircraft weapons. These modern weapons are capable of hitting targets up to 25 kilometers away and will probably be used to defend various testing sites in Iran. Therefore, if some attempt is made to strike at the country and the deliveries from Russia are made quickly enough, we can expect a strong response. In other words, Iran will be able to defend itself."

Ivanov added a significant caveat: "However, if ballistic missiles are used, then nuclear sites can be targeted effectively. We must not forget that Russia has its experts working on some of these sites, and is not interested in a military scenario, if only to protect them."

Russia`s current strategy is to renew its earlier offer, rejected initially by Tehran, to take the uranium fuel from Iran to Russia for reprocessing - then returned to Iran for use in the country`s reactors - thus defusing the crisis significantly. Last Wednesday, Iran`s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said that Tehran viewed Moscow`s offer as a "positive development", but no agreement has been reached between the countries. Talks have continued over the specifics, including Tehran`s proposal to have China involved in the Russian enrichment process.

After his meeting with Russian Security Council chief, Igor Ivanov, Larijani told the media, "Our view of this offer is positive, and we are trying to bring the positions of the sides closer." Further talks come in February, after the planned emergency IAEA meeting of this Thursday. Iran opposition groups claim the Russian talks are merely a ploy to divide the West and buy more time. Larijani and Ivanov said in a joint statement that Tehran`s nuclear standoff must be resolved by diplomatic efforts in the UN atomic watchdog agency.

The China factor in Iran
China, in its increasingly urgent search for secure long-term energy supplies, especially oil and gas, has developed major economic ties with Iran. It began in 2000, when Beijing invited Iranian president Mohammed Khatami for a literal red carpet reception and discussion of areas of energy and economic cooperation. Then in November 2004, curiously at the occasion of the second Bush election victory, the relation took a major shift as China signed huge oil and gas deals with Tehran.

The two countries signed a preliminary agreement worth potentially $70 billion to $100 billion. Under the terms, China will purchase Iranian oil and gas and help develop the Yadavaran oil field, near the Iraqi border. That same year, China agreed to buy $20 billion in liquefied natural gas from Iran over a quarter-century.

Iran`s oil minister stated at the time, "Japan is our number one energy importer for historical reasons ... but we would like to give preference to exports to China." In return, China has become a major exporter of manufactured goods to Iran, including computer systems, household appliances and cars. In addition, Beijing has been one of the largest suppliers of military technology to Tehran since the 1980s. The Chinese arms trade has involved conventional, missile, nuclear and chemical weapons. Outside Pakistan and North Korea, China`s arms trade with Iran has been more comprehensive and sustained than that with any other country.

China has sold thousands of tanks, armored personnel vehicles and artillery pieces, several hundred surface-to-air, air-to-air, cruise and ballistic missiles as well as thousands of antitank missiles, more than 100 fighter aircraft and dozens of small warships.

In addition, it is widely believed that China has assisted Iran in the development of its ballistic and cruise missile production capability. In addition, China has supplied Iran scientific expertise, technical cooperation, technology transfers, production technologies, blueprints and dual-use transfers.

In sum, Iran is more than a strategic partner for China. In the wake of the US unilateral decision to go to war against Iraq, reports from Chinese media indicated that the leadership in Beijing privately realized its own long-term energy security was fundamentally at risk under the aggressive new preemptive war strategy of Washington. China began taking major steps to outflank or negate total US domination of the world`s major oil and gas resources. Iran has become a central part of that strategy.

This underscores the Chinese demand that the Iran nuclear issue be settled in the halls of the IAEA and not at the UN Security Council, as Washington wishes. China would clearly threaten its veto were Iran to be brought before the UN for sanctions.

EU relations with Iran
The EU is Iran`s main trading partner concerning both imports and exports. Clearly, they want to avoid a war with Iran and all that would imply for the EU. The EU`s balance of trade with Iran is negative due to large imports of oil. Germany`s new government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a clear point of trying to reaffirm close ties with Washington following the tense relations under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who openly opposed the Iraq war along with France`s Chirac in 2002 and 2003.

Chirac for his part is the subject of major controversy since he gave a speech on January 19 in which he overturned the traditional French nuclear doctrine of "no first strike" to say that were a terrorist nation to attack France, he would consider even nuclear retaliation as appropriate.

This declaration by a French president triggered an international uproar. Whether it was French psychological warfare designed to pressure Iran, or the reflection of a fundamental change in French nuclear doctrine to one of preemptive strike or something similar, is so far not clear. What is clear is that the Chirac government will not stand in the way of a US decision to impose UN sanctions on Iran. Whether that also holds for a US-sanctioned nuclear strike is not clear.

The EU-3, whose negotiations diplomatically have so far produced no results, are now moving toward some form of more effective action against Iran`s decision to proceed with reprocessing. The only problem is that other than nuclear saber-rattling, the EU has few cards to play. It needs Iranian energy. It is also aware of what it would mean to have a war in Iran in terms of potential terror retaliations. The EU, to put it mildly, is highly nervous and alarmed at the potential of a US-Iran or Israel-US vs Iran military showdown.

The Bush administration role in Iran
Unlike the Iraq war buildup where it became clear to a shocked world that the Bush administration was going to war regardless, Washington with Iran has so far been willing to let the EU states take a diplomatic lead, only stepping up pressure publicly on Iran in recent weeks.

On January 19, the US repeated that neither it nor its European partners wanted to return to the negotiating table with Iran. "The international community is united in mistrusting Tehran with nuclear technology," said Rice. "The time has come for a referral of Iran to the [UN] Security Council." Rice`s choice of the word "referral" was deliberate. If Iran is only "reported" to the Security Council, debate would lack legal weight. A formal "referral" is necessary if the council is to impose any penalty, such as economic sanctions.

The neo-conservatives, although slightly lower profile in the second Bush administration, are every bit as active, especially through Cheney`s office. They want a preemptive bombing strike on Iran`s nuclear sites. But whatever Cheney`s office may be doing, officially, the Bush administration is pursuing a markedly different approach than it did in 2003, when its diplomacy was aimed at lining up allies for a war. This time, US diplomats are seeking an international consensus on how to proceed, or at least cultivating the impression of that.

Iraq and the deepening US disaster there has severely constrained possible US options in Iran. In 2003, in the wake of the Iraqi "victory", leading Washington neo-conservative hawks were vocally calling on Bush to move on to Tehran after Saddam Hussein. Now, because of the "bloody quagmire" in Iraq, the US is severely constrained from moving unilaterally. With 140,000 troops tied down in Iraq, the US military physically cannot support another invasion and occupation in yet another country, let alone Iran.

Because of Iran`s size, a ground invasion may require twice as many troops as in Iraq, says Richard Russell, a Middle East specialist at the National Defense University in Washington. While an air campaign could take out Iran`s air defenses, it could also trigger terrorism and oil disruptions. Washington is internally split over the issue of a successful nuclear strike against Iran,

The AIPAC and Abramoff impact Washington
Another little-appreciated new element in the US political chemistry around the Bush White House are two devastating legal prosecutions that have hit the heart of the black and grey money network between Washington Republicans and the Israeli right-wing Likud.

Abramoff, the financial patron of several prominent Republicans, including ex-House majority leader, Tom Delay, and Steve Rosen, the key force behind AIPAC, were two of the most influential Jewish lobbyists in Washington before legal scandals effectively ended their careers and sent them scrambling to stay out of prison.

Abramoff has pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy arising out of his work lobbying for Indian gambling casino interests. That scandal could implicate far more Congressmen and even some in the White House.

Rosen is fighting allegations that as chief strategist at AIPAC, he received and passed classified national security information, received from Pentagon aide Larry Franklin, to unauthorized parties. Perhaps it is coincidence that two such high-profile damaging cases to the lobbying power of right-wing Israeli hawk elements surface at the same time, at just this time when war drums are pounding on Iran.

AIPAC`s drama began on August 2004, when on the eve of the Republican national convention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the organization`s offices, looking for incriminating documents. A year later, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Rosen, by then AIPAC`s director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, who had been an AIPAC Iran analyst.

The government disclosed it had had the men under surveillance for more than four years and alleged that they had received and passed along classified information. The indictment named Franklin as their co-conspirator. Franklin, who has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, pleaded guilty in October to passing classified documents to unauthorized persons and improperly storing such documents in his home. He was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison last week.

Bush, as de facto head of his party, faces a potentially devastating November Congressional election. With the quagmire of Iraq continuing and more Americans asking what in fact they are dying for in Iraq, if not oil, Bush`s popularity has continued to plunge. He has now only 46% of popular support. More than 53% of people have expressed an unfavorable opinion of Bush. The Hurricane Kartina debacle of bungled responses by the White House, the growing perception that Bush has "lied" to the public, all are working to seriously undermine Republican chances in November.

The stench of insider deals, not only with Cheney`s Halliburton, is growing stronger and getting major media coverage, which is new. Conservative traditional Republicans are outraged at the unprecedented federal spending binge Bush Republicans have indulged in to protect their own special interests.

In a recent article Michael Reagan, conservative son of the late president Ronald Reagan, wrote, "Republican congressional leaders promised individual members of Congress up to $14 million `in free earmarks` [special spending allocations] if they would support, which they did, the massive $286.5 billion Bush transportation bill." According to Reagan: "The bill came to a total of 6,300 earmarked projects costing the taxpayers $24 billion, a clear case of bribery. The people being bribed were members of Congress. The people making the bribes were members of Congress. Congressmen bribing congressmen."

A recent Fox News poll indicated that Americans saw the Republican congressional majority as materially more corrupt and more responsible for the current spate of scandals than the Democrats by a wide margin.

Conplan 8022
In January 2003, Bush signed a classified presidential directive, Conplan 8022-02. This is a war plan different from all prior in that it posits "no ground troops". It was specifically drafted to deal with "imminent" threats from states such as North Korea and Iran.

Unlike the warplan for Iraq, a conventional one, which required coordinated preparation of air, ground and sea forces before it could be launched, a process of months, even years, Conplan 8022 called for a highly concentrated strike combining bombing with electronic warfare and cyberattacks to cripple an opponent`s response-cutting electricity in the country, jamming communications and hacking computer networks.

Conplan 8022 explicitly includes a nuclear option, specially configured earth-penetrating "mini" nukes to hit underground sites such as Iran`s. Last summer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing around-the-clock military readiness to be directed by the Omaha-based Strategic Command (Stratcom), according to a report in the May 15 Washington Post.

Previously, ominously enough, Stratcom oversaw only the US nuclear forces. In January 2003, Bush signed on to a definition of "full spectrum global strike", which included precision nuclear as well as conventional bombs, and space warfare. This was a follow-up to the president`s September 2002 National Security Strategy, which laid out as US strategic doctrine a policy of "preemptive" wars.

The burning question is whether, with plunging popularity polls, a coming national election, scandals and loss of influence, the Bush White House might "think the unthinkable" and order a nuclear preemptive global strike on Iran before the November elections, perhaps early after the March 28 Israeli elections.

Some Pentagon analysts have suggested that the entire US strategy towards Iran, unlike with Iraq, is rather a carefully orchestrated escalation of psychological pressure and bluff to force Iran to back down. It seems clear, especially in light of the strategic threat Iran faces from US or Israeli forces on its borders after 2003, that Iran is not likely to back down from its clear plans to develop full nuclear fuel cycle capacities, and with it the option of developing an Iranian nuclear capability.

The question then is, what will Washington do? The fundamental change in US defense doctrine since 2001, from a posture of defense to offense, has significantly lowered the threshold of nuclear war, perhaps even of a global nuclear conflagration.

Geopolitical risks of nuclear war
The latest Iranian agreement to reopen talks with Moscow on Russian spent fuel reprocessing has taken some of the edge off of the crisis for the moment. On Friday, Bush announced publicly that he backed the Russian compromise, along with China and ElBaradei of the IAEA. Bush signaled a significant backdown, at least for the moment, stating, "The Russians came up with the idea and I support it ... I do believe people ought to be allowed to have civilian nuclear power."

At the same time, Rice`s State Department expressed concern the Russian-Iran talks were a stalling ploy by Tehran. Bush added. "However, I don`t believe that non-transparent [sic] regimes that threaten the security of the world should be allowed to gain the technologies necessary to make a weapon." The same day at Davos, Rice told the World Economic Forum that Iran`s nuclear program posed "significant danger" and that Iran must be brought before the UN Security Council. In short, Washington is trying to appear "diplomatic" while keeping all options open.

Should Iran be brought before the UN Security Council for violations of the NPT and charges of developing weapons of mass destruction, it seems quite probable that Russia and China will veto imposing sanctions, such as an economic embargo on Iran, for the reasons stated above. The timetable for that is likely some time about March-May, that is, after a new Israeli government is in place.

At that point there are several possible outcomes.

# The IAEA refers Iran to the UN Security Council, which proposes increased monitoring of the reprocessing facilities for weapons producing while avoiding sanctions. In essence, Iran would be allowed to develop its full fuel cycle nuclear program and its sovereignty is respected, so long as it respects NPT and IAEA conditions. This is unlikely for the reasons stated above.
# Iran, like India and Pakistan, is permitted to develop a small arsenal of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the growing military threat in its area posed by the US from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Emirates, as well as by Israel`s nuclear force.

The West extends new offers of economic cooperation in the development of Iran`s oil and gas infrastructure and Iran is slowly welcomed into the community of the World Trade Organization and cooperation with the West. A new government in Israel pursues a peace policy in Palestine and with Syria, and a new regional relaxation of tensions opens the way for huge new economic development in the entire Middle East region, Iran included. The mullahs in Iran slowly loose influence. This scenario, desirable as it is, is extremely unlikely in the present circumstances.
# Bush, on the urging of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative hawks, decides to activate Conplan 8022, an air attack bombing of Iran`s presumed nuclear sites, including, for the first time since 1945, with deployment of nuclear weapons. No ground troops are used and it is proclaimed a swift surgical "success" by the formidable Pentagon propaganda machine. Iran, prepared for such a possibility, launches a calculated counter-strike using techniques of guerrilla war or "asymmetrical warfare" against US and NATO targets around the world.

The Iran response includes activating trained cells within Lebanon`s Hezbollah; it includes activating considerable Iranian assets within Iraq, potentially in de facto alliance with the Sunni resistance there targeting the 135,000 remaining US troops and civilian personnel. Iran`s asymmetrical response also includes stepping up informal ties to the powerful Hamas within Palestine to win them to a Holy War against the US-Israel "Great Satan" Alliance.

Israel faces unprecedented terror and sabotage attacks from every side and from within its territory from sleeper cells of Arab Israelis. Iran activates trained sleeper terror cells in the Ras Tanura center of Saudi oil refining and shipping. The Eastern province of Saudi Arabia around Ras Tanura contains a disenfranchised Shi`ite minority, which has historically been denied the fruits of the immense Saudi oil wealth. There are some 2 million Shi`ite Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Shi`ites do most of the manual work in the Saudi oilfields, making up 40% of Aramco`s workforce.

Iran declares an immediate embargo of deliveries of its 4 million barrels of oil a day. It threatens to sink a large oil super-tanker in the narrows of the Strait of Hormuz, choking off 40% of all world oil flows, if the world does not join it against the US-Israeli action.

The strait has two 1-mile-wide channels for marine traffic, separated by a 2-mile-wide buffer zone, and is the only sea passage to the open ocean for much of OPEC oil. It is Saudi Arabia`s main export route.

Iran is a vast, strategically central expanse of land, more than double the land area of France and Germany combined, with well over 70 million people and one of the fastest population growth rates in the world. It is well prepared for a new Holy War. Its mountainous terrain makes any thought of a US ground occupation inconceivable at a time the Pentagon is having problems retaining its present force to maintain the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. World War III begins in a series of miscalculations and disruptions. The Pentagon`s awesome war machine, "total spectrum dominance" is powerless against the growing "asymmetrical war" assaults around the globe.

Clear from a reading of their public statements and their press, the Iranian government knows well what cards its holds and what not in this global game of thermonuclear chicken.

Were the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis to risk launching a nuclear strike on Iran, given the geopolitical context, it would mark a point of no return in international relations. Even with sagging popularity, the White House knows this. The danger of the initial strategy of preemptive wars is that, as now, when someone like Iran calls the US bluff with a formidable response potential, the US is left with little option but to launch the unthinkable - nuclear strike.

There are saner voices within the US political establishment, such as former National Security Council heads, Brent Scowcroft or even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who clearly understand the deadly logic of Bush`s and the Pentagon hawks` preemptive posture. The question is whether their faction within the US power establishment today is powerful enough to do to Bush and Cheney what was done to Richard Nixon when his exercise of presidential power got out of hand.

It is useful to keep in mind that even were Iran to possess nuclear missiles, the strike range would not reach the territory of the US. Israel would be the closest potential target. A US preemptive nuclear strike to defend Israel would raise the issue of what the military agreements between Tel Aviv and Washington actually encompass, a subject neither the Bush administration nor its predecessors have seen fit to inform the American public about.

F William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press, can be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

(Copyright 2006 F William Engdahl.)

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JAMES CARROLL
Is America actually in a state of war?
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By James Carroll | January 30, 2006

STATE OF the Union, state of war: They have a nice ring. When George W. Bush goes before the Congress and the nation tomorrow night, he will present himself (again) as a war president. Personally and politically, the identity defines him. Instead of the callow leader he was in the beginning of his presidency, he will conduct himself as a man of sharp determination, with defiance born of the impression that his fight is to the death. He will justify all of his policies, including the illegal ones, by citing his responsibilities -- and privileges -- as wartime commander in chief. He will not have to remind the men and women in front of him that twice (just after 9/11 and just before Iraq), they voted to license his use of ``all necessary and appropriate force" -- enabling acts by which most of them still stand. The United States became a nation at war with congressional collusion.

But did it? Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes -- but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of ``war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, something essential is lacking that would make it a war -- and that is an enemy.

The so-called ``insurgents," who wreak such havoc, are not America`s enemy. They are not our rivals for territory. They are not our ideological antagonists. Abstracting from the present confrontation, they have no reason to wish us ill.

Americans who bother to imagine the situation from the Iraqi point of view -- a massive foreign invasion, launched on false pretenses; a brutal occupation, with control of local oil reserves surely part of the motivation; the heartbreaking deaths of brothers, cousins, children, parents -- naturally understand that an ``insurgency" is the appropriate response. Its goal is simply to force the invaders and occupiers to leave. Sunnis, Shi`ites, and Kurds have intrinsic reasons to regard each other as enemies, from competition over land and oil, to ethnic hatreds, to unsettled scores. No equivalent sources of inbuilt contempt exist among these people toward America. Taken as a whole, or in its parts, Iraq is not an enemy.

President Bush would say Iraq is only one front in the so-called war on terrorism. Surely, in that realm, where the antagonist has a name and a face, the US is authentically at war. If Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are not an enemy, what is? True enough. But the war on terrorism is not real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America`s equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens.

Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault.

In each case, Bush is presiding over a self-serving delusion, in concert with a self-emasculating Congress, his partners as would-be war profiteers. Anticipating tomorrow night, one could say Bush will, on this question, be lying to the American people again. But that would presume he is not first lying to himself. State of war? No. State of the Union? Catastrophe, pure and simple.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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William Pfaff: To Europe, Bush is only creating more terrorists
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/29/opinion/edpfaff.php

TMSI
MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2006

PARIS The difference between official American and European perceptions of terrorism has serious practical consequences for trans-Atlantic cooperation.

At the police and intelligence level, all goes reasonably well, or did until the public uproar in Europe about alleged official cooperation with the CIA`s secret "rendition" and interrogation operations.



On the other hand, last Monday, France blocked a proposed NATO-European Union meeting on terrorism because NATO "was not intended to be the world`s gendarme." It is a military defense alliance of equal partners. A French diplomat said, "we do not wish to have NATO involved in everything, or imposing its agenda on the EU."

This is part of France`s consistent opposition to equally consistent American efforts to turn NATO into an agent of U.S. policy, and to convince the EU`s members that NATO should be the exclusive security organization of the Western alliance, and that Europe should abandon its embryonic independent security policy and European rapid reaction force.

There is nothing new in this this trans-Atlantic disagreement, but it does point to a serious terrorism issue: how the threat is to be defined, which in turn implies how it should be met.

The Bush administration is firmly committed to the notion that Al Qaeda presents a military problem that requires a military solution. It has to stick to this story or else it has no explanation for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. So President George W. Bush keeps making speeches about Al Qaeda`s supposed conviction that it could go from success in Iraq to mobilizing all of Islam, restoring the Grand Caliphate of the eighth and ninth centuries, and conquering the world. That`s a military problem.

The Europeans, in general, think otherwise. Rik Coolsaet, of Ghent University and the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations, notes that while some European analysts agree with Washington`s position, most see terrorism in Europe as "a patchwork of self-radicalizing cells with international contacts," lacking central direction.

Addressing The Transatlantic Dialogue on Terrorism at The Hague in December, Coolsaet said that at most European terrorism is described as an affair of "concentric circles around a still lethal Al Qaeda core." The first circle is composed of "more or less structured" organizations, surrounded by a loose and informal third circle of freelance militants.

International counterterrorism is said to have been successful in "degrading Al Qaeda as an organization and in decreasing its ability to conduct massive attacks." What survives is "a patchwork of homegrown networks and `lone wolves,` where almost everyone can be linked, at least indirectly, to almost everyone else," but in casual and nonoperational ways.

Thus the phenomenon of Muslim extremism in Europe is largely back to what it was before 9/11 and the panicked international reaction that followed, "unduly exaggerating the importance of Al Qaeda."

Coolsaet notes that European security agencies have reported "a growing tendency of self-radicalization and self-recruitment." The latter is now thought to be more important in producing jihad candidates "than any organized international network," possibly excepting the networks recruiting for Iraq.

This radicalization of young Muslim militants in Europe is superficially religious, but usually takes place outside mosques and "more often than not involves individuals with college education."

The sources of extremism are social and political alienation, exclusion (and unemployment) among the offspring of immigrant communities, but the international drama mobilizes them.

Coolsaet says that when Bush declares that America is fighting jihadists in Iraq so as not to fight them at home, most European counterterrorism officials find that just the opposite is true: The more the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan intensifies, the more the number of would-be terrorists in Europe increases.

He has a reassuring comment, however, on the trajectory of terrorism. To reidentify himself as a jihadist, the recruit must dissociate himself from his own society, politicize his views and look for groups with a similar radicalized worldview. "Groupthink gradually eliminates alternative views, simplifies reality," and causes the candidate-terrorist to "dehumanize" all who disagree - especially his fellow-Muslims.

"Ultimately, this strategy is self-defeating and will signify these groups` defeat, as was the case with Europe`s left-wing terrorist groups in the 1970s, and the anarchist terrorists in the 1890s." It isolates them from the community on whose behalf they think they are acting.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune

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[url]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/01/20/national/20060130_WOUNDED_FEATURE.html The Wounded! Flash Bild anklicken

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Bei früheren Kriegen starben viele Soldaten, die heute durchgebracht werden. Von der Reha der Verwundeten berichtet dieser Report.

January 31, 2006
The Wounded
A New Kind of Care in a New Era of Casualties
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/national/31wounded.html?hp…

By ERIK ECKHOLM

TAMPA, Fla. — Morning rounds at the Tampa veterans hospital, and a phalanx of specialists stands at Joshua Cooley`s door.

Inert in his bed, the 29-year-old Marine reservist is a survivor of an Iraq car bombing and a fearsome scramble of wounds: profound brain injury, arm and facial fractures, third-degree burns, tenacious infections of the central nervous system. Each doctor, six in all on a recent day, is here to monitor some aspect of his care.

As they cluster at the threshold, one gently closes the door — not to shield their patient from bad news, but to avoid overstimulating the nervous system of a man whose frontal lobe has been ripped by shrapnel. Not that the news right now is good: Corporal Cooley is spiking a fever, presumably because of his newest problem, blood clots in his left leg.

The doctors sort through a calculus of competing interests. Should they prescribe a blood thinner to dissolve the dangerous clots, even though that could cause more bleeding in the brain? Or should they just wait? At this point, the doctors decide, the clots pose the greater risk.

Thousands of miles from the battlefield, intricate medical choices have become routine here, at one of four special rehabilitation centers the government created last year to treat the war`s most catastrophically wounded troops.

"These soldiers were kept alive," said Dr. Steven G. Scott, the Tampa center`s director. "Now it`s up to us to try and give them some meaningful life."

With their concentrated batteries of specialists and therapists, these centers are developing a new model of advanced care, a response to the distinctive medical conundrum of the Iraq war. With better battlefield care and protective gear, the military is saving more of the wounded, yet the insurgents` heavy reliance on car bombs and buried explosives means the survivors are more damaged — and damaged in more different ways — than ever before.

To describe the maimed survivors of this ugly new war, a graceless new word, polytrauma, has entered the medical lexicon. Each soldier arriving at Tampa`s Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, inside the giant veterans hospital, brings a whole world of injury. The typical patient, Dr. Scott said, has head injuries, vision and hearing loss, nerve damage, multiple bone fractures, unhealed body wounds, infections and emotional or behavioral problems. Some have severed limbs or spinal cords.

"Two years ago we started seeing injured soldiers coming back of a different nature," recalled Dr. Scott, who is also the hospital`s chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Then last spring, with a Congressional mandate, the Department of Veterans Affairs created the four new centers, formalizing changes that a few top veterans hospitals were already starting to make.

After weeks or months of intensive care in military hospitals, more than 215 soldiers and a few more each week — still a tiny fraction of the roughly 16,000 soldiers who have been wounded in Iraq — have been sent here or to the other centers, inside V.A. hospitals in California, Minnesota and Virginia.

The surge in complex casualties, doctors found, required major reorganizing, enabling them to focus extraordinary medical and therapeutic expertise on each patient and to offer counseling, housing and other aid to their often shellshocked wives, children and parents.

"In the outside world you might have two or three consultants seeing a patient," said Dr. Andrew Koon, a specialist in internal medicine who was checking laboratory results on a portable computer during bedside rounds. "Here it`s not unusual to have 10 specialists on board."

The multiple wounds have required medical balancing acts and unusual cooperation across departments. One quadriplegic patient was so weakened by recurring infections that doctors had to wait a year before removing shrapnel from his neck. In other cases, the risk of new infection has delayed treatment of the spasms that some paralyzed patients suffer, which can require an implanted pump to inject medicine into the spinal column.

Of some 90 soldiers with extreme injuries who were treated in Tampa over the last year only one has died, of a rare form of meningitis. The drama here is more excruciatingly drawn out: Over months and months of painstaking physical and psychological therapy, the patients and their families start learning the boundaries of their future lives.

Quiet Struggles

The medical challenges are often persistent and daunting, but the real focus of the new centers is rehabilitation. Even as doctors battle drug-resistant bacteria blown into wounds with Iraqi dirt, patients start relearning to talk and focus their thoughts, to walk and run or maneuver a wheelchair. Some go home in almost normal shape; for others, simply swallowing is a milestone.

To spend several recent days here is to witness a panorama of quiet struggles. A young man with brain and nerve damage slowly fits big round pegs into big round holes. Another beams after jogging a full minute for the first time since his injury, but cannot voice his mix of pride and impatience because shrapnel destroyed the language center in his brain.

A quadriplegic is lifted by a giant sling from his bed to a high-tech wheelchair, which he has learned to drive with a mouthpiece.

Progress on these wards can be measured in agonizing increments.

Corporal Cooley, a 6-foot 6-inch former deputy sheriff, arrived in Tampa on Sept. 29 after more than two months at the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington. His doctors and relatives were encouraged when, after another couple of months, he wriggled his fingers and feet, and answered yes-no questions with blinks.

"They got him to make noises the other day," offered his wife, Christina. "He`s doing really well." At "rehab rounds" one recent day, assorted therapists took up Corporal Cooley`s case, reporting on small steps forward and compromises along the way.

The speech therapist said he was responding to questions with blinks about 30 percent of the time when she was alone with him, but less if distracted. She described her gingerly efforts to train him to swallow, using thin pudding, apple sauce and ice chips.

The respiratory therapist said his tracheotomy had to be changed to a larger, cuffed device that would allow them to expand his lower right lung.

The speech therapist groaned, "That will make it harder to swallow." They agreed that the lung had to take priority, but the speech therapist added, "Let`s get rid of that cuffed trach as soon as possible."

Brain injuries — the signature wounds inflicted by the blast waves and flying shrapnel of explosives — are pervasive, and they tend to dictate the arc of care.

"It`s really the brain injury that directs how we approach other impairments," Dr. Barbara Sigford, V.A.`s national director of physical medicine and rehabilitation and chief of the Minneapolis polytrauma center, said in a telephone interview. "Many types of rehab rely on intact thinking, learning and memory skills."

Using advanced prosthetic limbs, for example, requires control of specific muscles; patients without that capacity must use simpler models. Blind people are normally taught to navigate using their memory of the environment; if memory is spotty, they must find other ways.

In the recreational therapy room in Tampa on a recent day, several men are being led through a round of Uno, a card game that involves matching numbers and colors. Some play well. Some fumble trying to pick up cards. One rocks in frustration at his inability to summon the word "blue."

Sgt. Antwain Vaughn, 31, an Army combat engineer who took a roadside blast in the face on Aug. 31, arrives late and in a wheelchair. A padded helmet covers a large indentation where his shattered skull will receive a metal plate.

Sergeant Vaughn came to Tampa after two months on a ventilator and feeding tube. In addition to brain damage, facial fractures, pulmonary problems, blood clots and infections, he lost an eye and has trouble with complex tasks, something the card game could help.

Here he has learned to swallow and eat and in daily therapy, when he is feeling up to it, he is working to reclaim a life. But this time, he will not join the game. "My head`s hurting a lot," he quietly tells the group.

Head injuries have also left some soldiers in a peculiar psychological box. Before Iraq, most head injuries at the Tampa hospital involved car accidents, said Dr. Rodney D. Vanderploeg, the chief of neuropsychology. Though it may seem counterintuitive, soldiers with penetrating brain injuries, in which a fragment crashed through their skulls, are far more likely to remember the attack and its bloody aftermath, perhaps including the deaths of friends, he said.

These memories often cause great psychological stress. But psychotherapy becomes especially difficult if injury has impaired a patient`s insight and understanding.

Making Progress

In the hallways, the banter tends to be upbeat, as perhaps it needs to be for patients and staff. A patient shows off his stair-climbing wheelchair. Others compare the merits of prosthetic leg models. Nearly every patient vows, not always realistically, that he will get back on his feet and more.

"The way I see it, if I get able to walk a little bit, then eventually I`m going to walk a lot," said Specialist Charles Mays, 31, who was left with multiple fractures and partial paralysis of his legs after being blasted out of his Humvee by a vertically buried rocket south of Baghdad.

Sometimes the hallways bring success stories like Specialist Nicholas Boutin, who was slowly walking on his own to speech therapy in a hockey helmet, apparently not at all self-conscious about the red pit where an artificial eye will be implanted or about the large dent where a piece of skull will be replaced.

Specialist Boutin, 21, had arrived in Tampa just five weeks before, mute and hardly able to swallow, his right arm and leg almost useless. During a midnight patrol in a village near Samarra, an insurgent dropped a grenade into his Bradley fighting vehicle. Fragments sprayed into his face and the left side of his brain, leaving him with Broca`s aphasia — able to comprehend but not to speak.

He weathered fungal infections, facial pain where nerves were damaged and the destruction of his pituitary gland and a maxillary sinus, the kind of internal wound that can torment a person for life.

But now, after hard hours each day in therapy, he can jog briefly and write messages with his right hand. As speech therapists coax the right side of his brain to take over lost functions from the left, he has begun to make one-word responses and spontaneously utter a few words at a time. Soon he will head home to Georgia for continued therapy.

"Yes," he uttered instantly when asked if he felt he was progressing. Determination gleamed from his remaining eye.

Behind closed doors, though, bravado sometimes gives way to depression, explosive anger, survivors` guilt. Some patients sit quietly with glum faces or obsess endlessly about their buddies and time in Iraq.

As much as the nurses are often buoyed by their patients` progress, they say the relentless intensity of the work can sometimes bring them to tears. They spend as much time interacting with stressed-out relatives as with the patients.

"Relatives take out their frustrations on the nurses," said Laureen G. Doloresco, assistant nursing chief. "It`s also hard on the nurses because of the youth of the patients. Many of them have sons the same age."

Support Systems

At the bedsides of many of these young men are their equally young wives, whose lives have also been wrenched onto unexpected paths.

Before he was sent to Iraq last Jan. 1, Corporal Cooley and his wife were partners on the vice/narcotics squad of a sheriff`s department in central Florida. They married just before his deployment.

Soon after the car bombing on July 5, she and her husband`s parents were summoned to the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and warned to expect the worst.

After the car bomb detonated, near the town of Hit, Corporal Cooley had been pulled from his burning amtrack, an armored vehicle, unconscious and with a gaping hole in his head. The medics had at first refused to load him onto the evacuation helicopter, Christina Cooley later learned. They changed their minds when they heard a moan.

Ms. Cooley recalled telling doctors that they were showing her the wrong patient, that this bloated figure was not her husband. She was convinced only after she saw his tattoos.

She also saw, though, that he was breathing on his own. Days later, he was flown to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and for two months, his wife and the in-laws she still barely knew shared a hotel room and spent their days around Corporal Cooley`s bed in intensive care.

Here in Tampa, despite continued medical setbacks like the blood clots, attention was turning to his potential for physical and mental recovery.

So far, he had been put in a chair for a few hours a day and strapped into a "tilt board" at a 45-degree angle for 10 minutes at a time, to forestall the drops in blood pressure that occur when long-prone patients raise up.

His wife finds hope where she can.

Corporal Cooley often stares vacantly, she said, and "you don`t know if he`s there." But one day when she asked him, "Who`s my hero?" he pointed a finger toward himself.

Their home county, outside Tampa, has raised money that she plans to use on an accessible house.

"I hope he`ll walk through the door of that house," she said. "If not, I`ll take him as a vegetable. I`ll take care of him the rest of my life. I love that man to death."

Overhearing her, Dr. Scott, the center`s director, marshaled his characteristic optimism. "He can already move both legs," he said. "It`s possible he can be rehabbed to walk. How far he`ll go we just don`t know."

The polytrauma centers themselves remain works in progress, sharing lessons with one another and with the major military hospitals by videophone, and pushing scientific inquiry into the myriad, often invisible effects of explosive blasts.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it has not calculated the cost of establishing the centers, bolstering their staffs and treating patients so long and intensively. The Tampa hospital`s director, Forest Farley Jr., said that here alone, it was "several millions of dollars."

Though the average stay in polytrauma centers is 40 days, many patients remain for months and some for more than a year. In the end, a few must go to nursing homes, but most go home, where they receive continued care at less-specialized veterans hospitals, with oversight from the centers. Some require round-the-clock home aides and therapists and costly equipment, paid for by the government on top of monthly disability payments. Even so, wives or parents often must give up their jobs.

For the worst off, the ongoing annual costs — largely hidden costs of this war — can easily be several hundred thousand dollars or more.

"We expect to follow these patients for the rest of their lives," Dr. Scott said. "But I have a great deal of concern about our country`s long-term commitment to these individuals. Will the resources be there over time?"

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 31, 2006
And in This Corner, Fed Choice Is Blip on Some Senators` Radar
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/business/31bernanke.html?h…

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — The important presidential nominee who is scheduled for a vote in the Senate on Tuesday is widely regarded as brilliant, has ties to Princeton University and, if confirmed as expected, will influence the lives of ordinary Americans for years to come.

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the Supreme Court?

No, this is the other important nominee — Ben S. Bernanke for chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Wall Street may be intensely interested in just about every word ever uttered by Mr. Bernanke, the former Princeton economist and chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers who is President Bush`s choice to succeed Alan Greenspan.

But in Washington, he is barely on some people`s radar screens. Indeed, here is what Senator George Allen of Virginia, who is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said when asked his opinion of the Bernanke nomination.

"For what?"

Told that Mr. Bernanke was up for the Fed chairman`s job, Mr. Allen hedged a little, said he had not been focused on it, and wondered aloud when the hearings would be. Told that the Senate Banking Committee hearings had concluded in November, the senator responded: "You mean I missed them all? I paid no attention to them."

He was not the only one. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, regarded by some as a front-runner in 2008, also had no idea that the Bernanke hearings had come and gone.

While lawmakers and the public have been focused on the nomination of Judge Alito, who is also scheduled for a vote on Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke has become a rarity in modern Washington: the noncontroversial nominee.

True, monetary policy no longer ignites ideological passion the way it did in the days of double-digit inflation. Still, the job that Mr. Bernanke, 52, is ready to assume hardly lacks consequence. As Federal Reserve chairman, Mr. Bernanke, considered one of the nation`s pre-eminent monetary economists, would arguably be the most powerful economic figure in the world, his every remark having the power to move markets.

Unlike Judge Alito, Mr. Bernanke would not be receiving a lifetime appointment; the term of a Fed chairman is just four years. But Mr. Bernanke is also being appointed to a 14-year term as a member of the Fed`s board of governors, and under Fed rules would be eligible for reappointment as chairman for the life of that term. Mr. Greenspan, who served one partial term and one full term as a Fed governor, was chairman for 18 years.

That is long enough to have an extraordinary impact, and Fed chairmen often do. Their decisions affect many aspects of American financial life, including such things as increases in Social Security payments and how much interest people pay to borrow against the equity in their homes or to finance the purchase of a new car.

Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the banking committee, said the Fed chairman was "a lot more important, in the context of everyday life of the economy," than a member of the Supreme Court.

Allan H. Meltzer, a professor of political economy and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, who is writing a history of the Federal Reserve, felt similarly. "Bernanke is certainly every bit as important as Alito," he said.

Professor Meltzer contended that the banking committee gave Mr. Bernanke "a free ride" during his confirmation hearing, which lasted only one day. During the session, Mr. Bernanke said continuity with the Greenspan era would be his top priority.

"I think they could have pushed Bernanke a little bit more on the questions of how he saw the job and what objectives he was going to pursue," Professor Meltzer said, including "how he thought about the problems of reconciling full employment and low inflation — did he think the Fed had other responsibilities. It seemed to me they really didn`t lay many gloves on him."

Perhaps that is because relatively few people outside the world of finance seem to know who Mr. Bernanke is. There are no outside interest groups broadcasting television ads for and against him, no protests, no polls. His nomination received such scant attention that the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which tracks how closely people follows news events, did not bother to monitor it.

"I think he has negative name recognition," said Andrew Kohut, the center`s director. "We didn`t cover it, and I don`t think anyone else did."

Economists are a bit mystified, though not entirely surprised. The Alito hearings were brimming with controversy, from the judge`s membership in a Princeton University alumni group that fought against affirmative action to a 20-year-old memorandum in which he said that the Constitution did not provide a right to an abortion.

The Bernanke hearings, by contrast, centered on the world of monetary policy, a field where most of the big ideological fights were settled long ago.

"Monetary policy has become much less political than it used to be years back and centuries back," said Alan S. Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman who is a professor of economics at Princeton, where he was a colleague of Mr. Bernanke`s. "There`s a consensus on what monetary policy should be doing, which is to say keeping inflation low and, subject to that constraint, keeping employment high. So politicians take this attitude that it`s for technocrats, and it doesn`t matter too much whether the guy is a Republican or a Democrat."

Mr. Bernanke, for the record, is a Republican, though some of his close colleagues in academia said they did not know his political affiliation until he went to work for Mr. Bush. His nomination was announced last fall, days before Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, withdrew as a nominee to the Supreme Court amid accusations of political cronyism; picking Mr. Bernanke helped Mr. Bush fend off those charges.

Even so, Mr. Bernanke`s relationship with the president came up in his confirmation hearings, as Democrats pressed him on whether he would be independent of the White House.

But it was a Republican, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, a longtime critic of the Fed, who cast the lone vote in the committee against him, saying he did not regard Mr. Bernanke as independent enough from Mr. Greenspan. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who serves on both the Judiciary and Banking Committees and who led the charge against Judge Alito, came out strongly in favor of Mr. Bernanke.

"They avoided the equivalent of Samuel Alito in a monetary sense," Mr. Schumer said. "They didn`t pick a strict monetarist. They didn`t pick somebody who was tax cuts over everything else. They picked a mainstream guy, and if there was ever proof that Democrats would support the president`s nominee, it was Bernanke."

So unlike Judge Alito, who is expected to be confirmed by a vote pretty much along party lines, Mr. Bernanke is likely to receive the overwhelming support of the Senate, even if some prominent members are not quite up to speed on his views.

Mr. McCain — who joked during a 2000 presidential debate that if Mr. Greenspan died, he would "prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him," in a repeat of a prank in the movie "Weekend at Bernie`s" — said he did not know too much about Mr. Bernanke, but was comforted to know that Mr. Greenspan had a high opinion of him.

"It hasn`t gotten a lot of attention," Senator McCain said, "but I think he`ll be carefully scrutinized in his hearings, and the view that other people have of him will carry a lot of weight in the financial world, particularly Greenspan."

Mr. McCain was asked if he would be surprised to learn that the hearings were over. He paused, his eyes widening, before giving the verbal equivalent of a knock on the forehead: "You`re right, you`re right, you`re right. Duuuuuh."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Zu dem Greenspannachfolger Bernanke ein Kommentar von Krugman, der jetzt in Princeton auf dem Platz sitzt, den Bernance einmal inne hatte.

Bernanke And The Bubble
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20D…

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) 805 words
Published: October 28, 2005

By Bush administration standards, the choice of Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve was just weird.

For one thing, Mr. Bernanke is actually an expert in monetary policy, as opposed to, say, Arabian horses.

Beyond that, Mr. Bernanke`s partisanship, if it exists, is so low-key that his co-author on a textbook didn`t know he was a registered Republican. The academic work on which his professional reputation rests is apolitical. Moreover, that work is all about how the Fed can influence demand -- there`s not a hint in his work of support for the right-wing supply-side doctrine.

Nor is he a laissez-faire purist who believes that government governs best when it governs least. On the contrary, he`s a policy activist who advocates aggressive government moves to jump-start stalled economies.

For example, a few years back Mr. Bernanke called on Japan to show ``Rooseveltian resolve`` in fighting its long slump. He even supported a proposal by yours truly that the Bank of Japan try to get Japan`s economy moving by, among other things, announcing its intention to push inflation up to 3 or 4 percent per year.

Last but not least, Mr. Bernanke has no personal ties to the Bush family. It`s hard to imagine him doing something indictable to support his masters. It`s even hard to imagine him doing what Mr. Greenspan did: throwing his prestige as Fed chairman behind irresponsible tax cuts.

All of this raises a frightening prospect. Has President Bush been so damaged by scandals and public disapproval that he has no choice but to appoint qualified, principled people to important positions?

O.K., seriously, many economists and investors feared that Mr. Bush would try to place a highly partisan figure in charge of the Fed. And even before the revelations surfaced about cronyism at FEMA and elsewhere, there was widespread concern that Mr. Bush would try to select a John Snow type -- a businessman whose only qualification is loyalty -- to run monetary policy. The naming of Mr. Bernanke was a sign of Mr. Bush`s weakness, and it brought a collective sigh of relief.

Obviously I`m pleased, too. Full disclosure: Mr. Bernanke was chairman of the Princeton economics department before moving to Washington, and he made the job offer that brought me to Princeton.

So should we all feel confident about the economic future, assuming that Mr. Bernanke is confirmed? Alas, no.

This isn`t a comment on Mr. Bernanke`s qualifications, although there is one talent, important in a Fed chairman, that Mr. Bernanke has yet to demonstrate (though he may have it). Mr. Greenspan, for all his flaws, has repeatedly shown his ability to divine from fragmentary and sometimes contradictory data which way the economic wind is blowing. As an academic, Mr. Bernanke never had the occasion to make that kind of judgment. We`ll just have to see whether he can develop an economic weather sense on the job.

No, my main concern is that the economy may well face a day of reckoning soon after Mr. Bernanke takes office. And while he is surely the best politically possible man for the job (all the other candidates I would have been happy with are independents or Democrats), coping with that day of reckoning without some nasty shocks may be beyond anyone`s talents.

The fact is that the U.S. economy`s growth over the past few years has depended on two unsustainable trends: a huge surge in house prices and a vast inflow of funds from Asia. Sooner or later, both trends will end, possibly abruptly.

It`s true that Mr. Bernanke has given speeches suggesting both that a ``global savings glut`` will continue to provide the United States with lots of capital inflows, and that housing prices don`t reflect a bubble. Well, soothing words are expected from a Fed chairman. He must know that he may be wrong.

If he is, the U.S. economy will find itself in need of the ``Rooseveltian resolve`` Mr. Bernanke advocated for Japan. We can safely predict that Mr. Bernanke will show that resolve. In fact, Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco has already predicted that next year Mr. Bernanke will start cutting interest rates.

But that may not be enough. When all is said and done, the Fed controls only one thing: the short-term interest rate. And it will be a long time before we have competent, public-spirited people controlling taxes, spending and other instruments of economic policy.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Die schöne US-Scheinwelt.

January 31, 2006
Editorial
Wanted: A Wary Audience
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/opinion/31tue1.html

When President Bush gives his State of the Union address tonight, expect to hear a renewed call for setting the administration`s first-term tax cuts in concrete, combined with warnings that letting the cuts expire would retard economic growth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As proof of tax cuts` ability to spur the economy, Mr. Bush generally cites productivity growth, job creation and the rise in personal income. Productivity has indeed been stellar, and supply-siders claim that is because tax cuts have led to investment, which led to higher productivity. But business investment has been flat for five years. Meanwhile, the benefits of productivity growth have been concentrated among the wealthy. So tax cuts haven`t unleashed investment, but they have contributed to inequality.

Job growth during the Bush-era recovery has been worse, by far, than in any comparable economic upturn since the 1960`s. It would take some 500,000 new jobs a month every month this year just to equal the second worst job-creation record in the modern era. And while working Americans are laboring harder, hourly wages and weekly salaries — the financial lifeblood of most Americans — have been flat or falling, after inflation, since the middle of 2003.

That last inconvenient fact isn`t likely to stop Mr. Bush from bragging about rising "real after-tax income." Besides paychecks, that much-cited statistic includes things like bonuses, stock dividends and health insurance.

Dividends flow mainly to the top 5 percent of the income ladder, and health benefits, while valuable, are increasingly provided in lieu of salary. So the fact that personal income, writ large, is up "by 7 percent since I`ve been your president," as Mr. Bush boasted recently, isn`t a measure of what is in most Americans` pockets. (Besides, a 7 percent gain is hardly worth bragging about, since the average from other comparable recoveries is 12.5 percent.)

Mr. Bush bristles at the oft-repeated criticism that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains mainly benefits the wealthy. That`s odd, because the criticism is simply a statement of the obvious, given the facts: almost half of all dividends are earned by people making more than $200,000, and more than half of all capital gains are earned by people with incomes over $1 million.

Of late, the president has taken to saying that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains helps "workers in the automobile plant" and the other millions of Americans who own stock through their 401(k) plans. But in truth, when taxes on dividends and capital gains are cut, investing in a 401(k) plan becomes less attractive. That`s because tax- deferred buildup in a 401(k) is a big part of its allure, but the lower the tax rate, the less valuable the deferral. Investors in 401(k)`s also lose out when wages and salaries are taxed at higher rates than investments, as they are now and as Mr. Bush wants to ensure they remain. That`s because money that`s withdrawn from a 401(k) is taxed like salary, not like investments.

In his State of the Union speech, the president will also undoubtedly return to his promise to do something about the deficit, which he often vows to halve by 2009. His audience should remember that this claim assumes minimal spending going forward for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a continuation of the voracious alternative minimum tax, which everyone in government knows must be reformed. This month Congress`s budget agency forecast that if the tax cuts are made permanent and the alternative tax fixed, the United States will face large and growing deficits over the next decade, with red ink of between $3.5 trillion and $4 trillion over that time.

Tonight is Mr. Bush`s night to speak. But it`s the job of all of us to be critical listeners.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Najma Jan. 30, 2006
Last and Least
http://iraq.page.nytimes.com/b/a/239882.htm?p=1

During the time I wrote in this group blog the neighborhood generator broke down, then was fixed, the telephone line was repaired, then broke down again, the exams started, then ended. . . . It all comes and goes, days repeat themselves. . . . It`s all boring, it`s all intolerable.

I had plans for the break: Work on the Internet, write a post, watch some movies, read a book, get my room cleaned up and a whole bunch of things. Now, I just feel numb.… I don`t feel like doing anything.

I finally got the chance to visit a relative today. Her grandfather had died two weeks ago, and I was hoping I would get to talk to her since neither she nor I are able to go out much. But when I got there, I found she had gone with her dad to visit her grandfather`s grave, and I ended up listening to some old women talking about who died and who is dying.

Bird flu was found in Kurdistan, and that is just what we need, one more burden to carry. "No more eggs," mom declared. "But can`t we just die and get away from here?" I asked.

They seem to be in vain, all those discussions about not wanting to live in hell, Iraq. It seems like real hell at times here, it feels like hell, it looks like hell, and it sounds like hell. But at other times, it amazes me that we can still go on with our lives. I smile. I thank God for keeping us safe. Is it that we got used to it? It`s good that we did, but it`s bad as well, because if we`re satisfied, then we won`t do what will lead to change.

I will one day regret the fact that I had an opportunity to write for such a site, and all I did was whine. But it`s all I could do. It`s the day-to-day life in Iraq.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye.


Truth Teller Jan. 30, 2006

New Day, Same Old Story
http://iraq.page.nytimes.com/b/a/239881.htm?p=1

There is no doubt that the security situation has deteriorated in the last two weeks. The exact reasons are not clear to me.

There are many checkpoints throughout the city together with concrete blocks in the vicinity of police centers and governmental buildings.

The neighborhood where my clinic is located is considered a hot region; there are always clashes and confrontations there. There were two police centers in the neighborhood, but both are destroyed completely and have become unusable. There is no reconstruction here as in other parts of the city. The police occupied a new three-floor building and now use it as a base. It is near the intersection. They closed off the main street in front of that building with concrete blocks, so the cars coming to the neighborhood must take a detour, which is longer and full of holes.

On Tuesday, Jan. 14, as I was on my way to the clinic, I saw many cars coming back in the opposite direction. People standing in front of their houses told me not to continue because there had been a shooting at the intersection a few minutes before. I stopped my car near a shop and walked toward my clinic. The streets were empty. No one was there.

I phoned my secretary, who was in the clinic at that time. He told me that there was heavy shooting in the region but it had stopped a half an hour before. I continued on my way to the clinic. In the middle of the intersection there were fragments of glass from a car window, but no blood.

About an hour after I got to the clinic, I heard loud voices outside. There were a few American soldiers with an interpreter. The soldiers shouted at us to get out of the building. As I was leaving, two U.S. soldiers pointed their guns at my chest. Their fingers were on the triggers. I told them I was a doctor and worked at the clinic. Still, they told us to get out. They made us stand near a wall, but they didn’t enter the building.

After a few long minutes the soldier closest to me said “Shukran jazeelan”: “Thank you very much,” in Arabic.

When they left, I collected my things and returned home.

My secretary was closing the door, and before he left, other soldiers entered the building, kicked the locked doors and broke them. The keys were with the secretary, but they didn’t wait for him to open the doors. After they searched the building they left without a word of thanks or apology.

The next day, a neighbor told me what he saw and heard at the intersection: A pickup had stopped about a hundred meters away from the clinic. A masked man holding an automatic gun started shooting towards the police building, then drove away. The shops closed immediately, and the pedestrians disappeared. About 15 minutes later, the police, from their well-protected building, started to shoot in all directions. They shot a car, injured its driver, and broke its windows. The signs of the bullets on the doors of the closed shops and the walls of the buildings were numerous.

An hour afterward, Americans came to the area in search for insurgents.

On Wednesday, Jan 15, the Americans and the police came again and arrested most of the shopkeepers in the region. The next day, the local news agency said the police had arrested the terrorists who had attacked the police.


Hassan Kharrufa Jan. 30, 2006

Life After the Elections
http://iraq.page.nytimes.com/b/a/239880.htm?p=1

On Jan. 20, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq announced the voting results. The results were in favor of the United Iraqi Alliance, the group of main Shiite parties, who captured 128 of the total 275 seats. Following them was the Kurdish Alliance, with 53 seats. The main group of Sunni parties, the Iraqi Consensus Front, won 44. The remaining seats were divided on small lists. The results were not a surprise to us.

These elections have been a great thing. The problem is that Iraqis did not vote based on politics. They voted for candidates based on religious and ethnic grounds. For example, a Shia would vote for a Shia, a Sunni for a Sunni, and a Kurd for a Kurd. Most Iraqis knew whom they were going to vote for long before they read their political propaganda.

The main thing that we are looking forward to achieving from these elections is any improvement in the security situation in Iraq. The violence here has taken many lives and is the primary concern of both Iraqis and Americans.

So far, day-to-day life in Iraq has not been affected by the elections. The security situation is still the same. My friends and I have stopped discussing who should be prime minister. Before the elections, this discussion was hot because we believe that if anything can be done in Iraq, the prime minister is the one who should do it.

The thing that we all agree on is that we can finally chose whom to vote for, and be sure that our vote will not be neglected or changed if we do not vote for a certain candidate. Before the war, any elections in Iraq usually ended in something like 99.99 percent of the vote in favor of Saddam Hussein. Obviously, this was impossible. It was rumored that the counters used to change many of the votes from "no" to "yes," fearing that if the results were not acceptable, they might lose their lives. Thankfully, that fear is gone.

# Copyright 2006 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/
Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Top Ten things Bush won`t Tell you About the State of the Nation

1. US economic growth during the last quarter was an anemic 1.1%, the worst in 3 years.

2. The US inflation rate has jumped to 3.4 percent, the highest rate in 5 years.

3. The number of daily attacks in Iraq rose from 52 in December, 2004 to 77 in December, 2005.

4. [urlA third of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, some 40,000 persons,]http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId=Cq9MO0eidDxmTAxjHCxrYB29WC21LBNrHBgG[/url] exhibit at least some signs of mental health disorders. Some 14,000 were treated for drug dependencies, and 11,000 for depression.

5. [urlIncreases in American consumer spending come from borrowing.]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11101634/[/url]


6. The $320 - $400 bilion deficits run by the Bush administration may push up the cost of mortgages and loans.


7. [url58% of Americans think Bush is painting Iraq as rosier than it is.]http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/10731[/url] A majority thinks we should never have invaded the country.

8. [urlThe US military is at a breaking point.]http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=25145[/url]

9. [urlIn fact, The US and Iran are tacit allies in Iraq.]http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/30/opinion/edtakeyh.php[/url]

10. Mor e money would be needed to finish the US reconstruction projects begun in Iraq.

posted by Juan @ [url1/31/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/top-ten-things-bush-wont-tell-you.html[/url] 0 comments

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US consumers dip into savings as spending rises
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11101634/

By Christopher Swann in Washington
Financial Times
Updated: 7:42 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2006

US personal spending rose by 0.9 per cent in December, beating forecasts and bolstering the belief that consumers remained in high spirits.

The strong rise in expenditure, the fastest since July, came in spite of modest wage growth of just 0.3 per cent.

Much of the extra spending was funded by borrowing, with Americans eating into their assets for the seventh consecutive month. In December the savings rate fell to minus 0.7 per cent, meaning Americans spent seven cents more than they earned for every $100 of income.

Economists remain concerned that if the housing market runs out of steam in 2006, as many expect, consumers will cut spending sharply to rebuild savings.

Scott Hoyt, an analyst at the Economy.com consultancy, remained hopeful that there could be a slow revival in savings rather than a disruptive surge. "Declining energy prices will relieve stress on households, permitting more saving," he said. He added that household income might start to pick up as the labour market continued to strengthen.

But other economists are worried wage growth will be held down by globalisation, with the threat of moving production overseas reducing the bargaining power of workers. The savings rate would also need to rise significantly to bring it back to more normal levels, and few economists expect it to rise back to its postwar average of about $7 per $100 of income.

However, even a rise back to $2 per $100 of income might require painful cuts in spending for US households.

On the positive side, inflation is taking less of a toll on disposable income. The personal consumption expenditure deflator was flat in December – with falling energy prices offsetting a modest rise in other prices. The core PCE deflator – which excludes volatile food and energy prices and is seen as the Federal Reserve`s preferred measure of inflation – rose by just 0.1 per cent.

Yesterday`s figures reinforced expectations that consumer spending will rebound in the first months of 2006, after GDP figures last week showed spending up by just 1.1 per cent in the final three months of last year. Ian Morris, US economist at HSBC, said yesterday`s data pointed to a rise in consumption of between 4 and 6 per cent in the first quarter of 2006.

"If economic growth is looking like 5 per cent in the first quarter after 1.1 per cent, this would solidify the chances of a rate rise by the Fed in March and start to raise the chances of a rate hike in May too," said Mr Morris.
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11101634/

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American and Iranian interests meet in Iraq
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/30/opinion/edtakeyh.php

Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2006

WASHINGTON The crisis over Iran`s nuclear program is fast heating up. Now that Tehran is developing the technology needed to produce bomb-grade uranium, the United States and the European Union are pressing to take the issue to the UN Security Council. Iran`s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has scoffed at the looming threat of sanctions, telling the Western powers that, "those who use harsh language against Iran need Iran 10 times more than we need them."

Ahmadinejad`s belligerence and anti-Israel rants may call into question his judgment, but his analysis of the nuclear standoff is close to the mark - Iran does indeed hold an impressive deck of cards.

As the world`s fourth-largest exporter of oil, Iran has considerable sway over petroleum markets. Tehran also wields extensive influence over Iraq. The two countries share a long, porous border. Many of Iraq`s most influential clerics have lived or studied in Iran, giving Tehran exclusive entrée to the politicians and clerics destined to dominate Iraq`s politics.

Iran`s influence in Iraq does contribute to its intransigence, but it also provides a potential solution to the current nuclear impasse. Tehran`s nuclear ambitions represent not an unbridled quest for regional hegemony, but an anxious search for adequate deterrence against perceived external threats. From this perspective, only by addressing the issue within the broader context of regional security in the Gulf can Tehran`s nuclear program be contained.

Paradoxically, it is in Iraq, where U.S. and Iranian interests coincide, that the two countries could work together to advance regional stability. The resulting improvements in U.S.-Iranian relations and in regional security could at once defuse the nuclear crisis and advance the prospects for a stable Iraq.

Iranians are delighted that Saddam Hussein, who started the Iran-Iraq war, is languishing in prison. But now Iran itself is in America`s crosshairs, with a vast arsenal of U.S. military power parked next door. Faced with these insecurities Tehran is unlikely to abandon its nuclear aspirations in response to the threat of economic sanctions and military strikes. Indeed, such sticks promise to be counterproductive unless complemented by an alluring carrot: the prospect of alleviating the fears stemming from Iran`s dangerous neighborhood and its longstanding duel with America. It is here that Iraq enters the picture.

The United States and Iran have many common interests in Iraq, providing a unique opportunity for Tehran and Washington to edge toward normalization. Tehran, like Washington, is keenly interested in avoiding a civil war and sustaining Iraq as a unitary state. Iranian elites support a democratic Iraq, fully aware that consensual arrangements for power-sharing among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are vital to Iraq`s survival.

Washington and Tehran should capitalize on their common interests in Iraq to cooperate on a host of issues. Iran can help U.S. economic reconstruction efforts through its ties to the Iraqi merchant community and its own official aid to Baghdad. As for political stability, the United States may have the boots on the ground, but America`s coercive potential must be backed up by Iran`s soft power.

Iran`s seminaries, clerics, politicians and businessmen hold powerful sway over elites in Baghdad as well as local leaders. Tehran`s interest in preventing the fragmentation of Iraq gives it reason to encourage all Shiite parties, including the independent militias, to work with the central government and resist secessionist temptations.

An Iraqi-Iranian-American dialogue could eventually provide a foundation for a new security architecture for the Gulf. A regional body could begin with confidence-building measures and arms-control pacts, and move toward collective security institutions and common markets. This endpoint is admittedly far off, but the process of getting there would help ease the geopolitical uncertainties that fuel Iran`s nuclear ambitions and Iraq`s disarray.

To pursue this agenda, Washington needs a willing partner in Tehran. Ahmadinejad is not that man. But a subtle power struggle is going on within the clerical state between the pragmatists, such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and the new president and his entourage of firebrands.

Ahmadinejad came into office determined to consolidate his power by rekindling revolutionary fires and ensuring Iran`s isolation. By refusing to play along and instead seeking to forge a common approach toward Iraq, the Bush administration could help tip the domestic balance in favor of the forces of moderation, paving the way for a government ready to work with Washington.

Given the Iranian president`s repellent rhetoric and political intransigence, it may seem an odd moment to advise Washington to reach out to Tehran. But doing so holds out the best hope for not only taming Iran`s nuclear aspirations, but also stabilizing Iraq.

(Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh are senior fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Copyright © 2006 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

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The world according to George W Bush

Tonight, US President delivers annual State of the Union address as world powers meet in London to discuss global flashpoints

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article342131.e…

Published: 31 January 2006

NORTH KOREA

State of the Union The regime is a bandit state that will stop at nothing to build a nuclear arsenal. There are fears it will send plutonium to Iran.

State of the Region US policy on North Korea has been a complete failure and the regime has blackmailed South Korea into sending aid.

CANADA

State of the Union President Bush sees new Prime Minister Stephen Harper as an ally on issues including abortion. Mr Harper criticised Canada for not joining Iraq war.

State of the Region Mr Harper`s first move was to say he rejected the US assertion that the Arctic North-west Passage was "neutral waters".

EUROPE

State of the Union Enlargement of EU protects friends of the US: Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states. Nato shares the burden in Afghanistan.

State of the Region Merkel supplanting Blair in "special relationship". Use of European airports for "rendition flights" has damaged US.

AFGHANISTAN

State of the Union US trumpets progress, pointing to $5bn spent on the country. Afghan government committed to improving security and economic affairs.

State of the Region President Karzai confined to his palace as the insurgency spreads in the south where UK troops will be deployed.

IRAQ

State of the Union "Free elections" were held in December. Iraqis replacing American forces, raising prospect of troops` withdrawal.

State of the Region Shia majority, allied to Iran, swept to victory. Insurgent attacks dashing hopes of withdrawal. More than 2,240 US troops have been killed.

IRAN

State of the Union Adamant Iran must not be allowed nuclear weapons. Washington wants diplomatic solution but bombing an option.

State of the Region By keeping military threat alive, Mr Bush may allow mullahs to justify nuclear weapons programme for self-defence. Could invite riposte from Israel.

ARAB-ISRAEL

State of the Union After first election for a Palestinian parliament in a decade, US refusing to deal with Hamas until it drops terrorism and ambition to destroy Israel.

State of the Region Dilemma for US is whether to cut off funds to Palestinians - choking the seeds of democracy. Same problem across the Middle East.

AFRICA

State of the Union US forgave debt of the poorest countries. A key bulwark in the "war on terror``. Its mineral and oil assets make it a key strategic partner.

State of the Region Scramble for Africa between China, the US and India. US defines its value in terms of oil and access to military bases.

LATIN AMERICA

State of the Union A problem. Socialist candidates topped the poll in 11 elections in past year. But US investment in region is strong. The market economy safe. Drugs war being stepped up.

State of the Region Voters rejecting unfettered capitalism. New leaders expanding state control on the oil and mining industries.

CHINA

State of the Union An ally in the "war on terror" and a source of enormous potential profit for corporate America.

State of the Region China is poised to challenge the US global leadership and overturn international standards. Economically and militarily the Middle Kingdom is bursting outward.


© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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1pm update
100th British military death in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1698873,00.html

Lance Corporal Allan Stewart Douglas of the Highlanders, who yesterday became the 99th British soldier to die in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Mark Oliver and agencies
Tuesday January 31, 2006

Guardian Unlimited
A British soldier was killed in southern Iraq today, taking the total death toll of UK military personnel in the country to 100 since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

The solider died from injuries sustained in an explosion in Um Qasr, Iraq`s biggest port, which is in the southern Basra province where British troops are based.

The blast, which happened at around 8.30am local time (0530 GMT), also injured three other soldiers, one seriously, the Ministry of Defence said.

Tony Blair, who ordered British troops to join the invasion, was "deeply saddened" by the death, as he was by all fatalities of service personnel, his official spokesman said.

The spokesman said British forces in Iraq - which currently amount to around 8,000 troops - would stay in the country for "as long as necessary".

"No life is worth this kind of sacrifice but, in terms of why we are in Iraq, we have now had three democratic elections in a country that was brutalised for decades," he told reporters.

The defence secretary, John Reid, said it was an "appropriate time" to reflect on the "dedication, courage, professionalism and sacrifice" of the armed forces and their families.

Dr Liam Fox, the Tory defence spokesman, also expressed his sympathy over today`s fatality.

War critics lambast government over deaths

However, critics of the war blamed the government for the soldiers` deaths.

Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was one of six military policemen killed in an ambush in Iraq more than two years ago, said the milestone figure was "absolutely dreadful".

"We have had 100 chances to learn our lesson. It just goes on and on," he said.

"These deaths were 100% preventable. These lads are dying for a falsehood. Their oath of allegiance has been betrayed. This was not what they went to war for. They are not the world`s police."

Andrew Burgin, of the Stop the War Coalition, said it would be holding an impromptu illegal protest at Parliament Square at 5pm tonight, at which the names of the 100 dead soldiers will be read out.

George Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and a leading critic of the war, said: "What a melancholy milestone this is.

"The United States long ago passed it - now 2,000 deaths and counting. Of course, nobody is counting the number of Iraqis killed.

"These deaths are the all too predictable consequences of the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. I don`t want another British soldier to die occupying other people`s countries. That`s why all British troops must be brought home now."

The MoD has not yet released the name of the soldier killed today, who was from the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats.

British troops are regularly targeted by insurgents using improvised explosive devices, which are often left by roadsides to target patrols.

Second British loss in 24 hours

Today`s fatality is the second British loss in just over 24 hours. Lance Corporal Allan Douglas, 22, of the 1st Battalion the Highlanders, died after being wounded by sniper fire in Maysan province, south-east Iraq, yesterday.

His father, Walter, of Aberdeen, told the Daily Mirror his son had not wanted to go to Iraq. "He was against the war. He couldn`t see the point of it. The lives of 99 young men have now been lost - and all for nothing," he said yesterday.

Of the 100 fatalities, the MoD classes 77 soldiers as having been killed in action and 23 as having died from illness, non-combat injuries, accidents or unknown causes. At least 230 British troops have been injured.

In all, just over 4,000 people, including Iraqis and British civilians as well as servicemen and women, have been evacuated to the UK for medical treatment. The vast majority suffered illness or an accident.

It is hoped the number of British troops in Iraq will eventually be scaled back as UK and US forces train Iraqi security personnel to take their place.

However, continuing attacks by Sunni insurgents are hampering those hopes, and no definite withdrawal plan has been announced.

Last year, Mr Blair warned Iranian elements to stop training insurgents in the construction of more sophisticated roadside bombs which were being used against British troops.

Mr Reid last week announced plans for a major new deployment of British troops to a dangerous area in southern Afghanistan, where US forces have been targeted by suicide bombers.

In the next few months, around 3,300 combat troops will be sent to Afghanistan, on top of around 850 already there, and will take on a Nato peacekeeping and counter-narcotics mission.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Hewitt reprieves cottage hospitals in care shift

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-havri…
From the Los Angeles Times
Beer and present danger
The president`s State of the Union address might go down a little easier if you mix it with a few drinks.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-havri…

By Heather Havrilesky
HEATHER HAVRILESKY is a television critic for Salon.com.

January 31, 2006

DESPITE THE HYPE, tonight`s State of the Union address is certain to disappoint. Sure, President Bush will do his best to work us into a frenzy, as he did in his most recent televised address, with his talk of a vast cabal of brutal forces afoot, "unconstrained by conscience," opposed to "our deepest values," determined to view the world as a "giant battlefield."

But even as he spoke of this very exciting giant battlefield, the president just sat there at his desk, staring blankly into the TelePrompTer. Is that any way to build suspense? Why weren`t there flames shooting into the sky on either side of his head? Why didn`t the camera crew get some extreme close-ups with a shaky, hand-held camera? Did Karl Rove forget to cue the nerve-jangling, clock-ticking sound from "24"?

Because Bush refuses to take any tips from the Great and Powerful Oz`s playbook, the only way to pump up the shock and awe is by playing a drinking game that`s custom-made for the State of the Union address. (Kids, don`t try this at home. Adults, don`t try this anywhere else but home.)

The game is simple enough for even your average registered voter to understand. Basically, every time Bush says "terror," "terrorism," "terrorist," "war on terror" or "Terror Dome," you drink.

Also drink when the president winks, nods and points at someone in the audience in rapid succession; drink each time he refers to 9/11 or uses the word "nuke-u-lar," and drink something bitter when he says that "the state of our union is strong."

Whenever there`s a close-up of a sour-faced Democrat, drink. If it`s Hilary Clinton, Ted Kennedy or Harry Reid, drink twice.

When Bush says "protect" as in "protect America," "protect the lives of Americans" or "protect our right to eavesdrop on the phone calls of any American," drink. If he refers to his solemn right to spy on antiwar activists as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," drink three times.

Also, drink whenever the president uses the word "security," as in the "security of all Americans" or "a secure nation." If he mentions "Social Security," turn the volume up; you didn`t hear him correctly. If he talks about "securing an exit strategy in Iraq," drink, then look outside to see if the sky is falling.

When the president alludes to "tax reform," "tax credits" or "tax relief," give a big shout-out to the federal budget deficit — then drink.

Drink each time the president begins a charming anecdote about some folks from a small red-state town; drink twice when the camera cuts to said folks. If the president reports that his chat with these fine people made it clear to him that the administration`s current course is the proper one, drink half a beer, then tell the person sitting next to you that it`s clear to you that your current course toward inebriation is the proper one as well.

Every time the president smiles or chuckles when he`s talking about something scary and awful, like giant battlegrounds and forces of evil, smile and chuckle along with him — Haw haw haw! — then kick your dog.

Drink each time the president mentions "free elections" in Iraq, or suggests that the Iraqi elections are a sure sign that democracy and freedom are spreading across the globe. Drink when the president mentions "free elections" in the West Bank, and if he suggests that the Palestinian elections are a sure sign that democracy and freedom are spreading across the globe, finish your beer, throw the bottle at the wall and yell, "Praise Allah!"

By the end of the president`s speech, I personally guarantee that not only will you experience all the nail-biting anticipation and excitement that you crave, you`ll also feel a hell of a lot better about the state of this country — that is, if you`re still conscious. Just don`t try to walk, talk, parent small children, drive or operate heavy machinery. In fact, this game is almost guaranteed to kill you — at least until January of 2009.



Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |

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Latest Update: #34984 28.01.06 23:29:25 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Jan 31, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2445 , US: 2242 , Jan.06: 64


Iraker 01/30/06: Civilian: 565 Police/Mil: 190 Total: 755
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Condi: Clueless at Foggy Bottom
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Seit der Konferenz der Arabischen Liga vor zwe Monaten laufen die Verhandlungen mit den unniten. Da wurde von den Sunniten das Angebot gemacht, Zarqawi auszuschalten als Gegenleistung für den Abzug der USA und der Reinstallierung der Shiiten an der Macht.

Dieser Weg führt direkt in den Bürgerkrieg.

Wenn die USA sich mit den Sunniten verbünden, werden diese für die Ausschaltung der Zarqawianhänder auf dem sofortigen Abzug der USA bestehen und danach werden sie versuchen, wie auch bei den anderen Malen, die Shiiten wieder von der Macht zuverdrängen.

Denn die Sunniten waren immer in den führenden Position in Verwaltung und Militär und wären daher am besten in der Lage eine schlagkräftige Armee aufzustellen.

Nur zwischenzeitlich haben die Shiiten mit Hilfe des Irans ihre Kampfverbände aufgebaut und würden meht oder weniger offen von den Iranern unterstützt.

Und wenn dann die US-Truppen noch im Land wären, würden sie nicht nur von den Sunniten, sondern auch von Shiiten angegriffen und könnten sich nur noch in wenigen gesicherten Stellungen wirklich sicher fühlen.

Und eins darf man nicht vergessen in allen Gebieten am Golf gibt es mehr oder weniger große Anteile an Shiiten in der Bevölkerung. Sabotage könnte fast alle Verladestationen in Saudi Arabien, in Kuwait und anderswo unbenutzbar machen.

Ich glaube nicht, dass ein Verständigung mit den Sunniten für die USA Vorteile brächte.

US-Botschafter Khalilzad ist zwar rührig, aber es ist mehr sinnloser Aktionismus, der zu keiner Lösung führt.

Der einzige Weg der zur Beruhigung führen würde, wäre eine Einigung mit dem Iran und die Anerkennung des Irans als Führungsmacht im Nahen Osten.

Die Saudis sind die kleinere Gefahr als der Iran, behauptet jedenfalls Scholl-Latour.

Feb 1, 2006

US shifts Iraq loyalties
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB01Ak01.html

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Two major revelations this past week show how far the administration of US President George W Bush has already shifted its policy toward realignment with Sunni forces to balance the influence of pro-Iranian Shi`ites in Iraq.

US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad revealed in an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that he has put the future of military assistance to a Shi`ite-dominated government
China Business Big Picture


on the table in the high-stakes US effort to force Shi`ite party leaders to give up control over key security ministries.

Khalilzad told Ignatius that, unless the "security ministries" in the new Iraqi government were allocated to candidates who were "not regarded as sectarian", the United States would be forced to re-evaluate its assistance to the government.

"We are saying, if you choose the wrong candidates, that will affect US aid," Khalilzad said.

He had previously demanded that the Interior Ministry be given to a non-sectarian candidate, but he had not backed up those demands with the threat of withdrawal of assistance. He has also explicitly added the Defense Ministry to that demand for the first time.

Implied in Khalilzad`s position is the threat to stop funding units that are identified as sectarian Shi`ite in their orientation. That could affect the bulk of the Iraqi army as well as the elite Shi`ite police commando units, which are highly regarded by the US military command.

Khalilzad`s decision to make the US threat public was followed by the revelation by Newsweek in its February 6 issue that talks between the US and "high level" Sunni insurgent leaders have already begun at a US military base in Anbar province and in Jordan as well as Syria. Khalilzad told Newsweek: "Now we have won over the Sunni political leadership. The next step is to win over the insurgents."

As this sweeping definition of the US political objective indicates, these talks are no longer aimed at splitting off groups that are less committed to the aim of US withdrawal, as the Pentagon has favored since last summer. Instead, the Bush administration now appears to be prepared to make some kind of deal with all the major insurgent groups.

US military spokesman Rick Lynch said, "The local insurgents have become part of the solution."

The larger context of these discussions is a common interest in counterbalancing Iranian influence in Iraq. US officials are remaining silent on this aspect of the policy. According to Newsweek, however, a "senior Western diplomat" explains the talks by saying, "There is more concern [on both sides] about the domination by Iran of Iraq."

US concern about the pro-Iranian leanings of the militant Shi`ite parties that will dominate the next government has grown as the Bush administration presses a campaign to take Iran`s nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council, with the military option "on the table". A Western diplomat told Associated Press that the United States needed to find "some other allies who will not turn against them if things heat up with Iran".

Even the possibility of a separate peace between the United States and the Sunni insurgency, which is inherent in these negotiations, signals to the Shi`ites that the US is no longer wedded to the option of supporting Shi`ite military and police.

Sunni political party leaders also see US policy as supporting the Sunnis in order to limit the power of the Shi`ites. The Iraqi Islamic Party`s Naseer al-Any told the Christian Science Monitor: "We are convinced that we are in a powerful position now. There is a change in the way the Americans deal with us ..."

The US position and that of Sunni politicians toward the new government are now fully aligned. On Saturday, Sunni political groups and secular political parties announced a new political bloc to demand that the Interior Ministry not be in the hands of "people related to political parties".

The Bush administration has been trying to find ways to counterbalance the influence of the pro-Iranian Shi`ite faction since mid-2004, especially by keeping control of paramilitary forces and secret police out of the hands of the militant Shi`ites. But until recently, those efforts have been constrained by the political imperative to prevail in the war against the Sunnis.

Shi`ite leaders have been convinced since last year`s parliamentary election campaigns that Washington has been conspiring with their enemies to undo the political power the Shi`ites had gained in 2005.

Redha Taki, an official at party headquarters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which heads the ruling Shi`ite coalition, told the Christian Science Monitor`s Charles Levinson that the United States is only part of a much bigger coalition of interests opposing Shi`ite political power in Iraq, which includes Britain, the Iraqi Sunnis and the Arab League.

The common denominator uniting all those actors, of course, is antagonism toward the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran, with which the militant Shi`ite parties in Iraq are aligned.

Shi`ite leaders believe the shift in US policy is intended actually to reinstall a Ba`athist government in Baghdad. Taki hinted strongly to the Monitor that SCIRI is planning to use force if necessary to defend the present government. "We are threatening that maybe in the future we will use other means," he said, "because we have true fear.

"I am prepared to go down into the streets and take up arms and fight to prevent the Ba`athist dictators and terrorists from coming back to power."

That statement captures the feeling among many Shi`ite leaders and militia of being under siege, which could lead them to plan for extreme actions to deal with an anticipated bid by their enemies to take away their power.

Everyone is now waiting to see how far the Bush administration will carry its political realignment. These new moves suggest that the administration may have redefined its interests in Iraq to downgrade the importance of the fight against insurgency there in light of the larger conflict with Iran.

The logic of such a redefinition of interests would dictate a ceasefire with the Sunni insurgents. That would not only free the latter to fight al-Qaeda, but would alter the balance of power between militant Shi`ites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Going that far would conflict with White House assurances only a few weeks ago of US "victory" in the Iraq war. But word at the State Department last week was that Khalilzad, the mastermind of the new policy, has the president`s ear. And the new policy may be just what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other hardliners on Iran have been looking for.

Although it may be a way out of a war that cannot be won, the US shift in political alignment away from the Shi`ites and toward the Sunnis brings with it a different set of costs and risks.

It is bound to bring to the surface the anti-US sentiments that the Shi`ite political leadership and militants have kept more or less under wraps since the US invasion for pragmatic political reasons.

And as the Shi`ites gird for a showdown with their enemies, they will be seeking the assistance of their Iranian patrons. The worst crises for US policy in Iraq are still to come.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published last June.

(Inter Press Service)

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Afghan opium: License to kill
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HB01Df02.html

By Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy

Editor`s note: More than 60 delegations, mostly countries but also some multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, meet in London for two days this week to tackle development issues for Afghanistan. One of the more controversial topics to be tabled is how to deal with Afghanistan`s opium fields, which last year produced about 4,200 tonnes of raw opium.
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In June 1906, Charles Henry Brent, the first Protestant Episcopal Church bishop of the Philippines and a staunch opponent of the opium trade, wrote to president Theodore Roosevelt to ask for the United States to call an international conference to enforce anti-opium measures in China.

The conference was held in Shanghai in 1909. One hundred years after Bishop Brent`s letter, the global prohibition of opium and certain other drugs has largely failed, in spite of, or maybe because of, more than 30 years of the "war on drugs" launched in 1971 by the administration of US president Richard Nixon.

This is what was stressed at a conference on "Drug Production and State Stability" recently held in Paris, when Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, explained that, "after fighting five drug wars in 30 years at a cost of US$150 billion, Washington has presided over a [fivefold] increase" in the world illicit-opium supply, from 1,000 tonnes in 1970 to between 5,000 and 6,000 tonnes in the mid-2000s.

This was exemplified in late 2005 when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirmed that Afghanistan was still and by far the world`s first producing country of illicit opium, despite alternative development efforts, eradication measures, and widely lauded achievements in democracy and state-building in the country.

Clearly, as has now been stated by many observers and analysts, the danger for Afghanistan is that a hastened suppression or eradication program will, in the absence of alternative livelihoods being widely promoted, damage the fragile rural economy, prove counterproductive in the mid-term, and impede sustainable solutions to the Afghan crisis.

Indeed, in a 2004 interview, Doris Buddenberg, the head of UNODC in Afghanistan, said, "Eradication usually does not bring about a sustainable reduction of poppy crop - it is a one-time, short-term effort. Also eradication usually pushes the prices up. As we have seen from the Taliban period, the one-year ban on opium-poppy cultivation increased prices enormously the following year and it became extremely attractive for farmers to cultivate poppy."

However, in December 2005, only a few weeks after having lauded "the largest decrease [of opium-poppy cultivation] ever recorded in a single year in any country", Buddenberg said there were "signs cultivation may increase next year in many areas, in part because of pressure on farmers to grow opium poppies and their own concerns about making a living", thus without clearly acknowledging that the so-called "success" in reducing opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2004-05 had already been and was still to be largely counterproductive.

In such a context, where both interdiction and development have failed to solve the "opium problem" in Afghanistan, because interdiction without development amounts to further deteriorating the livelihoods of opium farmers, and alternative development is far from having been implemented with adequate economic means and political determination, a rather new, but unrealistic, proposal has emerged: the licensing of Afghan opium for production of pharmaceutical morphine.

Described as "a truly winning solution" by many, the proposal of the Senlis Council, an "international drug-policy think-tank" based in Paris, consists of licensing Afghan opium for the production of legal medicines such as morphine and codeine as a way to respond to the urgent need to significantly reduce Afghanistan`s illegal opium production and trade, but also as a way to overcome the "significant global shortage of opium-based medicines such as morphine and codeine", a problem "felt most acutely in the developing world".

This proposal, however, is based on false or inexact premises, on at least two levels: regarding the world market on the one hand, and national and local opium-farming communities on the other hand.

Supply and demand of opioid analgesics
According to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which is in charge of examining on a regular basis issues affecting the supply of and demand for opiates used for medical purposes, the supply of such opiates has for years been "at levels well in excess of global demand".

In fact, as stocks continue to be more than sufficient to cover global demand for one year, the INCB even recommends reducing the production of opiate raw materials. Nevertheless, the INCB stresses that "the low consumption of opioid analgesics for the treatment of moderate to severe pain, especially in developing countries, continues to be a matter of great concern".

"In 2003, six countries together accounted for 79% of global consumption of morphine" while "developing countries, which represent about 80% of the world`s population, accounted for only about 6%" of its global consumption. Thus, for the INCB, the urgency is more "to raise awareness of the necessity to assess the actual medical needs for opiates" in the world than to increase the production of legal medical morphine in countries such as Afghanistan.

This is easily understandable when one knows that most governments in the world did not respond to the INCB questionnaire on their medical needs and that information about half of the needs of the world`s population was insufficient.

However, simply raising levels of morphine production, whether by licensing opium production in Afghanistan or by increasing the yields of current producers, is unlikely to increase the medical consumption of morphine and codeine in the world.

The recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) that morphine and codeine be used as analgesics are too often impeded by obstacles that are not, or not only, supply-related: concerns about drug addiction and drug diversion, restrictive national laws, insufficient import or manufacture, but also deficiencies in national health-care delivery systems, insufficient training, etc.

Of course, the demand for modern analgesics is also related to the importance of conventional or allopathic medicine with regard to local traditions and beliefs. In China for example, according to WHO, traditional herbal preparations account for 30-50% of the total medicinal consumption, while in Africa up to 80% of the population uses traditional medicine for primary health care.

Thus, obviously, the world`s medical consumption of opiates is far from being directly dependent on supply and demand, and price contingencies, as was actually hinted by the Senlis Council itself when it stressed that "in 2002, 77% of the world`s morphine was consumed by seven rich countries: [the] US, the UK, Italy, Australia, France, Spain and Japan", but that, according to official figures, "even in these countries only 24% of moderate to severe pain-relief need was being met".

The fact that medical consumption of opiates is low even in rich morphine-producing countries clearly shows that the consumption of opiate-based painkillers is determined by factors more complex than only those of the market.

Indian licit vs Afghan illicit opium production
As far as Afghanistan and its opium farmers are concerned now, the licensing of the illicit opium supply is very unlikely to help develop them economically.

First, it is important to understand that while legal opium-poppy cultivation is undertaken for pharmaceutical use by 12 countries (Australia, China, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, India, Japan, Slovakia, Spain, Macedonia, Turkey and the United Kingdom), only one of them, India, produces opium, the latex that bleeds, coagulates and is harvested from incised opium-poppy capsules. The 11 other actually grow opium poppies to harvest poppy straw and produce concentrate of poppy straw (CPS) in the context of a modern mechanized agriculture that resorts for the most part to combine harvesters on large tracts of cultivated land.

Conversely, because opium harvesting is a long and arduous manual process, it requires a numerous and, more than anything, cheap local workforce if the opium and morphine production process is to be economically viable. For that reason, and also because of international agreements derived from the role the opium economy played in its colonial past, opium is only legally produced in India.

Of course, since 12 countries already produce raw opium materials to make morphine, codeine and thebaine, and have significantly increased the concentration of alkaloids in opium-poppy plants, the INCB, pursuant to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, wishes to "to avoid the proliferation of supply sites" to prevent diversion of opium-poppy plants and seeds licitly produced to the illicit market.

Diversion from the licit to the illicit market occurs much more easily with opium than concentrate of poppy straw, as the Indian example shows us.

In India, legal opium producing occurs in selected tracts in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The Indian central government sets an opium minimum qualifying yield (MQY) according to the yields reported by farmers the previous years. During the 2004-05 crop year (8,770 licensed hectares), MQY of 58 kilograms per hectare in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and of 49kg in Uttar Pradesh had to be achieved by opium farmers to be eligible for the renewal of their license in 2005-06.

Cultivators are issued a license for growing poppies and the entire opium produced by all farmers is purchased by and only by the Central Bureau of Narcotics at a price fixed by the central government. The price paid to the farmers depends on the yields achieved, with farmers producing more opium getting paid a higher price per kilogram: in 2004-05, the minimum price paid per kilogram was Rs750 (US$17) for yields up to 44kg per hectare. The maximum price paid was Rs2,200 for yields above 100kg/ha. The average national yield was 56kg/ha and was paid at a price Rs1,150 per kilogram.

However, it is important to bear in mind that, to try to prevent diversion to the illicit market, in 2004-05 the maximum licensed area to be cultivated in opium poppies was 0.10 hectare. Therefore, the maximum income that Indian farmers can derive from legal opium production is limited by fixed prices and by limitation of areas cultivated by each of them.

With such low prices paid to Indian opium farmers, diversion to the illegal market, where opium can fetch prices as much as four to five times the minimum government price, clearly takes place; although there is no reliable estimate of such diversion.

The 2005 International Control Strategy Report of the US Department of State stresses that "in 2004, the government of India discovered and shut down six morphine base laboratories in India`s opium-growing areas; four in Uttar Pradesh and two in Madhya Pradesh".

The fact that the central government raises the MQY and the official price paid to farmers is clearly not enough to keep some of them from diverting part of their harvest to the illegal market. It is worth noting that the CBN recently tightened its control on opium farming and against diversion, drastically lowering the number of hectares licensed (from 21,141 in 2003-04 to 8,771 in 2004-05) and the number of farmers licensed (from 105,697 in 2003-04 to 87,682 in 2004-05).

Shortcomings of opium licensing in Afghanistan
The proposal to license opium production in Afghanistan thus raises an important question: Would the prices paid to opium farmers be high enough to provide them with a sufficient income and to enable the development of the Afghan rural economy while, in the meantime, preventing opium diversion from the licit to the illicit market?

In Afghanistan, opium prices have varied greatly during the past decade, ranging from $23 to $350 per kilogram of fresh opium at harvest time. In 2005, the average farm-gate price of fresh opium at harvest time was $102 per kilogram (average yield: 39 kg/ha) and 309,000 families, or about 2 million persons (8.7% of the population) were involved in opium-poppy cultivation, itinerant workers not included.

Such prices, which are far from enriching Afghan opium farmers but simply allow them to cope with poverty, only need to be compared to those of India to realize that licit opium production in Afghanistan could not compete with illicit opium production, that most opium farmers would still have to give up opium production while the others would see their revenues plummet, and that, considering the limited writ and power of the Afghan authorities, diversion from the licit to the illicit market would be unavoidable and would reach much higher proportions than in India.

More important, licensing opium production in Afghanistan would not be better than eradication or alternative development at addressing the causes of the recourse to illegal opium production and would thus fail to fulfill the international community`s objective: the suppression of illegal opium production. If crop substitution proved to be a failure in the past decades, why would the substitution of an illegal opium production for a legal opium production work better by reducing farmers` income and not addressing the structural factors causing illegal opium production?

It is crucial to understand that, contrary to what has often been denounced here and there, opium production is more a consequence of Afghanistan`s lawlessness, instability and poverty than its cause. Opium production clearly proceeds from poverty and food insecurity, from Afghanistan to Myanmar and Laos, where it is a coping mechanism and livelihood strategy.

Opium production is a vital element in the livelihood strategies of part of the Afghan rural population, providing peasants not only with a source of income, but also with access to land and credit. More than opium production as such, it is therefore poverty and the shortcomings of the Afghan agrarian system that should be tackled.

It is alternative livelihoods that must be promoted, in a way that counter-narcotics objectives are mainstreamed into national development strategies and programs, if the causes of opium-poppy cultivation are to be addressed and illicit opium production eventually curtailed.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy is a geographer and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique research fellow, and produces www.geopium.org.

(Copyright 2006 Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy.)

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Die Umfrage:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/16…

Posted on Mon, Jan. 30, 2006

Nearly half of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops, poll finds
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/137…

BY DREW BROWN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A new poll found that nearly half of Iraqis approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and most favor setting a timetable for American troops to leave.

The poll also found that 80 percent of Iraqis think the United States plans to maintain permanent bases in the country even if the newly elected Iraqi government asks American forces to leave. Researchers found a link between support for attacks and the belief among Iraqis that the United States intends to keep a permanent military presence in the country.



At the same time, the poll found that many Iraqis think that some outside military forces are required to keep Iraq stable until the new government can field adequate security forces on its own. Only 39 percent of Iraqis surveyed thought that Iraqi police and army forces were strong enough to deal with the security challenges on their own, while 59 percent thought Iraq still needed the help of military forces from other countries.

Seventy percent of Iraqis favor setting a timetable for U.S. forces to withdraw, with half of those favoring a withdrawal within six months and the other half favoring a withdrawal over two years.

"Iraqis are demanding a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, and most believe that the U.S. has no plans to leave even if the new government asks them to," said Steven Kull, the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which conducted the poll. "This appears to be leading some to even support attacks on U.S.-led troops, even though many feel they also continue to need the presence of U.S. troops awhile longer."

"If you put it all together, it`s clear there is a center of gravity, not towards immediate withdrawal, but for the U.S. to be there in a way that affirms their intent to withdraw eventually," he said. "There is real consensus on that point."

The poll was to be published Tuesday by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a Web site that reports on public opinion from around the globe. The survey was conducted Jan. 2-5, with a nationwide sample of 1,150 Iraqis from country`s main religious and ethnic sects.



According to the poll`s findings, 47 percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces, but there were large differences among ethnic and religious groups. Among Sunni Muslims, 88 percent said they approved of the attacks. That approval was found among 41 percent of Shiite Muslims and 16 percent of Kurds.

Ninety-three percent of Iraqis oppose violence against Iraqi security forces, and 99 percent oppose attacks on Iraqi civilians.

"They`re pretty much the same results that have been going on since 2003, so it`s consistent with a lot of the attitudes that exist," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and a longtime Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center for national-security studies in Washington. "We`re not seen as liberators by the Sunnis, but what else is new?"

Previous samples from Shiites who supported attacks on coalition troops have been much lower in the past, Cordesman said, but support for U.S.-led forces even among Shiites - who were oppressed under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni - has been mixed from the beginning.

"It was clear after the invasion that about a third or more of Shiites did not see us as liberators, and did not see the war as justified, and somewhere around 15 percent supported attacks on coalition forces then," he said. "We`re also seen as creating all kinds of internal problems without creating any kind of internal solutions."

U.S. officials have acknowledged in the past that the mere presence of American troops in Iraq has helped fuel the insurgency, which is dominated by Iraq`s Sunni minority. U.S. officials have sent mixed signals about long-term American intentions.

During a visit with U.S. troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said "at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases" in Iraq. "It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government," he said.

According to the poll, 80 percent of Iraqis overall assume that the United States intends to keep bases in Iraq. The breakdown of people who have that belief is 92 percent of Sunnis, 79 percent of Shiites and 67 percent of Kurds.

More than 80 percent of Sunnis favor a six-month withdrawal period; 49 percent of Shiites favor a longer withdrawal. Just 29 percent of all Iraqis surveyed say U.S. forces should be reduced only as the security situation improves, though more than half of the Kurds surveyed favor that option.

The survey will be available at www.worldpublicopinion.org



© 2006 KRT Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com

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Zu meinem Text in #35065
Da wurde von den Sunniten das Angebot gemacht, Zarqawi auszuschalten als Gegenleistung für den Abzug der USA und der Deinstallierung der Shiiten von der Macht.

So hätte der zweite Satz lauten sollen.

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Die Mahdi-Miliz und die Badr-Miliz sind in den letzten Monaten mit Hilfe der Iran stark aufgerüstet worden.

January 31, 2006
Bush`s 130,000 Hostages
Why the U.S. Probably Won`t Attack Iran
http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew01312006.html

By ANDREW COCKBURN

WASHINGTON DC.

Jimmy Carter presented Iran with 52 hostages. George Bush has done a lot better, sending 130,000 Americans across the ocean as guarantees of his administration`s good behavior toward the Islamic Republic. Last week, Tehran reminded us of its ability to make life unpleasant for US forces in Iraq by hosting Moqtada al Sadr for a high profile visit, in the course of which he obligingly pledged that his militia, the Mahdi army, would retaliate for any American attack on Iran. His spokesman quoted him as telling his hosts "If any Islamic state, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is attacked, the Mahdi Army would fight inside and outside Iraq."

This warning should be taken seriously. The Jaish al Mahdi, al Sadr`s militia, has emerged as a formidable force since its formation in 2003. Fifteen months ago, in November 2004, when it was less well trained and equipped than today, this army held off a determined assault by US Marines for three weeks in Najaf.

But Iranian interest and influence in Iran are by no means confined to the radical Shi`ite cleric and his fighters. SCIRI, the principal party in the dominant Shi`ite coalition that triumphed in the Iraqi elections, was after all originally founded and fostered in Iran. Its first leader was Ayatollah Mohammed Shahroodi, presently head of the Iranian judiciary. SCIRI`s military arm, the Badr Army, fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war, and was long regarded as the direct instrument of Iranian intelligence. Elsewhere, Iranian intelligence can look to such assets as Abu Mehdi al-Mohandis--"the engineer"--resident in Najaf with mentoring responsibilities for Sadr`s militia there.

In the north, in and around the Kurdish enclave, credible sources attest that Iranian intelligence has been providing some measure of support to Sunni insurgents, including the militant Islamic Sunni group Ansar al Islam. Indeed, the dozen or so senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commanders killed in a plane crash two weeks ago, possibly including Mohammed Sulaimani, the key Guards official involved in Iraqi affairs, were on their way to Oroumieh in north west Iran, the main base for Iranian operations in northern Iraq.

It may seem counter-intuitive for the Shi`ite Iranians to be supporting groups with a militantly anti-Shi`ite agenda, but this same regime sheltered the Afghan fundamentalist Sunni leader Gulbeddin Hekmatyar for many years, despite deep seated mutual antipathy.

Furthermore, power in Iran is diffused. Iraq is a huge prize, and control of this asset, so obligingly proffered to Iran by George Bush when he toppled Saddam Hussein, is inevitably a matter for contention among powerful factions inside the regime. Revolutionary Guards commanders may have a different agenda from that of the "Etalaat"--intelligence services, or the office of Supreme Leader Khamanei, let alone that of the elected President Amahdinejad. Among other imperatives, these various fiefdoms have financial interests at stake in Iraq. Many of the IRGC commanders, for example, are "Moawedun," meaning they are of Iranian descent but born in Iraq, who have property interests in Iraq.

Following the US invasion, the most influential voice in Iranian policy toward Iraq was that of President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who opted for limited cooperation with the occupiers. Despite alarmist rumors circulating in Baghdad that "One million Iranians had infiltrated into Iraq with fake Iraqi ID cards," most of the Iranians on view were pacific pilgrims thronging the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. The consensus in Tehran appeared to be that Iraq should be maintained in what officials called "managed chaos;" both to keep the country weak and discourage a prolonged US occupation while avoiding the wholesale disintegration of Iraq into anarchy.

However, the defeat of Rafsanjani by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Presidential election and the steadily escalating confrontation with the US over Iran`s nuclear program have changed the rules of the game. Ahmadinejad is close to some of the more radical IRGC leaders, and shows little desire to defer to American sensitivities. His outspoken defiance of the west over the nuclear issue, not to mention his remarks about Israel, have only bolstered his political position at home, while his ability to play the Iraq card should certainly give Washington pause. As a close aide to one of the leaders of SCIRI, which is generally considered less violently radical than Moqtada Sadr`s group, told me recently "If America attacks Iran, then all bets are off." With such a deterrent at hand, who needs a nuclear weapon?

Andrew Cockburn is the co-author, with Patrick Cockburn, of Out of the Ashes: the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

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The Bush Administration’s radical foreign policy now lies in ruins
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2006/as-editorials-0131-…

01-31-2006

The two pillars that support the Bush administration’s foreign policy — the doctrine of pre-emption and democratization by gun — are crumbling.

The invasion of Iraq was supposed to show the strength of these pillars; instead, it has revealed their weakness.

In principle, the doctrine of pre-emption, which President Bush unveiled in a June 2002 speech at West Point, subverted our country’s foreigh-policy traditions and flew in the face of hundreds of years of international law. In practice, it has given us an unprovoked and unnecessary war that has made us significantly less safe.

Pre-emption, as embodied in the Iraq campaign, always had a certain cowboy aspect to it. The idea was that by making an example of Saddam, we would show terrorists and rogue states the dire consequences of so much as casting a dirty look at the United States.

But what’s happened is that the Iraq war has created many more jihadists than we have killed, and it has provided them with the perfect training ground for honing their deadly skills. Meanwhile, those other members of the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, don’t exactly seem to be quaking in their boots as a result of our show of force in Iraq. As a report from Tehran in Sunday’s New York Times explained, the Iraq quagmire has only emboldened Iran’s leaders.

As for the president’s professed zeal for spreading democracy across the globe, who can take issue with it so long as the discussion remains at the level of grandiose rhetoric?

But it bears mentioning that the United States has always touted itself as the champion of democracy, even during the Cold War when it was overthrowing democratically elected governments or blocking free and fair elections from Iran to Guatemala to Vietnam to Chile. What Bush and his neoconservatives advisers brought to the table was a willingness to back up their idealistic talk with cruise missiles and fighter jets.

Of course, Bush and the neocon architects of the Iraq invasion were not all that idealistic in practice. Their initial idea of democracy in Iraq was to install slimy exile Ahmed Chalabi as leader of the country. The administration also dragged its feet on holding direct elections, but Iraqi Shiite powerbroker Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forced Bush’s hand.

Still, some creative interpretation of the events of the past couple of years has enabled the president’s supporters to credit his policies for the spate of elections in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Now that we’ve learned that honest elections do not guarantee desirable outcomes, it will be interesting to see how the pro-Bush historical revisionists explain recent developments in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere.

President Bush took office as a man who knew little about the world, and seemed to care about it even less. He was a nearly empty vessel into which radical neoconservatives could pour their half-baked ideas. We now have had nearly three years to see the catastrophic results of their ideas put into action.

The country still has three more years of this presidency, but it cannot waste another day in charting a new course for the nation’s foreign policy. That project must begin by renouncing unprovoked wars and by acknowledging that democratization must be an organic, homegrown affair, not something outsiders impose with guns and bombs and exiled con men.

The Anniston Star, P.O. Box 189, Anniston, AL 36202.

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[url]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/01/31/politics/20060201_STATE_AUDIO.html Analysis of the State of the Union Address Bild anklicken!

[/url]
[urlTranscript]http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/politics/text-bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin[/url]

It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush`s most memorable.
Und wie immer bei Bush unterscheiden sich seine Ankündigen sehr von seinem Handeln.

February 1, 2006
News Analysis
Bold Visions Have Given Way to New Reality
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/politics/01assess.html?ei=…

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — It was an evening for President Bush to confront America`s anxieties — and his own.

Only a year after Mr. Bush stood in the House, describing in bold terms how he planned to spend the political capital he had amassed in the 2004 election, the president who addressed the nation on Tuesday evening was far less ambitious, his tone noticeably different.

The Texan who swept onto the national political scene six years ago talking about drilling for new energy supplies and preserving the American way of life vowed on Tuesday night to wean the nation from its reliance on oil. Instead of urging Congress to drill in the Arctic, the president who had waved off the critics who portrayed him and Vice President Dick Cheney as captives of the oil industry asked Congress to finance federal research into alternative fuels and lithium batteries.
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Nach dem Vorschlag von [urlBeer and present danger
The president`s State of the Union address might go down a little easier if you mix it with a few drinks]http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsaction.php?tid=695186&post=35061&smallwin=1&smallwinsize=600&werbung=sendposting&width=600&m=5.1.1.2.3&posting_action=drucken
hätte es noch immer für einen Vollbrand gereicht[/url]
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A president who has rarely dwelled on the impact of globalization for American workers was suddenly looking over his shoulder at China and India, and committing the federal government to a quest for 70,000 teachers and 30,000 scientists to prepare American students for a new era of competition.

It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush`s most memorable. Instead of evoking the grand ambitions that have suffused his presidency since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush emphasized the familiar and the modest. At a moment of partisan fervor, he offered an olive branch, reviving a pledge to lower the temperature. "Our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger," he said.

Yet by any measure, Mr. Bush`s options are far more limited than they were a year ago. Much of the momentum he boasted about in the days after his re-election is gone, some of it lost on a bold Social Security initiative that never took off, some washed away by the deeply disorganized federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

The budget deficit, rising again despite Mr. Bush`s promise to cut it in half by the time he leaves office in 2009, effectively handcuffs him when it comes to new initiatives. The few new ideas he unveiled were largely thematic, not backed by broad programmatic initiatives.

Three years into the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush tried anew to strike a tone of optimism, saying that "we are in this fight, and we are winning." But he also bowed to the country`s anxiety about finding a path out of a mission that seems to become harder each day, and he warned anew of the dangers of premature retreat. "In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders," he said.

Mr. Bush`s approval ratings, which soared over 90 percent in the days after the terrorist attacks, bounced around in the 30`s last fall and now hover anemically in the low 40`s. His party, beset by a lobbying scandal and a breakdown in discipline on Capitol Hill, is nervous about the coming midterm elections.

With three years left in his presidency, Mr. Bush is certainly far from that lame-duck moment he used to joke about on his campaign plane — that point in his second term when he said he would "quack like a duck." On Tuesday alone, he won two major victories, the confirmations of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the Supreme Court and Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Both appointments promise to leave Mr. Bush`s stamp on Washington long after he has retired to his ranch and begun building his presidential library.

But in acknowledging on Tuesday that Americans face "a complex and challenging time," Mr. Bush was doing more than issuing a call for global engagement. He was also acknowledging that five years into his presidency, the citizens of the world`s most powerful nation do not feel that their status has brought them security.

"He needs to reassure us on the economy, and reassure people there is a future they can be positive about," said Michael K. Deaver, the image maker who helped make Ronald Reagan — on whom Mr. Bush has tried to model much of his presidency — a master of optimism. "People have been saying no to that question everyone asks — `Am I going to be better off a year from now than I am today?` — and that has been going on for the past two or three years."

Mr. Bush`s prescriptions Tuesday night were largely familiar: making tax cuts permanent, keeping markets open, keeping health care costs down. What was new was his Advanced Energy Initiative, though the increases he proposed in clean-energy research, better batteries for hybrid cars and new ways of making ethanol largely piggyback on programs already under way at General Motors and Ford, Toyota and Honda, rather than charting a new course.

And his proposals to "encourage children to take more math and science" had echoes of President Bill Clinton, whose incessant talk of remaking the work force to meet the challenges of a global economy were often referred to derisively during Mr. Bush`s first term as feel-good economics.

"Second-term presidents often gravitate toward foreign policy," said Doug Sosnik, who drafted many of those policies for Mr. Clinton. "What`s happened to this president is that there is more pressure to attend to the domestic needs of the country. And it`s hard, because he has less room to operate and less money to spend."

Mr. Bush has more leeway in the area of foreign policy, but even here, limits loom larger than they did a year ago.

Facing public hearings in February on his once-secret program to conduct eavesdropping, without the benefit of warrants, on telephone calls between the United States and abroad, Mr. Bush defended his order anew as "a terrorist surveillance program." He also argued, in an expansive reading of existing case law, that he had acted "based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute," an authority that he said the federal courts had approved.

In the face of Iran`s defiance of full international inspection of its nuclear program, Mr. Bush declared that "the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." But in contrast to the confrontational tone that suffused his State of the Union speech of January 2003, which made the case for confronting Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, Mr. Bush made no threats about what would happen if Iran continued down its current path.

Instead, he struck a decidedly moderate tone, careful not to outstep the European allies with whom he is trying to repair relations. And he seemed to recognize, said Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations, that "clearly Iran has more ways of making our lives difficult in Iraq."

It is worth remembering that Mr. Bush has more time left in his presidency than John F. Kennedy served in his. Three years is a lot of time, and as Mr. Bush proved after Sept. 11, it only takes one day to redirect a presidency. But the path he described Tuesday night aimed more toward the middle lanes he talked about so often in the early days after he arrived in the White House, rather than the shifting of tectonic plates that he tried to engineer in the past four years.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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U.S. Army in Iraq Takes a Radical Look at Itself
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..signing battlespace assumption orders during a ceremony handing over several provinces in Iraq to the Iraqi army last Thursday in Diwaniyah.
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http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2006/02/01/international/01glo…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

BAGHDAD — When an American general gives you an article describing the United States Army as bureaucratic, inflexible, stiflingly hierarchical and culturally insensitive to the point of "institutional racism," it`s worth pondering what`s going on.

That`s what happened when I met recently with Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking American officer in Iraq. The article, by a British officer who served for 11 months in Iraq, was handed over with a strong personal endorsement.

Chiarelli`s approval of such criticism reflects a fundamental shift in Iraq. Even as the U.S. military is instructing a nascent Iraqi Army in warfare, it is undertaking a radical review of its own practices not seen on such a scale since the Vietnam War.

The catalyst to such self-examination has been the missed opportunities and failures since the formally declared end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003, and the realization that an army of staggering technological capacity, tremendous discipline and unrivaled power was ill prepared for counterinsurgency operations.

In the article, published by the U.S. Army magazine Military Review, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster cites the U.S. Army mission statement known as "The Soldier`s Creed," which is posted in camps in Iraq. It says, "I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat."

The word Aylwin-Foster focuses on is "destroy." Not the defeat of an enemy, he notes, but its destruction.

Defeating a foe can involve many things apart from force - political deftness, human intelligence and economic suasion among them. But destruction is about the brute application of might through conventional fighting, and in Iraq the U.S. Army, unlike the British, began with a strong preference for such methods.

That preference was a reflection of a doctrine still geared to traditional war fighting between nations, not yet adapted to the messy conflicts of the post-Cold War era, and disparaging of the whole question of insurgencies because of the painful experience of Vietnam.

It was a doctrine steeped in the conviction that overwhelming force could best secure rapid American victory and suspicious of activities falling under the unwieldy Defense Department acronym of OOTW, for Operations Other than War. That acronym served at least one important purpose: ensuring that peacekeeping, so dear to Europeans, did not enter the American military lexicon.

Almost three years into the Iraq conflict, peacekeeping remains anathema but the need to adapt training and doctrine to focus on counterinsurgency has become clear to many U.S. officers. Aylwin-Foster`s biting analysis is by no means universally accepted, but the fact that a U.S. Army magazine published it and Chiarelli is promoting it reflects a fundamental change.

What has been recognized is that so-called kinetic operations - tackling an insurgency principally through the kinds of search, sweep and destroy operations seen in Ramadi, Falluja and other Sunni strongholds - may be counterproductive.

Many initial U.S. practices in Iraq, including aggressive searches of Iraqi women by male soldiers and the destruction of entire neighborhoods, are now seen as having driven broad swaths of the population into the resistance.

Chiarelli, who has just begun a yearlong mission as second-in-command and previously oversaw the Baghdad area as the commander of the First Cavalry Division, is fond of saying that a 220-kilowatt electricity line can be a lot more effective than tank ammunition. He wants to see a significant shift from shooting and blowing up things to what he calls nonkinetic action.

Of course, it`s not easy to say to an 18-year-old soldier who has just arrived and narrowly survived a roadside bomb that it`s important not to overreact. But overreaction, the pulverizing application of superior American force, has been a problem.

Aylwin-Foster portrays a U.S. Army isolated from the local population by the reproduction of "mini-Americas" on its bases; too easily swayed into believing that superior technology rather than human intelligence can overcome an insurgency; imbued with a moral righteousness about its mission that sometimes leads to blindness or cultural insensitivity; slow to adapt, and so driven by a can-do optimism that frankness about problems is not widespread among junior officers.

"Intuitively, the use of options other than force came less easily to the U.S. Army than her allies," he writes, insisting that a counterinsurgency campaign must be guided by some overarching political direction served by the military.

Is that political direction now in place? I`m not convinced it is, but it is just possible that a push to include the disaffected Sunnis in a new government of national unity, complemented by a subtler military approach more geared to suasion than search-and-destroy missions, could bring better results.

What is clear is that the U.S. military cannot act in isolation. It needs an Iraqi government to deliver services, and those services need to be provided to everyone, irrespective of religion or ethnic group.

In Falluja today there is electricity in 80 percent of the poles but only 40 percent of the homes because lines have not been run from the poles to the houses. Getting that done is important, especially if it`s a Shiite minister making sure Sunnis get electric light.

Some officers have long been aware of how counterinsurgency involves a many-faceted approach, including Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Chiarelli, both of whom are cited by Aylwin-Foster as having understood early the importance of winning local support through initiatives outside the realm of conventional warfare.

But changing a military culture is a slow business, almost as slow as nation-building.

Staff Sergeant Christopher Bush, who arrived on his first Iraq tour in April 2003, has watched the change: "We`ve had to learn the whole way through. We weren`t trained to fight guerrilla wars, which is what this is. We had old training for fighting the Soviets. Conventional wars were easier - an enemy in uniform with recognizable equipment. But we`re adapting and, given time, we`ll defeat the insurgency."

Note that word from a noncommissioned officer with a view from the ground: defeat, not destroy. Iraq is schooling a new American Army.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2006

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[urlBush Warns Against Shrinking Global Role]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101361.html[/url]

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February 1, 2006
Editorial
The State of Energy
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01wed1.html

President Bush devoted two minutes and 15 seconds of his State of the Union speech to energy independence. It was hardly the bold signal we`ve been waiting for through years of global warming and deadly struggles in the Middle East, where everything takes place in the context of what Mr. Bush rightly called our "addiction" to imported oil.

Last night`s remarks were woefully insufficient. The country`s future economic and national security will depend on whether Americans can control their enormous appetite for fossil fuels. This is not a matter to be lumped in a laundry list of other initiatives during a once-a-year speech to Congress. It is the key to everything else.

If Mr. Bush wants his final years in office to mean more than a struggle to re-spin failed policies and cement bad initiatives into permanent law, this is the place where he needs to take his stand. And he must do it with far more force and passion than he did last night.
•

American overdependence on oil has been a disaster for our foreign policy. It weakens the nation`s international leverage and empowers exactly the wrong countries. Last night Mr. Bush told the people that "the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons," but he did not explain how that will happen when those same nations are so dependent on Tehran`s oil. Iran ranks second in oil reserves only to Saudi Arabia, where members of the elite help finance Osama bin Laden and his ilk, and where the United States finds it has little power to stop them.

Oil is a seller`s market, in part because of America`s voracious consumption. India and China, with their growing energy needs, have both signed deals with Iran. Rogue states like Sudan are given political cover by their oil customers. The United Nations may wish to do something about genocide in Darfur or nuclear proliferation, but its most powerful members are hamstrung by their oil alliances with some of the worst leaders on the planet.

Even if the war on terror had never begun, Mr. Bush would have an obligation to be serious about the energy issue, given the enormous danger to the nation`s economy if we fail to act. His own Energy Department predicts that with the rapid development of India and China, annual global consumption will rise from about 80 million barrels of oil a day to 119 million barrels by 2025. Absent efforts to reduce American consumption, these new demands will lead to soaring oil prices, inflation and a loss of America`s trade advantage. It should be a humbling shock to American leaders that Brazil has managed to become energy self-sufficient during a period when the United States was focused on building bigger S.U.V.`s.

Part of the answer, as Mr. Bush indicated last night, is the continued development of alternative fuels, especially for cars. The Energy Department has addressed this modestly, and last night the president said his budget would add more money for research. That`s fine, but hardly the kind of full-bore national initiative that will pump large amounts of money into the commercial production of alternatives to gasoline.

When it comes to cars, much of the research has already been done — Brazil got to energy independence by figuring out how to get its citizens home from work in cars run without much gasoline. The answer is producing the new fuels that have already been developed and getting cars that use them on the lots. There are several ways to make that happen. The president could call for higher fuel economy standards for car manufacturers. He could bring up the subject of a gas tax — the most effective way of getting Americans to buy fuel-efficient cars, and a market-based tax on consumption that conservative lawmakers ought to embrace if they are honest with themselves and their constituents. But Mr. Bush took the safe, easy and relatively meaningless route instead.

There is still an enormous amount to be done to find new sources of clean, cheap power to heat homes and create electricity. But regrettably, the president made it clear last night that he would rather spend the country`s resources on tax cuts for the wealthy. The oil companies are currently flush with profits from the same high prices that have plagued consumers, and the president might have asked the assembled legislators whether their current tax breaks might be redirected into a real energy initiative.
•

Simply calling for more innovation is painless. The hard part is calling for anything that smacks of sacrifice — on the part of consumers or special interests, and politicians who depend on their support. After 9/11, the president had the perfect moment to put the nation on the road toward energy independence, when people were prepared to give up their own comforts in the name of a greater good. He passed it by, and he missed another opportunity last night.

Of all the defects in Mr. Bush`s energy presentation, the greatest was his unwillingness to address global warming — an energy-related emergency every bit as critical as our reliance on foreign oil. Except for a few academics on retainer at the more backward energy companies, virtually no educated scientist disputes that the earth has grown warmer over the last few decades — largely as a result of increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels.

The carbon lodged in the atmosphere by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years has already taken a toll: disappearing glaciers, a thinning Arctic icecap, dead or dying coral reefs, increasingly violent hurricanes. Even so, given robust political leadership and technological ingenuity, the worst consequences — widespread drought and devastating rises in sea levels —can be averted if society moves quickly to slow and ultimately reverse its output of greenhouse gases. This will require a fair, cost-effective program of carbon controls at home and a good deal of persuasion and technological assistance in countries like China, which is building old-fashioned, carbon-producing coal-fired power plants at a frightening clip.

Mr. Bush said he would look for cleaner ways to power our homes and offices, and provide more money for the Energy Department`s search for a "zero emission" coal-fired plant whose carbon dioxide emissions can be injected harmlessly into the ground without adding to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But once again he chose to substitute long-range research — and a single, government-sponsored research program at that — for the immediate investments that have to be made across the entire industrial sector.

That Mr. Bush has taken a pass on this issue is a negligence from which the globe may never recover. While he seems finally to have signed on to the idea that the earth is warming, and that humans are heavily responsible, he has rejected serious proposals to do anything about it and allowed his advisers on the issue to engage in a calculated program of disinformation. At the recent global summit on warming, his chief spokesmen insisted that the president`s program of voluntary reductions by individual companies had resulted in a reduction in emissions, when in fact the reverse was true.
•

The State of the Union speech is usually a feel-good event, and no one could fault Mr. Bush`s call for research, or fail to applaud his call for replacing more than 75 percent of the nation`s oil imports from the Middle East within the next two decades. But while the goal was grand, the means were minuscule. The president has never been serious about energy independence. Like so many of our leaders, he is content to acknowledge the problem and then offer up answers that do little to disturb the status quo. If the war on terror must include a war on oil dependence, Mr. Bush is in retreat.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Es ist selten, dass ein Konservativer lernfähig ist. Friedman hat bewiesen, dass es in beschränktem Maße geht.

So far the democracy wave the Bush team has helped to unleash in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11 has brought to power hard-line Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, Palestine and Iran, and paved the way for a record showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. If we keep this up, in a few years Muslim clerics will be in power from Morocco to the border of India. God bless America.

February 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Addicted to Oil
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01friedman.html

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

So far the democracy wave the Bush team has helped to unleash in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11 has brought to power hard-line Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, Palestine and Iran, and paved the way for a record showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. If we keep this up, in a few years Muslim clerics will be in power from Morocco to the border of India. God bless America.

But is this all America`s doing? Not really. It`s actually the product of 50 years of petrolism — or petroleum-based politics — in the Arab-Muslim world. The Bush team`s fault was believing that it could change that — that it could break the Middle East`s addiction to authoritarianism without also breaking America`s addiction to oil. That`s the illusion here. In the Arab world, oil and authoritarianism are inextricably linked.

How so? Let`s start with Iron Rule No. 1 of Arab-Muslim political life today: You cannot go from Saddam to Jefferson without going through Khomeini — without going through a phase of mosque-led politics.

Why? Because once you sweep away the dictator or king at the top of any Middle East state, you go into free fall until you hit the mosque — as the U.S. discovered in Iraq. There is nothing between the ruling palace and the mosque. The secular autocratic regimes, like those in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq, never allowed anything to grow under their feet. They never allowed the emergence of any truly independent judiciary, media, progressive secular parties or civil society groups — from women`s organizations to trade associations.

The mosque became an alternative power center because it was the only place the government`s iron fist could not fully penetrate. As such, it became a place where people were able to associate freely, incubate local leaders and generate a shared opposition ideology.

That is why the minute any of these Arab countries hold free and fair elections, the Islamists burst ahead. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 percent of the seats; Hamas went from nowhere to a governing majority. In both societies the ruling secular parties — the N.D.P. in the case of Egypt and Fatah in the case of Palestine — were spurned as corrupt appendages of the authoritarian state, which they were.

Why are there not more independent, secular, progressive opposition parties running in these places? Because the Arab leaders won`t allow them to sprout. They prefer that the only choice their people have is between the state parties and religious extremists, so as to always make the authoritarian state look indispensable. When Ayman Nour, a liberal independent in Egypt, ran against President Hosni Mubarak, he was thrown in prison as soon as the election was over. Thanks for playing "Democracy" — now go to jail.

It is not this way everywhere. In East Asia, when the military regimes in countries like Taiwan and South Korea broke up, these countries quickly moved toward civilian democracies. Why? Because they had vibrant free markets, with independent economic centers of power, and no oil. Whoever ruled had to nurture a society that would empower its men and women to get educated and start companies to compete globally, because that was the only way they could thrive.

In the Arab-Muslim world, however, the mullah dictators in Iran and the secular dictators elsewhere have been able to sustain themselves in power much longer, without ever empowering their people, without ever allowing progressive parties to emerge, because they had oil or its equivalent — massive foreign aid.

Hence Iron Rule No. 2: Removing authoritarian leaders in the Arab-Muslim world, either by revolution, invasion or election, is necessary for the emergence of stable democracies there — but it is not sufficient. The only way the new leaders will allow for real political parties, institutions, free press, competitive free markets and proper education — a civil society — is if we also bring down the price of oil and make internal reform the only way for these societies to sustain themselves. People change when they have to, not when we tell them to.

If you just remove the dictators, and don`t also bring down the price of oil, you end up with Iran — with mullah dictators replacing military dictators and using the same oil wealth to keep their people quiet and themselves in power. Only when oil is back down to $20 a barrel will the transition from Saddam to Jefferson not get stuck in "Khomeini Land."

In the Middle East, oil and democracy do not mix. It`s not an accident that the Arab world`s first and only true democracy — Lebanon — never had a drop of oil.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Didn`t See It Coming, Again
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01dowd.html

By MAUREEN DOWD

Washington

The White House should hire an anthropologist.

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn`t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state of the union is sour but the state of the world is chilling, thanks to a hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that was once billed as a seasoned "dream team."

The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to tempestuous parts of the world, the more it discovers that you may be able to spin and scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle East is not so easy to manipulate. W. believes in self-determination only if he`s doing the determining. Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but elsewhere they`re violently opposing him.

It`s stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" — assuming other cultures think like us — doesn`t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama`s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

Bush officials keep claiming they couldn`t have anticipated disasters — from the terrorist attacks to Katrina — even when they got specific warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake nuclear threat in Iraq, they misplayed the real ones in Iran and North Korea. In London Sunday, Condi Rice admitted that all of our diplomats and spies were caught off guard by the Hamas win. "I`ve asked why nobody saw it coming," she said. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

Instead of paying the Lincoln Group millions to plant fake newspaper stories in Iraq, the Bush team might try reading real newspaper stories here. Instead of simply believing any fact that makes him feel self-important, the president might try reading history.

Like many other presidential candidates I`ve interviewed, W. said he liked Winston Churchill. But if he really had read Churchill, he would at least have understood that the Middle East never turns out the way you expect. Churchill, who called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano," would not have been surprised by the new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll showing that close to half of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces.

The State of the Union is a non-event. But Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, being blown up by a roadside bomb has forced the media to focus on what the Bushies try to hide — all the injured and maimed coming home from Iraq.

Mark Landler`s Times piece noted that the ABC journalists came to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, "on a military transport plane carrying 31 wounded soldiers — about a normal daily influx for this hospital."

As Denise Grady wrote in The Times, the survival rate in Iraq is higher than in other wars, but the wounds are multiple and awful: "combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress."

The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five oblivious years, about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton and Exxon are swimming in profits — Exxon`s revenues were bigger than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia or Indonesia — was rich.

A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq "a black hole." The "spiraling security disaster," she told Larry King, had robbed Iraqis of hope, "and by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse."

But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East country — and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another — without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?

* Copyright 2006The 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/

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

How to Tell if Bush is Serious about Ending US Dependence on Foreign Petroleum

Bush said last night he wanted to end the dependence of the United States on foreign petroleum. That is not the right goal, since if we just burned coal and ran electric cars we could be independent. But we`d accelerate global warming and give ourselves black lung.

The goal should be vastly reducing our use of hydrocarbons. Global warming is going to drown a lot of our coastal areas and send hurricanes on more of our cities if it keeps accelerating this way. Once the arctic shelves go into the drink and the ocean heats up sufficiently, you could have a rise in sea level of 20 feet. New Orleans, as bad as it was, would look like a picnic in comparison with this level of catastrophe.

The way you could tell Bush was serious would be if he ordered the Pentagon to use green sources of energy where possible. If a major US bureacracy spent even a few billions on things like solar power and electric vehicles, there would be technological breakthroughs and prices would plummet.

Or Bush could rescind some of his tax cuts for the super-rich and use the money as incentive for green energy.

But as long as Bush, who is as he keeps reminding us, the chief executive officer of the US government, doesn`t even require his own employees to try to use less petroleum, then all he is doing is mouthing plattitudes he stole from Al Gore and John Kerry, without intending to do more than flap his lips.

In the old SPD/Green government in Germany, substantial strides were made toward profitable solar power companies, because of government investment and support. That is what a real energy policy would look like, Mr. Bush. Get one.

posted by Juan @ [url2/01/2006 06:31:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/how-to-tell-if-bush-is-serious-about.html[/url] 0 comments

14 Bodies in Baghdad US Talks with Guerrillas Halted

Altogether 14 dead bodies showed up in the capital of Baghdad on Tuesday, all shot in what were probably sectarian reprisals. Four Iraqi troops were killed in a clash with guerrillas. A British soldier was killed.

A new poll shows that nearly half of Iraqis approve of attacks on US troops, and almost all Sunni Arabs do. Most Iraqis want the US military out of their country within 6 months to 2 years. Over 70 percent of Sunni Arabs want them out within 6 months. Most Iraqis fear that the US seeks permanent bases in Iraq. Most feel, however, that if the US withdrew, the new Iraqi government could govern the country.

Al-Zaman reports that its sources in Damascus tell it that the secret negotiations [Ar.] between the US military and the Sunni Arab guerrilla leaders, conducted via intermediaries, have broken down and been suspended. The guerrillas made an unalterable demand that the US set a timetable for withdrawing its troops from Iraq. The US, which had offered them a place in the new government if they would lay down their arms, refused to set such a timetable.

The negotiations never had a chance to widen to the whole guerrilla movement. The persons to whom the US was speaking said that would cease their attacks if the US would sign a binding treaty guaranteeing the unity, sovereignty and independence of Iraq, in addition to a withdrawal timetable. They also demanded that the old Iraqi army be completely reconstituted and rearmed just as it had been. They also wanted compensation for damages. They said it would not be involved in politics. They wanted elections supervised directly by the United Nations. They demanded that all laws be abrogated that reflected foreign influence or contributed to a possible break-up of the country. They demanded that all militias of the religious parties be dissolved, especially those in the Shiite south.

Al-Hayat maintains [Ar.] that the Scorpion Brigade, a unit of the Shiite-dominated ministry of the interior, has made a deal with the chiefs of the major clans in northern Babil province, a guerrilla hotspot. They will be guaranteed the sanctity of their property if they cooperate in curbing guerrilla actions in that area. They have formed popular committees for this purpose. The tribes or clans include Al-Gharir, al-Shujayriyah, al-Sa`id, al-Janabiyin, Humayyir, Al-Bu `Alwan, Al-Bu Mustafa, Khafajah, al-`Awadiyin, Al-Shibl, and al-Kuray`at. Most of them are heavily Sunni.

Al-Zaman reports the death of Idris al-Hajj Da`ud, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front in Mosul, of a heart attack. Born in that city in 1934, he was the founder of the Mosul Muslim Brotherhood with Shaikh Muhammad Mahmud al-Sawaf. The Iraqi Islamic Party, of which he was a leading member after the fall of Saddam, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in Egypt. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has done well in recent elections. In Palestine, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood is known as Hamas, and recently swept to power in parliament. The latter development is decried by the Bush administration, but it welcomed Sunni Muslim fundamentalists` participation in the recent elections in Iraq.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari yesterday appointed Hashim al-Hashimi (Virtue Party) the interim Petroleum Minister, adding it to his earlier portfolio as ministry of tourism. (I suppose he must have had time on his hands.)

Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, who resigned as petroleum minister, told al-Zaman [the Times of Baghdad] [Ar.] that the oil ministry has become an object of competition among the rivals for the post of prime minister. Al-Zaman asked him if the Sadrist Virtue [Fadhilah] Party had tried so hard to get the ministry of petroleum--despite the short time any new ministry would have to serve-- because it hoped to keep the portfolio in the next government. Bahr al-Ulum said he would not rule it out. The ministry of petroleum is the backbone of the Iraqi state, he said, and decried the lively competition for it within the UIA.

Al-Zaman asked Bahr al-Ulum if Jaafari gave the interim minister of petroleum portfolio to the Virtue Party in a bid to seal its support of his own candidacy to be prime minister. Virtue or Fadhila has 15 seats in the religious Shiite alliance that will dominate parliament. Again, Bahr al-Ulum said that the state of Iraqi politics is such that it is plausible that Jaafari made this move (i.e. used the advantages of incumbency for influence peddling).

Bahr al-Ulum had originally been a member of the Virtue Party, but resigned as minister of petroleum in protest against last December`s decision to triple the price of petroleum for Iraqis, removing some government price supports. The Virtue Party leadership, an associate of Bahr al-Ulum`s charged, deeply disliked this move. After Bahr al-Ulum had been removed and then reinstated, Fadhilah asked him to resign yet again. They feared Jaafari would appoint an interim minister from some other party and Virtue would forfeit its claim on the post. He said that Ahmad Chalabi was perhaps one beneficiary of the shake-up.

He decried the lack of vision among the Iraqi political parties, which led them to squabble over such positions.

posted by Juan @ [url2/01/2006 06:29:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/how-to-tell-if-bush-is-serious-about.html[/url] 0 comments

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China ist die größte Herausforderung für die USA.
Auch wenn augenblicklich der Handel zwischen beiden Ländern blüht, wird China irgendwann der USA die Rechnung präsentieren. Und das beginnt schon mit Taiwan!

Resistance grows to US assumption of primacy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,,1699408,00.…

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday February 1, 2006

Guardian
Stressing the indispensability of American global leadership is standard fare in State of the Union addresses, and George Bush`s speech last night was no exception. But a string of foreign policy setbacks has highlighted growing flaws in Washington`s long cherished assumption of international primacy.

China`s rapid rise presents the most obvious long-term challenge to American ascendancy. It recently overtook Britain and Italy to become the world`s fourth largest economy. And its political clout is growing even faster, as Robert Zoellick, the US deputy secretary of state, was reminded last week.

Visiting Beijing, Mr Zoellick said the US wanted China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in global good governance. "China could play a very positive role in the international system, from issues dealing with non-proliferation to energy security to counter-terrorism," he said.

But Mr Zoellick quickly hit trouble when he got down to specifics. His plea for China to back the formal referral of Iran`s nuclear activities to the UN security council for possible punitive sanctions was rebuffed. Beijing`s stonewalling recalled similar blocking action over Darfur.

China`s simultaneous feting in Beijing of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia meanwhile offered a different, unsettling perspective on the energy security issues raised by Mr Zoellick. Joint agreements on extraction and refining mean increasing amounts of Saudi crude oil will be earmarked for China rather than the US, Riyadh`s long-time number one customer.

China`s courting of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il, who secretly toured the country last month, may only aggravate another of Mr Zoellick`s concerns - how to separate Pyongyang from the nuclear bombs it claims to possess. Adding to American discomfiture, South Korea`s president, Roh Moo Hyun, warned Washington not to use or even threaten to use force to achieve regime change and the overthrow of Mr Kim. Such mutinous talk from a traditionally close US ally would once have been quite unthinkable - but not now.

Similarly jolting rejections of once unquestioned American authority are proliferating. The Palestinian vote for Hamas ignored US pressure and financial string-pulling and left its Middle East peace policy in tatters.

While they might once have quietly acquiesced, India and Pakistan reacted sharply and publicly to recent US attempts to block trade with Iran and an "unauthorised" attack on a supposed al-Qaida hideout. Flexing its energy muscle, Russia has simply ignored US protests over its treatment of NGOs and its gas pipeline rows with Ukraine and Georgia.

Despite Condoleezza Rice`s bid for a post-Iraq fresh start, European opinion has been alienated all over again by the extraordinary rendition row. In Iraq itself, allies such as Italy are breaking ranks, intent on bringing troops home whether or not Mr Bush deems the job done.

In his book The Opportunity, Richard Haass suggested that US over-reaching, as seen in Iraq and in Mr Bush`s grandiose second term "vision" to set the world free, was partly responsible for the trend towards rejection of American leadership. "It is neither desirable nor practical to make democracy promotion a foreign policy doctrine," Mr Haass, a former US government official, said. "Too many pressing threats in which the lives of millions hang in the balance (threats such as nuclear proliferation and genocide) will not be solved by the emergence of democracy."

But he argued that US primacy was also increasingly vulnerable to non-military challenges that were beyond the control of any administration. The US should pursue more collaborative, integrated policies - or risk rising "passive resistance" internationally. "For the immediate future, non-cooperation is likely to be a more frequent and bigger problem for US foreign policy than direct opposition."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Schon oft versprochen und immer wieder gebrochen!

Fuels gold

George Bush delivered a State of the Union address loaded with optimism, but read the small print, warns Julian Borger

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1699480,00.html

Julian Borger
Wednesday February 1, 2006

Guardian Unlimited
It was, as one Washington wag pointed out, almost certainly the first State of the Union address in US history to mention switch grass. It is also known, perhaps more appropriately as tall panicgrass. It grows in marshes and may, according to George Bush, be part of the solution to America`s oil addiction - along with woodchips and stalks.

In six years, the president said, the ethanol derived from such vegetable matter would be a viable, affordable fuel for America`s cars. This coupled with other innovations, hydrogen fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles would replace three quarters of America`s current consumption of oil from the Middle East.

If nothing else, it was a masterful stroke of public relations by the political virtuosi in the White House. Expectations of the speech had been lowered for weeks and press attention had been diverted to a host of red herrings. Then the president took the press by surprise with extraordinary plans and seemingly hard figures promising optimistic solutions to two of the greatest anxieties currently facing America: high fuel prices and the spectre of being overshadowed economically by China and India.

To address the former, he promised an inventive technological fix. To the latter, he pledged 70,000 more science teachers and 30,000 professional mathematicians and scientists to be drafted into classrooms, to help schoolchildren prepare for the economic struggle to come.

Who could disagree? Alternative fuels and more teachers are solutions most Americans would embrace. There are some grounds for sceptical pause however. President Bush has been here before. He has pledged more support for alternative fuel technologies in previous State of the Union addresses, but US dependence on foreign oil has continued to rise throughout his tenure.

He persuaded Democrats to join hands with him on the No Child Left Behind education act in early 2002, which promised an extraordinary federal focus on improving schools, but then his administration failed to come up with enough money to run the programme.

Addressing the nation from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush captured the headlines by promising the city would "rise again", only "higher and better" than before. Months on, reconstruction work is hamstrung for lack of funds.

He has also used the State of the Union speech to offer the bold vision of American astronauts returning to the moon and using it as a launching pad to Mars. Once again, the vision was there, but the necessary money has not been forthcoming.

Then there is the small print to examine. Mr Bush`s oil independence pledge is less ambitious than it seems at first glance. He predicted the US would replace 75% of Middle East oil imports by 2025, but only a fifth of American imports come from the region. So the alternative fuels would only account for 15% of total imports. That does not sound so breathtaking.

To achieve his goals, the president wants to rely - once more - on market incentives spurred on by an American spirit of innovation, and avoid government regulation. But that approach has done little to curb greenhouse gases. The White House opposed a bipartisan congressional measure to tighten fuel economy standards four years ago, and the tax system actually encourages the use of huge four-wheel drive SUVs (sports utility vehicles). Since George Bush took office, net imports of oil have risen from 53% of consumption to 60%.

Reacting to last night`s speech, Jason Mark, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said: "We could save more than 75% of Middle East oil imports within ten years by increasing the fuel economy of our cars and trucks to 40 miles per gallon. The investments in renewable fuel technologies the president proposed will pay important dividends down the road. But you can`t transform transportation by research alone. We need aggressive policies now to wean ourselves off oil."

The State of the Union tradition is an important presidential asset. It is an extraordinary piece of theatre, which provides a string of television soundbites complete with excited applause. But increasingly, that is all it is. Once the curtain comes down and the show moves on, the audience is left humming some of the catchier tunes, but can rarely remember much of the plot.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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[urlS.F. PROTEST: Raucous Union Square rally]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/01/PROTEST.TMP
Activists protest in Union Square during President Bush`s State of the Union address on Tuesday.[/url]
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Activist arrest: Sheehan hauled in from House gallery
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/01/S…

- Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Washington -- Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, given a ticket by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, to attend President Bush`s State of the Union address Tuesday evening, was arrested by Capitol police in the front row of the House gallery, reportedly for wearing a T-shirt with an anti-war message in violation of House rules.

Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq while serving in the Army, gained national fame in August when she camped out near Bush`s Crawford, Texas, ranch unsuccessfully seeking a meeting with the president. Since then she has campaigned against the war and was arrested outside the White House in September.

Woolsey gave Sheehan her lone visitor`s pass for the speech earlier in the day at an anti-Bush event sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is co-chaired by Woolsey.

Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said Sheehan was charged with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor. She was taken in handcuffs to police headquarters a few blocks away and was expected to be released on her own recognizance later.

Schneider told the Associated Press that Sheehan wore a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that the shirt was not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

"It stunned me because I didn`t know in America you could be arrested for wearing a T-shirt with a slogan on it,`` Woolsey said. "That`s especially so in the Capitol and in the House of Representatives, which is the people`s House.``

Woolsey said she thought the shirt Sheehan was wearing was from Veterans for Peace. Referring to the number of Americans killed in Iraq, the shirt read, "2,245 and how many more?``

Some other members were upset about Sheehan`s arrest. "I`m still trying to find out why the president`s Gestapo had to arrest Cindy Sheehan in the gallery. ... It shows he still has a thin skin,`` said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont.

In the morning, Sheehan had attended an event at Democratic National Committee headquarters near the Capitol, where she chatted with lawmakers and party activists.

She told The Chronicle that she is seriously considering challenging California Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the Democratic primary this year because she doesn`t think Feinstein has been vigorous enough in opposing Bush`s Iraq policy. The senator voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq.

"The Democratic Party has not been a true opposition party. It`s been very weak -- and frankly, the war is not the only issue."

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/01/S…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Through the second half of 2004, Washington appeared to function in a policy void, as the neo-conservative faction in the security establishment, which had already edged out the traditional multilateralists, lost influence with no competing tendency strong enough to take its place.

Bis jetzt kann ich nicht erkennen, dass eine brauchbare Alternative entwickel wurde.

Wenn man von dem nutzlosen Aktivismus des US-Botschafters Khalilzad im Irak absieht. Denn eine Rückkehr der Sunniten in die Politik gibt es nur, wenn die USA einen Plan zum Abzug vorlegen. Und daran scheinen die Verhandlungen zu scheitern.

Dass es Unzufriedenheit mit der Zarqawi-Gruppe unter den mehr säkularen Sunniten gibt, ist schon seit langem bekannt. Und auch, dass man meinte, Zarqawi oder wer es auch immer sein mag, unter Kontrolle zu haben, wurde auch schon vor längerem von den Sunniten behauptet. Bis jetzt haben sie es aber noch nicht auf eine Machtprobe ankommen lassen.
In anderen Weltregionen kommen von der USA bis jetzt meist nur leere Worte. [urlThe world according to George W Bush]http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article342131.ece[/url]
Interessant ist, was ich heute gelesen habe, Wolfowitz fordert trotz der Hamas weitere Hilfe für die Palästinenser. Aber der ist ja weg vom Fenster.

Aber schaun wer mal!


Feb 2, 2006

Washington`s geostrategic shift
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB02Ak03.html

By Michael A Weinstein

In quick succession on January 18-19, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced major changes in the operational dimension of Washington`s global diplomatic strategy.

Wrapped in the language of the Bush administration`s campaign to encourage democracy around the world and explained under the rubric of "transformational diplomacy", Rice laid out plans to reposition diplomatic resources from Europe and Washington to emerging power centers in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East.

As well, the administration of foreign aid will be reorganized by creating the post of director of foreign assistance, a job that would entail coordinating aid programs currently dispersed among several agencies and bringing them into line with Washington`s broad foreign-policy goals.

Rice`s announcements culminate a major revision of Washington`s overall geostrategy that has been in the making since 2004 when the failures of the Iraq intervention exposed the limitations of US military capabilities and threw into question the unilateralist doctrine outlined in the administration`s 2002 National Security Strategy.

Through the second half of 2004, Washington appeared to function in a policy void, as the neo-conservative faction in the security establishment, which had already edged out the traditional multilateralists, lost influence with no competing tendency strong enough to take its place. That picture changed in 2005 when Rice became secretary of state and moved to fill the policy vacuum by implementing her realist vision based on classical balance of power.

In a January 18 speech at Georgetown University, where she sketched out how US diplomatic resources would be repositioned, Rice left behind the scenario of the neo-conservatives and their allies in Vice President Dick Cheney`s office that is premised on the ability of the US to achieve sufficient military superiority to allow it to act alone to secure its global interests in the long term. Rather than thinking in terms of a unipolar configuration of world power dominated by the United States, Rice embraced multipolarity and the acknowledgment of Washington`s limitations that follows from it.

Nearly echoing the analysis of Beijing`s 2005 defense white paper, Rice asserted that "states are increasingly competing and cooperating in peace, not preparing for war". The complex web of convergent and divergent interests occurs within the context of a dispersion of power among regions - the hallmark of multipolarity: "In the 21st century, geographic regions are growing ever more integrated economically, politically and culturally." Within regions, dominant power centers are rising: "In the 21st century, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history." The 21st century, in Rice`s view, will not be a second "American century"; it will be a global century defined by what PINR (Power and Interest News Report) has called "the new regionalism".

The shift in Washington`s geostrategic thinking from what it was from September 11, 2001, through the Iraq intervention in 2003 could not be more pronounced. It proceeds from the time-honored rule of international relations that policy follows power. Rice`s analysis was preceded by a change in the Pentagon`s perspective through 2005 in which military planners introduced the idea that Washington was entering a "long war" to secure its interests against Islamic revolutionaries and a long-term attempt to contain rising regional power centers that would require partnerships and stabilization efforts around the world.

Rice`s view is no longer one voice among several in the administration of President George W Bush; her growing prominence and influence represent an acceptance in Washington of the reality of multipolarity. This realization brings the United States into line with the consensus among other world powers and is likely to persist in succeeding administrations.

Now that Washington has begun to accept a world in which the US does not shape the course of history according to its own agenda, but is a major player in an intricate and evolving pattern of cooperative and competitive relations, it has positioned itself to develop strategies for restoring some of the influence that it has lost as a result of the Iraq intervention and, far more important, as a consequence of the redistribution of global power that was beyond its control. Such strategic innovation in response to polycentricity is behind Rice`s State Department reforms.

Diplomatic repositioning
Rice`s Georgetown speech is a curious mixture of the Bush administration`s current ideology - advanced in the president`s 2005 inaugural address - that the US would "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture", and a statement of concrete measures that would - if they can be implemented successfully - represent steps toward a realistic adaptation of US diplomacy in a multipolar world.

Promotion of democracy abroad has been a recurrent theme of US presidents for nearly a century and has always run up against the fact that Washington`s perceived interests often require it to cooperate with non-democratic regimes and movements, and to undermine democratic tendencies. It is not to be expected that the Bush administration will close the familiar gap between rhetoric and practice; indeed, in her speech, Rice singled out for praise "good partners like Pakistan and Jordan", neither of which is a democracy.

If the democracy language has any concrete import, it refers to the belief in sectors of Washington`s security establishment that US interests are best served by market-oriented governments that allow enough popular participation and sufficient independence of civil-society groups to dissipate anti-US left and right oppositions. As is the case with every state, the US above all wants regimes that are favorable to its perceived interests. All other things being equal, Washington would prefer that those regimes follow democratic forms. When - as in Georgia`s Rose Revolution and Ukraine`s Orange Revolution - people power combines with market-oriented and pro-Western leadership, Washington will back the democratic movement. Awareness of that has caused governments around the world to look on Washington with suspicion and to distance themselves from it.

The high concept of Rice`s version of the democratization ideology is "transformational diplomacy", which she defines as "a diplomacy that not only reports about the world as it is, but seeks to change the world itself". Here, either Rice is only rephrasing what all states have always done, or she is announcing a policy of soft regime change to replace the hard version of military regime change represented by the Iraq intervention. If it is regime change that she has in mind, it is not clear that a public announcement of a policy to destabilize in order to try to gain greater stability serves Washington`s interests.

The significance of Rice`s new diplomatic strategy does not reside in its ideological rhetoric, which can be pared away without loss, but in its concrete measures to reposition Washington`s diplomatic resources that begin what is likely to be a long-term trend in US foreign policy regardless of which political party controls the presidency and what ideology it adopts.

Taking up the thinking of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry`s foreign-policy and security team, Rice noted in her speech that in light of the probable peaceful future of relations among great powers, "the fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power". Among the threats to US security, she identified terrorism, pandemics, arms proliferation and failed states, all of which can only be countered by cooperation with regional powers and access to trouble spots.

At the heart of Rice`s plan to respond to the emerging threat pattern is the redistribution of US diplomats to the rising power centers around the world, starting immediately with 100 and reaching, according to analysts, as many as one-third of the 4,000 foreign service officers during the next decade.

The mission of US diplomacy will also be redefined through a series of measures ranged under the idea of "forward deployment", in which diplomats will go into the field and administer programs in addition to their traditional duties. Regional public-diplomacy centers will be created to counter anti-US media, "American Presence Posts" - sometimes staffed by only one diplomat - will be set up outside capital cities, and there will be "Virtual Presence Posts" - local interactive websites - to appeal primarily to youth. Diplomats will work directly on projects to improve health care, reform education, set up businesses, fight corruption and encourage democratic practices.

Diplomats will also coordinate more closely with the US military through political advisers, and the State Department`s Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization will have access to up to US$100 million from the Department of Defense to manage post-conflict situations - recognition of the shortcomings in planning for the aftermath of the Iraq intervention.

Although Rice claims her revision of US diplomatic strategy is a "bold" initiative, it is actually only a first step toward making Washington a more effective player in a multipolar world, and it promises only limited success. Most important, to be successful the reforms will have to be backed by adequate funds, which are unlikely to be made available under the conditions of persisting budget deficits.

There are also questions about how security will be provided for the American Presence Posts, and the effectiveness of public diplomacy has yet to be proved in regions, such as the Middle East, where anti-US sentiment has become deeply entrenched and is bound up with opposition to US policies. Finally, it remains to be seen how much access regimes that are suspicious of Washington`s aims will grant its diplomats.

Rice`s reforms follow a pattern that has been established by the Pentagon in its redeployment of troops from Europe and South Korea to smaller bases within the "arc of instability" that stretches from East Africa through Central Asia. That policy has been limited by failures to gain access when Washington has provoked hostility from local regimes, such as in Eritrea and Uzbekistan. The same problem is likely to come up when Rice`s strategy is implemented.

When Rice`s reforms are considered as a whole, their most significant components are her forthright acknowledgment that "partnership" is necessary in order to manage threats to US security and the simple shifting of diplomats to emerging regional power centers. What those diplomats will do and how effective they will be will depend more on Washington`s positions in inter- and intra-state conflicts than on the mechanics of forward deployment.

Centralization of foreign aid
Having laid out her revision of US diplomatic strategy, Rice moved on January 19 to announce her reorganization of foreign assistance to the staff of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Here, the heart of Rice`s reform was the centralization of the administration of foreign aid, along the lines of the Bush administration`s 2004 restructuring of the intelligence apparatus, aimed at coordinating assistance programs to serve the goals defined in her statement of diplomatic strategy.

To bring the various aid programs controlled by the State Department under unified guidance, a new post of director of foreign assistance (DFA) has been created. The new director will superintend the Office of Global AIDS Coordinator, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and USAID. The DFA will also be the USAID administrator, bringing that agency, which has previously been independent, under greater State Department direction.

Accounting for $14 billion of the yearly $18 billion US foreign-assistance budget, USAID had been given its relative independence to ensure it would pursue its mission of providing long-term development aid unfettered by temporary changes in foreign policy. Although Rice assured USAID`s staff that its mission would be unimpaired by the reform, she also made it clear that foreign assistance would be "aligned" with the objectives of her transformational diplomacy.

There is little doubt that Rice does not intend the reorganization to be merely cosmetic and that she wants to diminish the power of USAID to allocate funds - the "dual-hatting" of DFA and USAID administrator will not serve to bring all foreign assistance under the development agenda, but will gear development programs to serve strategic aims.

Rice`s reform plan met with predictable criticism from elements inside and outside USAID who believe that Washington`s long-term interests are best advanced by insulating development programs from political pressures. While that argument has merits, so does Rice`s view that Washington needs to mobilize its diplomatic and financial resources to restore its global power - a process that will demand genuine sacrifices.

As is the case with her plan to reposition diplomats, Rice`s reorganization of foreign assistance has strict limitations. Outgoing USAID administrator Andrew Natsios has identified congressional earmarking of aid as a greater problem than deficiencies in coordination, and earmarking will not be touched by Rice`s reform. In addition, the State Department will not gain control over assistance programs that are currently dispersed among the Defense, Agriculture and Commerce departments. It is also likely that there will be resistance within USAID to integrating its organizational culture into the State Department`s. Again, Rice`s reorganization is more a first step than a bold transformation.

Conclusion
Reflecting Washington`s diminished position in the global configuration of power, Rice`s revisions of US diplomatic strategy and her reorganization of foreign assistance will have limited immediate effect and will be hindered from long-term success by constraints resulting from the likelihood of budgetary austerity. Nonetheless, Rice`s reforms are significant because they are embraced by a multipolar perspective on world politics that brings Washington into line with the other major power centers. Her reforms put into place concrete measures that follow from that perspective, even though they are - as should be expected - just a beginning.

Rice has made it plain that the new diplomatic strategy is predicated on a sustained effort that will take at least a generation to bear fruit - another long war like the one envisaged by Pentagon planners. That effort - even if it were successful - would not restore the US to the dominating position that it held temporarily after the fall of the Soviet Union, but it might stem Washington`s loss of power and even strengthen its position if it were deft at manipulating regional balances of power.

Within the context of the general consensus that world politics are structured by a complex web of competition and cooperation that is stressed by Islamic revolution, competition over natural resources, the eruption of populism, state failure, environmental degradation and the possibility of pandemics, other power centers will welcome Washington`s acknowledgment of multipolarity at the same time that they will be challenged by it.

Published with permission of the Power and Interest News Report, an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. All comments should be directed to [e-mail] .

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Only about 74 percent of Americans call themselves Christian nowadays, down from 86 percent about 15 years ago. What`s more, it seems [urlthe numbers are dropping steadily,]http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm a little less than 1 percent a year.[/url]
Vielleicht sind in 50 Jahren auch die islamischen Staaten demokratiefähig, und dann gibt es doch noch ein Happyend!

The Real State Of The Union

How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, February 1, 2006

My fellow Americans, we`re not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

Yes, we are on the brink of epic destruction involving war and sweaty religious nutballs and a mad grab for the planet`s few remaining gurgles of oil and the general appalling lousiness of the new TV season. But that`s not necessarily a bad thing. Destruction can be healthy. A positive force. Destruction sweeps the place bare, scrubs out the spiritual colon, cleanses the palate for what`s next. And besides, have you seen "Grey`s Anatomy"? Totally cute.

But here`s the best part: No one really knows what`s next. Oh sure, we have prognosticators and pundits and professional fearmongers from the GOP and the religious right who want to tell you that the apocalypse is nigh and God hates everything you do and if the terrorists don`t get your fresh innocent white babies, the gays or the pot smokers or the rappers will.

But the truth is, we really haven`t the slightest clue what`s going on. Hell, 20 years ago, who could have predicted the insane rise of the Internet? The success of the Toyota Prius? Five-hundred-dollar Gucci iPod cases? Polyphonic ring tones? Dark matter? The baffling success of Ashlee Simpson? Puggles? This much we know: We don`t know squat. Except, of course, that there is one hell of a lot more to know.

Yes, the Bush administration has done more to harm the economy and decimate the national spirit and rape the notion of patriotism than any administration in 100 years. It might very well be true -- hell, we all know it`s true -- but is that all there is?

Juicy progress has occurred, despite Dubya and his ilk. Hell, in 1942 you couldn`t buy a vibrator to save your life, much less your marriage. People were playing scratchy 78s on their steam-powered turntables and danced in heavy girdles made of bailing wire and lost hopes. Merely uttering the words "double soy mocha latte" in some states would get you shot for being some sort of Communist. Life was brutal. Thongs had yet to be invented. Radiohead didn`t exist. Telephones were made of wood and string and lots of yelling. People ate meat from a can. Power steering was science fiction.

This much we know: Progress is measured in fits and hurls and recoils and lurches. We are certainly not where we were, but in some ways, we are stuck there like a pig in quicksand. It`s a conundrum. Make that a paradox. A cosmic knock-knock joke. It is merely the way.

Here is some interesting news: Only about 74 percent of Americans call themselves Christian nowadays, down from 86 percent about 15 years ago. What`s more, it seems the numbers are dropping steadily, a little less than 1 percent a year. Which means, in about 30 years from now, Christians could be a minority in the United State. What are we to make of this? Here`s the most fascinating aspect: God is smiling about it.

Although there`s a desperate need to cling on to the old, unenlightened ways, a deep trembling fear of change and progress, a need by the PTB to force everyone into little manageable boxes of identity and function, all while absolutely refusing to allow intellect and gender and belief to be as fluid and fascinating as they so desperately want to be, the good news is, the cat is out of the bag and she`s sprinting for the border, singing Led Zep`s "Black Dog" and laughing maniacally.

Art will not die. Gay rights marches awkwardly on. Wicca is the fastest-growing religion in America. Sex keeps us more giddy than ever. New galaxies get discovered. Women laugh. Communication evolves. Vibrator quality improves. Wars end. All this pseudo-Christian panic is merely the last spasm of a dying dogma. Which is to say, conservatives may wail and religions may pule, but love winks and shrugs and evolves anyway, despite them both.

You see, magic abounds. Change can blink clumsily to life even in the dankest of corners. Take health care. You will hear much about health care this year. Health care is a nasty, bloated mess, a massive crisis, bigger than any other fiscal issue facing the nation, could very well bankrupt the U.S. government. One reason costs are so high and HMOs are so abusive is because the health industry has powerful lobbyists and the industry CEOs are cronies of the president. What are we to do about this?

Maybe not as much as you might think. Because now a funny thing is happening: Ironically, the powerful crony CEOs of all the other major American corporations, like GM and Wal-Mart and even Starbucks, have become royally furious about how much of their overhead is going to pay for employee health care and are letting Congress feel their wrath, forcing a change. It is the battle of the BushCo cronies!

See, sometimes positive change can happen, even when it`s not borne of decent or humanitarian purposes. Of course your current gummint doesn`t care a whit about you or your health or well-being. They care about power and money and control. But sometimes even that works out sort of OK. Weird.

A sort of chaotic, forward-lurching equilibrium prevails. Even powerful, seemingly ironclad secrets cannot hold. The Bush administration is the cagiest and most morally abusive in decades, and we`ve worked like paranoid ferrets to narrow the extent and application of America`s landmark laws regarding open government, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Presidential Records Act. In other words, they don`t want you to know crap about how deep their lies go.

But look. In one short year, the sneering, all-consuming GOP has gone from master of all domains, from owning every aspect of the federal government and launching multiple failed wars and abusing all laws and spying and wiretapping and torturing and lying, to one of the least stable parties in ages. Scandals, indictments, arrests, Abramoff, Enron, DeLay, thousands of dead U.S. soldiers and nothing to show for it but more enraged terrorists, an economy running on fumes. Regimes built on lies and religious fearmongering never last. It`s like a genital rash -- it just seems to take forever to heal.

Are you not reassured? Because this is the amazing thing. There are languages left to learn. Countries you have still not visited. Musical drumbeats you have not felt deep in your tailbone. There are sexual positions and tongue-related sensations and deep longing stares you have yet to hold in your body the way an open palm holds a small bird. It might take another lifetime or three. This is just fine. We have time. Lots of it.

Did you know every religion in the world has some variant of a belief in past lives, in reincarnation? It`s true. Most believe that this earthly plane is merely an intense cosmic schoolroom for our spirits, albeit one of the harshest and meatiest and most spasmodically radiant in the galaxies. And yet we keep coming back here, over and over, millions of times, to learn all the aspects, dark and light and murderous and blissful, so we can move to the next level, help the universe hum that much brighter.

My fellow Americans, I am here to tell you I have no freaking idea why it`s set up this way. But I can tell you one thing: It sure makes for one hell of a ride.

Thank you and God bless America.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark`s column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

As if that weren`t enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin` SF Gate Culture Blog.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
©2006 SF Gate

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Tomgram: Thomas Powers on Spying, Lying, and Saying No
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=54458

This post can be found at
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=54458

On the day that Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared in his nine thousandth video from -- assumedly -- the remarkably technologized wilds of the Afghan-Pakistan border region, mocking President Bush for a botched Predator-drone missile attempt on his life, another article caught my eye. In a piece in the Los Angeles Times, headlined CIA Expands Use of Drones in Terror War, Josh Meyer reported: "Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say." These high-tech, long-distance "targeted killings" from the air -- they used to be called assassinations and Chris Dickey of Newsweek files them away under the rubric of "boys with toys" -- turn out, like acts of torture, to be staggeringly counterproductive. This one, which reportedly killed a number of women and children, shook the regime of Pakistani military strong man and U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf.



Like National Security Agency warrantless spying on U.S. citizens, the waterboarding of captives, and so many other actions of this administration, such assassination attempts rely on the shakiest and most dubious of legal findings produced more or less out of thin air. In fact, thanks to a recent Newsweek investigative piece, Palace Revolt by Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas, we know a good deal more about just how thin that air was. As they report, with the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet convinced that the 9/11 attacks "and the threat of more and worse to come -- were perfect justification for unleashing the CIA and other long-blunted weapons in the national security arsenal," all that was needed was "legal cover, so (the CIA) wouldn`t be left holding the bag if things went wrong."



Here`s where what we now know as the "unitary executive theory," the idea of an unfettered presidency in which George Bush would be commander-in-chief not just of the military but of all of us, came into play. As the three reporters describe the process, David Addington, then the Vice President`s legal counsel (now his chief of staff), fearing opposition within the bureaucracy, "came up with a perfect solution: cut virtually everyone else out." Thus, a legal cabal supported the Rumsfeld/Cheney "cabal" former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson has written about so vehemently.



In this way, a wide-ranging legal justification for the President`s right to do whatever he cared to do as long as we were "at war" burst from the fevered brows of a few top officials and a small group of administration lawyers. From the point of view of my own fevered brow, a single institutional law seems to apply to the administration`s subsequent efforts: Always expand. All programs involving the secret powers of the president -- to torture, imprison, create global prison networks, assassinate, spy on citizens and others, or generally involve the military in civilian life -- started from modest seeds and simply grew and grew without bounds or even any particular relationship to their efficacy. Take the Pentagon`s three year old Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA. Initially a small office charged with "protecting military facilities and personnel," it now has nine directorates, a staff of 1,000, a large secret budget, and its own full-scale secret spying program, code-named Talon, that reported as a "national security threat" ten peace activists "who handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside Halliburton`s headquarters in Houston in June 2004." The same could be said of CIA secret prisons, NSA domestic spying operations, or the new U.S. Northern Command that the administration set up in 2002.



Thomas Powers, author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, explores the meaning of the recent NSA spying scandal below in fascinating detail and the abject failure of Congress (or the American public) to rein in this administration. As he writes trenchantly, "In public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no." It`s clear that the expansion of secret (and not so secret) "war-time" powers proved a heady, addictive experience for top officials of this administration. (Where`s Nancy Reagan and her "just say no" program when we need them most?) Powers` superb essay will be running in the February 23 issue of the New York Review of Books just now heading toward the newsstands. It appears here as an on-line exclusive thanks to the kindness of that magazine`s editors. Tom

The Biggest Secret
By Thomas Powers

A Review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen.

1.

The challenges posed to American democracy by secrecy and by unchecked presidential power are the two great themes running through the history of the Iraq war. How long the war will last, who will "win," and what it will do to the political landscape of the Middle East will not be obvious for years to come, but the answers to those questions cannot alter the character of what happened at the outset. Put plainly, the President decided to attack Iraq, he brushed caution and objection aside, and Congress, the press, and the people, with very few exceptions, stepped back out of the way and let him do it.

Explaining this fact is not going to be easy. Commentators often now refer to President Bush`s decision to invade Iraq as "a war of choice," which means that it was not provoked. The usual word for an unprovoked attack is aggression. Why did Americans -- elected representatives and plain citizens alike -- accede so readily to this act of aggression, and why did they question the President`s arguments for war so feebly? The whole business is painfully awkward to consider, but it will not go away. If the Constitution forbids a president anything it forbids war on his say-so, and if it insists on anything it insists that presidents are not above the law. In plain terms this means that presidents cannot enact laws on their own, or ignore laws that have been enacted by Congress.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is such a law; it was enacted to end years of routine wiretapping of American citizens who had attracted official attention by opposing the war in Vietnam. The express purpose of the act was to limit what presidents could ask intelligence organizations to do. But for limits on presidential power to have meaning Congress and the courts must have the fortitude to say no when they think no is the answer.

In public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no. We are living with the consequences of the inability to say no to the President`s war of choice with Iraq, and we shall soon see how the Congress and the courts will respond to the latest challenge from the White House -- the claim by President Bush that he has the right to ignore FISA`s prohibition of government intrusion on the private communications of Americans without a court order, and his repeated statements that he intends to go right on doing it.

Nobody was supposed to know that FISA had been brushed aside. The fact that the National Security Agency (NSA), America`s largest intelligence organization, had been turned loose to intercept the faxes, e-mails, and phone conversations of Americans with blanket permission by the President remained secret until the New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau learned over a year ago that it was happening. An early version of the story was apparently submitted to the Times` editors in October 2004, when it might have affected the outcome of the presidential election. But the Times, for reasons it has not clearly explained, withheld the story until mid-December 2005 when the newspaper`s publisher and executive editor -- Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller -- met with President Bush in the Oval Office to hear his objections before going ahead. Even then certain details were withheld.

What James Risen learned in the course of his reporting can be found in his newly published book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, a wide-ranging investigation of the role of intelligence in the origins and the conduct of the war in Iraq. Risen contributes much new material to our knowledge of recent intelligence history. He reports in detail, for example, on claims that CIA analysts quit fighting over exaggerated reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as word spread in the corridors at Langley that the President had decided to go to war no matter what the evidence said; that the Saudi government seized and then got rid of tell-tale bank records of Abu Zubaydah, the most important al-Qaeda figure to be captured since September 11; and that "a handful of the most important al Qaeda detainees" have been sent for interrogation to a secret prison codenamed "Bright Light." One CIA specialist in counterterror operations told Risen, "The word is that once you get sent to Bright Light, you never come back."

Digging out intelligence history is a slow process, resisted by officials at every step of the way, and Risen`s work will be often quoted in future accounts of the Iraq war. But nothing else in Risen`s book rivals the NSA story in importance, revealing that the President not only authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking court orders, but to listen in a new way, by intercepting a large volume of communications among categories of people, and then analyzing or "mining" the data in those calls for suspicious patterns that might offer "potential evidence of terrorist activity."

"This is the biggest secret I know about," one official told Risen. The eavesdropping effort is technically known as a "special access program" (SAP), which means that its existence and the information it collects are both tightly held. Within the government, Risen tells us, witting officials referred to it simply as "the program," and even the legal opinions justifying it are classified. Risen traces the origins of the program back to the brief war that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan and resulted in the capture of many al-Qaeda suspects along with their cell phones and computers. These suspects had been calling and e-mailing people throughout the world, many of whom, inevitably, were in the United States, raising understandable fears of new terrorist attacks. But according to Risen, the NSA does not limit itself to monitoring numbers provided by the CIA from captured al-Qaeda phone books, targets for which there is some degree of "probable cause" to think they might be terrorist-connected. Those phone numbers provide only the jumping-off point for the program. The NSA has since broadened its effort by establishing "its own internal checklist" to pinpoint phone numbers and addresses of interest, and it is likely that the items on the list are checked off by a computer program in a nanosecond, not by analysts exercising deliberate judgment.

How big is the target list? At any given moment, Risen believes, the NSA may be "eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the United States...." But his number of five hundred should not be interpreted as an outer limit. The actual volume of intercepted calls is almost certainly a very great deal larger, going beyond communications between known, named persons. Modern eavesdropping seldom mirrors the classic wiretap of yesteryear when FBI agents with earphones might record hundreds of hours of a Mafia chief chatting with his underboss in New York`s Little Italy. The idea now is to see if anyone on the phone in New York or New Jersey sounds in any way like a Mafia chief. A dinner of linguine with clams in a known Mafia hangout could be enough to warrant a further look. The al-Qaeda phone book numbers were the crack in the door; follow-up targets are simply numbers or e-mail addresses, leading to other numbers and e-mail addresses, all plucked from the torrents of traffic transmitted by the switching systems of the major American telecommunications companies, which daily handle two billion phone calls and perhaps ten times as many e-mail messages. What Risen discovered, in short, was a program best described as "big."

2.

Under existing law the NSA should have sought permission from the secret FISA court in Washington before listening in on the communications of any "US persons" -- basically, American corporations, citizens, and others lawfully inside the United States -- who had turned up in al-Qaeda phone books and directories. The law makes provision for emergencies: if investigators feel they don`t have time for legal rigmarole they can act first and then seek permission within the following three days. This was not done. President Bush insisted on New Year`s Day that "This is a limited program... it`s limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States. But they are of known -- numbers of known al-Qaeda members or affiliates." But it seems clear that the NSA program quickly spilled beyond its original limits; the real reason for ignoring the FISA courts is probably a savvy guess that the courts would not approve what the administration wants to do.

Listening to specific persons was only part of it, and not the greater part. What Risen learned, which has been backed up by other press accounts in recent weeks, is that the counterterror investigators from the beginning wanted to cast the net wide -- to listen to all the people in the al-Qaeda phone books, and then broaden their search to the still wider circle of people the phone book names were in touch with, and go on to check out all their contacts as well. If the first generation of targets numbered a hundred, let`s say, and each of them had been talking to a hundred people in a second generation of targets, then even a third generation search could easily sweep up a million people. You can see why investigators desperate to prevent any repetition of the attacks of September 11 would have favored this rapid and wide casting of the net, but that sort of industrial-scale fishing expedition is exactly what the FISA courts were established to prevent.

In the days after the Risen–Lichtblau story first appeared President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the head of the NSA at the beginning of the program, General Michael Hayden, and others all defended the program as urgent, successful, justified by acts of Congress and the President`s powers under the constitution, sharply limited in scope, approved by members of Congress who had been briefed on the program, and carefully managed to protect the civil liberties and other rights of Americans.

"The whole key here is agility," said General Hayden.

"What we`re trying to do is learn of communications, back and forth, from within the United States to overseas members of al-Qaeda," said Gonzales. "That`s what this program is about. This is not about wiretapping everybody. This is about a very concentrated, very limited program focused on gaining information about our enemy."

"Dealing with al-Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement," President Bush said in a press conference on December 19.

"It requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States.... So, consistent with US law and the Constitution, I authorized the interception of international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.... Leaders in the United States Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this program.... I`ve reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for so long as... the nation faces the continuing threat...."

The President`s carefully worded statement casts a troubling new light on his insistence that we are fighting a "war on terror" and that he is a "wartime president." Constitutional lawyers have long argued about the limits of presidential or executive power, but all agree that the limits are more elastic in wartime, and it is increasingly evident that the Bush administration has treated this distinction as a barn door. The shock caused by the revelation of the NSA program is not centered on concern for the civil liberties of al-Qaeda terrorists but on the scale, still unknown, of the eavesdropping authorized by the President; on his refusal to use the courts or seek any change in the governing laws; and on his blanket claim that Article Two of the Constitution gives him, as president and commander in chief of the armed forces, both the responsibility for defending the country and "the authority necessary to fulfill it."

Even some Republican leaders find this broad claim troubling. Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate`s Judiciary Committee, has announced that he will hold hearings on the NSA program. "I am skeptical of the attorney general`s citation of authority, but I am prepared to listen," he said in December. "You can`t have the administration and a select number of members [of Congress, those briefed by the White House] alter the law. It can`t be done."

In an interview with Fox News on January 19, Vice President Dick Cheney said such briefings "have occurred at least a dozen times. I presided over most of them." One of those briefings, possibly the first, was held in Vice President Cheney`s office on July 17, 2003, four months after the American invasion of Iraq and a year after the NSA program began. Present were Representatives Jane Harman and Porter Goss, now the director of the CIA; and Senators Pat Roberts and John D. Rockefeller. Briefing them were Goss`s predecessor at the CIA, George Tenet, and General Hayden of the NSA. There has been no published account of what the members of Congress were told about the nature, rationale, justification, and scale of the program. They were neither permitted to take notes nor to discuss what they heard with any other persons. Far from feeling that the administration had fulfilled its obligations under existing law, Senator Rockefeller handwrote a brief letter to Cheney the same day

"to reiterate my concern regarding the sensitive intelligence issues we discussed today.... Clearly, the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues.... Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities. As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter`s TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern...."

TIA stands for Total Information Awareness, an intelligence program conceived in the Pentagon`s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the year following the attacks of September 11. It was designed to collect and exploit digital records of all kinds from private and public compilers of information -- phone records, bank records, credit card records, police records, medical records, travel records -- basically everything that is recorded about individuals. Running the program was John Poindexter, a former Navy admiral and national security advisor under President Reagan who had been indicted and convicted on seven felony charges during the Iran-contra investigation in the early 1990s, convictions later overturned on appeal. When the New York Times first published a description of TIA in December 2002, the fact that Poindexter was running it proved a fatal debility, and in September 2003 Congress killed funding for the Pentagon`s Information Awareness Office.

But Poindexter`s retirement and the end of the IAO did not extinguish official hopes for "data-mining," a computer-intensive approach to finding meaning in apparently random patterns. This, in fact, is basically what the NSA has always done -- collect communications from targets of interest and attack them with "tools," which are basically computer programs that seek patterns in apparently random letter and number groups. Data-mining seeks patterns in random actions -- buying, selling, check-writing, getting on planes, and so on -- rather than in the numbers and letters that make up codes. Data-mining is not a way to find out what persons of interest have been up to; it is a way to identify persons of interest among the general population -- persons, in short, who have not been detected doing anything that might convince a judge on the FISA court to issue a warrant for surveillance. Checking out US persons contacted by al-Qaeda would have raised no red flags with FISA judges; the larger and more significant part of the program uncovered by James Risen -- the part which the administration did not want to describe to the FISA court or to members of Congress who could have amended the law; the part, in fact, which the administration still hopes to keep secret and continue -- is the use of data-mining techniques by the NSA to do what Congress refused to allow Poindexter and the Pentagon to do. And that is to generate large numbers of names -- not dozens, thousands -- for the FBI to investigate.

John Poindexter and Total Information Awareness were one bell that rang loudly in the mind of Senator Rockefeller after his briefing in Cheney`s office. It is probable that another has rung since -- the testimony of John Bolton during his confirmation hearings last summer to be U.S. ambassador to the UN, when he said that on ten occasions he had formally asked the NSA to identify the "U.S. persons" who had been party to, or perhaps only mentioned in, communications intercepted by the agency and included in reports distributed to others in the government. The fight over the administration`s refusal to identify the nineteen persons who aroused Bolton`s curiosity in those ten communications was one reason President Bush abandoned efforts to force a Senate vote and instead made an interim appointment of Bolton to the UN post while Congress was in recess. But the argument while it continued jarred loose additional information about the scale of NSA activity -- for example, the State Department`s admission that Bolton`s colleagues had made over four hundred requests for the identities of U.S. persons in NSA reports; that the NSA had been asked as many as 3,500 times by other agencies to fill in the names of U.S. persons, and that the total number of names provided to other agencies was greater than 10,000.

Who are these people? Some of them were probably included in a database of 1,519 "suspicious incidents" compiled by the Pentagon`s Counterintelligence Field Activity, an office charged with defending military bases, according to a report broadcast by NBC a few days before the original New York Times story on the NSA program. On examination, the Pentagon`s "suspicious incidents" were simply public protests of the sort watched, photographed, investigated, and wiretapped during the Vietnam War under the program that led to the enactment of FISA twenty-five years ago. At that time the Pentagon`s database had ballooned to 18,000 names.

Of the numerous questions facing investigators for the Judiciary Committee the easy ones will concern the legality of the program. It was patently illegal under FISA and the only argument for letting the President get away with ignoring FISA is that he is prepared to make a fight of it. No committee headed by Republicans will do more than chide him on the law. The questions hardest to answer will be what the NSA actually did, and whether it served any useful purpose. A recent New York Times story contradicts the President`s claim that the NSA program was "limited... to known al-Qaeda members or affiliates." Citing anonymous FBI officials, the Times claimed that the NSA flooded the bureau with "thousands" of names per month to check out for possible terrorist connections. Far from being a "vital tool," as described by President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing will-o`-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And far from saving "thousands of lives," as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.

3.

Over the next few months the White House will be fighting a two-front war to preserve its secrets -- one against the Judiciary Committee, as just described, and a second against the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has committed itself to a renewed effort to investigate the administration`s drum-beating for war with Iraq by citing scary reports of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction -- reports that were virtually all wrong, and in some cases were little short of fabricated.

The committee`s chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, promised before the 2004 presidential election that "phase two" of its investigation would address the administration`s actual use of the intelligence it received, flawed as it was. This was something of a minefield. On their face, many statements by Bush, Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared to go well beyond even the exaggerated claims made by the CIA. After Bush won a second term the Republican Roberts not surprisingly dropped "phase two," saying he no longer saw the point. But in November Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, revived phase two when he invoked a rarely used parliamentary rule to call for a secret session of the Senate to discuss new evidence suggesting that substantial doubts about WMD intelligence had been suppressed before the war.

Risen found evidence of that, too. Included in his book is a new account of a pre-war CIA program conceived by the agency`s assistant director for intelligence collection, Charles Allen, to send Iraqi-Americans to Baghdad to ask scientist-relatives about WMDs. A chief target of the new program was Iraq`s effort to develop nuclear weapons, the subject of intense ongoing scrutiny after a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein defected in mid-1995 to Amman, Jordan, where he described WMD programs to UN officials. Sawsan Alhaddad, a woman doctor working and living in Cleveland, was one of about thirty Iraqis dispatched to Baghdad under this program in late summer 2002. When she returned in September she told CIA debriefers in a Virginia hotel room that her brother, an electrical engineer who had joined the Iraqi nuclear program in the early 1980s, had insisted the nuclear weapons program was dead, shut down years earlier. The other Iraqis all said the same thing only months before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but their reports were bottled up in the CIA.

The agency, it turns out, had heard the same thing from many sources, including Hussein`s defector son-in-law, General Hussein Kamal, who was fool enough to return to Baghdad, where he was executed. But before leaving, Kamal told the UN that Iraq`s WMD program, larger and more advanced than the CIA had believed before the first Gulf War in 1991, had been closed down

"after visits of [UN] inspection teams. You have important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.... All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.... In the nuclear area, there were no weapons. Missile and chemical weapons were real weapons. Our main worry was Iran and they were [intended for use] against them."

Kamal`s report, like Sawsan Alhaddad`s and many others, were never cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate used to convince Congress to vote for war. The pattern is clear; evidence of Iraqi WMDs, however flimsy, was treated like scripture while information contradicting that evidence, however clear, was bottled up and never left the building. On three separate occasions, for example, in mid-2001, mid-2002, and January 2003, just before the war, the CIA asked the French for their evaluation of the now-infamous reports that Iraq was trying to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Niger. According to the Los Angeles Times of December 11, 2005, the French intelligence chief at the time, Alain Chouet, said that the answer was the same in each instance -- nothing to it.

The French were in a position to know; uranium ore in Niger was all mined by French companies. In mid-2002 the French even told the CIA that the Italian documents reporting the purchase were forgeries, something the CIA did not even attempt to examine on its own for another year; and a few months later, "at about the same time as the State of the Union address" when the President cited the yellowcake as alarming evidence of Saddam Hussein`s nuclear ambitions, the Italians also told the Americans that the documents were forgeries. In similar fashion, claims that Iraq was providing al-Qaeda with training in the use of poison gases, cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN in February 2003, were also contradicted by reports the CIA had but chose to ignore.

In public debate it is customary at this point to ask, in a voice of amazed horror: How could this have happened? Are these intelligence professionals all community college dropouts? Have they forgotten everything they learned in spy school? My own view is that inconvenient evidence that angers policymakers and threatens careers cannot be pushed under the rug by intelligence officers unless they are fully aware of each step in the series -- they know it is evidence, they know it is inconvenient, they know it will anger policymakers, they know their careers will be threatened, and they know they are pushing evidence in the direction of a rug.

James Risen is not willing to go so far. His book is filled with evidence supporting this interpretation, but he seems reluctant to embrace it. "[Paul] Wolfowitz personally complained to Tenet about the CIA`s analytical work on Iraq and al-Qaeda," Risen says in discussing the use of intelligence to justify the war. Can we be in doubt why Wolfowitz complained, or why the agency assured Powell that Iraq was training al-Qaeda, scout`s honor? When CIA officers told Tenet the war would be a mistake, Risen notes, "he would just come back from the White House and say they are going to do it." Risen sums up Tenet`s attitude thus: "War with Iraq was inevitable, and it was time for the CIA to do its part." That seems clear enough; surely Risen means that the agency`s part was to help beat the drum for war. But then Risen swings back, like a man facing snakes on one side and alligators on the other. Why was the information reported by Sawsan Alhaddad and the other Iraqis bottled up at the agency? "Petty turf battles and tunnel vision of the agency`s officials" is Risen`s first answer. In the next sentence he braces up, then wilts again:

"...Doubts were stifled because of the enormous pressure that officials at the CIA...felt to support the administration. CIA director George Tenet and his senior lieutenants became so...fearful of creating a rift with the White House, that they created a climate within the CIA in which warnings that the available evidence on Iraqi WMD was weak were either ignored or censored. Tenet and his senior aides may not have meant to foster that sort of work environment -- and perhaps did not even realize they were doing it...."

What can Risen be thinking? How could they not realize they were doing it? They were running the place.

Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, was not the only official to let the CIA know what he wanted to hear. Rumsfeld set up a special office in the Pentagon to "re-look" the intelligence on Iraqi WMDs and then urged Tenet to listen to its findings. Vice President Cheney crossed the Potomac more than once to ask questions -- the same questions, over and over. John Bolton tried to fire resistant analysts in the State Department`s intelligence shop and at the CIA; they kept their jobs, but who could fail to get the message? Robert Hutchings, a former chief of the National Intelligence Council, the group that wrote the October 2002 NIE, described Bolton`s way of mining intelligence reports to come up with the administration`s version of the world. "He took isolated facts and made much more to build a case than the intelligence warranted," he said. "It was a sort of cherry-picking of little factoids and little isolated bits that were drawn out to present the starkest-possible case."

These were not intellectual exercises; Bolton needed custom-built intelligence to support the administration`s policies. "When policy officials came back repeatedly to push the same kind of judgments, and push the intelligence community to confirm a particular set of judgments," Hutchings said, "it does have the effect of politicizing intelligence, because the so-called ‘correct answer` becomes all too clear." Has the Senate Intelligence Committee got the fortitude to accept the implications of these facts and many others just like them?

The systematic exaggeration of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq and the flouting of FISA both required, and got, a degree of resolution in the White House that has few precedents in American history. The President has gotten away with it so far because he leaves no middle ground -- cut him some slack, or prepare to fight to the death. The fact that he enjoys a Republican majority in both houses of Congress gives him a margin of comfort, but I suspect that Democratic majorities would be just as reluctant, in the end, to call him on either count. Americans were ready enough to believe that one president might lie about a sexual affair; but they balk at concluding that his successor would pressure others to lie, and even would utter a few whoppers himself, so he could take the country to war.

Risen helps to explain how it was done, but lets it go at that. In his Fox News interview Vice President Cheney did not give an inch on the necessity of the NSA spying or of the war itself. "When we look back on this, ten years hence," he insisted, "we will [see that we] have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world." A decade down the road we`ll know if Cheney is right or wrong, and if the change is the one we wanted. The question now is whether the President could do it all again -- take the country to war, and scrap restraints on spying, just as he pleases. The answer is yes, unless Congress and the courts can say no.

Thomas Powers is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and is the author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda; The Man Who Kept the Secrets; and Heisenberg`s War.

This article appears in the February 23 issue of the New York Review of Books

Copyright 2005 Thomas Powers


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Enron`s political helpmates
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate
Wednesday, February 1, 2006

FINALLY, after four years of legal maneuvering, the trial of Enron top dogs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling opens a new window on the outrageous practices of our modern-day robber barons. But it is depressing that the politicians who benefited from Lay`s largesse, and who changed the law enabling Enron`s chicanery, are going unpunished and even uncriticized.

Indeed, the larger crime, in any proper moral dimension of that word, was committed in the rewriting of the law on corporate regulation to permit Enron`s very existence as a humongous stock market swindler. There simply would be no Enron story were it not for the deregulation of the energy market ushered in by Republican politicians, as Lay himself acknowledged freely in a 2000 interview when asked to explain the "common thread" in Enron`s business model.

"I think the common elements first are that, basically, we are entering markets or in markets that are deregulating or have recently deregulated, and so they have become competitive, moving from monopoly franchise-type businesses to competitive, market-oriented businesses," said Lay.

Enron`s domination of those deregulated markets was made possible, to a large degree, through the work of the powerful Washington couple, Phil Gramm, then-Republican senator from Texas, and his wife Wendy, then-chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Perhaps predictably, neither Gramm has been charged with any crimes in connection with the Enron scandal, and both are barely mentioned in the two leading books on the scandal by New York Times business writers. But their antics, well documented by the leading public-interest watchdog group Public Citizen, are the key to understanding the Enron debacle.

Back in 1993, when Enron was an upstart energy trader and Wendy Gramm occupied the position of chair of the CFTC, she granted the company, the biggest contributor to her husband`s political campaigns, a very valuable ruling exempting its trading in futures contracts from federal government regulation.

She resigned her position six days later, not surprising given that she was a political appointee and Bill Clinton had just defeated her boss, the first President Bush. Five weeks after her resignation, she was appointed to Enron`s board of directors, where she served on the delinquent audit committee until the collapse of the company.

There was perfect quid pro quo symmetry to Wendy Gramm`s lucrative career: the elder Bush appoints her to a government position where she secures Enron`s profit margin; Lay, a close friend and political contributor to Bush, then takes care of her nicely once she leaves her post.

Although she holds a Ph.D. in economics and often is cited as an expert on the deregulation policies she so ardently champions, Gramm insists that while serving on the audit committee she was ignorant of the corporation`s accounting machinations. Despite her myopia, or because of it, she was rewarded with more than $1 million in compensation.

A similar claim of ignorance of Enron`s shenanigans is the defense of her husband, who received $260,000 in campaign contributions from Enron before he pushed through legislation exempting companies like Enron from energy trading regulation.

"This act," Public Citizen noted, "allowed Enron to operate an unregulated power auction -- EnronOnline -- that quickly gained control over a significant share of California`s electricity and natural gas market."

The gaming of the California market, documented in grotesque detail in the e-mails of Enron traders, led to stalled elevators, hospitals without power and an enormous debt inflicted on the state`s taxpayers. It was only after the uproar over California`s rolling blackouts, which Enron helped engineer, that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finally re-imposed regulatory control -- and thereby began the ultimate unraveling of Enron`s massive pyramid of fraud.

Because the second President Bush effectively stalled a more timely response by the FERC, Enron`s demise came too late to prevent California from losing its shirt in its desperate attempt to keep the lights on. The state was forced to hurriedly sign price-gouging long-term energy contracts in order to prevent more damage.

And Bush, even at that late date, still attempted to save Enron by reversing the policy of the Clinton administration aimed at closing off foreign-tax shelters of the type favored by the company`s duplicitous executives. Bush, who received $1.14 million in campaign contributions from Enron, according to Public Citizen, couldn`t understand why the company should not be allowed to have 874 subsidiaries located in offshore tax and bank havens.

As the trial reveals just how fraudulent those offshore Enron operations apparently were, keep in mind that this President Bush was most loath to clear out those refuges of corporate pirates.

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©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Cindy Sheehan: `My arrest: What really happened`
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=24668&mode=nest…

Posted on Wednesday, February 01 @ 09:54:38 EST
This article has been read 4928 times. Cindy Sheehan

Dear Friends,

As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union Address tonight.

I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country.

There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press. (Shocker) So this is what really happened:

This afternoon at the People`s State of the Union Address in DC where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh, Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union Address. At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2245 Dead. How many more?



After the PSOTU press conference, I was having second thoughts about going to the SOTU at the Capitol. I didn`t feel comfortable going. I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn`t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket and I didn`t want to be disruptive out of respect for her. I, in fact, had given the ticket to John Bruhns who is in Iraq Veterans Against the War. However, Lynn`s office had already called the media and everyone knew I was going to be there so I sucked it up and went.

I got the ticket back from John, and I met one of Congresswoman Barbara Lee`s staffers in the Longworth Congressional Office building and we went to the Capitol via the undergroud tunnel. I went through security once, then had to use the rest room and went through security again.

My ticket was in the 5th gallery, front row, fourth seat in. The person who in a few minutes was to arrest me, helped me to my seat.

I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled; "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I`m going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.

The officer ran with me to the elevators yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That`s Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said: "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn`t care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That`s because you were protesting." Wow, I get hauled out of the People`s House because I was, "Protesting."

I was never told that I couldn`t wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things...I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately, and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2245, huh? I just got back from there."

I told him that my son died there. That`s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm`s way for still? For this? I can`t even wear a shrit that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.

I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there and I thought every once in awhile they would show me and I would have the shirt on. I did not wear it to be disruptive, or I would have unzipped my jacket during George`s speech. If I had any idea what happens to people who wear shirts that make the neocons uncomfortable that I would be arrested...maybe I would have, but I didn`t.

There have already been many wild stories out there.

I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.

I don`t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ulitmate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That`s why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That`s why I am not going to let Bushco take anything else away from me...or you.

I am so appreciative of the couple of hundred of protesters who came to the jail while I was locked up to show their support....we have so much potential for good...there is so much good in so many people.

Four hours and 2 jails after I was arrested, I was let out. Again, I am so upset and sore it is hard to think straight.

Keep up the struggle...I promise you I will too.

Love and peace soon,
Cindy

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Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 by The Nation
Decoding the State of the Union
http://www.thenation.com/

by Katrina vanden Heuvel


Never misunderestimate George W. Bush. Here`s a President who`s gutted the Treasury, eroded the environment, divided our society, ruined our reputation, frayed our military, undermined our security, inspired our enemies and overall weakened America. But there he stood tonight and delivered a State of the Union speech disconnected from the reality we are living in.

As Tom Engelhardt has observed, the way gunmen once reached for their guns, this Administration reaches for its dictionaries to find words to deceive and distract people.

I know that the long battle to retake our country from the forces of extremism, corruption, mendacity and injustice requires bold ideas and principles. But in the meantime, remember that language is power and clever words sell really rotten policies. Or, as that savvy political philosopher George Carlin once said, "Whenever the other side has you talking their language, they`ve got you."

So, for all decent and truth-loving Americans, here`s a quick guide to decoding last night`s SOTU. All of these definitions come from my Dictionary of Republicanisms:

Bipartisanship, n.

1. When conservative Republicans work with moderate Republicans to pass legislation that Democrats hate.

2. Another name for date rape [Grover Norquist, Third Level, Hell].

Compassionate Conservatism, n.

1. Republican pre-election concern for the disadvantaged [Gary Hunter, Thomasville, NC].

2. (a) I got mine; (b) I got yours too [Brian Kenner, Tervuren, Belgium].

3. Poignant concern for the very wealthy [Laurence Sandek, Twin Peaks, CA].

Democracy, n.

1. A product so extensively exported that the domestic supply is depleted.

2. When they vote for us; see TYRANNY: When they vote for someone else [Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, CA].

Ending Tyranny, catchphr.

1. Bombing followed by military occupation [Kerry Jones, Houston, TX].

Energy Independence, n.

1. The Yucca Mountain renovation program [Kimberly Ellenberger, Beloit, WI].

2. The Caribou witness relocation program [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, OH].

Freedom, n.

1. God-given right of every American to agree with Bush and his policies [Ken Guarino, Miami, FL].

2. What Arabs want but can`t achieve on their own without Western military intervention; it bears a striking resemblance to chaos [Matthew Polly, Topeka, KS].

Free Markets, n.

Halliburton no-bid contracts at taxpayer expense [Sean O`Brian, Chicago, IL].

Frivolous Lawsuits, n.

Those filed against corporations that donate heavily to the GOP [Fred Bonavita, San Antonio, TX].

Growth, n.

1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich.

2. What happens to the national debt when Republicans cut taxes on the rich [Matthew Polly, Topeka, KS].

Health Savings Accounts, n.

1. Another tax shelter for the healthy and the wealthy [Ann Wegher, Montello, WI].

2. Investment capital for banks [Bill DiNome, Wilmington, NC].

Honesty, n.

Lies told in simple declarative sentences--e.g., "Freedom is on the march." [Katrina vanden Heuvel, New York, NY].

Job Growth, n.

Increased number of jobs an American has to take after losing earlier high-paying job [John E. Tarin, Arlington, VA].

Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, n.

No Drug Company Left Behind [George K. McHugh, Dublin, CA].

No Child Left Behind, riff.

There are always jobs in the military [Ann Klopp, Princeton, NJ].

Nonpartisan, n.

Member of good standing in the Federalist Society [Mark Hatch-Miller, Brooklyn, NY].

Personal Responsibility, n.

1. Poor people trying to support their families on $5.75 an hour.

2. Rich people changing the tax code so their children never have to work [Chelsea Snelgrove, Atlanta, GA].

Reform, v.

To end all entitlements [Herbert New, Verona, NJ].

Staying the Course, v.

Saying and doing the same stupid thing over and over, regardless of the result [Suzanne Smith, Ann Arbor, MI].

Support the Military, v.

To praise Bush when he sends our young men and women off to die for a lie without proper body armor [Marc Goldberg, Vancouver, WA].

Tax Reform, n.

The shift of the tax burden from wealth to work [Dan McWilliams, Santa Barbara, CA].

I hope this helps decode Bush`s speech.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor of The Nation.

© 2006 The Nation

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Thursday, February 02, 2006

Election Results...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_riverbendblog_a…

Iraqi election results were officially announced nearly two weeks ago, but it was apparent from the day of elections which political parties would come out on top. I’m not even going to bother listing the different types of election fraud witnessed all over Iraq- it’s a tedious subject and one we’ve been discussing for well over a month.

The fact that a Shia, Iran-influenced religious list came out on top is hardly surprising. I’m surprised, however, at Iraqis who seem to be astonished at the outcome. Didn’t we, over the last three years, see this coming? Iranian influenced clerics had a strong hold right from 2003. Their militias were almost instantly incorporated into the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense as soon a move was made to create new Iraqi security forces. Sistani has been promoting them from day one.

Why is it so very surprising that in times of calamity people turn to religion? It happens all over the world. During tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, blockades, wars- people turn to deities… It’s simple- when all else fails, there is always a higher power for most people.

After nearly three years of a failing occupation, I personally believe that many Iraqis voted for religious groups because it was counted as a vote against America and the occupation itself. No matter what American policy makers say to their own public- and no matter how many pictures Rumsfeld and Condi take with our fawning politicians- most Iraqis do not trust Americans. America as a whole is viewed as a devilish country that is, at best, full of self-serving mischief towards lesser countries and, at worst, an implementer of sanctions, and a warmongering invader.

Even Iraqis who believe America is here to help (and they seem to have grown fewer in number these days), believe that it helps not out of love for Iraqis, but out of self-interest and greed.

Shia religious parties, like SCIRI and Da’awa, have decidedly changed their tone in the last year. During 2003, they were friends of America- they owed the US their current power inside of the country. Today, as Iraqis are becoming more impatient with the American presence inside of Iraq, they are claiming that they will be the end of the ‘occupiers’. They openly blame the Americans for the lack of security and general chaos. The message is quite different. In 2003, there was general talk of a secular Iraq; today, that no longer seems to be an option.

In 2003, Jaffari was claiming he didn’t want to see Iraqi women losing their rights, etc. He never mentioned equal rights- but he did throw in a word here and there about how Iraqi women had a right to an education and even a job. I was changing channels a couple of weeks ago and I came across Jaffari speaking to students from Mustansiriya University- one of Iraq’s largest universities, with campuses in several areas in Baghdad. I couldn’t see the students- he might have been speaking with a group of penguins, for all I could tell. The camera was focused on him- his shifty eyes and low, mumbling voice.

On his right sat an Ayatollah with a black turban and black robes. He looked stern and he nodded with satisfaction as Jaffari spoke to the students (or penguins). His speech wasn’t about science, technology or even development- it was a religious sermon about heaven and hell, good and evil.

I noticed two things immediately. The first was that he seemed to be speaking to only male students. There were no females in the audience. He spoke of their female ‘sisters’ in absentia, as if they had absolutely no representation in the gathering. The second thing was that he seemed to be speaking to only Shia because he kept mentioning their ‘Sunni brothers’, as if they too were absent. He sermonized about how the men should take care of the women and how Sunnis weren’t bad at all. I waited to hear him speak about Iraqi unity, and the need to not make religious distinctions- those words never came.

In spite of all this, pro-war Republicans remain inanely hopeful. Ah well- so Ayatollahs won out this election- the next election will be better! But there is a problem…

The problem with religious parties and leaders in a country like Iraq, is that they control a following of fervent believers, not just political supporters. For followers of Da’awa and SCIRI, for example, it’s not about the policy or the promises or the puppet in power. It’s like the pope for devout Catholics- you don’t question the man in the chair because he is there by divine right, almost. You certainly don’t question his policies.

Ayatollahs are like that. Muqtada Al-Sadr is ridiculous. He talks like his tongue is swollen up in his mouth and he always looks like he needs to bathe. He speaks with an intonation that indicates a fluency in Farsi and yet… he commands an army of followers because his grandfather was a huge religious figure. He could be the least educated, least enlightened man in the country and he’d still have people willing to lay down their lives at his command because of his family’s religious history. (Lucky Americans- he announced a week ago that should Iran come under US attack, he and his followers would personally rise up to Iran’s defense.)

At the end of the day, people who follow these figures tell themselves that even if the current leader isn’t up to par, the goal and message remain the same- religion, God’s word as law. When living in the midst of a war-torn country with a situation that is deteriorating and death around every corner, you turn to God because Iyad Allawi couldn’t get you electricity and security- he certainly isn’t going to get you into heaven should you come face to face with a car bomb.

The trouble with having a religious party in power in a country as diverse as Iraq is that you automatically alienate everyone not of that particular sect or religion. Religion is personal- it is something you are virtually born into… it belongs to the heart, the mind, the spirit- and while it is welcome in day to day dealings, it shouldn’t be politicized.

Theocracies (and we seem to be standing on the verge of an Iranian influenced one), grow stronger with time because you cannot argue religion. Politicians are no longer politicians- they are Ayatollahs- they become modern-day envoys of God, to be worshipped, not simply respected. You cannot challenge them because for their followers, that is a challenge to a belief- not a person or a political party.

You go from being a critic or ‘opposition’ to simply being a heathen when you argue religious parties.

Americans write to me wondering, “But where are the educated Iraqis? Why didn’t they vote for secular parties?” The educated Iraqis have been systematically silenced since 2003. They’ve been pressured and bullied outside of the country. They’ve been assassinated, detained, tortured and abducted. Many of them have lost faith in the possibility of a secular Iraq.

Then again… who is to say that many of the people who voted for religious parties aren’t educated? I know some perfectly educated Iraqis who take criticism towards parties like Da’awa and SCIRI as a personal affront. This is because these parties are so cloaked and cocooned within their religious identity, that it is almost taken as an attack against Shia in general when one criticizes them. It’s the same thing for many Sunnis when a political Sunni party comes under criticism.

That’s the danger of mixing politics and religion- it becomes personal.

I try not to dwell on the results too much- the fact that Shia religious fundamentalists are currently in power- because when I do, I’m filled with this sort of chill that leaves in its wake a feeling of quiet terror. It’s like when the electricity goes out suddenly and you’re plunged into a deep, quiet, almost tangible darkness- you try not to focus too intently on the subtle noises and movements around you because the unseen possibilities will drive you mad…


- [urlposted by river @ 1:34 AM]http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113883446856655785[/url]

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Latest Update: #35063 31.01.06 15:15:56
Latest Coalition Fatality: Jan 31, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total:2446 , US: 2243 , Jan.06: 65
Für einen Monat mit eingeschränkten Angriffe durch die Sunniten ist das eine sehr hohe Zahl an Opfer bei den Koalitionstruppen.


Iraker: Civilian: 579 Police/Mil: 194 Total: 773
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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February 2, 2006
Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02nsa.html?hp&ex=…

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush`s domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.

The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings.

But the legality of the program is known to have produced serious concerns within the Justice Department in 2004, at a time when one of the legal opinions was drafted. Democrats say they want to review the internal opinions to assess how legal thinking on the program evolved and whether lawyers in the department saw any concrete limits to the president`s powers in fighting terrorism.

With the committee scheduled to hold the first public hearing on the eavesdropping program on Monday, the Justice Department`s stance could provoke another clash between Congress and the executive branch over access to classified internal documents. The administration has already drawn fire from Democrats in the last week for refusing to release internal documents on Hurricane Katrina as well as material related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Several Democrats and at least one Republican have pressed the Justice Department in recent days to give them access, even in a closed setting, to the internal documents that formed the legal foundation of the surveillance program. But when asked whether the classified legal opinions would be made available to Congress, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday, "I don`t think they`re coming out."

The official said the administration`s legal arguments had already been aired, most prominently in a 42-page "white paper" issued last month. "Everything that`s in those memos was in the white paper," said the official, who, like other administration and Congressional officials, was granted anonymity because classified material was involved.

While the administration has spent much of the last two weeks defending the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, the Judiciary Committee session will be the first Congressional hearing on it. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the panel, said Wednesday that he had "a lot of questions" the administration had not yet adequately answered about the program`s legal rationale.

Mr. Specter would not address the committee`s request for the classified legal opinions, except to say, "that`s not a closed matter — we`re still working on that."

Several Democrats on the panel have made formal requests for the legal opinions, including Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.

In the interview, Mr. Specter said that he wanted a fuller explanation as to how the Justice Department asserts that the eavesdropping operation does not conflict with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set strict and "exclusive" guidelines for intelligence wiretaps.

The operation was approved by President Bush, to allow the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on Americans` international communications without a court warrant. Mr. Specter said his view was that the operation "violates FISA — there`s no doubt about that."

He also questioned why the administration did not go to Congress or the intelligence court to seek changes in the process before moving ahead on its own with the classified program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat who was one of the few members of the Congress briefed on the operation, echoed that same theme in a letter sent Wednesday to President Bush.

She said in the letter that with changes made to the foreign intelligence law after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eavesdropping operations of the N.S.A. "can and should" be covered by court-approved warrants, "without circumventing" the process.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will be the lone witness at next week`s hearing, and his aides said he was entering it with confidence about the program`s legal footing, based on both the president`s inherent constitutional authority and a Congressional authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks to use military force against terrorists. But both Republicans and Democrats said Wednesday that they planned to question Mr. Gonzales about those assertions.

While the administration has laid out its legal defense repeatedly in the last two weeks, the formal legal opinions developed at the Justice Department to justify the program remain classified. The administration has refused even to publicly acknowledge the existence of the memorandums, but The New York Times has reported that two sets of legal opinions by the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel asserted the president`s broad power to order wiretaps without warrants in protecting national security.

The first Justice Department opinion is thought to have been written in late 2001 or early 2002 by John Yoo, a strong proponent of expanded presidential powers in wartime. The second opinion, officials said, was drafted by Jack Goldsmith, another senior department official who later left to teach at Harvard. It came in 2004 at a time some senior officials at the Justice Department were voicing concerns about the program`s legal foundation and refusing to sign off on its reauthorization.

Those concerns led in part to the suspension of the surveillance program for several months and also appear to have led Mr. Goldsmith and other Justice Department lawyers to revisit the question of its legal underpinnings in order to satisfy those concerns.

Members of the Judiciary Committee have sought access to the memorandums, officials said. Some Democrats speculate that the classified memos may contain far-reaching and potentially explosive legal theories similar to those advocated by Mr. Yoo and others, and later disavowed by the Justice Department, regarding policies on torture.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Mr. Gonzales, Mrs. Feinstein said the legal opinions and other internal documents were needed for Congress to assess whether the president "has the inherent authority to authorize this surveillance."

With two additional hearings scheduled on the program after Mr. Gonzales`s appearance, Mr. Specter said he was also considering seeking testimony from former Justice Department officials, and perhaps even input from the FISA court itself.

But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, said the panel should consider issuing subpoenas if the administration is not more forthcoming in providing documents and witnesses.

"Without the Justice Department memos and without more witnesses, it`s hard to se how anything other than a rehashing of the administration line is going to happen," Mr. Schumer said Wednesday. "I am worried that these hearings could end up telling us very little when the American people are thirsty to find out what happened here."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
An American Obsession
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/opinion/02herbert.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/opinion/02herbert.html


By BOB HERBERT

"I am going to keep on marching for justice, equality, peace and reconciliation of the human family until I am called home."

— Coretta Scott King

I remember that April evening so clearly. My father was coming out of one of his upholstery shops in suburban New Jersey when I walked up. I`d just heard the news on the radio and was anxious to tell him.

"Martin Luther King got shot," I said.

An odd look crossed my old man`s face, like he`d been punched unexpectedly and was trying not to show that it had hurt. "Where?" he asked.

It was not a geography question. "In the head," I said.

My father turned around and walked back into the store.

Dr. King`s message of peaceful change notwithstanding, there is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover.

The cities of Newark and Detroit had gone up in smoke less than a year before the rifle shot from James Earl Ray took out Dr. King. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities on the night that Dr. King died. Buildings went up in flames. Motorists were pulled from vehicles and beaten. Rioters were slain by the police and soldiers of the National Guard.

Two months later Bobby Kennedy, who had called for calm on the night of Dr. King`s death, was murdered in Los Angeles. Through all of this, the mindless orgy of violence in Vietnam continued without respite.

Dr. King understood with unusual clarity the price to be paid for the terrible belief that every problem could be settled by a bullet or a bomb. He warned his followers and the nation as a whole to avoid the "quicksand" of violence and hatred. He urged blacks to remain nonviolent in the face of horrendous injustices, and he spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam.

He might as well have been whispering into a hurricane. Extreme black power advocates excoriated him as a Tom, and supporters of the war told him, essentially, to shut up and stick to civil rights.

We`ve honored Dr. King, but we`ve never listened to him. Our addiction to the joy of violence is far too strong. We`ll search like hollow-eyed junkies all day and all through the night for a rationale, any rationale, to keep the killing going. Democratic politicians have suffered for years because they have been insufficiently insistent on violence as a solution to national problems.

When Dr. King was slain in 1968, the carnage in Vietnam was just hitting its stride. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, was quoted as follows in the book "Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides":

"We probably could have gotten the deal we ended up with in 1973 as early as 1969. And between 1969 and 1972 we almost doubled our losses. It`s easy to second-guess but I`ve never been convinced that those last 25,000 casualties were justified."

And that`s just on the American side. Anywhere from a million to two million Vietnamese lives were lost in the war.

Here in the U.S., it`s almost too frightening to consider how many lives have been sacrificed to mindless violence over the past four decades. In many parts of the black community, this form of domestic terror is taken for granted, and even celebrated in many of the most popular songs.

"Niggas who [bleep] wit me get shot up," says 50 Cent.

Civil rights leaders recently went out of their way to pay their respects to the memory of Stanley Tookie Williams, a co-founder of the Crips street gang who was executed in December for the murder of four people. He`d been redeemed, they said. Maybe so. But the Crips, the Bloods and their murderous imitators have spilled oceans of innocent blood. I think of them as world-class destroyers of children.

And, of course, the war of choice today — the quicksand that Dr. King would certainly have counseled us against — is in Iraq.

Thirty-seven years after the death of her husband (who was only 39 when he died), Coretta Scott King has been called home. Like her husband, she always believed that America`s addiction to violence could be brought under control.

They were wrong. We love it much too much.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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The Capitol`s Tempest in a T-Shirt
Chief Apologizes for Ejections at State of Union
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 2, 2006; A01

Two T-shirts -- one black, the other heather gray -- spotted in the House gallery the night of the president`s State of the Union speech caused a major ruckus on Capitol Hill.

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Peace advocate Cindy Sheehan speaks about the war in Iraq at a news conference
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It spilled into yesterday and came complete with impassioned political speeches, strident questions about rights being trampled, threats of lawsuits and a hat-in-hand apology from the U.S. Capitol Police chief.

The black shirt with white letters was worn by celebrated war protester Cindy Sheehan; the white letters read: "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" Beverly Young, the wife of a Republican congressman, sported a heather gray top with red, white and blue letters saying, "Support the Troops."

The wearers were hustled out of the House gallery by Capitol police who said the shirts amounted to protesting.

Late yesterday, after C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) had taken to the floor with an impassioned speech and his wife`s T-shirt held aloft, Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer showed up at his office to apologize.

Gainer said he also would ask that charges against Sheehan -- she was arrested; Beverly Young left before it came to that -- be dropped. "It was," he said, "a good-faith mistake by officers operating under poor direction."

After a night of fingerprinting and booking and lockup, Sheehan departed the city. But Young had not, and her response as she enjoyed hugs from supporters yesterday after the apology was to call Gainer "an idiot." Witnesses said her words for him were much saltier the night before.

The drama in cotton unfolded when Sheehan, who received a spectator ticket from Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey (D-Calif.), took her seat and unzipped her jacket, revealing her antiwar message. Sheehan`s son, Casey, was a soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

A Capitol Police officer spotted the words, pointed to her and yelled, "Protester!" Sheehan said. "He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat, and roughly . . . shoved me up the stairs," she said, adding that she was handcuffed, taken away, fingerprinted and booked.

That was before the speech.

About 45 minutes into the speech, an officer asked Beverly Young to step outside, where he told her: "We consider you a protester" because of her shirt, she said.

She said she angrily challenged officers to explain what law she had violated, and they threatened arrest.

She said an officer mentioned that Sheehan was removed earlier and therefore "it was kind of only fair" that she be asked to leave, too.

"They publicly humiliated me," Young told reporters. "They insulted our troops."

When the congressman heard what had happened to his wife, he summoned Gainer to his office and called Karl Rove, the president`s deputy chief of staff.

"When your wife is insulted and embarrassed, you do tend to get a little offended," Young said yesterday, explaining his upbraiding of Gainer that night and his fervent speech on the House floor yesterday morning, when he waved the shirt and bellowed about his wife`s ejection: "Shame! Shame!"

Young said he wouldn`t be so mad if it were just Sheehan. "I totally disagree with everything she stands for," he said. But by removing his wife, Gainer`s officers clearly "acted precipitously," Young said.

Attorneys on Sheehan`s side and attorneys for Young pored over case law yesterday, trying to find precedent for the ejection.

Gainer`s office didn`t respond to inquiries until after 5 p.m., when he walked into Young`s office and apologized.

"We`ve asked the U.S. attorney`s office to drop the charge against Sheehan," Gainer said later. "Our interactions both with her and Beverly Young were inappropriate."

He said he will clarify rules about disruption to remind officers that "simply having a T-shirt on" does not constitute lawbreaking.

After the mea culpa, Beverly Young, in her T-shirt again, was not forgiving, calling Gainer "an idiot" who should be replaced.

Her husband said he doesn`t want Gainer fired, but when asked if he might take legal action, he said, "I`m taking it one step at a time."

Staff writer Charles Babington contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Thursday, February 02, 2006

Sunni Arab Politicians threaten Civil Disobedience

At least 14 were killed in bombings and violence in Iraq on Wednesday. One bomb targeting Shiites killed 8 in Baghdad. Two Iraqi television journalists were kidnapped.

[urlSunni Arab politicians in Iraq demanded on Wednesday]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4671718.stm[/url] that the Shiite minister of interior be sacked, and threatened to mount a campaign of civil disobedience if their community does not cease being attacked. The BBC summarizes the demands of the Iraqi Islamic Party (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood):


`* Deployment of the Iraqi army to protect the citizens of Baghdad
* Dismissal of the interior minister and his senior aides
* Suspension of the tasks of the Interior Ministry security units, "which target innocent people on the pretext of pursuing terrorists"
* Disbanding of militias
* End of "random" arrest campaigns
* Release of all prisoners at prisons run by the Iraqi government
* Release of all prisoners in the prisons run by multi-national forces, "especially women"
* Publication of the findings of the investigation conducted into the Jadiriya detention facility, where 170 prisoners, some showing signs of apparent torture, were found by US troops in November.`



On the other hand, the Sunni Arabs have produced people who blow Iraqis, and thre may be a sense in which a civil disobedience campaign would be an improvement.

[urlThis article in a Bahrain daily argues]http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=134305&Sn=WORL&IssueID=28319[/url] that a lot of Iraqis were dismayed by Bush`s pledge to stay the course, since they feel that the situation would be better if US troops withdrew. (This view is supported by opinion polls. A majority of Iraqis wanted US troops out after the Dec. 15 elections.)

[urlThis article talks about proliferation of Iraqi satellite channels]http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2006-01/31/article05.shtml[/url], many of which have a strong sectarian or ethnic agenda and which are accused of spreading hatred of other groups.

[urlJim Krane of AP]http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-iraq-failed-reconstruction,0,1165181.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines[/url] explores the ways in which the Iraqi guerrilla movement succeeded in stopping a majority of some kinds of reconstruction projects, and in scaring away civilian contractors.

Ferry Biederman of the Financial Times discusses the isolation of the US military and officials from the real Iraq, and the unrealistic expectations it breeds.

But, in response to one of the US officers, I have to say that it is not fair to speak of "age-old" conflicts in Iraq. There wasn`t a lot of Sunni-Shiite violence in modern Iraq until recently.

posted by Juan @ [url2/02/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/sunni-arab-politicians-threaten-civil.html[/url] 0 comments

Arguing with Bush

The Middle East portion of Bush`s [urlState of the Union address]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101468.html[/url] was a real disappointment. Here is some of the text, with my comments.

` In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies in the world. Today there are 122.

And we are writing a new chapter in the story of self-government, with women lining up to vote in Afghanistan, and millions of Iraqis marking their liberty with purple ink, and men and women from Lebanon to Egypt debating the rights of individuals and the necessity of freedom . . .`


It is the height of hubris to speak about "self-government" in Iraq. The US is running the place and this is "self-government"? The US puts enormous pressure on them about who is acceptable as prime minister and how they have to write their constitution, and has 136,000 troops running around with tanks and constant aerial bombing. This is "self-government"? Moreover, elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Egypt are not a "new chapter." They`ve had parliamentary elections before. Lebanon has been having them for decades, and they`ve often been pretty representative. In Iraq and Afghanistan foreign interference had a lot to do with the rise of subsequent dictatorships. This idea that the Middle East is a blank slate that never knew what a parliament was before Bush and Cheney showed up is insulting. And, calling the government set up under imperial auspices after an illegal invasion "self-government" is laughable.

Finally, the elections that Bush trumpets in all four countries, and in Palestine, which he did not mention in this regard, were rebukes to Bush, not affirmations of him. The Afghans elected warlords, the Iraqis put in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Muqtada al-Sadr`s people (the ones who killed Cindy Sheehan`s son) along with the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood and some Baathists. The Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal have new weight in Lebanon. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt got 88 seats, an unprecedentedly large number.

These elections were Middle Eastern referendums on Bush, and he lost every one hands down. Bush`s main accomplishment in the Middle East since 9/11 has been to strengthen Muslim fundamentalist parties everywhere in the region.



` BUSH: And one of the main sources of reaction and opposition is radical Islam; the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death.

Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously.

They seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder.

Their aim is to seize power in Iraq and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world. `



Bin Laden can`t seize any part of Iraq. That is ridiculous.

more later . . .

posted by Juan @ [url2/01/2006 12:43:00]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/arguing-with-bush-middle-east-portion.html[/url] PM 5 comments

In the old SPD/Green government in Germany, substantial strides were made toward profitable solar power companies, because of government investment and support. That is what a real energy policy would look like, Mr. Bush. Get one.

posted by Juan @ [url2/01/2006 06:31:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/how-to-tell-if-bush-is-serious-about.html[/url] 7 comments

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End beckons for the `United States of Iraq`
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e67f89b0-9390-11da-a978-0000779e234…

By Ferry Biedermann
Published: February 2 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 2 2006 02:00

It`s raining in Iraq and as the desert bases of the US army turn to mud, the thoughts of the men and women serving there turn to home.

The talk among the commanders is of an expected drawing down of the troop strength, which stands at about 150,000.

There is a sense that with the final lap of the political handover completed with December`s election and, even more importantly, with the forthcoming US congressional elections in November, a substantial part of the army is on its way home - for good.

One staff major in a combat unit, who is about to head home after completing his second tour in Iraq, is pretty certain he will not have to come back. "By 2007, when we are up for the next rotation, we will not be here any more, at least not as extensively," he says.

One of his colleagues has a darker view: "Yeah, or we`ll be back by then with even more men to restore order because the country went to hell after a withdrawal in 2006."

Many of the commanders on the ground feel that they are achieving something, by gaining the trust of the local population and by working closely with the new Iraqi army and the police force.

Some say that given one or two more years of the same kind of effort, the Iraqi security forces will be able to stand on their own feet.

But some of the more thoughtful and more senior officers usually admit, after some reflection, that it is overly optimistic to think the US can change patterns that have been established over centuries.

The expressions of doubt come as the army and the whole of the US operationin Iraq has come undercriticism from unexpected quarters.

A poll in the Military Times last month showed that, within the military, support for the way thewar is being waged is crumbling.

Then, British army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster criticised the US forces, saying they showed little sensitivity to the cultural make-up of Iraq and that junior officers painted too bright a picture of the situation to their superiors.

Much of the criticism, both of the military and of other aspects of the US involvement in Iraq, is aimed at a perceived lack of American understanding of the complexity of the situation.

In Baghdad a senior western diplomat says this is because most Americans in Iraq maintain an often inevitable distance from the local population, cooped up in their large Green Zone administrative centre in Baghdad or their bases throughout the country. They only venture out, heavily armed, to liaise with leaders whose authority in the community remains hard to gauge.

This may be a slightly exaggerated picture but on a military flight into Baghdad from the Jordanian capital Amman, evidence of this dynamic can be seen.

Flak jackets and helmets notwithstanding, most of the people in the C-130 look as if they are bureaucrats on a morning commute in the suburbs of Washington DC. These civilian contractors and Department of Defense and State Department personnel will probably never set foot outside the confines of the American network of bases and transportation in Iraq.

The Americans have built a parallel, virtual country in Iraq that most soldiers and American civilians never have to leave. "I`m not in Iraq," says one soldier in Balad. "This is the United States of Iraq."

Even the majority of soldiers seldom or never go "outside the wire", being engaged in support functions.

Contact with Iraqis is limited to the few who work on bases, are employed as translators or those who serve in the new Iraqi army.

The drawing down of troop strength is already fraying some parts of this virtual world.

The Green Zone is slowly being phased out, with buildings being handed over to the Iraqi government and security forces, to the dismay of some of the support units based there.

"Pretty soon we will be in the middle of the Red Zone," says a sergeant, referring to the Iraqi capital outside the enclave, which is regarded as unsafe.

With the dismantling of the Green Zone, a symbol of the foreign presence will disappear, although the Americans are building an enormous new embassy compound in the area that even some of their troops refer to as "a monstrosity" and which is likely to function as a mini-Green Zone inthe future.

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[urlSpecial Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction]http://www.sigir.mil/reports/audit.aspx[/url]

Insurgents Thwarting Iraq Reconstruction
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-ir…

By JIM KRANE
Associated Press Writer

February 1, 2006, 10:51 PM EST

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Guerrilla attacks in Iraq have forced the cancellation of more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects, in part because American intelligence failed to predict the brutal insurgency, a U.S. government audit said.

American goals to fix Iraq`s infrastructure will never be reached, mainly because insurgents have chased away contractors and forced the diversion of repair funds into security, according to an audit of the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Program released last week. It is the latest in a series of auditing reports being issued by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The rise of Iraq`s insurgency was never envisioned by U.S. officials, who originally budgeted about 9 percent of reconstruction aid for project security, the audit said.

As kidnappings, killings and sabotage drove local laborers and foreign technicians from the reconstruction program, U.S. administrators were forced to step up protection for workers.

New measures like armored vehicles, private security teams and blast walls absorbed as much as 22 percent of project costs, according to the audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

"The whole purpose of those attacks was to drive those contractors out," said Wayne White, who headed the State Department`s Iraq intelligence team until last year. "Lots of them had to leave. They were terrified."

Planners "envisioned a much more permissive security environment than that experienced in 2004 and 2005. The Iraq insurgency has directly affected the cost of the reconstruction projects, increased the cost of materials and created project delays," the audit found.

Pre-invasion U.S. intelligence reports said guerrilla attacks were likely, White said.

"But nobody predicted anything of this magnitude in terms of resistance," said White, now an analyst with the Middle East Institute in Washington. "And in part, the magnitude of the resistance was spurred by our failures in reconstruction."

U.S. officials coped with the gathering insurgency by diverting $5.6 billion of the $18.4 billion U.S. aid package into Iraq`s security and public safety sectors, while slashing projects aimed at restoring the country`s water and electricity infrastructure, the report said.

Funds earmarked for Iraq`s military and law enforcement jumped 55 percent, funding training and weapons for Iraqi police and troops, prison construction and additional border guards.

U.S. occupation authority planners assumed incorrectly that rebuilding projects could proceed without interference from Iraqi insurgents, according to the audit, titled "Challenges Faced in Carrying Out Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund Activities."

The insurgency has had "a very significant impact" on reconstruction efforts, said Greg Sullivan, a spokesman for the State Department. But he said the U.S. rebuilding goals have always been to give Iraq a head start.

"This is an incredibly oil-rich country, and eventually money and resources are not going to be a problem," Sullivan said. "The long-term goals we`re pretty confidant Iraq can meet as long as it gets enough of a head start."

The spending diversions forced the cancellation of 60 percent of the 136 planned water and sanitation projects, including sewage, irrigation and dams. Just 49 water projects are expected to be completed, the audit says.

Of the 425 planned electric projects, 300 will be finished, meaning ambitious U.S. promises to restore Iraqi power will not be fulfilled.

Projects canceled include $1 billion for six generating plants across Iraq, which will cut back U.S.-funded increases in Iraq`s power generation capacity from a planned 3,400 megawatts to 2,109 megawatts, the report said. The stated monthly goal was 6,000 megawatts.

Many in Washington agree the U.S. emphasis on huge infrastructure projects was a mistake because they provided few jobs or immediate improvements to daily life.

"So many of our goals were not met, in part because of really expert sabotage by the resistance," White said. "But it was also the fault of being overly focused on long-term projects that weren`t bringing short-term relief."

Iraq`s still-constant blackouts and a perception among Iraqis that the United States failed to live up to early reconstruction promises have helped make the U.S. occupation deeply unpopular.

Lack of electricity also boosted reconstruction costs, forcing contractors to import generators, White said, noting that few of Iraq`s state-owned factories reopened after the U.S. invasion.

"If you can`t rely on the national power grid, you really can`t get back to a state of normalcy which is required for industrial recovery," he said.

* ___

On the Net:

Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction: http://www.sigir.mil/reports/audit.aspx

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.

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State of the Union analysis: So has the President gone green? Not just yet
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article342656.e…

By Rupert Cornwell
Published: 02 February 2006

State of the Union addresses are transient affairs, their details usually forgotten within 24 hours. Most of those delivered by George Bush however have contained a phrase that lingers. In 2002 it was the "axis of evil" of Iraq, North Korea and Iran. This time it will surely be Mr Bush`s remark that America is "addicted to oil". But the 2006 speech may be even more notable for what he did not say. Not once did he mention global warming. The words
"conservation" and "Kyoto" did not once pass his lips. There was no reference to higher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, which consume roughly half the oil used by the US.

In short, reports that Mr Bush has gone green are premature. Once again the President was arguing that the solution to both America`s energy problem and global climate change lay not in reducing per capita consumption of energy, but in using technology to find new sources of energy. On one point at least environmentalists can take heart. Usually Mr Bush never misses an opportunity to demand that greater use be made of domestic US oil resources. This time however he did not call for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling - acknowledgement perhaps that the measure, which failed again in Congress late last year, may now be off the table for good.

Generally reaction here has been underwhelming. Most green groups described Mr Bush`s ideas as "nothing new", and in a scathing editorial, The New York Times lambasted the proposals as "woefully insufficient". "Once again," the paper said, "he chose to substitute long-range research, and a single programme at that, for the immediate investments that have to be made across the entire industrial sector". His approach amounted to "a negligence from which the globe may never recover".

Grounds for cynicism abound. Since Richard Nixon, presidents have bemoaned the country`s reliance on foreign oil. In 1979, at the height of the second "oil shock", President Carter promised that the US would never again consume more imported oil "than we did in 1977".

In fact, imports have risen ever since. Today, the US buys roughly 12 million barrels a day of oil from abroad, some 60 per cent of total daily consumption of 21 million barrels. Of those imports, the biggest suppliers are Venezuela, Canada and Nigeria. The Middle East, according to figures for the first 11 months of 2005, supplies less than a fifth.

In the light of these statistics, Mr Bush`s pledge to cut US imports from the Middle East by more than 75 per cent by 2025 is far less ambitious than it sounds.

Even so, as Greenpeace pointed out, Mr Bush has taken a small step in the right direction. "The first step in curing an addiction is recognising that you have a problem," said Steve Sawyer, climate policy expert at the environmental group. "He`s stood up and taken the first step in the `oil-aholics` programme."

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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`Marlboro Man` turns against war he symbolised
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article342643.e…

By Andrew Buncombe, in Washington
Published: 02 February 2006

A cigarette hung from his mouth in the manner of John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, his grime-covered face showed the exhaustion of battle.

This image of US Marine Lance-Corporal Blake Miller, taken during the battle of Fallujah, instantly captured the public imagination and for a while he was known simply as Marlboro Man.
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But 15 month after that photograph appeared in more than 100 US newspapers, the 21-year-old is back from Iraq, back on civvy street and he is talking about the trauma of what he experienced and the scars he still bears, physical and mental. The once unquestioning Marine is now also questioning whether US forces should be in Iraq.

The mental health experts who are treating him call his condition post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but Mr Miller describes it in more immediate language: nightmares, sleeplessness and periods when he will "blank out", not knowing where he is or what he is doing. "I could tell you stories about Iraq that would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," he said. "And I could tell you things that were great over there. But that would still not tell you what it was actually like. You had to be there and go through it to really understand."

Mr Miller is not alone. The federal Veterans Affairs (VA) department revealed last week that up to a third of US troops returning from Iraq or Afghanistan - about 40,000 - suffer mental health problems. It is to spend an extra $29m (£16.3m) on troops who have PTSD. Days ago, The Independent reported the suicide of another veteran of the Iraq war, Doug Barber, a National Guardsman who took his life after struggling with his experiences of the war after he returned to civilian life.

Mr Miller, who received an honourable discharge last November after military psychologists decided he would be a threat to himself or his colleagues if he continued to serve, said there remained a stigma about mental health issues. He told Knight Ridder Newspapers: "I want people to know that PTSD is not something people come down with because they are crazy. It`s an anxiety disorder, where you`ve experienced something so traumatic that you`re close to death." Mr Miller`s photograph was taken in November 2004 during the battle for Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold. The two-week operation resulted in the deaths of up to 50 US troops, an estimated 1,200 insurgents and an unknown number of civilians.

The former Marine says he now questions the US tactics and believes troops should have been withdrawn some time ago. He said: "When I was in the service my opinion was whatever the Commander-in-Chief`s opinion was. But after I got out, I started to think about it. The biggest question I have now is how you can make a war on an entire country when a certain group from that country is practising terrorism against you. It`s as if a gang from New York went to Iraq and blew some stuff up and Iraq started a war against us because of that."

Mr Miller`s image was captured by the Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco. At the time, he smoked five packs a day. Now, recently married and looking to make a fresh start, he has cut down to just one.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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[urlSpecial report: United States]http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/0,,759893,00.html[/url]

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On Iran, the French are from Mars and the Americans are from Venus

We need a new international regime to supervise our nuclear capacities and everyone should submit to it
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1699946,00.html

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday February 2, 2006

Guardian
So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it`s the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.

Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil". Now he says "the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons". The world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy, preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!

To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that there are no good options for strikes on Iran`s nuclear facilities, only bad or worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack. Many people suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran`s nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was ready to.

Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There are so many possible sites where the mullahs might be hiding their nuclear kit. After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise. Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the bombing - a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by encouraging Hizbullah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel. Since Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but the unleashing of Hizbullah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect they were intended to avoid.

None of this is to say that Israel wouldn`t, in the end, do the deed if it felt its own vital security was threatened. But militarily, only the US could do it with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the programme to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). However, that technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz, it`s almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.

Four years ago the run-up to Iraq was like a game of American football - swift and explosive. Over Iran we shall see a long, drawn-out game of chess. The board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that begins today will be followed by another in early March, which will almost certainly agree to report Iran to the UN security council. That is what was agreed in a useful meeting between Britain, France, Germany, the US, Russia and China in London earlier this week. Russian and Chinese officials have gone to Tehran to bring home the message to the Iranian government. Jack Straw did the same in a meeting with the Iranian foreign minister yesterday.

Even if it goes to the UN, there will probably be more elaborate moves before sanctions are imposed. It`s very unclear what sanctions China and Russia would agree to. This Persian chess game is multidimensional and exemplifies the reality of a multipolar world. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denounces the assaults of "false superpowers", but the real point is that they are multiple great powers, with diverse interests. Even if they agree sanctions, those may not stop the Iranian regime going ahead, overtly or covertly, with its nuclear programme. Fortunately, nuclear experts reckon that it will take from three to eight years for Iran to reach the point at which it can decide whether to go hell for leather towards the weaponisation of its nuclear capacity.

That timetable has a particular significance for US politics. If you wonder why the Bush administration is being so mild and moderate, so more-European-than-the-French, on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know the crunch won`t come on their watch. If you ask why both John McCain and Hillary Clinton, two frontrunners to become the next president of the United States, are being so hawkish on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know the crunch probably will come on their watch, after 2009.

Meanwhile, we should avoid seeing Iran only through the prism of our attitudes to the United States, as so many Europeans did with Iraq. The truth is that, whatever Washington does or does not do, the world faces a serious problem of nuclear proliferation, and Iran has become a leading test case. The head of the IAEA, the Nobel peace-prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Davos: "The present system for preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is at an end, is bankrupt." The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is not adequate to the task and is often honoured only in the breach. The most telling charge against established nuclear powers such as the US and Britain is that of double standards: why is there one rule for you and another for the rest? More acutely still: why is there one rule for Iran but quite another for Israel and India? To say "Oh, that`s because they are responsible democracies" raises the question, "Who decides which states are responsible democracies?" And anyway, Pakistan isn`t.

So whatever we do about Iran, what we need is a new international system for the supervision and inspection of nuclear capacities in every country in the world. It should be explicit, consistent and administered by the nearest thing we have to a world arbiter, the United Nations. In order for it to be credible, established nuclear powers such as Britain and the US will have to submit themselves to the same regime of supervision and inspection as everyone else. "The US will never agree to that!" you exclaim. Well, not under the present leadership and in its current mood. But the American approach to Iran and this week`s state of the union address show how much even the Bush administration has changed. In 2009 Washington could change some more. If you want a message of hope in this dark scene, remember Churchill`s remark that you can usually rely on the United States to do the right thing - once it has exhausted all the alternatives.

Timothygartonash.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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[urlShell posts $23bn record profit]http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,1700408,00.html[/url]

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Latest Update: #35108 02.02.06 00:29:49 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 01, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Feb.06: 4

Iraker 02/01/06: Total: 19
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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State of the union

Running on empty
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=…

Feb 2nd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition


Not many new ideas from the president. But that may serve George Bush and the Republican Party rather well

GEORGE BUSH likes to boast that he doesn`t do “small ball”. Each of his previous four state-of-the-union addresses has had a big idea at its core—from cutting taxes to fighting terrorism to overhauling Social Security. And most of them have also contained big surprises—such as his identification of an “axis of evil” to his plan to spend $15 billion fighting AIDS.

This year the former impresario of the Texas Rangers had no choice but to play small ball. This is partly because this is his fifth outing; the big ideas have already been used. But it is mainly because he is being crushed under the weight of previous policies. America is in a fiscal hole (with a $319 billion deficit last year), thanks in large part to his tax cuts and spending increases; abroad, he is still struggling with the consequences of invading Iraq and unleashing democracy in the Middle East.

And yet Mr Bush seems to need a shot of political adrenaline. He goes into his sixth year in office with approval ratings of around 42%—lower than any post-war president except for the Watergate-logged Richard Nixon. Close to two-thirds of the population thinks America is headed in the wrong direction; half thinks that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake.

These dismal figures partly reflect Mr Bush`s favoured political strategy of firing up his conservative base and letting the rest go hang. But they are also testimony to a dismal 2005—a year in which Mr Bush failed to sell Social Security reform, saw precious little progress in Iraq and lost much of his reputation for competence (and compassion) with Hurricane Katrina.

Even in the best of circumstances history strongly favours the out party in the sixth year of a presidency, and these are not the best of circumstances. A significant majority of Americans tell pollsters that they would rather go in the direction outlined by congressional Democrats than that favoured by the Republicans. In Congress, the president`s party is wracked by corruption scandals and it faces a contentious leadership race in the House that will bruise egos. Meanwhile, the legislative system is severely overloaded, with lobbying reform, immigration reform, appropriation bills, budget reconciliation and the Patriot Act waiting in the wings.
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Mr Bush`s main challenge with the state of the union was not easy: how do you come across as bold and purposeful when in fact you have boxed yourself into a corner? His answer was to recast his presidency as a bold alternative to the twin bogeymen of isolationism abroad and protectionism at home. This allowed him to repeat his familiar theme about democracy being an alternative to terrorism and to sing a paean of praise to the open economic policies that have helped America outperform its rivals. He also restated his support for a liberal immigration policy.

The latter is important: it suggests that he is willing to take on the wrath of the nativist right of his party. But the rest contained more rhetoric than substance. In a gesture towards Palestine, Mr Bush made the good point that there is more to democracy than just elections: there is the wider challenge of building a civil society. But the administration still seems flummoxed about what to do when Muslims use elections as an opportunity to elect extremists.

Indeed, Mr Bush spent a lot of time eschewing novelty and just blasting out the old favourite tunes. He urged Congress to renew his tax cuts, praised the Senate for confirming Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to compromise over the use of wiretaps, condemned Iran`s nuclear ambitions, pledged himself to preserving the family and said he wouldn`t have any truck with “creating human-animal hybrids”.

The Democrats duly sat pat while the Republicans stood up and cheered. But these conservative-pleasing bits of the speech represented a victory for the forces of the status quo rather than radicalism. For instance, Mr Bush called for the Iranian people to solve their own problems, but he didn`t suggest ways to foment popular resistance to clerical rule, as many neo-conservatives had hoped. He also quietly bowed to reality on another radical proposal, reforming Social Security; in a neat Texan two-step, he announced that he was now in favour of setting up a commission to look at the impact of the ageing baby-boomers on entitlement programmes.

So was there any sign of a presidency advancing? The most dramatic phrase in the speech was his promise to free America from its addiction to oil, but there was little real change in energy policy (see article). Two others may yet be significant—strengthening private medical accounts to make it easier for people to buy health insurance out of their own pockets and directing resources to improve America`s competitiveness in science and mathematics—but details on both are elusive.

So this year`s state of the union will hardly go down as a classic. But that does not mean that it did not serve its purpose.

To begin with, state-of-the-union speeches are not as important as political types maintain. Examine Gallup`s “pre-SOTU” and “post-SOTU” ratings going back to Jimmy Carter`s administration and you discover that, despite all the publicity, only ten out of 24 speeches boosted a president`s approval rating; in 12 it was lower and two saw no change. And most of these flickers on the dial were within the margin of error. Ironically, one of the few examples of a state of the union making a big difference was last year: Mr Bush`s rating jumped by six points. But this preceded the most disastrous year in his presidency.

Next, from a tactical viewpoint, Mr Bush`s biggest challenge was arguably to avoid making big new commitments rather than to add yet more of them to an overextended administration. He passed this test with flying colours (and managed to look confident and jaunty even when saying not very much).

Another reason not to change course was that Mr Bush`s presidency is on an uptick at the moment, albeit a small one. The biggest danger for such a polarising president was that his base would desert him. His lacklustre response to Hurricane Katrina, his overspending and his decision to nominate Harriet Miers, his personal lawyer, to the Supreme Court made this a possibility last year—especially when you add in the Republican corruption scandals.

War and the Defeaticrats

From this perspective, the most important scene was not Mr Bush holding forth before the chamber; it was Justices Roberts and Alito taking their seats before the presidential dais. The conservative movement was created as much by fury at the liberal courts as anything else. The double confirmation of Mr Roberts (who is 51) and Mr Alito (55) will move the court to the right on everything from racial preferences to the role of religion; it will shape American law and culture for decades to come.

Meanwhile, the Bush battleplan for the 2006 mid-term elections has begun to emerge. He wants to solve the Republicans` problems by focusing the troops on what they do best: laying siege to Democrats. Mr Bush`s speech followed Karl Rove`s address to the Republican National Committee on January 20th. The president`s main political adviser promised an assault on the Democrats` weakest spot: the war on terrorism. America is at war, goes the argument, but the Democrats are obsessed with warrantless wiretaps. America faces a monstrous enemy, but Democrats are obsessed by blaming America. This doesn`t mean that the Democrats are unpatriotic, observed a smiling Mr Rove. They are just wrong. It is a safe bet that we will hear a lot more about the “Defeaticrats” than health savings accounts in the next ten months.


Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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GREENSPAN SENDS MIXED SIGNALS IN FIRST DAY AT HOME
Former Fed Chief’s Inscrutable Statements Baffle Wife
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In his first day at home since stepping down from his post as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan made a series of cryptic, inscrutable pronouncements that left his wife, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, totally baffled.

The former Fed chief was renowned for his confusing, often incomprehensible statements about the markets and the economy while testifying to Congress, but according to Ms. Mitchell, those remarks were “a piece of cake” to understand compared to the mixed messages he has been sending at home.

The trouble began at the breakfast table, Ms. Mitchell said, when she asked the former Fed chief what he wanted to eat, a question which led to a serpentine 45-minute response.

“To order ham and eggs at this time is tempting, but may not be warranted given my desire to keep my cholesterol below a reasonable ceiling,” Mr. Greenspan reportedly said.

Later in the day, Mr. Greenspan reviewed several of the family’s credit card statements and warned Ms. Mitchell against “irrational exuberance,” adding that she was “spending at a rate that is not sustainable given my projected retirement income going forward.”

According to Ms. Mitchell, Mr. Greenspan spent the rest of the day holding the TV remote control, moving the remote up five channels and then down five channels for no apparent reason.

“I kind of feel sorry for him,” Ms. Mitchell said. “I think he really misses moving interest rates.”

Elsewhere, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Bush listed a series of accomplishments of his administration, including that the United States is warmer than it has ever been.

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Published on Thursday, February 2, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
A Mis-Statement of the Union Address
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0202-22.htm

by Stephen Zunes


This essay evaluates some of the key claims made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address of January 31, 2006:

“In this decisive year, you and I will make choices that determine both the future and the character of our country. We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom­or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life. We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy­or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity. In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting­yet it ends in danger and decline. The only way to protect our people... the only way to secure the peace... the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership­so the United States of America will continue to lead.” This is an extraordinarily simplistic formulation of a series of complex issues facing the United States and the world. Opposing a foreign policy that includes the invasion of sovereign nations on the far side of the globe and prosecuting bloody counter-insurgency wars is not a call to “retreat from our duties.” Opposing neoliberal international economic policies that favor powerful multinational corporations at the expense of American jobs, labor rights, consumer protection, and a healthy environment is not a call to “shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity.” Challenging such dangerous policies of the Bush administration is not advocating “isolationism and protectionism.” More fundamentally, the pursuit of a foreign policy based upon reckless unilateralism and militarism­which has alienated our country from the vast majority of the international community­is not the same as “leadership.”

Terrorism, Authoritarianism, and Freedom

“On September 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.” Actually, the “problems” that led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States did not originate in Afghanistan. Sixteen of the nineteen hijackers were from the oppressive, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Saudi Arabia and others were from the oppressive, U.S.-backed dictatorships in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Most of them had received more “training” in flight schools in the United States than they ever did in Afghanistan and the terrorist cells from which the 9/11 hijackers emerged did not coalesce in “failed and oppressive states,” but in Germany and the United States. Furthermore, the rise of the Taliban and the chaos that did take place in the “failed and oppressive state” of Afghanistan came about in part as a result of the $5 billion of aid the U.S. government sent to radical Islamic militias in that country during the 1980s.

“Dictatorships shelter terrorists, feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror.” Again, this is an incredibly simplistic formulation: The United States is a democracy, but it has sheltered Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists implicated in attacks that have killed scores of civilians. Similarly, the United States­along with such democracies as Great Britain, France, India, and Israel­have pursued and possess nuclear weapons. Furthermore, a number of democratic nations have failed to respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors. For example, Israel has invaded and occupied its neighbors and India has engaged in serious human rights abuses against its citizens in Kashmir, the Punjab, and its eastern states. Conversely, there are scores of dictatorships that do not shelter terrorists or seek weapons of mass destruction.

“Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies on Earth. Today, there are 122.” First of all, this impressive figure ignores the fact that there were only about 60 independent countries in the world in 1945; there are nearly 200 today. So, while there has been a five-fold increase in the total number of democratic governments, if one measures in terms of overall percentage, it is an increase of barely 50%. More significantly, in those intervening years, the United States helped facilitate the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and several other countries and actively supported dictatorial regimes that suppressed popular movements for freedom in scores of others. As a result, the advance of freedom is an important and laudable achievement, yet it has in large part taken place despite of, rather than because of, U.S. foreign policy.

“We are writing a new chapter in the history of self-government, with … men and women from Lebanon to Egypt debating the rights of individuals and the necessity of freedom.” Despite longstanding domination by Syria, men and women in the Republic of Lebanon have been openly debating individual rights and the necessity of freedom for decades, long before the Bush administration assumed office. The Lebanese people significantly advanced their freedom when they finally forced Syrian troops out of their country through a massive nonviolent uprising they initiated on their own. Though supportive of the Syrian withdrawal, it is important to remember that the United States backed Syria`s decision to send its troops into Lebanon back in 1976 as well as its consolidation of power in 1990. The United States also backed Israel`s 1978 and 1982 invasions and its 22-year occupation of the southern part of that country, also raising questions as to the sincerity of professed U.S. support for Lebanese freedom. Meanwhile, Egypt is still under the grip of the U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship, which has beaten, arrested, jailed, and tortured hundreds of pro-democracy activists while enjoying its status as the second-largest recipient of U.S. military and economic aid. Egyptians may indeed debate “the rights of individuals and necessity of freedom,” but they do so at their own jeopardy.

“At the start of 2006, more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half­in places like Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran­because the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well.” It is revealing that the only governments President Bush bothered to mention by name are among the minority of autocratic regimes that are not supported by the United States. By contrast, he notably failed to mention Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Brunei, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Chad, or scores of other dictatorial regimes that have received billions of dollars worth of police and military assistance from the United States since President Bush came to office.

“Terrorists like bin Laden … aim to seize power in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world.” First of all, al-Qaida is a decentralized network of underground terrorist cells which has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to launch terrorist attacks around the world without controlling any country. Secondly, Salafi Sunni extremists of the likes of Osama bin Laden make up only a small minority of the armed Iraqi resistance, so it`s hard to conceive how they would be able to seize power even in the unlikely event of an insurgent victory. Finally, it is important to remember that outside of a tiny enclave in the northeastern corner of the autonomous Kurdish region outside of Saddam Hussein`s control, Islamist terrorists had no active presence in Iraq until after the United States invaded in 2003. As a result, whatever threat may actually exist of such Salafi Sunni extremists taking over Iraq is a direct consequence of Bush administration policy.

“If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores.” Despite similar claims during the Vietnam War that “if we don`t fight them over there we`ll have to fight them here,” the Vietnamese fighting U.S. forces did not move the battlefield to America once U.S. troops got out of their country. The Afghans fighting Soviet forces did not move the battlefield to Russia when the Soviets got out of their country. Similarly, the Iraqis fighting U.S. forces will not move the battlefield to America once we get out of their country. It is the ongoing occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces, the bombing and shelling of Iraqi cities, the torture of Iraqi detainees, and the chaos and destruction inflicted upon that ancient land as a result of the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation that is prompting the insurgency. The U.S. war in Iraq is creating terrorists faster than we can kill them.

On Iraq

“There is no peace in retreat. And there is no honor in retreat.” There is no peace or honor in violating the United Nations Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and other international legal principles by invading a sovereign nation on the far side of the world and torturing and killing its people.

“And we are on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory.” In reality, U.S. forces are increasingly relegated to defensive positions. The much hyped “plan for victory” put forward by the administration at the end of last year has since been revealed to have been written not by military commanders or strategic planners, but by a public relations firm.

“First, we are helping Iraqis build an inclusive government, so that old resentments will be eased, and the insurgency marginalized.” Virtually all accounts of what is really happening in Iraq indicate the following: The government that is emerging, like the outgoing regime, will likely be dominated by Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists who have engaged in widespread human rights abuses against the country`s Sunni minority. Ethnic tensions have increased dramatically since the U.S. invasion and are getting worse. And the insurgency is growing.

“Second, we are continuing reconstruction efforts, and helping the Iraqi government to fight corruption and build a modern economy, so all Iraqis can experience the benefits of freedom.” The Bush administration has essentially eliminated additional funding for reconstruction and diverted much of what was originally allocated for security. Corruption is endemic and the economy has largely collapsed. Millions of Iraqis lack freedom from fear or freedom from want, making it difficult to appreciate the post-Saddam right to elect their own government. The “modern economy” imposed in the early months of the U.S. occupation has included the massive privatization of public enterprises, allowing unlimited foreign ownership and repatriation of profits, a 15% flat tax, and scores of other measures restructuring the economy on neoliberal lines, which has proven decidedly unpopular with the Iraqi people, currently suffering from record unemployment and poverty.

“At the same time, our coalition has been relentless in shutting off terrorist infiltration, clearing out insurgent strongholds, and turning over territory to Iraqi security forces. I am confident in our plan for victory … Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning.” Infiltration by foreign terrorists was virtually non-existent in Iraq in the years immediately preceding the American conquest, but­as a result of the U.S. invasion­it has become a serious problem and has increased every year since. Similarly, areas of Iraq controlled by insurgents have grown each year since U.S. forces took over that country. Few Iraqi units can be trusted to maintain control over much territory without an active U.S. presence alongside them. Furthermore, virtually every published independent strategic analysis as well as leaked documents from a number of U.S. military and intelligence sources reveal that the United States is not winning the war.

“The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home. As we make progress on the ground, and Iraqi forces increasingly take the lead, we should be able to further decrease our troop levels­but those decisions will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, DC.” The Bush administration has repeatedly overruled advice from military commanders regarding Iraq since the early planning stages for the invasion. The decision to invade Iraq and place American forces in an extremely vulnerable urban guerrilla warfare situation could have only been made by politicians­few American commanders would support such a foolish decision on their own­but they were the pro-war politicians, not the anti-war politicians to whom President Bush refers. The growing numbers of Democratic members of Congress who have belatedly called for a withdrawal of U.S. forces have done so in large part not out of their own initiative, but in response to the demands of their constituents who elected them to office and to whom they are accountable. The Bush administration has also repeatedly exaggerated the state of readiness of the Iraqi armed forces. As a result, there are serious questions as to whether a military victory is even possible.

“Our coalition has learned from experience in Iraq. We have adjusted our military tactics and changed our approach to reconstruction.” The Bush administration, despite its earlier promises, has essentially given up on serious reconstruction efforts. And, while U.S. forces have improved their tactics as a result of nearly three years of fighting, so have the insurgents. And there is not much of a coalition to speak of at this point. The British are the only foreign forces remaining in the “coalition” that are still engaged in active combat operations.

“Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.” Recognizing that the war is probably unwinnable is not defeatism. It is realism. Aiming for an unachievable military “success” is not responsible. It is a folly of tragic proportions. And insisting the Bush administration be held accountable for the lies, the negligence, and the tragic blunders which have resulted from this ongoing tragedy is a patriotic duty.

“A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison … put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country … and show that a pledge from America means little. Members of Congress, however we feel about the decisions and debates of the past, our Nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies, and stand behind the American military in its vital mission.” First of all, Iraqis are already experiencing death and prison as the war and repression continue. Secondly, after fighting to rid American and British foreigners from their soil, it`s hard to imagine the highly nationalistic and predominantly Shiite Iraqis would tolerate being ruled by a Saudi or Jordanian Sunni extremist. Thirdly, the strength of such terrorists is growing as long as the United States continues to prosecute its bloody counter-insurgency war in the heart of the Islamic world. Most significantly, the United States has already broken perhaps its most solemn pledge: The United Nations Charter, which resulted from a global awareness that the tragic events of World War II would not be repeated and the writing of which was heavily influenced by Americans, mandates that no nation can engage in an aggressive war. The use of force is recognized as legitimate only if explicitly authorized by the UN Security Council as a last resort to ensure collective security or in self-defense against an armed attack. When the United States signed and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, it made a pledge to the world that it would never engage in anything like the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarly, according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, treaties signed and ratified by the United States are Supreme Law. When President Bush launched the invasion and when members of Congress authorized the invasion, they chose to pursue a policy in direct contravention of the treaty obligations of the United States, thereby violating their oath of office in which they pledged to uphold and defend the Constitution.

“Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change. So the United States of America supports democratic reform across the broader Middle East.” The United States remains the number one supplier of armaments and police training in the world, most of which goes to governments which engage in a pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations. U.S. military aid to the Middle East is six times U.S. economic aid. In addition, U.S. arms sales to that region surpass that of consumer goods, high technology, and agriculture as the number one commercial export. If President Bush were serious about promoting political freedom and peaceful change, he would end U.S. support of repressive governments and stop fueling the deadly arms trade.

Democracy in the Middle East

“The great people of Egypt have voted in a multi-party presidential election­and now their government should open paths of peaceful opposition that will reduce the appeal of radicalism.” This “multi-party presidential election” barred the largest opposition party from participating, effectively banned independent candidates, and refused to allow for international election monitors. It could not even remotely be considered a free and fair election. While President Bush`s call for the Mubarak regime to “open paths of peaceful opposition” are good words, he has refused to back them up with action, categorically rejecting calls by human rights activists to condition U.S. military and economic aid to the Egyptian government ending its human rights abuses.

“The Palestinian people have voted in elections­now the leaders of Hamas must recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism, and work for lasting peace.” While such demands are valid, it is noteworthy that President Bush says nothing about ending Israel`s ongoing occupation and illegal colonization of the West Bank, which has resulted in the dramatic growth of that radical Islamist movement.

“Saudi Arabia has taken the first steps of reform­now it can offer its people a better future by pressing forward with those efforts.” These “first steps”­some male-only elections for a minority of seats on some local legislative councils­are quite meager. By almost any measure, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains a family dictatorship whose Islamic fundamentalist rule and lack of accountable government is significantly worse than even that of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

"The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions­and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.” It is significant that President Bush chooses to make an issue over Iran`s nuclear program, which is years away from producing nuclear weapons, while making no mention of Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, already possesses nuclear weapons, and continues to defy the world through its violation of UN Security Council resolution 487, which calls on that country to place its nuclear program under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nor does President Bush mention India and Pakistan, which have also refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, already possess nuclear weapons, and continue to defy UN Security Council resolution 1172, which calls on those countries to eliminate their nuclear programs altogether. Indeed, President Bush has sent billions of dollars worth of highly sophisticated weapons to Israel, has agreed to sell nuclear-capable jet fighters to Pakistan, and has signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with India.

“And tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our Nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.” If this is really the case, why did the United States overthrow Iran`s last democratic government, that of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh? If the United States really respects the rights of the Iranian people to choose their own future, why did successive U.S. administrations support the tyrannical regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, installed by the United States following Mossadegh`s ouster, whose dreaded CIA-trained SAVAK secret police tortured and murdered thousands of dissidents, thereby spawning the Islamist revolution that has since come to power?

Counter-Terrorism and Civil Liberties

“It is said that prior to the attacks of September 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al-Qaida operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. So to prevent another attack­based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute­I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have­and Federal courts have approved the use of that authority. This terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qaida, we want to know about it­because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” First of all, there is nothing under the existing 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval before or immediately after the executive branch orders electronic surveillance, that prevented the Bush administration from monitoring the overseas phone calls to al-Qaida operatives prior to 9/11. Secondly, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution which gives the president the authority to order wiretaps without judicial or Congressional approval. Thirdly, Congress never granted statutory authority for President Bush to engage in warrantless wiretaps. Fourthly, previous presidents who have ordered wiretapping have generally done so only with court approval. When President Richard Nixon was discovered to have ordered warrantless wiretaps, it was incorporated in the articles of impeachment that drove him from office. Most importantly, President Bush has failed to present any evidence whatsoever that warrantless wiretaps have “helped prevent terrorist attacks” or that it is somehow “essential to the security of America.” The choice is not one of either violating the civil liberties of Americans or “sitting back and waiting to be hit again.”

“Our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy­a war that will be fought by Presidents of both parties, who will need steady bipartisan support from the Congress. And tonight I ask for yours. Together, let us protect our country, support the men and women who defend us, and lead this world toward freedom.” Unfortunately, President Bush`s foreign policy agenda has for the most part been embraced by a bipartisan majority of Congress. The Congressional Democratic leadership joined President Bush in deceiving the American public about non-existent Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” authorized the invasion of Iraq, and continues to support funding the war. They have also supported his policy of threatening war against Iran while backing other regimes which violate human rights and develop nuclear weapons. Similarly, they have defended President Bush`s support for Israel`s occupation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and they have helped the Bush administration undermine international law and discredit the United Nations. Such policies do not protect America, however, since such policies only increase anti-Americanism and the appeal of extremist ideologies and terrorist groups. They do not support the men and women of the armed forces, who are taken from their homes and families to fight in a bloody and fruitless counter-insurgency war in a faraway land. And they do not lead the world toward freedom, since such policies include the backing of dictatorial regimes and occupation armies.

Stephen Zunes 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). He also serves as Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article first appeared.

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Mehr zu dem Thema:
The White House memo

[urlThe White House meeting that took us to war]http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/02/02/the_white_house_meeting_that_took_us_to_war.html[/url]

7pm

Bush told Blair we`re going to war, memo reveals
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1700881,00.html

· PM backed invasion despite illegality warnings
· Plan to disguise US jets as UN planes
· Bush: postwar violence unlikely
Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday February 2, 2006

Guardian Unlimited
Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion`s legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

"The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

The disclosures come in a new edition of Lawless World, by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College, London. Professor Sands last year exposed the doubts shared by Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion in disclosures which eventually forced the prime minister to publish the full legal advice given to him by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

The memo seen by Prof Sands reveals:

· Mr Bush told the Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".

· Mr Bush even expressed the hope that a defector would be extracted from Iraq and give a "public presentation about Saddam`s WMD". He is also said to have referred Mr Blair to a "small possibility" that Saddam would be "assassinated".

· Mr Blair told the US president that a second UN resolution would be an "insurance policy", providing "international cover, including with the Arabs" if anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning oil wells, killing children, or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq.

· Mr Bush told the prime minister that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". Mr Blair did not demur, according to the book.

The revelation that Mr Blair had supported the US president`s plans to go to war with Iraq even in the absence of a second UN resolution contrasts with the assurances the prime minister gave parliament shortly after. On February 23 2003 - three weeks after his trip to Washington - Mr Blair told the Commons that the government was giving "Saddam one further final chance to disarm voluntarily".

He added: "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament through the UN. I detest his regime - I hope most people do - but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN`s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully."

On March 18, before the crucial vote on the war, he told MPs: "The UN should be the focus both of diplomacy and of action ... [and that not to take military action] would do more damage in the long term to the UN than any other single course that we could pursue."

The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair, attended by six close aides, came at a time of growing concern about the failure of any hard intelligence to back up claims that Saddam was producing weapons of mass destruction in breach of UN disarmament obligations. It took place a few days before the then US secretary Colin Powell made claims - since discredited - in a dramatic presentation at the UN about Iraq`s weapons programme.

Earlier in January 2003, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, expressed his private concerns about the absence of a smoking gun in a private note to Mr Blair that month, according to the book. He said he hoped that the UN`s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, would come up with enough evidence to report a breach by Iraq of is its UN obligations.

The extent of concern in Washington at the time is reflected in the plan to send US planes over Iraq disguised in UN livery - itself a clear breach of international law.

Prof Sands also says that Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain`s UN ambassador at the time, told a colleague from another country that he was "clearly uncomfortable" about the failure to get a second resolution.

Foreign Office lawyers consistently warned that an invasion would be regarded as unlawful. The book reveals that Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FO`s deputy chief legal adviser who resigned over the war, told the Butler inquiry, into the use of intelligence during the run-up to the war, of her belief that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, shared the FO view.

Lord Goldsmith told the FO lawyers in early 2003: "The prime minister has told me that I cannot give advice, but you know what my views are", according to private evidence to the Butler inquiry.

Shortly afterwards, in February 2003, Lord Goldsmith visited Washington where he had talks with William Taft, Mr Powell`s legal adviser. Mr Taft is quoted in the book as as saying Lord Goldsmith also met "our attorney general [then John Ashcroft], and people at the Pentagon".

On March 7 2003 Lord Goldsmith advised the prime minister that the Bush administration believed that a case could be made for an invasion without a second UN resolution. But he warned that Britain, if it went ahead, could be challenged in the international criminal court. Ten days later, he said a second resolution was not necessary.

Sir Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat acting leader, said last night: "The fact that consideration was apparently given to using American military aircraft in UN colours in the hope of provoking Saddam Hussein is a graphic illustration of the rush to war. It would also appear to be the case that the diplomatic efforts in New York after the meeting of January 31 were simply going through the motions, with decision for military action already taken."

Sir Menzies continued: "The prime minister`s offer of February 23 to Saddam Hussein was about as empty as it could get. He has a lot of explaining to do."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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February 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
State of Delusion
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/opinion/03krugman.html

By PAUL KRUGMAN

So President Bush`s plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.

But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still — perhaps more than ever — run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don`t take the business of governing seriously.

Here`s the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol" and other technologies would allow us "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East."

But the next day, officials explained that he didn`t really mean what he said. "This was purely an example," said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. "A veteran researcher," reports The New York Times, "said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol."

Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy "plan" was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say.

For weeks administration sources told reporters that the State of the Union address would focus on health care. But at the last minute the White House might have realized that its health care proposals, based on the idea that Americans have too much insurance, would suffer the same political fate as its attempt to privatize Social Security. ("Congress," Mr. Bush said, "did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security." Democrats responded with a standing ovation.)

So Mr. Bush`s speechwriters were told to replace the health care proposals with fine words about energy independence, words not backed by any actual policy.

What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration`s achievements. But what`s a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush`s largest domestic initiative to date. It`s also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we`ve "changed our approach to reconstruction."

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

So now, having squandered billions in Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayer dollars, we`ve told the Iraqis that from now on it`s their problem. America`s would-be Marshall Plan in Iraq, reports The Los Angeles Times, "is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding." I guess you can call that a change in approach.

There`s a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. ... I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues."

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That`s why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It`s why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it`s why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Rumsfeld Offers Strategies for Current War
Pentagon to Release 20-Year Plan Today
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 3, 2006; A08

The United States is engaged in what could be a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

Rumsfeld, who laid out broad strategies for what the military and the Bush administration are now calling the "long war," likened al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin while urging Americans not to give in on the battle of wills that could stretch for years. He said there is a tendency to underestimate the threats that terrorists pose to global security, and said liberty is at stake.

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," Rumsfeld said in a speech at the National Press Club.

The speech, which aides said was titled "The Long War," came on the eve of the Pentagon`s release of its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which sets out plans for how the U.S. military will address major security challenges 20 years into the future. The plans to be released today include shifts to make the military more agile and capable of dealing with unconventional threats, something Rumsfeld has said is necessary to move from a military designed for the Cold War into one that is more flexible.

He said the nation must focus on three strategies in the ongoing war: preventing terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, defending the U.S. homeland and helping allies fight terrorism. He emphasized that these goals could take a long time to achieve.

Indeed, the QDR, mandated every four years by Congress, opens with the declaration: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

The review has been widely anticipated in Washington defense circles because of the dramatic changes in the U.S. military`s global role since the last review in 2001. Adding to the high expectations is the fact that Rumsfeld and his team have now been in place for more than four years.

The QDR strategy draws heavily on lessons learned by the military from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide campaign against terrorism, shifting the Pentagon`s emphasis away from conventional warfare of the Cold War era toward three new areas.

First are "irregular" conflicts against insurgents, terrorists and other non-state enemies. Iraq and Afghanistan are the "early battles" in the campaign against Islamic extremists and terrorists, who are "profoundly more dangerous" than in the past because of technological advances that allow them to operate globally, said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England in an address on Wednesday.

The QDR also focuses on defending the U.S. homeland against "catastrophic" attacks such as with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Finally, it sets out plans for deterring the rising military heft of major powers such as China.

The strategic vision outlined in the QDR has won high marks from defense analysts for diagnosing the problems the U.S. military will likely face. However, it is less successful in translating those concepts into concrete military capabilities, the analysts say.

The review does not dramatically change the "force construct" -- the set of world contingencies that the U.S. military is expected to be able to deal with. The most important change is the recognition that U.S. forces may have to carry out long-term stability operations, or surge suddenly to a world hot spot. There are not "huge tectonic shifts," said Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an address Wednesday.

The strategy does call for devoting resources to accelerate a long-range strike capability directed at hostile nations, and for new investments aimed at countering biological and nuclear weapons -- such as teams able to defuse a nuclear bomb. But it makes relatively minor adjustments in key weapons systems, with the biggest programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Army`s Future Combat Systems escaping virtually unscathed. This leaves less room for investments in innovative programs and forces to address the types of problems that the QDR identifies, analysts say.

"A lot of tough choices are kicked down the road," said Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

One of the toughest battles facing the United States, Rumsfeld said yesterday, is recognizing the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the immediacy of fighting the nation`s enemies. He said the task facing Western nations could be arduous, as terrorists operate in numerous countries around the world, hidden, and with the willingness to wait long periods between attacks. Military leaders and officials in the Bush administration have taken to calling the global war on terrorism the "long war," which defense experts say is a recognition that there is no end in sight.

"Dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism is going to take a long time," said Robert E. Hunter, senior adviser at Rand Corp. and a former ambassador to NATO. "But we have to define success. You`re never going to get rid of all terrorism."

Rumsfeld said he does not believe the war will end with a bang but, instead, with a whimper, "fading down over a sustained period of time as more countries in the world are successful," much as how democracy outlasted communism in the Cold War. He added that the early decades of the Cold War also brought confusion and doubt.

"The only way that terrorists can win this struggle is if we lose our will and surrender the fight, or think it`s not important enough, or in confusion or in disagreement among ourselves give them the time to regroup and reestablish themselves in Iraq or elsewhere," he said.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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What the President Meant to Say
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/02/02…


By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, February 2, 2006; 12:42 PM

The most memorable portion of President Bush`s otherwise largely forgettable State of the Union address Tuesday night was his call for America to break its addiction to oil from the Middle East.

But it turns out maybe we should forget that, too.

Kevin G. Hall writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America`s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn`t mean it literally.

"What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025. . . .

"Asked why the president used the words `the Middle East` when he didn`t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that `every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.` The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble."

H. Josef Hebert writes for the Associated Press that Bodman and Hubbard "struggled Wednesday in an attempt to explain what Bush had meant by `replacing` Middle East oil. . . .

"On Wednesday, Hubbard and Bodman acknowledged that Persian Gulf oil may, in fact, not be replaced at all, even if overall oil imports were to drop because of the increased availability of alternative motor fuels."

Here is the text of Bodman and Hubbard`s briefing.
Troubles Ahead

Elisabeth Bumiller writes in the New York Times: "The energy proposals set out on Tuesday by President Bush quickly ran into obstacles on Wednesday, showing how difficult it will be to take even the limited steps he supports to reduce the nation`s reliance on foreign oil. . . .

"Democrats said Mr. Bush had opposed foreign oil reduction targets in last year`s energy bill, and Republicans questioned the practicality of relying on ethanol and other alternatives.

"Scientifically, researchers said ethanol and other alternative fuels were still years away from widespread commercial use.

"Economically, energy analysts said Mr. Bush`s goal of reducing Mideast oil imports would have little practical benefit because oil was traded in world markets and its price was determined by global supply and demand, rather than bought from one country by another."
Defending Big Oil

And just in case you thought Bush, himself an oil man by profession, had suddenly turned all populist on the issue: Never fear. High oil prices have taken an enormous toll on working Americans while contributing to world-record profits for the oil companies. But Bush doesn`t see a problem there.

Terence Hunt writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush defended the huge profits of Exxon Mobil Corp. Wednesday, saying they are simply the result of the marketplace and that consumers socked with soaring energy costs should not expect price breaks. . . .

"Early this week, Exxon reported record profits of $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter and $36.13 billion for the year -- the largest of any U.S. company. While some politicians raised furious objections, Bush had a different reaction.

" `There is a marketplace in American society,` he said."

In a short interview with the Associated Press on Air Force One yesterday morning -- several hours before Bodman and Hubbard`s briefing -- Bush offered an even "more ambitious hope than in his State of the Union speech for cutting imports from the volatile Mideast," Hunt writes.

" `I believe in a relatively quick period of time, within my lifetime, we`ll be able to reduce if not end dependence on Middle Eastern oil by this new technology` of converting corn, wood, grasses and other products into ethanol, he said."

Here are excerpts from the interview.
Guzzler Watch

Kenneth R. Bazinet writes in the New York Daily News to remind us that "President Bush is one of the biggest gas guzzlers in the country and his first stop to sell the idea of breaking the nation`s oil addiction burned up thousands of gallons of jet fuel and hundreds of gallons of gasoline."
Reuters Interview

Bush also sat down for a short interview with Reuters.

Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush said yesterday the United States would defend Israel militarily if necessary against Iran, a statement that appeared to be his most explicit commitment to Israel`s defense. . . .

"The White House played down Bush`s comments, saying they are in line with previous remarks and do not represent new policy. But examples provided by the White House were not as explicit, with Bush publicly saying he was `committed to the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state` or `committed to the safety of Israel.` "

Steve Holland writes for Reuters: "President Bush on Wednesday called for overhauling the way lobbyists do business in Washington in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. . . .

"Bush, in an interview with Reuters aboard Air Force One while en route from Washington to Nashville a day after his annual State of the Union address, said, `We`ve got to examine what laws are necessary to prevent people from, you know, taking advantage of the system.` . . .

"Bush said, `In terms of political consequences, I think a close scrutiny will show that people in both parties have been involved in lobbying, being lobbied and therefore people in both parties must come up with the solution. That`s why last night I praised people in both parties for working on a solution.` "

Both parties do get lobbied, of course, but the Abramoff scandal -- which has already resulted in the indictment of one White House aide, former chief procurement officer David Safavian -- revolves exclusively around influence-peddling allegations involving Republicans.
Hurricane Watch, Part I

Spencer S. Hsu and Amy Goldstein write in The Washington Post: "Responsibility for the government`s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina extends widely but begins at the top of the Bush administration, which failed before the storm to name a White House, homeland security or other senior aide to take command of disaster relief, congressional investigators reported yesterday. . . .

" `A single individual -- directly responsible and accountable to the president of the United States -- should be dedicated to act as the central focal point to lead and coordinate the overall federal response,` [Government Accountability Office] chief David M. Walker said, summarizing the preliminary findings of 30 pending Katrina-related studies. . . .

"Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who asked Walker to report to a House investigation whose work is due to be completed on Feb. 15, said Bush aides including Vice President Cheney, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend `were just not prepared for a storm of this magnitude.` "

Lara Jakes Jordan writes for the Associated Press: "The White House had no clear chain of command in place, investigators with the Government Accountability Office said, laying much of the blame on President Bush for not designating a single official to coordinate federal decision-making for the Aug. 29 storm. Bush has accepted responsibility for the government`s halting response, but for the most part then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, who quit days after the hurricane hit, has been the public face of the failures."

Here is the GAO`s preliminary report .
Hurricane Watch, Part II

Anne Rochell Konigsmark writes for USA Today: "Many Gulf Coast residents spent Wednesday angrily counting the words President Bush devoted to their storm-battered region in his State of the Union speech.

"The tally: Bush addressed 165 of his 5,300 words to disaster recovery in the Gulf, and he never used the word `Katrina.`

" `I waited until the bitter end,` Dottie Tabor, a New Orleans retiree, said as she bought food at a city market. `There was not enough at all about New Orleans, and he promised a lot when he was down here.` "
Missing E-mails

Pete Yost writes for the Associated Press: "Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House.

"The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney`s former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame."

Here`s Wolf Blitzer on CNN yesterday with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

"BLITZER: [W]hen I hear a story like this, it hearkens back, I remember, of course, some of those missing tapes during Watergate and the Nixon White House that evidence may have been destroyed. This may be totally, totally overreaching. There may be a simple explanation, but the fact that the prosecutor writes this letter saying what happened to this -- to these e-mails, that raises certain questions.

"TOOBIN: And certainly the Iran-Contra affair was based almost entirely on electronic messages, so-called prof notes sent between Oliver North and colleagues. They have been crucial evidence in all White House investigations. What happened to them? A lot of things get destroyed in the normal course of business. Why were the normal procedures not followed? As you point out, could be completely innocent. But we just don`t know."

The news first broke yesterday, at the end of an article by James Gordon Meek in the New York Daily News.

"CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald collected 10,000 pages of documents - including the most sensitive terrorism memos in the U.S. government - from Vice President Cheney`s office, he said in court papers released yesterday.

"Without serving any warrants in his probe of who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald even obtained censored copies of the President`s Daily Brief, the supersecret CIA threat memo for President Bush.

"Now Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney`s disgraced former chief aide, is asking a court to force Fitzgerald to fork over all the documents to fight charges of perjury and lying to the FBI."

It was in that context that Meek reported: "Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby`s request, said in a letter to Libby`s lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney`s office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy."

Also yesterday, Neil A. Lewis wrote in the New York Times: "Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, offered a detailed outline on Tuesday of Mr. Libby`s likely defense to charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative.

"In papers filed in federal court, the lawyers strongly suggested they would argue that if Mr. Libby`s statements to investigators were untrue, it was a case of innocent confusion or faulty memory because of his preoccupation with weightier national security matters at the time."
Domestic Spying Watch

Eric Lichtblau writes in the New York Times: "The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush`s domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday."

Charlie Savage writes in the Boston Globe; "Legal specialists yesterday questioned the accuracy of President Bush`s sweeping contentions about the legality of his domestic spying program, particularly his assertion in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday that `previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have.` "

The "legal specialists said yesterday that wiretaps ordered by previous presidents were put in place before warrants were required for investigations involving national security. Since Congress passed the law requiring warrants in 1978, no president but Bush has defied it, specialists said."
Straw Man Watch, Part I

The New York Times editorial board writes: "President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He`s fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings. . . .

"One of the oddest moments in Mr. Bush`s defense of domestic spying came when he told his audience in Nashville, `If I was trying to pull a fast one on the American people, why did I brief Congress?` He did not mention that some lawmakers protested the spying at the briefings, or that they found them inadequate. The audience members who laughed and applauded Mr. Bush`s version of the truth may have forgot that he said he briefed Congress fully on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know how that turned out."
At the Grand Ole Opry

Robert Pear writes in the New York Times: "From the stage of the Grand Ole Opry House here, Mr. Bush delivered a reprise of his State of the Union address. But he was more folksy, more personal and more impassioned in setting forth his vision of the United States` place in the world, epitomized on posters plastered around the hall: `Americans win when America leads.`

"Mr. Bush was fired up, full of determination in talking about Iraq and foreign policy. By contrast, when he turned to domestic policy, he rambled at times, then rushed through a list of proposals on health care, immigration, science education and energy conservation. . . .

"The president appeared to draw strength from the enthusiastic crowd, which included thousands of people invited to the event by local civic, business and political groups. He was scheduled to speak for 35 minutes but talked for more than an hour, and was frequently interrupted by thunderous applause."

As I wrote in yesterday`s column , some reporters saw signs in Tuesday`s speech that Bush was newly willing to acknowledge the anxious state of the American public. I suggested that might have been an overreaction based on a pre-speech pep talk for journalists from White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

Yesterday, an unscripted Bush made some more awkward steps in that direction.

James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Bush`s speech, delivered to a supportive audience in the vast Grand Ole Opry House, suggested he was facing a new challenge: justifying his broad optimism, even as he recognizes that increasing numbers of Americans, as measured by multiple public opinion polls, have deep worries about the progress of the war, the future of the economy and the direction in which he is leading the country."

Nedra Pickler writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush said Wednesday he understands why the nation he has led for five years has become more anxious, and he urged people to have confidence in him.

"Bush maintained his optimistic message. . . . But in a rare acknowledgment of the troubled times on his watch, he tried to show empathy with the public`s worries.

" `People are uncertain, in spite of our strong union, because of war, and I understand that,` Bush said."

Here`s the transcript .

Bush himself raised the question that he recognized as "dear to the hearts of many people."

"How long will we be in Iraq? And the answer is this -- it`s a security aspect. And that is that if people want to be free, and if 11 million people chose to vote, the question on people`s mind is, is there a willingness for the Iraqis to defend their own freedom. And I will tell you, the answer we have seen, our commanders on the ground have seen, is, absolutely. Absolutely. There is great bravery amongst these Iraqi soldiers. Our job is to convert their desire to protect their new democracy into effective forces. And that`s what we`re doing."

He wrapped up the answer seven paragraphs later, saying it`s up to the commanders on the ground.
Greenspan`s Rebuff

Brody Mullins and Jackie Calmes write in the Wall Street Journal that just a few days before his State of the Union speech, Bush tried -- and failed -- to woo Alan Greenspan to head a bipartisan commission on controlling the exploding costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Straw Man Watch, Part II

Andrew J. Bacevich writes in a Los Angeles Times opinion column: "In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush worked himself into a lather about the dangers of `retreating within our borders.` His speech bulged with ominous references to ostensibly resurgent isolationists hankering to `tie our hands` and leave `an assaulted world to fend for itself.` Turning inward, the president cautioned, would provide `false comfort` because isolationism inevitably `ends in danger and decline.`

"But who exactly are these isolationists eager to pull up the drawbridges? What party do they control? What influential journals of opinion do they publish? Who are their leaders? Which foundations bankroll this isolationist cause?

"The president provided no such details, and for good reason: They do not exist. Indeed, in present-day American politics, isolationism does not exist. It is a fiction, a fabrication and a smear imported from another era."
Sheehan Watch

Laurie Kellman writes for the Associated Press: "Capitol Police dropped a charge of unlawful conduct against anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday and apologized for ejecting her and a congressman`s wife from President Bush`s State of the Union address for wearing T-shirts with war messages."
Manimal Watch

Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate: "This year`s pandering nadir came during the brief passage on bioethics, when George Bush called for legislation banning the creation of `human-animal hybrids.` In Washington, there is a lobby for everything except apparently mermaids and centaurs."

Via Wonkette , you can now buy a human-animal hybrid T-shirt at humananimalhybrid.net .

But via Kevin Drum , blogger and biology professor PZ Myers explains that doing such things as inserting human genes into mice can be the key to developing valuable treatments.

Of Bush, Myers writes: "He`s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he`s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions."
Cartoon Watch

[urlSlate compiles the best State of the Union cartoons]http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?topicid=51&image=0[/url]

© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

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Der alte Trick. Beispiele sind zu genüge bekannt.

Bush `plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane`
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article342859.e…

By Andy McSmith
Published: 03 February 2006

George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein`s regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.

The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam`s WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 ­ when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.

The leaders discussed the prospects for a second resolution, but Mr Bush said: "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would `twist arms` and `even threaten`. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." He added that he had a date, 10 March, pencilled in for the start of military action. The war actually began on 20 March.

Mr Blair replied that he was "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam." But he also insisted that " a second Security Council resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover, including with the Arabs" .

The memo appears to refute claims made in memoirs published by the former UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, who has accused Mr Blair of missing an opportunity to win the US over to a strategy based on a second UN resolution. It now appears Mr Bush`s mind was already made up.

There was also a discussion of what might happen in Iraq after Saddam had been overthrown. President Bush said that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". Mr Blair did not respond. Details of the meeting are revealed in a book, Lawless World, published today by Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London.

"I think no one would be surprised at the idea that the use of spy planes to review what is going on would be considered," Mr Sands told Channel 4 News last night. "What is surprising is the idea that they would be painted in the colours of the United Nations to provoke an attack which could then be used to justify material breach.

"Now that plainly looks as if it is deception, and it raises... questions of legality, both in terms of domestic law and international law."

Other participants in the meeting were Mr Bush`s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Dan Fried, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mr Blair`s then security adviser, Sir David Manning, his foreign policy aide, Matthew Rycroft, and his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell.

The Downing Street spokesman later said: "The Prime Minister only committed forces to Iraq after securing the approval of the Commons in the vote on 18 March 2003."

The spokesman added: "All these matters have been thoroughly investigated and we stand by our position."

* The Ministry of Defence will publish casualty figures for UK troops in Iraq on its website within the next few weeks, the Government disclosed last night. Defence Secretary John Reid said the figures ­ which will be regularly updated ­ would identify the number of personnel categorised as seriously injured and very seriously injured. He promised to alert MPs before the first publication of the figures. The pledge came in a Commons written reply.

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Bush just has to face it: he is wrong and Chirac is right

The crises over Hamas and Iran underline the collapse of the neocon mission and the end of a one-superpower world

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1701037,00.html

Jonathan Steele
Friday February 3, 2006

Guardian
George Bush`s presidency still has three years to run, but this week`s state of the union address had an unmistakably ebb-tide air. Its tone - "chastened, deferential, modest" in the words of the Los Angeles Times - suggested that the president felt the waves of power were flowing against him.

This is not the same as being a lame duck. The moment when second-term presidents start to face severe problems in getting legislation through Congress or convincing foreign allies to support controversial measures normally comes later in the cycle. The last midterm elections (in this case November 2006) are the usual peak before the White House incumbent`s domestic authority declines. On foreign policy the slippage comes even later. It may be delayed as far as the final weeks of office, as Bill Clinton found when he tried to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians in January 2001.

Nor does the change in Bush`s demeanour this week result mainly from fading support among Americans for what will be remembered as the central decision of his presidency, the mistaken war on Iraq. His unprecedentedly low poll ratings certainly affected his mood on Tuesday night, and one sharp-eyed New York Times reporter noted that "he smiled seldom and only winked once". But the reason for Bush`s gloom goes much deeper.

Like missionaries who find that the heathens are refusing to be converted, he and his neocon colleagues are beginning to realise that their mission of freedom is not as convincing as they expected. It is also having unpredicted effects, forcing them to confront awkward choices: carry on elaborating grand principles, or adjust the message and feel guilty of sinful backsliding.

Bush`s speech was remarkable for the number of times he called on his fellow Americans not to retreat, not to give up, not to succumb to pessimism, not to be defeatist. If his policies were not floundering, these pleas would not have been necessary. They were markedly different from the confident tone of last year`s address, when he had just been inaugurated for a second term and the administration hoped that Iraq`s first elections would bring the collapse of the insurgency. Now, after a constitutional referendum and another election, the attacks on US and British forces show no sign of abating significantly.

Bush insisted on Tuesday that democracy was still on the march around the world, particularly in the Middle East. He cited the polls in Egypt, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, though when he claimed that Iran "is held hostage by a small clerical elite" he seemed to forget that its president was also elected: he won in a well-contested race with a high voter turnout and no obvious frontrunner.

Yet, as one listens to Bush and his neocon team, their sense of frustration is palpable. They realise they have been ambushed by their own policies. Their zeal for ideological purity pushed them into positions from which it is hard to escape without looking as though they are betraying themselves.

Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has made two difficult trips to Europe in less than a month. The first was overshadowed by the scandal over secret US torture centres in Europe; the second was meant to be a triumphant assertion of progress in Afghanistan, but turned into a series of crisis meetings on Hamas and Iran.

Rice pleads with Europeans to understand that a real war is going on and there are bad people out there. She urges us not to be complacent about terrorism and argues the need to make tough changes in our civil-liberty laws. She sees it as a success that the Bush administration has abolished the distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists. This means, she argues, that the tolerance shown to the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1980s, which allowed them generous time to drop their commitment to violence, cannot be repeated with Hamas now.

She fears that Hamas`s victory will erode Europeans` commitment to the war on terror as they struggle to square the circle of continuing to help the Palestinians while calling on their new government to tear up its manifesto. The Hamas crisis is not just a foreign-policy dilemma. It is a metaphor for the brittle nature of the Bush administration`s self-awarded global mission as it faces the contradictions of the real world.

The crisis over Iran`s nuclear ambitions is equally significant. The post-cold-war era, when there was only a single superpower, is over now. The United States is being forced to enlist Russia and, to a lesser extent, China as partners in finding a compromise. With this, the economic rise of India and the resurgence of anti-yanqui nationalism in several states in Latin America, we have clearly entered a multipolar world.

No one in Downing Street or Washington will admit it publicly, but Jacques Chirac has turned out to be right. His global Gaullism, the notion that the world has several power centres, and it is no longer just "the west versus the rest", offers a more accurate picture than the image of the lone cowboy acting in the name of us all. The analysis is not Chirac`s alone, of course. The French president is in most ways a discredited figure, little loved even at home. But he is the most prominent European to dare to embrace multipolarity as the new reality of international politics.

Leaders of the non-aligned nations have been saying the same thing for a long time, as have Washington`s latest bugbears, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In his soft-spoken way, Kofi Annan has also been calling for a new recognition of the dispersal of international power. In a little-reported speech in London this week, he took issue with even the concept of a five-nation power centre made up of the permanent members of the UN security council. "Do not underestimate the slow erosion of the UN`s authority and legitimacy that stems from the perception that it has a very narrow power base, with just five countries calling the shots," he pleaded.

UN reform is a slow process, and it is doubtful whether the new claimants for permanent security-council seats, such as Brazil, India and Japan, will get their way soon. But the trend is in their direction, regardless of whether it is formalised by the UN now or in several years.

So, Bush`s frantic pleas to his American audience not to retreat are signs not just that his ideological simplicities carry less conviction at home than they once did. He has also begun to see that US power abroad is on the wane.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-brook…
From the Los Angeles Times
ROSA BROOKS
Next on `Oprah` -- leaders who lie
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-brook…

Rosa Brooks

February 3, 2006

SOMEDAY, IN AN alternate universe….

Oprah: George W. Bush, I want to thank you for joining us today.

Five years ago you sat with me and spoke about your past struggles with alcohol. But this week you did something even more courageous. You stood right up before millions of Americans during your State of the Union address and you openly confessed that you`re "addicted to oil."

George: Well, Oprah, thank you. That was hard for me to say because, you know, for a Texas man, it`s just not easy to face up to something like that.

Oprah: George, after you said that, I got the whole transcript of your speech, and I stayed up two nights straight, honest-to-goodness. I could not sleep, people! I was like, reading, reading. I couldn`t put it down.

I was just feeling for you, having to face getting rid of your SUVs and Air Force One and the whole presidential motorcade!

George: Well, you know, the speech, it was full of complete truthiness for me.

Oprah: And you spoke so movingly about facing up to your "switch grass" issues too. There`s an underlying message here about redemption, isn`t there? You are not surrendering to evil. That really resonated with me.

George: I appreciate that. Fighting evil, it`s hard work. I, um … my SUV, um …

Oprah: George, you just go ahead, cry if you want to. I`m not ashamed to tell you that when I watched your speech, I cried too.

George: I really appreciate that, Oprah.

Oprah: But George, I have to be straight with you now. I … I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I also feel really duped. I feel that you betrayed millions of Americans. I mean, uniting, not dividing? "Clear plan for victory" in Iraq? Please! So now, today, I don`t know what is true and I don`t know what isn`t.

George: Oprah, I … I … look, I made some mistakes.

Oprah: George, why did you have to lie?

George: Oprah, the speech wasn`t supposed to be read like it was, you know, nonfiction. It`s more like a memoir about the state of the union.

Oprah: I feel that you conned us. You embarrassed me. You embarrassed this nation.

George: I`m … I`m a flawed person.

Oprah: How much of what was in the speech was fabricated?

George: Not that much. I mean, all the evils are real. Terrorism, uh, sick people … Democrats…. That hurricane was real…. And the human-animal hybrids. They were in a movie.

Oprah: OK, I want to move on to the NSA surveillance story, because that part of your story is so compelling, in terms of your struggle with these Peeping Tom compulsions you have. Then you get to how you`re catching all these terrorists that way and it`s all so, you know, legal.

But that`s a lie too, isn`t it?

George: Oprah, I … I … wrote that part of the speech from memory…. I had legal documents that supported it…. Well, I mean, the lawyers said they doubted the Constitution meant I could do that, um, but that there was a chance that it did, so I….

Oprah: George, when will you come clean about WMD?

George: Well, there too I`ve talked to — well, it`s, like, a secret, and it`s … since that time I`ve struggled with the idea of it….

Oprah: No, the lie of it. It`s not an idea, George. That`s a lie.

George: [muffled sobbing]

Oprah: Do you now wish you had put a disclaimer in the speech, George, something to warn the American people that your presidency has pretty much been a million little lies, not to mention a few really big whoppers?

George: (Weeping) Oprah, you … you`re right. I`m sorry. I`ve … I`ve betrayed the American people. But I can`t, I don`t want to lie anymore!

Oprah: It`s not too late. I believe the truth can set you free.

George: Oprah, uh, obviously, this hasn`t been a great few years for me or, I guess, uh, for those guys over there in, uh, Iraq. But I think I come out of it better.

I mean, I feel like I came here and finally I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to … to lying.

Oprah: (To the studio audience) And so we move forward — optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause and confident of the victories to come.

May God bless America.

(Applause).


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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Tomgram: De la Vega on Why Rove Will Fall
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=55695

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=55695

The President passed through his State of the Union address -- ill-digested chunks of so many other speeches he`s given ("We`re writing a new chapter in the story of self-government -- with women lining up to vote in Afghanistan, and millions of Iraqis marking their liberty with purple ink…) -- largely untouched by the media. His two Supreme Court-changing appointments, Roberts and Alito, were triumphantly in the front row of the audience. Undoubtedly, it wasn`t a bad way for a besieged President to start year two of term two. Okay, maybe in distant Baghdad -- "We`re on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory" -- things were actually looking a little peaked and, admittedly, the Bush wave of freedom in the Middle East had just swept Islamic fundamentalists into control of the Palestinian Authority, but all in all the President had reason to feel at least some satisfaction. And yet there lurks a presidential problem of administration-staggering proportions that few are even thinking about at the moment.



Quietly, largely below the radar screen, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald continues to work on the CIA leak case in which the administration decided to punish ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson for embarrassing them on Saddam`s nonexistent search for yellowcake uranium by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. News on the case has been sparse indeed of late. I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, indicted former chief of staff for Vice President Cheney, crept back into the papers this week on a fishing expedition for CIA documents; while a single, shades-of-Watergate sentence in a brief report by James Gordon Meek in the New York Daily News indicated that "Fitzgerald… said in a letter to Libby`s lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney`s office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy." (The letter can be found at the Raw Story website.) Meanwhile, not so long ago in an investigative report at the Truthout website, the fine Internet reporter Jason Leopold indicated that Fitzgerald "has been questioning witnesses in the CIA leak case about the origins of the disputed Niger documents referenced in President Bush`s January 2003 State of the Union address."



Still, the case, having largely disappeared into the media void, has something of the look of yet another danger dodged by an administration with at least nine lives. Well, don`t let the relative silence surrounding Fitzgerald fool you. As former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega indicates below, the Special Counsel is working on another time schedule than that of administration officials. So, in due course, expect fireworks out of his office that will first illuminate the role of Karl Rove in the case and then may well light up a far wider stretch of the horizon. Tom

When Two Worlds Collide
Rove v. Fitzgerald
By Elizabeth de la Vega

For Karl Rove, no news from the Plame case -- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald`s grand jury investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson`s identity as a CIA agent -- is definitely not good news. Seismic activity is notoriously silent, so we may not be hearing any rumblings at the moment. But speaking as a former prosecutor, I believe it highly likely that, just below the surface, the worlds of Karl Rove and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, shifting like tectonic plates, are about to collide. As was true with Vice President Cheney`s top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a federal agent as well as to the grand jury, Rove might not be charged with the leak itself. I am confident, however, that Rove will not leave this party empty-handed. He will, at the very least, almost certainly be charged with making false statements to an FBI agent. Here`s why.

For starters, the evidence that Rove deliberately lied to the FBI is overwhelming.

In case anyone`s forgotten, on July 14, 2003, in an op-ed in the New York Times, eight days after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly questioned Bush`s claim that Iraq had tried to acquire "yellowcake" uranium in Africa, columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" had told him the trip to Niger, which Wilson referenced in that piece, had been arranged by his wife Valerie, whom the officials described as a CIA operative assigned to investigate matters involving weapons of mass destruction.

It is now undisputed that Karl Rove spoke with at least two reporters about Valerie Wilson before Novak`s now infamous article appeared: Novak himself (whom Rove has known for 30 years) and Time magazine`s Matthew Cooper. Some details of the discussion with Cooper are in dispute, but there`s no question that the two men discussed Valerie Wilson`s identity as a CIA agent and the administration`s claim that she had arranged her husband`s trip to Niger. After the conversation, Rove sent an e-mail about it to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Rove`s aide Susan Ralston has reportedly testified that Rove told her not to log in the phone call, although that was the usual office procedure. On July 17, Cooper wrote an article in which he described conversations with two government officials who claimed Wilson`s wife was a CIA agent and had arranged Wilson`s trip to Africa. Cooper questioned whether the administration was declaring war on Wilson.

Between July 14 and October 8, when Rove was interviewed by the FBI, the Bush administration held approximately 30 press briefings in which the leak and/or the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations were discussed. There were hundreds of news articles and repeated calls for an investigation by congressmen, columnists, and the CIA.

By mid-September, Karl Rove was increasingly being named as one of the "two senior administration officials" who blew Wilson`s cover and Bush`s press officer Scott McClellan was facing ever more insistent questions about Rove`s involvement. On September 16, McClellan said that "it was ridiculous" to suggest Rove was the leaker. On the morning of September 29, McClellan announced that "the President knows Rove is not involved." From that date to October 8, when Rove was interviewed, Bush and McClellan were specifically questioned about Rove`s possible role on ten separate occasions. On October 7, Rove and other White House staffers were required to provide investigators with all documents relating to any contacts they had had with reporters about Joseph Wilson, his trip to Niger, or his wife, Valerie Wilson.

As has now been widely reported, when Karl Rove spoke to FBI agents, he specifically told them that he had not spoken to any reporters about Joseph Wilson`s wife before Novak`s article appeared.

Given the almost seamless press coverage of the leak during the preceding three months, the time and effort that the White House was devoting to the issue, as well as the intensifying focus on whether he himself had leaked the information, it is impossible to believe that, on October 8, Karl Rove -- known for his brilliance, attention to detail, and legendary memory -- did not remember those two conversations with reporters about Valerie Wilson. If Rove told the FBI agents otherwise, it was surely a deliberate lie.

According to reports, Rove then added that he had first heard about Valerie Wilson from a reporter, though he did not remember which reporter or when he heard it. He also said that he had enlisted the aid of the Republican National Committee and conservative news agencies among other groups to spread disparaging information about Joseph Wilson and his wife, but only after Novak`s article appeared.

Rove`s elaboration not only compounded his initial lie but also illuminated the world of politics that he has been incapable of leaving behind -- a world that collides head-on with the one Patrick Fitzgerald inhabits, where politics have no place and where laws, and the highest standards of public service, prevail.

Despite his measured words, Fitzgerald revealed much about his worldview in the press conference in which he announced Libby`s indictment. He said that the investigation was serious because the disclosure of classified information about a CIA officer could jeopardize national security. But equally serious -- and he repeated this more than once -- was the betrayal of government employees by their own officials. Anyone who has worked as a federal prosecutor for two decades, as has Fitzgerald, has also worked closely, often late and long hours, with law enforcement agents, so it is not surprising perhaps that when asked about the damage caused by the leak, Fitzgerald offered the following:

"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected. And they have to expect that when they do their job, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected. And they run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don`t run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow employees."

Over and over again, in that same press conference, Fitzgerald demonstrated his belief that if you sign onto a system that has certain rules, you have to follow those rules even if it might be personally advantageous to break them. Those who tuned in saw reporters repeatedly ask him about information he could not reveal without violating the rules of grand jury secrecy or prosecutorial ethics. He was asked, for example, whether other people might be charged. He declined to answer. He was asked to evaluate the strength of the case. He declined to answer. He acknowledged how frustrating his inability to answer undoubtedly was to the assembled media, but explained that he couldn`t gather information according to the rules of grand jury secrecy -- which prohibit talking about people who were investigated but not charged with a crime -- and then afterwards reveal the information anyway because it was too "inconvenient" not to answer reporters` questions

Later in the press conference, he said simply, "All I can do is make sure that myself and our team follow the rules."

Fitzgerald`s world is far removed from the world of expediency and personal advantage in which Karl Rove operates. In his carefully crafted statements during the FBI interview on October 8, Rove indicated an obvious belief that he could get away with spreading information about government employees for political purposes as long as someone else had revealed that information first, regardless of whether or not the information was disparaging or classified. He did not appear to be concerned with where the information came from, or even whether it was true.

Although it is astounding that Rove would blatantly describe such a despicable ethos (if you can call it that), it should not have been unexpected. In the world of campaign politics that Rove has so long inhabited, smears and personal attacks are designed to seem as if they were spontaneously generated. They can then wander around, undirected, until they finally curl up in America`s living rooms like so many mysterious, uninvited guests. These intruders may be rude and destructive, but no one is supposed to be able to get rid of them, in part because no one is supposed to be able to sort out or pinpoint how they got there in the first place. Thus, although Karl Rove has lurked in the background of an unprecedented number of whisper and smear campaigns -- that, for instance, John McCain had an illegitimate child (a rumor spread during the Republican primaries that preceded the 2000 election), or that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was a lesbian (a persistent rumor that was spread during Bush`s Texas gubernatorial campaign) -- he has never been held accountable. And that is a state of affairs to which Rove became accustomed.

Rove has escaped responsibility for his sneaky campaign tricks because the candidates for whom he has worked -- most prominently, George Bush -- have had a stunning ability to accept, unquestioningly, the miraculous appearance of information that takes down their opponents. They had no problem about endorsing brazen dishonesty or the least interest in ferreting out bad actors in their camps. At the same time, opposing candidates have had neither the resources, nor the time to fully investigate the attacks before plummeting in the polls. Afterwards, of course, it was already far too late.

Unlike Rove`s former adversaries in the political world, however, Fitzgerald has both the time and investigative resources. When Fitzgerald was appointed special prosecutor, all the known facts on the outing of Valerie Wilson indicated that government officials had broken the rules, if not the law. It`s no surprise then that Fitzgerald has pursued the matter vigorously; nor should it be a surprise that Rove`s statement to the FBI on October 8 would have raised some obvious red flags and caused Fitzgerald to become skeptical. Rove deliberately omitted key information about conversations with reporters that he could not possibly have forgotten; he claimed to have heard classified government information only from a reporter -- despite the fact that he himself was one of the highest government officials in the nation; and then he admitted that he had no qualms about enlisting surrogates to betray government employees in order to achieve political gain.

Rove`s statement raised more questions than answers. It also opened a window into the world of a President`s key adviser who never left campaign mode and who had never before been tripped up, no matter what he did. Such a man would be quite unprepared for an investigator like Fitzgerald who operates under a very different timetable and in a world ordered by radically different rules.

Now that Rove`s statement has been shown to be so obviously false, it would be most surprising if when his world and Fitzgerald`s collide, the result isn`t a political earthquake. The moment an earthquake arrives remains impossible to predict, but it would be surprising if, in the CIA leak case, the impact of a Rove indictment did not cause massive aftershocks.

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney`s Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch. She may be contacted at [e-mail].

Copyright 2006 Elizabeth de la Vega


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Latest Update: #35128 02.02.06 15:00:43 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 02, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2452 , US: 2249 , Feb.06: 6

Iraker 02/02/06: Total: 55
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Informed Comment

Friday, February 03, 2006

Guerrillas Kill 37 Iraqis wound 90; 5 GIs Killed
Muqtada Threatens "The Most Violent Response" to US Attack

Guerrillas set off two bombs in the al-Amin quarter of Baghdad on Thursday, killing 16 persons and wounding 90 others at a market and near a gas station. Al-Hayat [Ar.] reports that violence killed altogether 37 Iraqis in a "Bloody Thursday." It is not clear whether that number includes 19 bodies, three of them police,and most discovered yesterday in East Baghdad. Also, the woman who is general director in the Ministry of Industry was kidnapped.

A US helicopter gunship fired a rocket into Sadr City on Thursday, killing a young woman and wounding 5 others. The US military maintains that the helicopter had taken fire from the ground. Sadr City is a stronghold of Muqtada al-Sadr, who is calling for US military withdrawal from Iraq and who has a substantial bloc of delegates in the new parliament. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that [Ar.] Muqtada threatened the Americans with "the most violent of responses" over the incident. The fighting lasted 2 hours. Aside from the death and injuries, several houses were damaged. The Sadr movement issued a communique condemned the "terrorist US attacks." It spoke of several women and children being hurt and then added, "these operations will be met with the most violent response if they continue, from the oppressed masses . . ."

Nir Rosen, who has actually met Muqtada al-Sadr, assesses his new role as kingmaker in Iraq at Salon.com.

Guerrillas had used small arms fire and roadside bombs to kill 5 GIs on Wednesday in separate incidents, one at Fallujah. Wasn`t the slogan that Fallujah was the safest place in Iraq after the US reduced it to rubble?

AP says that there is still no sign of a new Iraqi government, even though it is February and the election was held last December. Such long periods of political gridlock have in the past given an opening to the guerrillas, and this phenomenon seems to be repeating itself.

An official in the Coalition Provisional Authority, Robert Stein, has admitted to stealing $2 million, and to taking bribes for giving out contracts. Some $8.8 billion is unaccounted for from the CPA period, so only 8.798 billion is left to clear up.

The US military really should avoid shooting up the cars of ambassadors in Iraq, more particularly those of allies like Canada. The Canadians are taking over security duties in Qandahar in AFghanistan, and really are allies.

Christiane Amanpour thinks things are getting "worse and worse" in Iraq. Given that daily attacks are up from 55 per day to 77 per day over a year ago, and given that Baghdad (1/4 of the population) is being starved of fuel and electricity, and given that the Sunni Arabs rejected the constitution and are threatening to launch a civil disobedience campaign on top of the guerrilla war, I don`t see in what way her statement is controversial.

It is a measure of the fantasy world in which about 40 percent of Americans live that her statement is even a matter for comment. As for the charge that her views might affect her reporting, no one on the right is complaining about all those gung ho reporters who went to Iraq in 2003 believing it was a noble endeavor. Wouldn`t that philosophy have affected their reporting of the war? In fact, don`t Fox Cable News reporters get pressure from their editors and from Rupert to constantly downplay the guerrilla war in Iraq and to find silver linings in this mess? And Christiane, who has reported on wars all over the world and knows the Middle East like the back of her hand is the one who is out of line?

posted by Juan @2/03/2006 06:39:00 AM 0 comments

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/03/muqtada/print.h…

America`s unlikely savior

Recently, the U.S. was calling for Muqtada al-Sadr`s head. Now, the fiery cleric may be the only man who can defuse Iraq`s Sunni-Shiite conflict.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/03/muqtada/print.h…

By Nir Rosen

Feb. 03, 2006 | In the spring and summer of 2004, the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr led an armed uprising against the U.S. occupiers. His militia, the Mahdi army, fought several bloody battles against American forces. Muqtada`s intifada, along with the Sunni insurgency that broke out in Fallujah at the same time, spelled doom for the neocon fantasy that the U.S. occupation would be a cakewalk. High-ranking U.S. officials called for Muqtada to be captured or killed. But the fiery cleric not only survived, but flourished -- and in the last two years he has turned his enormous street credibility into political power. In the December elections his slate earned potentially 30 seats in Parliament, making him an equal partner with two other Shiite groups in the largest Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance.

But what sets Muqtada apart from the other Shiite leaders -- and makes him a potentially crucial, if supremely unlikely, ally for the United States -- is his close ties to the Sunni insurgents. With sectarian tensions in Iraq and the region increasing, Muqtada may be the only Shiite leader in Iraq who can reach out to Sunnis, who see him as "the good Shia." His Mahdi army fought the American occupiers, establishing street cred with the Sunni resistance. Much of Muqtada`s appeal is his fervent nationalism. Unlike the leadership of Dawa or the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Muqtada was not in exile and, like his father, has condemned foreign-born clerics based in Iraq.

On the crucial issues that divide Shiite and Sunni, Muqtada sides with the Sunnis. He opposes federalism, which he believes will lead to the breakup of Iraq, and supports amending the constitution. SCIRI and the other main Shiite party, Dawa, support federalism and refuse to amend the constitution. For Sunnis, federalism means the loss not just of the old Iraq, which they dominated, but also of oil revenue, and they are determined to resist it. Muqtada is their only Shiite ally. Inexperienced in foreign affairs and barely experienced in politics, Muqtada may nonetheless be the only figure capable of halting Iraq`s steady descent into a civil war that could ignite the entire region.

Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert on Iraq`s Shiites, says, "Muqtada is indeed now in a position to form a link between fundamentalist Sunnis and hard line Shias, to the extent that they do have some goals in common. [American ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad is now supporting a better deal for the Sunni Arabs and is pushing for a national unity government into which the Shias incorporate them, so he is a de facto potential ally of Muqtada, though neither he nor Muqtada will admit it."

Muqtada is an unlikely ally for the United States. Before joining the Shiite coalition, Muqtada insisted that other Iraqi politicians agree to his "Code of Honor," which sets a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, legitimizes resistance if the U.S. stays, and rejects any relationship with Israel. Muqtada also refused to work with more secular former Baathist parties, calling the participation of U.S. favorite Ayad Allawi in particular a red line that would force him to back out. Allawi and his party were hated by Muqtada`s men both for having former Baathists in their ranks and for Allawi`s asking the Americans to battle Muqtada in the spring and summer of 2004.

In recent weeks, Muqtada burnished his credentials with both the Sunni and Shiite establishments when he visited first Saudi Arabia, then Iran -- where he warned the United States that if it attacked Iran, he would send his forces into the field. His meeting with Saudi Arabia`s King Abullah proved he is the only Shiite leader in Iraq that Sunnis can tolerate; his trip to Iran cemented his ties with the Shiite clerical elite and boosted his regional stature as an ideological foe of the United States and Israel.

Muqtada`s legislative triumph makes him legitimate, no longer an outsider. Crucially, his presence gives Sunnis hope that he will succeed in defying SCIRI by blocking federalism and modifying the constitution. It also complicates SCIRI`s coalition with the Kurds. The hypernationalist Muqtada and his followers are fierce enemies of the Kurds, condemning their autonomy and clashing with them in the north, where many Shiite Turkmens are aligned with Muqtada.

Muqtada is far from impressive in person. His unpolished speech and youth (it has been widely speculated that he is younger than his putative age of about 32) have led American officials to consistently underestimate him. But Muqtada has drawn on his impeccable family pedigree and his fiery anti-Americanism to build vast popular support -- and he has proved much more clever than his enemies expected.

I first met Muqtada in May 2003 in his barani, or office, in a Najaf alley, across a shop where his and his father`s sermons were sold on CD and one could buy watches with the Sadr family members depicted on the face. Unlike other clerics in Najaf, who speak classical Arabic, Muqtada speaks in a strong colloquial slang. He seemed cocky. He disparaged Shiite exile leaders who had been based in Iran and had not suffered with the Iraqis, singling out the SCIRI for particular disdain. Muqtada expressed only contempt for the Americans who had so recently rid his people of Saddam, and resentment of Iran, which had done nothing to help Iraq`s Shiites. "I am not afraid," he said, "I wish to be a martyr and I don`t fear death." I was struck by how awkward Muqtada looked and how ill-experienced he was for a man so popular that throughout Shiite neighborhoods he was known only by his first name, a tribute no other Iraqi leader received. I wondered, as I do to this day, if there was some other brain behind his operation. His young, unctuous associates seemed too smug, as if they already knew Iraq was theirs.

Muqtada al-Sadr derives his power from his family connections. He is the scion of the revolutionary Sadr family, one of the most illustrious religious names in Iraq. His great-uncle, Muhammad Bakr Sadr, was the most important Shiite theologian of the 20th century, writing about economics, politics and philosophy as well. Bakr Sadr led the Dawa Party, an underground movement whose members were decimated by the Baath Party. In 1980, after Bakr Sadr declared Baath Party membership forbidden, he was arrested with his sister, forced to watch her raped and executed, and then executed himself by having nails driven into his head. He became known as the First Martyr.

Bakr Sadr`s nephew (and Muqtada`s father), Ayatollah Muhamad Sadiq Sadr, envisioned himself as the wali al am, or general leader, of the clergy, a position above all others, including the top clerics in Iran. He aspired to lead world Shiism and head an Islamic government in Iraq. In 1998, when Saddam Hussein relaxed restrictions on the Friday khutba, or sermon, Sadiq Sadr began preaching at the Kufa mosque outside Najaf. His 47 very influential sermons reached all Iraqi Shiites. He was particularly obsessed with the coming of the Mahdi, or Shiite messiah, the 12th leader of the Shiite community who disappeared into an occult realm and whose return is eagerly awaited by Shiites.

Muhamad Sadiq Sadr may have looked like an avuncular Santa Claus, but he regularly damned as infidels those who disagreed with him, and hung up lists of the damned in his office. (Many on the lists were accused of homosexuality.) Sadr outraged the Shiite establishment in Najaf`s hawza, or seminary, by denouncing the other leading ayatollahs who were not of Iraqi origin. Saddam`s regime promoted Sadr as a homegrown alternative to non-Iraqi clerics, especially those originating from Iran. In 1999 Muhamad Sadiq Sadr became the Second Martyr after he and two of his sons were killed when their car was riddled with bullets. Although Shiites blamed it on the regime, it is likely that rival clerics in the hawza were responsible for the assassination.

Muqtada moved quickly to establish his power base after Saddam fell. Posters of the First and Second Sadr martyrs appeared throughout Iraq`s Shiite areas, symbolizing the new order. The downtrodden masses of Iraq, the Shiite "mustad`afeen," as the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iraq had called them, were in power for the first time since the 7th century, when the Sunnis had begun ruling over them. Muqtada`s father, the Second Martyr, had built an impressive network of mosques and social services around the country, controlled by his former students, and Muqtada capitalized on this network, dispatching young clerics around the country to seize mosques, hospitals, clinics, and looted goods, and to provide security and social services. His men soon gained control of the Baghdad slums known as Saddam City, where up to 3 million Shiites lived. Built in the `50s to house Shiite migrants from the south, it was originally called Madinat Athawra, or Revolution City, and was a bastion of the Iraq Communist Party. Signs and graffiti proclaimed Saddam City`s new name: Sadr City. (Part of the reason for Muqtada`s support for a centralized Iraq may be because he has so much support in Baghdad.)

There was a nearly messianic euphoria among Iraq`s Shiites, many of whom viewed the Mahdi`s arrival as imminent. Among Muqtada Sadr`s followers it was common to hear the view that the U.S. Army had come to kill the Mahdi, but that the Mahdi would kill all the Americans -- and all the Jews too, for good measure.

The Shiite leadership followed the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who counseled the faithful to bide their time and not resist the American occupation. But Muqtada remained defiant. Rejected for a post in the Iraqi Governing Council established by American proconsul Paul Bremer, he seized the role of spoiler, condemning the occupation and the IGC and establishing his Mahdi army, allegedly to protect Shiites. Muqtada became a rallying point for Iraqi nationalism. In August 2003, when an American helicopter tried to remove a Shiite flag in Sadr City, enraged followers of Muqtada rioted, convinced that America was the enemy of Iraq and Islam.

From the start, Muqtada has supported the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency, with the exception of the foreign Arab-dominated Zarqawi movement that finds Shiites anathema. As the insurgency spread, Muqtada established a close working relationship with radical Sunni movements, especially the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a neo-Baathist movement of Sunni clerics. The AMS controlled one of Iraq`s most important indigenous resistance groups, the 1920 Revolution Battalions, named for the rebellion against the British occupation, and AMS scholars routinely sermonized in support of the resistance. Muqtada`s clerics held joint prayer sessions with them, and in the fateful spring of 2004, when Fallujah rose up against the Americans, followed by an uprising of Shiites in the south, Shiite followers of Muqtada helped their Sunni brethren and benefited from aid and arms sent at the behest of the AMS.

Muqtada fought the Americans once more in the summer of 2004. Though American forces swore to arrest or kill him, Muqtada survived and even indirectly fielded candidates in the January 2005 elections. They won seats in both the national and provincial governments and even had two ministers in the Cabinet.

These battles were invaluable in establishing Muqtada`s militant and patriotic credibility, particularly among Sunnis. Muqtada`s followers boast that "the two intifadas" they have fought against the Americans prove that they are true Iraqi nationalists who refuse to accept occupation, unlike the two other leading Shiite movements, SCIRI and Dawa. In addition, Muqtada`s movement has drawn many former Baathists into its ranks, as well as Shiites who served in Saddam`s dreaded security and intelligence services. And he has been a fierce critic of Iran, warning of Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. All these factors make Muqtada acceptable to Sunnis who fear and hate the rest of the Shiite establishment.

Sunnis increasingly view all Shiites as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shiites are the majority or that Shiites had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis are the primary victims of American military aggression, and they view Shiites as collaborators with the occupation.

And Sunni antagonism towards Shiites has been fed by an increasingly violent series of targeted killings of insurgent leaders. In the fall, Sunni leaders accused SCIRI`s Badr militia of infiltrating the Ministry of Interior and sending out uniformed death squads to assassinate former Baathists and Sunni clerics. (In fact, Muqtada`s militia, the Mahdi army, also sends out death squads to assassinate Sunnis it deems deserving of death, but this fact is not widely known.) The existence of secret prisons revealed that the SCIRI-dominated Ministry of Interior had learned well from America`s prisons in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

For their part, Shiites tend to view Sunnis as Baathists or Wahhabis, but until last year -- despite suffering an endless onslaught of terror attacks meant to provoke a civil war -- they showed restraint. But last year the situation grew more ominous. Politics became increasingly sectarian -- and bloody. Tit-for-tat killings began: After a Shiite cleric was assassinated, a Sunni cleric would turn up dead the following morning. Threats and bombings drove Shiites from Sunni neighborhoods.

The Sunni-Shiite discord unleashed by the U.S. invasion is not confined to Iraq. Muqtada`s trip to Saudi Arabia took place against a backdrop of rising sectarian tensions throughout the region. Sunnis make up the majority in every Arab state except Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon; in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in particular, they feel threatened by the Shiite renaissance in Iraq. In December 2004, Jordan`s King Abdullah warned of a "Shiite crescent" from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq`s Shiites have demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who cross into Iraq and commit atrocities against Shiite civilians.

These tensions have spilled over into acrimony between Iraqi and Saudi officials. In September, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. In response Bayan Jabr, Iraq`s interior minister -- and the former commander of the Badr Corps, SCIRI`s militia -- called the Saudi foreign minister a "Bedouin riding a camel" and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship.

In Saudi Arabia, home of Wahabi Islam, Shiites are known as "rafida," which means "rejectionists." A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shiites are outside Islam, and to Shiites it is the equivalent of being called "nigger." This is the same word that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida`s leader in Iraq, uses to describe Shiites, as do Sunni radicals in the region. The ascension of King Abdullah, who has taken a more moderate stance on the Shiites, is a positive development. But Saudi Arabia`s 2 million Shiites have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shiite "rafida" collaborators.

In this context, Muqtada`s trip to Saudi Arabia was at least a small step in building a regional bridge between Sunnis and Shiites.

As Iraqis try to form a government, it is not yet clear whether Muqtada will succeed in persuading his fellow Shiites to compromise on key issues like federalism and the constitution. Iraq`s Shiites are triumphant, knowing that Iraq is now theirs and cannot be taken away from them except by the Americans. There is no threat of Sunnis retaking the country, because they had never taken it before; they had been given it -- first by the Ottomans and then by the British. SCIRI sees no need for compromise. It plans to forcefully impose a new order on Iraq, one that directly clashes with Sunni aspirations and reinforces all their fears.

The one figure opposing SCIRI`s maximalist demands is Muqtada. Should he win out over SCIRI in a battle for influence, we might see a majority in the Assembly calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq, and we would also see support for a stricter imposition of Islamic law as well as increased tension with the Kurds. The Americans who had once called for his arrest or death would be forced to deal with their former enemy, though he too would now be restrained by his own political participation.

It is a priceless irony that Muqtada Sadr -- the poorly educated, inarticulate, thuggish and violently anti-American young cleric -- may be the one man who can allow America to get out of Iraq without the roof caving in after them.

-- By Nir Rosen
Salon Media Group, Inc
101 Spear Street, Suite 203
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]


Copyright ©2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Mehr Berichte über die Medien Konferenz in Qatar:
http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search=Julia+Day+in+qata…
2.15pm

US media at `all-time low`
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1700691,00.…

Julia Day in Qatar
Thursday February 2, 2006

MediaGuardian.co.uk
Arabic-language media have an unprecedented chance to take over as the world`s premier news source because trust in their US counterparts plummeted following their "shameful coverage" of the war in Iraq, a conference heard today.

The US media reached an "all-time low" in failing to reflect public opinion and Americans` desire for trusted information, instead acting as a "cheerleader" for war, said Amy Goodman, the executive producer and host of US TV and radio news show Democracy Now!, at a news forum organised by al-Jazeera.

Newsweek`s Paris bureau chief, Christopher Dickey, said the US media were dying because of cutbacks and weren`t interested in covering the world outside America.

But other delegates questioned whether Arabic media were up to the challenge.

"The US media have done a shameful job of reporting on the Arab world. With the rise of al-Jazeera and independent media there is a chance for the Arab media to react back, but instead what we get is a clash," said Ethan Zuckerman, the co-founder of Global Voices Online and research fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

"I would urge everyone involved with new Arabic media not just to report on this [Arabic] world more fairly and accurately, but to report on the whole world more fairly and accurately. I challenge al-Jazeera and the new Arabic media players to do a better job that the US in covering the rest of the world," he said.

Ms Goodman said in the run-up to the Iraq war a study of NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS newscasts over a fortnight recorded 393 interviews on the conflict, of which only three reported the anti-war movement.

"This is a media cheerleading for war and does not represent mainstream opinion in the US," she added.

Ms Goodman said she believed the policy of embedding reporters with coalition forces was "a total failure for independent journalism ... western audiences need to see the other side of the story - from communities and hospitals".

"If people in the US had a true picture of war - dead babies, women with their legs blown off, dead and dying soldiers - they would say `no`," she said.

"There is nothing more important than the media - it is more powerful than any bomb or missile and we have to take it back ... we need a media that is independent and honestly showing us the images, the hell, ugliness and brutality of war, not selling us war."

Mr Dickey, the Middle East regional editor and Paris bureau chief at Newsweek magazine, said US media were "dying".

"After 25 years as a foreign correspondent I know what the US wants from the rest of the world: to forget about it."

"There`s this idea that the US media is controlling the agenda. In fact the US media is dying. Resources, money and staff are being cut back. Twenty years ago Newsweek had 25 staff in Paris, today it has one: me," said Mr Dickey.

He added that the gap between what the US and Arabic media reports was widening. with American reports being "all about victory and the Arabic being all about victims".

Faisal al-Kasim, host of al-Jazeera`s The Opposite Direction show, said that as a result of a perceived failure of western media to reflect the full picture more people were turning to Arabic media.

"Even Arabs who live in the west are giving up watching western networks and tuning to Arabic networks instead," Mr al-Kasim said.

However, concerns were aired at today`s conference about the ability of the Arabic media to operate independently.

Lawrence Pintak, a director of the Adham Centre for Electronic Journalism and a former CBS foreign correspondent, urged delegates against thinking that Arabic media were allowed the freedoms to which western journalists were accustomed.

"I am concerned that someone from the US or Europe who doesn`t know the Arabic world will think that all is goodness and light when we know that is not the case," he said, citing the beating of journalists during the Egyptian elections and the detention of journalists in Yemen and Morocco.

However, Mr Pintak there was a "great sense of possibility" about journalism in the Arabic world, likening it to the interest in the profession in the US following Watergate.

Concerns were also aired about the ability of al-Jazeera`s soon-to-launch English language station, al-Jazeera International, to reproduce the success of its main Arabic network across the world.

"We might as well buy a new channel in the US," Mahmud Shammam, the bureau chief for the Dar Al Watan newspaper and Newsweek Arabic.

"[Al-Jazeera International] will not have Arabic characteristics and that`s a big challenge."

Hugh Miles, a journalist and United Nations media consultant, said al-Jazeera was massively popular in north Africa but because conspiracy theories about its agenda were rife, the new English-language channel would be watched very carefully.

"If al-Jazeera International is perceived to be biased or insensitive to Islam - on the Danish cartoon issues for example - there will be a loss of faith in the al-Jazeera brand," he said.

"The Arabic service has done a tremendous job in establishing al-Jazeera as a trusted name. It would be a terrible shame to see that image jeopardised."

But the director of al-Jazeera`s research centre, Mostefa Souag, attempted to allay fears about the new channel, saying the network`s managing director, Wadah Khanfar, has confirmed its editorial stance "will not be far away" from its sister station.

· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email [e-mail] or phone [phone]

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Der Artikel gibt die US-Sicht der Dinge wieder. Trotz dieser einseitigen Sicht kommen viele der augenblicklichen Probleme im Verhältnis der USA zu Süd-und Mittelamerika zum Vorschein.

© Foreign Affairs, die führende konservative außenpolitische Zeitschrift der USA.
Die Beiträge erscheinen in deutscher Sprache exklusiv beim "Rheinischen Merkur"
[urlIs Washington Losing Latin America?]http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20060101faessay_v85n1_hakim.html[/url]


Getrennte Wege

Der US-Präsident wollte die Kooperation mit dem Süden zu seiner Priorität machen. Daraus ist nichts geworden. Heute ist der Graben so tief wie nie zuvor. Die Geschichte einer Desillusionierung.

http://www.rheinischer-merkur.de/index.php?id=10045

PETER HAKIM

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Die Beziehungen zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten und Lateinamerika sind heute am tiefsten Punkt seit dem Ende des Kalten Kriegs angelangt. In den achtziger Jahren hatten viele Beobachter noch gehofft, dass Lateinamerikas Kehrtwendung hin zu Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft, gepaart mit Washingtons nachlassender Gewichtung von Sicherheitsfragen, zu engeren und kooperativen Verbindungen führen würde. Doch nach dem 11.September 2001 hat Washington sein Interesse an Lateinamerika verloren. Umgekehrt ist in der ganzen Region die Unterstützung für Washingtons Politik geschwunden. Nur wenige Lateinamerikaner halten die Vereinigten Staaten heute für einen verlässlichen Partner.

Bis dato resultierten die angeschlagenen Beziehungen zu Lateinamerika für beide Seiten in einer Serie verpasster Chancen. Zu einer Zeit, in der die Regierung Bush rund um den Globus Partner und Verbündete benötigt, sind die Vereinigten Staaten und ihre internationale Agenda in Lateinamerika in Verruf gekommen. Größtenteils wegen der trostlosen wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Lage gerät der demokratische Fortschritt in einem Land nach dem anderen ins Wanken.

Die Vereinigten Staaten haben immer noch einen großen Markt in Lateinamerika. Die US-Exporte werden jährlich auf mehr als 150 Milliarden Dollar geschätzt; beinahe so viel wie der Wert der US-Exporte in die Europäische Union. Davon gehen jedoch zwei Drittel nach Mexiko, während Brasilien und andere südamerikanische Märkte mangels effektiver Handelsabkommen verhältnismäßig unerschlossen bleiben. Die zunehmende Bevölkerung lateinamerikanischer Abstammung in den Vereinigten Staaten sorgt schon jetzt für wichtige neue Verbindungen zu Ländern in ganz Lateinamerika. Ihre potenzielle Mitwirkung wird allerdings von Washingtons unpraktikablen und konfusen Einwanderungsgesetzen eingeschränkt.

Doch nicht nur in dieser Hinsicht sind US-Interessen in der Region gefährdet. Öl- und Erdgaslieferungen aus dem politisch unruhigen Venezuela und anderen Andenstaaten, die über viele Energieressourcen verfügen, sind unsicherer denn je. Mehrere kleine und schwache Staaten in der Karibik und Lateinamerika laufen Gefahr, dauerhaft zu Zentren von Rauschgiftgeschäften, Geldwäscherei und anderen kriminellen Handlungen zu werden. Beinahe überall in Lateinamerika bedroht der Anstieg von Kriminalität und Gewalt die Stabilität.


Die Sternstunden der Demokratisierung sind vorbei

Zu Beginn seiner Amtszeit verkündete Präsident Bush, dass Lateinamerika auf der Liste seiner außenpolitischen Prioritäten weit oben stehe. Das Weiße Haus begrüßte freudig den Fortschritt der Region in Richtung Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft und machte sich daran, die laufenden Verhandlungen über ein gesamtamerikanisches Freihandelsabkommen zum Abschluss zu bringen, weiter reichende wirtschaftliche Partnerschaften aufzubauen und chronische Probleme wie Immigration und Rauschgifthandel zu lösen. Die Regierung war zuversichtlich, dass sie die Beziehungen mit den beiden größten und einflussreichsten Ländern der Region, Brasilien und Mexiko, neu beleben könnte. Besonders in der neu eingesetzten Regierung von Präsident Vicente Fox, dessen Wahl siebzig Jahre Einparteienherrschaft beendete, sah sie eine außerordentliche Gelegenheit. Fünf Jahre später hat sich die Haltung der Regierung Bush merklich verändert – wegen mehrfacher Enttäuschungen.

Wirtschaftlich kränkelt die Region schon seit langem. Zwar haben in den letzten beiden Jahren die guten Nachrichten überwogen: Investitionen aus dem Ausland fließen allmählich in die Region, der Handel hat rasch zugenommen, die Inflation bleibt auf einem niedrigen Stand. Aber nur wenige Analysten sind zuversichtlich, dass diese Errungenschaften aufrechterhalten werden können. Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der Region ist hauptsächlich auf eine besonders gesunde Weltwirtschaft zurückzuführen, die Lateinamerikas Warenexport angekurbelt und die Zinsen niedrig gehalten hat. So wurde auch die Last der hohen Schulden in der Region gemildert. Doch selbst unter diesen Umständen bleiben die Wachstumsraten der lateinamerikanischen Länder immer noch hinter anderen Regionen zurück.

Für die US-Regierung gibt die sich abzeichnende politische Situation noch mehr Anlass zur Sorge. Washington wirbt gerne mit Lateinamerika als Musterfall gelungener Demokratisierung. Immer noch stellt demokratische Politik in der Region die Regel dar; nur Kuba verharrt unter einer autoritären Herrschaft. In den letzten zehn Jahren wurden allerdings beinahe ein Dutzend gewählte Präsidenten aus dem Amt vertrieben, viele von ihnen durch Protest auf den Straßen oder Gewalt des Pöbels. Venezuela kann heute nur schwerlich als Demokratie bezeichnet werden – abgesehen davon, dass Wahlen und Volksentscheide abgehalten werden. Dasselbe gilt für Haiti, das immer mehr einem gescheiterten Staat ähnelt.

In Bolivien und Ecuador verstärken tiefe soziale, ethnische und religiöse Spaltungen den Parteienstreit. In Nicaragua hat eine Allianz von korrupten sowohl linken als auch rechten Gesetzgebern die Regierung so sehr gelähmt, dass die Präsidentenwahl in diesem Herbst den Sandinisten-Führer Daniel Ortega – Washingtons Nemesis – an die Macht zurückbringen könnte. Und dies sind nicht die einzigen Länder in der Region, in denen die Demokratie unter großer Belastung steht und schnell an Boden verlieren könnte.

Die Desillusionierung der Regierung Bush geht allerdings weit über die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Fehler hinaus. Washington war empört über Lateinamerikas Widerstand gegen die Agenda der Vereinigten Staaten nach dem 11. September. Das Weiße Haus war außer sich, als Chile und Mexiko, Lateinamerikas Vertreter im UN-Sicherheitsrat 2003 und darüber hinaus zwei von Washingtons engsten Verbündeten in der Region, sich gegen eine Resolution stellten, die den Einmarsch im Irak legitimiert hätte. Tatsächlich befürworteten von den 34 lateinamerikanischen und karibischen Ländern nur sieben den Krieg. Sechs von ihnen (Costa Rica, die Dominikanische Republik, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua und Panama) waren zu dieser Zeit an Verhandlungen über Handelsabkommen mit den Vereinigten Staaten beteiligt. Und das siebte Land im Bunde, Kolumbien, erhält von den Vereinigten Staaten jährlich mehr als 600 Millionen Dollar Militärhilfe.

Noch ärgerlicher ist für Washington das Auftauchen von Venezuelas Präsident Hugo Chávez als ein potenziell gefährlicher Gegenspieler. Unter Chávez hat Venezuela enge Verbindungen mit Kuba geknüpft und subventioniert nun freigebig die Wirtschaft der Insel. Da er auf diese Weise einem repressiven Regime hilft, an der Macht zu bleiben, befürchten in Washington einige, dass diese Unterstützung Kubas Wandel in der Zeit nach Castro erschweren werde. Und es bestehen noch unmittelbarere Sorgen. Auch wenn die Natur von Chávez’ Verstrickung noch unklar ist, sind Beamte der Regierung überzeugt, dass er einige der unbeständigsten Staaten auf der Halbkugel einschließlich Bolivien, Ecuador und Nicaragua destabilisieren will. Ferner beunruhigen seine mutmaßlichen Beziehungen zu Kolumbiens linken Guerillas, die in Venezuela Unterschlupf finden.

Darüber hinaus beschränken sich die Ambitionen des venezolanischen Präsidenten nicht darauf, Konflikte in einigen Nachbarländern zu schüren. Er hat seine Absicht deutlich zum Ausdruck gebracht: eine große antiamerikanische Koalition zu schmieden, um Washingtons Agenda für den südamerikanischen Kontinent durch seine eigene zu ersetzen – eine, die repräsentative Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft ablehnt. Bis jetzt ist er weit davon entfernt, sein Ziel zu erreichen. Keine Regierung ist seiner wirtschaftlichen und politischen Führung gefolgt. Tatsächlich sieht nahezu jedes lateinamerikanische Land seine Zukunft an der Seite der Vereinigten Staaten und möchte seine Beziehungen zu Washington verstärken.

Nichtsdestotrotz sind die Vereinigten Staaten sowohl alarmiert von der neuen radikalen Regierung in Bolivien, wo der Führer des linken Flügels, Evo Morales, die Präsidentenwahl im Dezember 2005 gewonnen hat, als auch von den Aussichten, dass Ortega in Nicaragua an die Macht kommen könnte. Chávez unterhält enge Beziehungen zu beiden Führern und unterstützt sie finanziell.


China bietet sich als Partner an

Washington ist darüber verärgert, dass bis jetzt kein lateinamerikanisches Land geneigt ist, ihm dabei zu helfen, Chávez herauszufordern. Selbst jene Regierungen, die eng mit Washington verbunden sind, haben einige Sympathien für die Anti-Bush- und Anti-USA-Polemik des venezolanischen Regierungschefs. Auch wenn Brasilien von Zeit zu Zeit dabei geholfen hat, Chávez in seine Schranken zu weisen, äußerte Präsident da Silva – ein zuverlässiger Demokrat – im Herbst 2005, dass Venezuela an zu viel Demokratie leide, nicht an zu wenig. Bei einem Treffen der Organisation Amerikanischer Staaten (OAS) im vergangenen Jahr lehnten die lateinamerikanischen Diplomaten einen US-Vorschlag ab, der die Einrichtung eines Komitees zur Überwachung der Demokratie vorsah – da er als Versuch der USA wahrgenommen wurde, Chávez bloßzustellen. Viele Regierungen in der Region sind unglücklich mit Chávez und seiner Politik, aber sie sind nicht geneigt, ihre kommerziellen und wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen mit Venezuela aufs Spiel zu setzen.

Auch über Chinas wachsende Präsenz in Lateinamerika ist Washington beunruhigt – eine Sorge, die schon Gegenstand von Kongressanhörungen war. Tatsächlich halten einige Kongressmitglieder China für die ernsthafteste Behinderung der US-Interessen in der Region seit dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion. In den vergangenen sechs Jahren haben sich Chinas Importe nach Lateinamerika nahezu versechsfacht, sind also um fast 60 Prozent pro Jahr gestiegen. Auch Peking steht indessen einer großen politischen Herausforderung gegenüber: Von den 26 Ländern, die Taiwan anerkennen, liegen zwölf in Lateinamerika oder in der Karibik. China ist darauf bedacht, diese Anzahl durch aggressive Diplomatie sowie gesteigerten Handel, militärische Unterstützung und Investitionen zu reduzieren.

Viele Menschen in Lateinamerika halten China für eine wirtschaftliche und politische Alternative zur Hegemonie der Vereinigten Staaten. Auch wenn Beamte in einigen dieser Länder befürchten, dass China ihnen mit seinen niedrigeren Herstellungskosten Absätze, Gewinne und Investitionen streitig machen wird, sehen andere (hauptsächlich in Südamerikas Lebensmittel und Mineralien produzierenden Nationen) in China einen bedeutenden potenziellen Wirtschaftspartner.

Die Enttäuschung über die Beziehung zwischen den USA und Lateinamerika beruht auf Gegenseitigkeit. Der Antiamerikanismus ist in jedem Land Lateinamerikas angestiegen. Die Menschen in der Region, Arm wie Reich, stoßen sich am offensiven Unilateralismus der Regierung Bush und verurteilen Washingtons Missachtung internationaler Institutionen und Normen.

Für viele in der Region klingt inzwischen Washingtons Eintreten für Menschenrechte und Demokratie besonders unglaubwürdig. Die meisten Lateinamerikaner waren entgeistert über das Vorgehen in Abu Ghraib und Guantanamo Bay. Lange Zeit hat die US-Regierung lateinamerikanische Länder für ihre Verletzung der Menschenrechte und ihre schlampige Strafverfolgung gescholten, als jedoch ihre eigene Sicherheit auf dem Spiel stand, schienen plötzlich andere Regeln zu gelten. Lateinamerikaner, die die oftmals verheerenden Militäraktionen in der Region nicht vergessen haben, fühlten sich niemals wohl mit den einseitigen US-Interventionen und lehnen Gewalt zur Verbreitung von Demokratie ab.

Es gibt wenig Grund zur Annahme, dass sich die Beziehung der Vereinigten Staaten zu Lateinamerika bald verbessern wird. Es ist sogar wahrscheinlich, dass sie sich verschlechtern wird. Die Region wird an der Peripherie der zentralen Interessen der US-Außenpolitik bleiben. Diese sind: der Krieg gegen den Terrorismus, die Sicherung und der Wiederaufbau des Irak, der Konflikt zwischen Israelis und Arabern sowie die Eindämmung der Verbreitung von nuklearen Waffen. Da in diesem Jahr in fast einem Dutzend lateinamerikanischer Länder Wahlen angesetzt sind, die neue Präsidenten an die Macht bringen, werden wichtige politische Verschiebungen stattfinden.

Aber es gibt auch Gegebenheiten in Lateinamerika, die sich wahrscheinlich nicht stark verändern werden. Im besten Fall wird die Region ihr jüngstes Wirtschaftswachstum aufrechterhalten, aber sie wird nicht die Handels- und Investitionsmöglichkeiten bieten, die US-Firmen in Asien oder Zentraleuropa vorfinden. Lateinamerikas soziale und politische Spannungen werden auch weiterhin bestehen, und ein Großteil der Region wird den Vereinigten Staaten entfremdet bleiben. Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach wird Chávez in nächster Zeit seine feindliche Haltung gegenüber den Vereinigten Staaten beibehalten. Wenn er zu Hause seine Macht weiterhin festigt und damit fortfährt, Venezuelas enorme Ölerträge einzubringen und auch auszugeben, könnte sich sein Auftreten sogar noch verschärfen.

Dennoch gibt es einige politische Initiativen der USA, die die Beziehungen verbessern könnten. Die lateinamerikanischen Regierungen dringen am stärksten auf Änderungen in der US-Landwirtschaftspolitik; die Handelsbarrieren für Lebensmittel- und Textilexporte sollen sinken. Sie verlangen insbesondere Kürzungen der Subventionen für landwirtschaftliche Erzeugnisse und Produzenten sowie geringere Zölle. Diese Änderungen würden nicht nur Lateinamerikas Exporte erhöhen und Arbeitsplätze schaffen, sondern auch die Verhandlungen über eine gesamtamerikanische Freihandelszone wiederbeleben und den Weg frei machen für einen sicheren Zugang zum US-Markt, zu Investitionen und Technologie – genau das, was sich die Region von ihrer Beziehung zu den Vereinigten Staaten wünscht. Solche Reformen würden zudem den bitteren Streit mit Brasilien und Argentinien beenden, den größten landwirtschaftlichen Exporteuren der Region.

Für viele lateinamerikanische Länder, besonders für Mexiko, ist die Einwanderungspolitik der USA zum wichtigsten Thema ihrer Beziehungen zu den Vereinigten Staaten geworden. Die Entscheidungsträger beider Seiten sind sich im Großen und Ganzen über die Grundsätze einig, die einer neuen Herangehensweise an das Thema zugrunde liegen sollten – dazu gehören ein erheblicher Anstieg der Anzahl von Leiharbeitern, denen die Einreise in die Vereinigten Staaten erlaubt wird, und die Legalisierung von nicht gemeldeten Immigranten.


Wenig Chancen auf eine gemeinsame Freihandelszone

Präsident Bush hat zu einer Reform der Einwanderungsbestimmungen aufgerufen, die im Wesentlichen mit diesen Prinzipien übereinstimmt. Dennoch haben Meinungsverschiedenheiten den Kongress und die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit so tief gespalten, dass die Chancen für irgendwelche Änderungen, außer einer intensiveren Durchsetzung der bestehenden Gesetze, gering sind.

Selbst wenn die Bush-Administration zu politischen Offerten in der Lage wäre, ist es unsicher, ob die Regierungen der Region willens wären, darauf einzugehen. Jede Konzession in der Landwirtschaft würde zum Beispiel verlangen, dass Brasilien und andere Länder ihre Schranken für US-Exporte von Lebensmitteln, Industriegütern sowie Dienstleistungen drastisch reduzieren und strenge Standards für Urheberrecht und Patentschutz anerkennen. Die brasilianische Regierung hat noch nie gesagt, ob sie diese Bedingungen akzeptieren würde. Es ist ebenfalls unsicher, ob Washington auf die Hilfe Mexikos bei Grenzkontrollen zählen kann, wenn die USA die Einwanderungsbestimmungen lockern.

Doch hat auch die Regierung Bush weder die Entschlusskraft noch die Fähigkeit gezeigt, Strategien zu verfolgen, die für beide Seiten akzeptabel wären. Die lateinamerikanischen Länder – untereinander schon uneins – fordern mitnichten eine Erneuerung der südamerikanischen Kooperation. Durch Chávez’ Possen auf dem OAS-Gipfeltreffen im November 2005 wurde die tatsächliche Tragik der Zusammenkunft verschleiert – nämlich wie wenig die Führer erreichten, wie schlecht ihre Agenda abgestimmt war und wie tief gespalten sie sind.

Trotz des Enthusiasmus in der Region für eine wirtschaftliche Partnerschaft ist Lateinamerikas fundamentale Ambivalenz gegenüber der Außenpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten wieder deutlich in Erscheinung getreten. Die Kosten dieser Konfrontation könnten hoch sein, sowohl für die Vereinigten Staaten als auch für Lateinamerika. Andere finanzielle Krisen in Argentinien oder Brasilien könnten weltweite Auswirkungen haben. Das Gleiche gilt für eine politische Konfrontation mit dem ölreichen Venezuela oder eine Verschärfung des bewaffneten Konflikts in Kolumbien. Von einer stärkeren regionalen Integration und politischen Kooperation könnten alle Länder der westlichen Hemisphäre profitieren – wie sie es in Europa getan haben. Doch die Vereinigten Staaten und Lateinamerika haben bewiesen, dass sie weder den Willen noch die Fähigkeit besitzen, diesen Weg gemeinsam zu gehen.
Peter Hakim ist Präsident des „Inter-American Dialogue“. Aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Charlotte Rommerskirchen.

© Foreign Affairs, die führende außenpolitische Zeitschrift. Die Beiträge erscheinen in deutscher Sprache exklusiv beim "Rheinischen Merkur", www.foreignaffairs.org
© Rheinischer Merkur Nr. 3, 19.01.2006

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[urlWatch This British News Video and Then Ask Why is Bush Still in the White House and Not In Jail? And This is Just One of His Impeachable Offenses.]http://www.channel4.com/player/playerwindow.html?id=2815&vert=news[/url]
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The Commerce Department report that Americans spent more than they saved in 2005, with the result that the national savings rate stood at minus 0.5 percent.
Nur ein Narr sagt, die US-Wirtschaft ist gesund.

February 4, 2006
Globalist
As Personal Savings Fall, a Comeuppance Is Due
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2006/02/04/international/IHT-0…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

The soaring oratory of President George W. Bush`s State of the Union address came in the same week as a rather more banal statistic: The personal savings rate of Americans fell below zero for the first time since the Great Depression. The Commerce Department report that Americans spent more than they saved in 2005, with the result that the national savings rate stood at minus 0.5 percent, did not make front-page news. But as an image of a country living beyond its means, it is powerful. The accumulated deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. budget and its current account tend to boggle the mind, but we can all understand consumers maxing out on their credit cards, taking home equity loans to go surfing in Hawaii, and embracing the view that only fools still think that rainy days come around. The only other years in which the savings rate was negative were 1932 and 1933, a time when people had no choice but to spend whatever money they had because they were out of a job and businesses were collapsing around them.

The story in 2005 is rather different: Personal spending appears to have outstripped personal income in part because rising house prices have created a ``wealth effect`` for Americans, giving them the feeling they are rich enough to buy a bigger car or flat-screen TV.

There are also many people resorting to debt because their salaries are not keeping pace with rising costs for everything from health care to a college education. Nor are wages growing enough to satisfy rising appetites for the latest brands.

Bush said: ``We strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society.`` Americans in general are all those things. But debt, which grows in the night, has a way of gnawing at compassion and decency. It gnaws that much more when interest rates rise, as they did again this week, and housing prices begin to cool, as they have.

There are many factors behind Bush`s current low job approval rating, hovering at around 42 percent. The disastrous handling of the Katrina hurricane — scarcely mentioned in the speech — and difficulties in Iraq have eroded the president`s standing. But the state of people`s pocketbooks usually provides the most intimate and surest guide to political sentiment. Bush should know that from his father.

Although the U.S. economy has been growing faster than those of other major industrialized nations, creating about 4.6 million new jobs in the past two and a half years, many Americans feel less well off because the drive for global competitiveness has sharply curtailed any wage increases.

Their own debt-burdened finances parallel those of the nation, whose leader has seen fit to cut taxes at the same time as embarking on a hugely expensive war. There`s not much of a feel-good factor in any of this. Bush`s declaration that ``in recent years, America has become a more hopeful nation`` smacks more of wishful thinking than a reality whose harsher aspects were revealed with great clarity in Kat rina`s aftermath. Of course, so long as foreigners are prepared to go on financing America`s proclivity to spend more than it saves, so long as the Japanese and Chinese continue to pour their savings into U.S. Treasury bonds, it may be possible for the country to go on defying economic gravity even as it requires $2 billion a day in new foreign financing. In 2005, the current account deficit reached $700 billion.

Ben Bernanke, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, has in the past taken a rather sanguine view of this growing deficit, arguing that a global savings boom — a mass of new funds looking for a home in the world`s most powerful economy — goes some way to explain it.

In a speech last April, Bernanke said: ``Over the past decade a combination of diverse forces has created a significant increase in the global supply of saving — a global savings glut — which helps to explain both the increase in the U.S. current account deficit and the relatively low level of long-term interest rates in the world today.``

In other words, the deficit is not merely an American creation and must be interpreted in the wider context of a globalized economy. That is no doubt true. But the United States did not become the power it is today without a solid grounding in the values of Midwestern husbandry. A nation or a family that goes on spending more money than it possesses is headed for a comeuppance. When that will happen is unclear. The U.S. economy has an essential vitality that makes all predictions hazardous. Bush is now talking a more fiscally responsible line — although his credibility on fiscal issues is close to zero — and the House has embarked on some modest budget cuts. The worst is by no means inevitable.

But the Commerce Department`s savings statistics came at a time when Americans had other economic reminders that a ``compassionate, decent, hopeful society`` may prove elusive. The start of the Enron trial provided an emblem of a get-rich- quick culture at its most ruthless and damaging. As for Exxon Mobil`s record-breaking $10.73 billion fourth- quarter profit and $36 billion in annual income, it seemed to embarrass even the company itself — a symbol somehow of the extremes of American society and the thirst for oil that Bush has now vowed to quench. The president made many promises in his speech, but for the moment he is rowing against the tide. That could change. Bush said one thing of a grave and essential truth: ``The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world.`` It is because they know that and believe in the indispensable nature of American power that people throughout the world continue to place their money here, offsetting in some measure the spendthrift folly of Americans themselves.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2006

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February 4, 2006
New Details Revealed on C.I.A. Leak Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/politics/04leak.html

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — Vice President Dick Cheney`s former chief of staff told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.

The newly released pages were part of a legal opinion written in February 2005 by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His opinion disclosed that the former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., acknowledged to prosecutors that he had heard directly from Mr. Cheney about the Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson, more than a month before her identity was first publicly disclosed on July 14, 2003, by a newspaper columnist.

"Nevertheless," Judge Tatel wrote, "Libby maintains that he was learning about Wilson`s wife`s identity for the first time when he spoke with NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert on July 10 or 11." Mr. Russert denied Mr. Libby`s account. Ms. Wilson is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who has criticized the Bush administration`s Iraq policy.

Over all, the new material amplified and provided new details on charges outlined in the October 2005 indictment against Mr. Libby. The indictment accused Mr. Libby of falsely telling investigators that he had first learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters, when he had, according to the charging document, learned of it from other government officials like Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby appeared in federal court in Washington on Friday for the first time in several months. A federal trial judge, Reggie B. Walton, set a calendar that means Mr. Libby`s trial will not begin for at least 11 months, with jury selection to begin on Jan. 8, 2007.

Judge Walton had hoped to start the trial in the fall of 2006 but Mr. Libby`s chief lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., said he would be involved in another trial at that time.

Judge Tatel`s comments in the formerly secret legal opinion were largely drawn from affidavits supplied by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that were written nearly two years ago, in August 2004. At that time, Mr. Fitzgerald was seeking to compel grand jury testimony from two reporters, Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine.

By that point, the newly disclosed pages showed, Mr. Fitzgerald had centered his inquiry on possible perjury charges against Mr. Libby, although that was not publicly known at the time. Mr. Fitzgerald had abandoned a prosecution based on a federal law that makes it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert officer at the C.I.A. Such charges, Judge Tatel wrote, were "currently off the table for lack of evidence."

Judge Tatel wrote his opinion as part of a unanimous decision by the three-judge panel which ruled on Feb. 15, 2005, that Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper had potentially vital evidentiary information and could not refuse to testify to the grand jury in the leak case on First Amendment grounds.

In a separate affidavit filed by Mr. Fitzgerald and disclosed Friday, the prosecutor wrote that Mr. Libby had testified that he had forgotten the conversation with Mr. Cheney when he talked to Mr. Russert. "Further according to Mr. Libby, he did not recall his conversation with the Vice President even when Russert allegedly told him about Wilson`s wife`s employment."

About eight pages of Judge Tatel`s concurring opinion were deleted from the opinion released in 2005. After Mr. Libby`s indictment, lawyers for The Wall Street Journal went to court and succeeded in obtaining the material released Friday by order of the same three-judge panel.

Not all of the previously withheld material was released. Several pages, which apparently contained information about Mr. Fitzgerald`s investigation of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, remained under seal. Mr. Rove has not been charged, but remains under investigation although his lawyer has expressed confidence that Mr. Rove will be cleared.

The release of new material represented an important First Amendment ruling for the right of public access to court records, said Theodore J. Boutros Jr., a lawyer for The Journal. "We`re pleased that the court recognized that grand jury secrecy is not absolute and that there`s an important public interest in the public being able to scrutinize the basis for a judicial decision."

The newly disclosed information provides new details about other events, like a previously reported lunch on July 7, 2003, in which Mr. Libby told Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, about Ms. Wilson.

In his opinion, Judge Tatel said that Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Libby had told him that Ms. Wilson sent had her husband on a trip to Africa to examine intelligence reports indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Niger.

Judge Tatel wrote that Mr. Fleischer had described the lunch to prosecutors as having been "kind of weird" and had noted that Mr. Libby typically "operated in a very closed-lip fashion." Judge Tatel added: "Fleischer recalled that Libby `added something along the lines of, you know, this is hush hush, nobody knows about this. This is on the q.t.` "

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Oilman Plays Ozone Man
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/opinion/04dowd.html

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The Saudi ambassador summoned me to the embassy on Thursday, across the street from the Watergate.

He wanted to know if Americans were still addicted to oil.

I assured him we were.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the charming new envoy from the royal family, was confused about W.`s suddenly morphing into Ozone Man, as Poppy Bush called Al Gore in `92. At the State of the Union address at the Capitol Tuesday night, the prince watched with chagrin as the ex-Texas oilman urged breaking our dependence by replacing most Mideast oil imports with wood chips and ethanol, a word usually heard only quadrennially when pols pander during the Iowa caucuses.

The prince, dressed in long white robe and checkered headdress, explained that last fall, when Condi Rice was in Jidda, the Saudis and the U.S. launched a "strategic dialogue," which included a promise by the Saudis to pump more oil. And now the president promises that the U.S. will need less oil.

Which way are the desert winds blowing?

I told the prince it was politics. W. is just mouthing conservation arguments to offset Americans` disgust at the obscene profits of Exxon Mobil and Halliburton, high gas prices and a conflict in Iraq that Rummy now gallingly dubs "the long war." Shouldn`t it be "the wrong war"? (Halliburton never gets punished for bilking the Pentagon. The Army just awarded the company a $385 million contract to build detention centers for the Department of Homeland Security.)

Bush presidents, I told Prince Turki, sometimes say things without realizing that they are expected to act on their words. I expressed some doubt that the Duke of Halliburton, who dismissed conservation as a "personal virtue," would let W. go all "Earth in the Balance." It`s not easy being green with smoggy Dick keeping a gimlet eye on you. The Saudi ambassador said he liked the vice president.

After some Turkish coffee, some reminiscences about the time the religious police in Saudi Arabia almost threw me in a dungeon, some chat about Iraq — there are two possible outcomes, one good, one awful — and some mutual puzzlement over the administration`s lack of zeal in going after Osama bin Laden, we parted.

I needed no coat or sweater. It`s so warm this winter, we`ll soon have palm trees, the Saudi insignia, on the Potomac. A recent Washington Post story warned that global warming was progressing so fast that within decades, humans "may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend." Sounds like a plot for a thriller with Mr. Cheney as an enviro-villain, especially if you throw in that the Bush administration has been trying to gag the top NASA climate scientist from issuing Cassandra bleats about global warming.

Conservatives were so gobsmacked by W.`s promise to have the government drum up nonpetroleum energy options — Robert Novak huffed that it not only violated G.O.P. free-market philosophy, but it also had "a lengthy pedigree of failure" — that the vice president had to swiftly lumber onto conservative radio shows to praise drilling and gas guzzling.

Asked by Rush Limbaugh if drilling in Alaska was now out, Mr. Cheney said: "No, it`s not off the table by any means. We`ll keep pushing it because we think it makes eminent good sense."

Asked by Laura Ingraham if he agreed with Tom Friedman that the administration should impart pain with a gas tax, Mr. Cheney demurred, "Well, I don`t agree with that." He said that he and W. are "big believers" in the market and letting the market work, and that people "make decisions for themselves in terms of what kind of vehicle they want to drive, and how often they want to fill up the tank, and from the perspective of individual American citizens, this notion that we have to `impose pain,` some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist."

W.`s energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, clarified that the president`s words shouldn`t be taken literally. He said the aim of replacing 75 percent of Middle East oil imports with alternative fuels was "purely an example" of an action that could be taken.

Back in the Ford White House, when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative energy sources and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, Dick Cheney helped scuttle it.

If he hadn`t, we would no longer be oil addicts. And Dick Cheney wouldn`t have to go to the trouble of scuttling a new plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Das Ziel ist der immerwährende Krieg und das immerwährende Geldverdienen für die Auserwählten.

Ability to Wage `Long War` Is Key To Pentagon Plan
Conventional Tactics De-Emphasized
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 4, 2006; A01

The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.

Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.

China is singled out as having "the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States," and the strategy in response calls for accelerating the fielding of a new Air Force long-range strike force, as well as for building undersea warfare capabilities.

The latest top-level reassessment of strategy, or Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), is the first to fully take stock of the starkly expanded missions of the U.S. military -- both in fighting wars abroad and defending the homeland -- since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The review, the third since Congress required the exercise in the 1990s, has been widely anticipated because Donald H. Rumsfeld is the first defense secretary to conduct one with the benefit of four years` experience in office. Rumsfeld issued the previous QDR in a hastily redrafted form days after the 2001 strikes.

The new strategy, summarized in a 92-page report, is a road map for allocating defense resources. It draws heavily on the lessons learned by the U.S. military since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations. The strategy significantly refines the formula -- known as the "force planning construct" -- for the types of major contingencies the U.S. military must be ready to handle.

Under the 2001 review, the Pentagon planned to be able to "swiftly defeat" two adversaries in overlapping military campaigns, with the option of overthrowing a hostile government in one. In the new strategy, one of those two campaigns can be a large-scale, prolonged "irregular" conflict, such as the counterinsurgency in Iraq.

In the 2001 strategy, the U.S. military was to be capable of conducting operations in four regions abroad -- Europe, the Middle East, the "Asian littoral" and Northeast Asia. But the new plan states that the past four years demonstrated the need for U.S. forces to "operate around the globe, and not only in and from the four regions."

Yet, although the Pentagon`s future course is ambitious in directing that U.S. forces become more versatile, agile and capable of tackling a far wider range of missions, it calls for no net increases in troop levels and seeks no dramatic cuts or additions to currently planned weapons systems.

For example, the active-duty Army will revert by 2011 to its pre-2001 manpower of 482,400, with the additional Army Special Operations Forces incorporated in that number, defense officials said. The Air Force will reduce its strength by about 40,000 personnel.

Moreover, the review`s key assumptions betray what Pentagon leaders acknowledge is a certain humility regarding the Defense Department`s uncertainty about what the world will look like over the next five, 10 or 20 years, as well as its realization that the U.S. military cannot attain victory alone.

"U.S. forces in all probability will be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they`re not currently engaged. But I can tell you with no resolution at all where that might be, when that might be or how that might be," Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a Pentagon news briefing unveiling the QDR.

"Things get very fuzzy past the five-year point," Henry said of the review in a talk last month.

At the same time, Henry stressed yesterday, "we cannot win this long war by ourselves."

When a major crisis, such as a terrorist strike or outbreak of hostilities, occurs -- requiring a "surge" in forces -- the U.S. military will plan for "somewhat higher level of contributions from international allies and partners, as well as other Federal agencies," the review concludes.

The new strategy marks a clear shift away from the Pentagon`s long-standing emphasis on conventional wars of tanks, fighter jets and destroyers against nation-states. Instead, it concentrates on four new goals: defeating terrorist networks; countering nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; dissuading major powers such as China, India and Russia from becoming adversaries; and creating a more robust homeland defense.

Central to the first two goals is a substantial 15 percent increase in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF), now with 52,000 personnel, including secret Delta Force operatives skilled in counterterrorism.

The review calls for a one-third increase in Army Special Forces battalions, whose troops are trained in languages and to work with indigenous fighters; an increase in Navy SEAL teams; and the creation of a new SOF squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles to "locate and target enemy capabilities" in countries where access is difficult.

In addition, civil affairs and psychological operations units will gain 3,500 personnel, a 33 percent increase, while the Marine Corps will establish a 2,600-strong Special Operations force for training foreign militaries, conducting reconnaissance and carrying out strikes.

"SOF will increase their capacity to perform more demanding and specialized tasks, especially long-duration, indirect and clandestine operations in politically sensitive environments and denied areas," the report says. By 2007, SOF will have newly modified Navy submarines, each armed with 150 Tomahawk missiles, for reaching "denied areas" and striking individuals or other targets.

"SOF will have the capacity to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously" and will deploy for longer periods to build relationships with "foreign military and security forces," it says.

To conduct strikes against terrorists and other enemies -- work typically assigned to Delta Force members and SEAL teams -- these forces will gain "an expanded organic ability to locate, tag and track dangerous individuals and other high-value targets globally," the report says.

The growth will also allow for the creation of small teams of operatives assigned to "detect, locate, and render safe" nuclear, chemical and biological weapons -- as well as to prevent their transfer from states such as North Korea to terrorist groups.

To strengthen homeland defense, the report calls for improving communications and command systems so that military efforts can be better coordinated with state and local governments.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side."
-- [urlNAACP]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP Chairman Julian Bond[/url]

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Saturday, February 04, 2006

George "Gen. Jack Ripper" Bush

Another leaked British memo ("everywhere you dig you find a body") reveals that Bush and Blair sat around on January 31, 2003, thinking up crazy schemes to provoke a war with Saddam since they didn`t have any real casus belli.

What is worse, the memo confirms that our genius president knew about the dangers of messing with Iraq`s internal stability and did it anyway.


`There was also a discussion of what might happen in Iraq after Saddam had been overthrown. President Bush said that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". `








So this means someone could make a lot of money by finding out on which team Bush is betting to win the Superbowl, and putting a bundle on the other team.

For all the world like a latter day Gen. Jack Ripper as depicted in Stanley Kubrick`s Dr. Strangelove, Bush was going to fly a US spy plane over Iraq painted in UN colors, in hopes Saddam would have it shot down, so as to provoke a war (and `protect our precious bodily fluids?`). This crackpot idea doesn`t make any sense to me, and suggests the truth of the rumors that Bush never really did give up drinking heavily (or maybe it can only be explained by doing lines). The UN doesn`t have spy planes and everyone knows it. And, wouldn`t Secretary General Kofi Annan have pointed this out?





Bush also still hoped that Scooter Libby and Ahmad Chalabi could produce a defector out of a hat who would testify to Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction stockpile. I suppose this desperate measure was made unnecessary by the discovery that Colin Powell would be willing just to read out Libby`s science fiction novel about sinister aluminum tubes and an Iraq armed to the teeth before the UN Security Council.

The memo also makes clear that Bush and Blair had already decided to go to war no matter what, regardless of the United Nations Security Council. Bush had "pencilled in" March 10 (was it an item in his social calendar?) Blair committed to the plan, though he preferred a second UNSC resolution. That he committed in advance is embarrassing to him, since he only received British parliamentary approval to so commit on March 18, a month and a half later. Blair`s office refused to comment on the memo, discussed in a new edition of Philippe Sands`s Lawless World.

According to The Independent:


` George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein`s regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.

The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam`s WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 ­ when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.

The leaders discussed the prospects for a second resolution, but Mr Bush said: "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would `twist arms` and `even threaten`. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." He added that he had a date, 10 March, pencilled in for the start of military action. The war actually began on 20 March.

Mr Blair replied that he was "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam." But he also insisted that " a second Security Council resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover, including with the Arabs" .



Andy McSmith notes that the memo contradicts the allegation in the memoirs of Christopher Meyers, the British ambassador in Washington at that time, that Blair had missed an opportunity to convince Bush to seek a second UNSC resolution. Obviously, Bush`s mind and long before been made up.

The parade of leaked British memos that have gradually emerged paint an increasingly detailed picture of Bush and Blair as Machiavellian warmongers-- fully aware of the illegal character of their enterprise, cynical about the United Nations Security Council, and fully apprised of the profound dangers that might ensue, but determined to attack aggressively nevertheless, and to propagandize and to twist the truth until neither any longer knew where it lay.

posted by Juan @ [url2/04/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/george-gen.html[/url] 0 comments

Shiite control of Interior a Red Line

Al-Zaman reports [Ar.] that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is still determined to try to obtain for his faction of the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, the prime ministership. His candidate is Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is running against Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jaafari, the current prime minister. The two will lobby parliamentarians this weekend with dueling, lavish banquets. There will likely be an up and down vote by the UIA on the nomination, though its exact details have yet to be worked out. The formation of a new government is moving at a glacial pace, and it may take months.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.] says that its sources in the Kurdistan Alliance say that the Kurds are tilting toward Abdul Mahdi as prime minister. The Kurds would also prefer that powerful cabinet posts such as Interior and Defense go to technocrats not affiliated with a party or militia.

The problem is that, as noted below, the Shiites are saying that their control of Interior is a "red line" that cannot be crossed.

Since the Shiite religious parties could elect a president on a second ballot by simple majority, and since they can also form a government and run parliament with 51%, they could in a pinch dispense with the Kurds if pressed too hard. They just need 138 parliamentarians to vote with them. They have 132 (128 UIA, 2 Sadrist Risaliyun, 1 Christian and 1 other). If they can make a sufficiently sweet offer to the Yazidi MP and to the 5 Kurdish Islamists, they`d have their 51%. The Kurdish Islamists are apparently saying that they won`t vote with the Kurdistan Alliance (see below), which suggests that they are available for a deal with the Shiite religious parties. It would be a mere marriage of convenience, but couldn`t be ruled out.

Al-Zaman also reports that guerrillas detonated a bomb in Mosul aimed at a passing American convoy, but missed and killed a number of civilians instead, as well as badly damaging buildings. Two bodies were discovered in Mosul, those of a student and an unidentified civilian. A former Baath military commander was assassinated.

There is some sort of deep dark conspiracy involved in the s… 120 Bulgarian troops at the Ashraf base in Iraq to guard 4000 members of the Iranian dissident terrorist cult, the Mojahedin-e Khalq [MEK]. The group was used by Saddam to blow things up in Iraq, and has been defended by Neocons in the US such as Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. The Iraqi Shiites want it out of Iraq, but instead the Pentagon has kept it in place. A lot of the phony intelligence about alleged Iranian nuclear weapons programs is manufactured by the MEK, which has bought a number of powerful US senators and congressmen.

Scroll down at the link above and read the article about the UPI article about the Lord`s Resistance Army, a Christian cult that has terrorized the Congo and kidnapped 20,000 children. People keep asking me why Muslim movements are more destructive than those in other religions. But the people who ask that have never bothered to read about groups such as the LRA, which is as "Christian" as al-Qaeda is "Muslim" or Aum Shinrikyo is "Buddhist."

From BBC World Monitoring of the Iraqi Press for Jan. 31:


` Al-Bayyinah on 29 January carries on the front page a 700-word exclusive report citing well-informed sources confirming that Iraqi National Bloc candidates Rasim al-Awwadi and Asim al-Janabi have requested Talabani to exclude them from the de-Ba`thification process. The report cites Adil al-Lami confirming that IECI is obliged to follow De-Ba`thification Committee`s decisions in this regard.

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January runs on the front page a 340-word exclusive report citing Unified Iraqi Coalition Candidate Jawad al-Maliki confirming that the coalition will announce the mechanism for the nomination of the next prime minister during its meeting today. When asked about Zalmay Khalilzad`s recent statement, Al-Maliki said: "We reject all forms of interference." . . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January publishes on page two a 270-word exclusive report citing Unified Iraqi Coalition Candidate Hasan al-Sari confirming that parliament`s opening session will be held within 15 days after the endorsement of the election results . . .

Al-Adalah carries on the front page a 120-word report citing Interior Minister Baqir Jabr Sulagh confirming that Unified Iraqi Coalition will retain more than half the ministerial posts in the next government . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 350-word exclusive report citing Unified Iraqi Coalition Candidate Hadi al-Amiri confirming that the coalition regards Interior Ministry as a "red line". . .

Dar al-Salam on 29 January carries on the front page a 120-word report citing Kurdistan Islamic Union member Hamid Muhammad Ali refusing to join Kurdistan Coalition . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page two a 1,200-word report that Al-Sadr Trend rejects federalism in south and central regions, and has asserted the necessity of respecting the honour document signed earlier. . .

Al-Mashriq devotes all of page six to the survey conducted by the newspaper regarding the religious fatwa that encouraged Iraqis to participate in the elections. The survey shows that 80 per cent of Iraqis were affected by these fatwas, 15 per cent were secular, and the remaining 5 per cent took part because they wanted to be part of this political process . . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January devotes all of pages eight and nine to an interview with Women`s Affairs Minister Dr Azhar al-Shaykhli on the ministry`s activities and goals and women`s role in the political process. . .

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 28 January runs on page four an 800-word report entitled "Unprecedented Deterioration in Iraq`s Security Situation".

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 28 January publishes on page eight a 400-word report on the postponement of National Conciliation Conference. . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January publishes on the front page a 130-word report citing well-informed sources accusing local and foreign parties of financing Islamic Army, a newly formed militia responsible for the assassination of Shi`is in Iraq. The report accuses former Defence Minister Hazim al-Sha`lan`s followers of selling conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction to unknown parties . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page three a 500-word report citing Al-Najaf Artifacts Director Muhammad Hadi Bidan confirming the arrest of seven smugglers and the seizure of 174 historical artifacts. He explained that they were planning to sell the artifacts to multinational troops in Al-Diwaniyah. . .

Al-Zaman runs on page five a 400-word report on the demonstration organized by Wasit Advisory Council today, 30 January, to protest the random killings by multinational forces . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 50-word report that USAID has predicted serious deterioration in the security situation in Iraq despite optimism of Iraqi officials in Ministry of Interior. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page three a 400-word report citi ng Basra environment director confirming that 70 per cent of Basra`s untreated sewage goes into Shat al-Arab, which is the main source for drinking water.

Al-Zaman carries on page three a 300-word report citing Ninawah Jurists Union Chairman Abd-al-Sattar al-Baku`a praising Al-Karkh Court`s decision to rule out Justice Ministry`s decision to dissolve Iraqi Lawyers Association. . .

Al-Furat carries on the front page a 250-word report citing chairman of Pro-Children`s Rights Association in Basra saying that his association conducted a symposium on the shortage in medicines in Basra at Basra Public Hospital. . .

Tariq al-Sha`b devotes all of page four to a report citing pharmacists commenting on medicines being sold on roads and drug addiction.

Tariq al-Sha`b carries on page nine a 700-word report citing pharmacists in Basra complaining about the shortage in medicines because some gangs smuggle them to neighbouring countries. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page four a 200-word report that 200,000 poor families in Baghdad are being covered by the social care system. . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page two a 300-word report citing Deputy Governor Abd-al-Husayn Abtan confirming 90 per cent completion of the construction of Al-Najaf Airport. The report cites Al-Najaf Governor As`ad Abu Kalal outlining the results of his recent visit to India. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page three a 1,000-word report entitled "Diyala University`s Students and Professors: We Live between the Hammer of Deteriorating Security and Anvil of Electricity Outages." . . .

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 28 January devotes all of pages 34 and 35 to an article by Dr Rif`at Sayyid Ahmad on the deteriorating Iraqi economy due to "occupation."

Al-Mu`tamar carries on page two a 500-word report citing Industry and Minerals Ministry`s Undersecretary Adil Karim Ahmad saying that the ministry has prepared plans to privatize its companies and factories. He added that the ministry will construct 20 cement factories. . .

Tariq al-Sha`b carries on page two a 230-word report citing director general of Integrity Commission in Ninawah saying that the increase in crude oil transport costs from Bayji refineries to Ibrahim al-Khalil Complex is because terrorists take their shares from drivers.

Tariq al-Sha`b carries on page two an 80-word report citing a press source saying that Karbala is devoid of electricity since Friday. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page five a 350-word report that Iraq`s oil exports are expected to drop to 1.1m barrels per day, the lowest since the latest war. . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January publishes on page three a 1,400-word article by Salman al-Shammari entitled "Effective Parliament and Strong Parliamentary Opposition," saying that it is not wise for all forces to participate in the government. . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January publishes on page four a 750-word unattributed article criticizing Sunni clerics and religious organizations for not condemning terrorist attacks against Shi`is.

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January runs on page four a 1,000-word article by Arif al-Jawahiri entitled "Unified Iraqi Coalition Rejects Maram Front`s Call for Sectarian Proportional Power Sharing Government." . . .

Al-Bayyinah on 29 January runs on page 10 a 1,000-word article by Nadir al-Khazraji discussing federalism and proposing the formation of two federal blocs in Iraq: Kurdistan and Arab federal bloc. . .

posted by Juan @ [url2/04/2006 06:04:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/shiite-control-of-interior-red-line-al.html[/url] 0 comments

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Da haben wohl einige Leute zu früh losgeschlagen, z.B. Broder der da wohl nicht die Stimme seines Herren abgewartet hat.

Und auch andere, die das Verständnis für die Aufregung der Muslime als Folge der 68er geortet haben.

Nun aber schnell auf Linie umschalten, den das Zentralkommitee in D.C. hat entschieden, die Karikaturen sind Gotteslästerung.

Na also Fundamentalisten unter sich!

February 4, 2006
U.S. Says It Also Finds Cartoons of Muhammad Offensive
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/politics/04mideast.html

By JOEL BRINKLEY and IAN FISHER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — The Muslim world erupted in anger on Friday over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Europe while the Bush administration offered the protesters support, saying of the cartoons, "We find them offensive, and we certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive."

Streets in the Palestinian regions and in Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia were filled with demonstrators calling for boycotts of European goods and burning the flag of Denmark, where the cartoons first appeared.

While a huge rally in the Gaza Strip was peaceful — and many leaders warned against violence — some of the oratory was not.

"We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible," one preacher at Al Omari mosque in Gaza told worshipers during Friday Prayer, according to Reuters. Other demonstrators called for amputating the hands of the cartoonists who drew the pictures.

Many Muslims consider it blasphemy to print any image of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, let alone a cartoon that ridicules him.

The set of a dozen cartoons has outraged Muslims as being provocative and anti-Muslim, while many Europeans have defended their publication under the right to free speech.

One cartoon depicts Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb. Another shows him at the gates of heaven, arms raised, saying to men who seem to be suicide bombers, "Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins." A third has devil`s horns emerging from his turban. A fourth shows two women who are entirely veiled, with only their eyes showing, and the prophet standing between them with a strip of black cloth covering his eyes, preventing him from seeing.

Since being published in Denmark in September, they have been reprinted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary, as well as in Jordan. They are also on the Internet. Editors at the papers in France and Jordan were fired.

The United States has been trying to improve its image in the Arab world, badly damaged by the Iraq war and American support for Israel.

The State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, reading the government`s statement on the controversy, said, "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images," which are routinely published in the Arab press, "as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."

Still, the United States defended the right of the Danish and French newspapers to publish the cartoons. "We vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view," Mr. McCormack added.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan also criticized the publication of the cartoons, but urged Muslims to forgive the offense and "move on."

"I am distressed and concerned by this whole affair," he said. "I share the distress of the Muslim friends, who feel that the cartoon offends their religion. I also respect the right of freedom of speech. But of course freedom of speech is never absolute. It entails responsibility and judgment."

For the Bush administration, talking about the uproar represented a delicate balancing act. A central tenet of the administration`s foreign policy is the promotion of democracy and human rights, including free speech, in countries where they are lacking. But a core mission of its public diplomacy is to emphasize respect for Islam in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, did not publish the caricatures. Representatives said the story could be told effectively without publishing images that many would find offensive.

"Readers were well served by a short story without publishing the cartoon," said Robert Christie, a spokesman for Dow Jones & Company, which owns The Wall Street Journal. "We didn`t want to publish anything that can be perceived as inflammatory to our readers` culture when it didn`t add anything to the story."

In a midafternoon meeting on Friday, editors at The Chicago Tribune discussed the issue but decided against publishing the cartoons. "We can communicate to our readers what this is about without running it," said James O`Shea, the paper`s managing editor.

Most television news executives made similar decisions. On Friday CNN ran a disguised version of a cartoon, and on an NBC News program on Thursday, the camera shot depicted only a fragment of the full cartoon. CBS banned the broadcast of the cartoons across the network, said Kelli Edwards, a spokeswoman for CBS News.

Only ABC showed a cartoon in its entirety, lingering over the image for several seconds during Thursday`s evening news broadcast and on "Nightline." "We felt you couldn`t really explain to the audience what the controversy was without showing what the controversy was," said Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman.

In France, where rioting broke out last year among its sizable Muslim population, President Jacques Chirac released a statement on Friday defending free speech but also appealing "to all to show the greatest spirit of responsibility, of respect and of good measure to avoid anything that could hurt other people`s beliefs."

In Gaza, a pamphlet released by gunmen at the European Union office threatened harm to "churches."

Hamas leaders, showing how their role has changed since their election success last week, quickly and publicly reacted to calm fears of Gaza`s small Christian population, only 3,000 people. On Thursday a top Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, visited the only Catholic church in Gaza to condemn any threats against Christians.

"He said he is protecting us not because he is Hamas," said the Rev. Manuel Musallam of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, who said he has long and friendly relations with Hamas. "But he is protecting Christians and our institutions as the state of Palestine and as a government."


* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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[urlComment on Editorial Cartoons ]http://forums.washingtonpost.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=wpeditorials&msg=4826.38[/url]

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Latest Update:#35152 03.02.06 15:26:40 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 02, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2454 , US: 2250 , Feb.06: 8


Iraker 02/04/06: Civilian: 68 Police/Mil: 13 Total: 81

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

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Ha Ha Ha

[urlHA HA HA AMERICA]http://festival.sundance.org/2006/watch/film.aspx?which=402&category=DOC[/url] Ein Kurzfilm.
Poignantly weird. The Sundance Film Festival caption reads:
"A translated harangue from China That Laughs at our missteps."


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http://clowncrack.com/

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February 5, 2006
`State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,` by James Risen
Spies and Spymasters
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05isaac.html?…

Review by WALTER ISAACSON

THIS explosive little book opens with a scene that is at once amazing and yet not surprising: President Bush angrily hanging up the phone on his father, who ``was disturbed that his son was allowing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues to exert broad influence over foreign policy.`` The colorful anecdote is symptomatic of ``State of War.`` It is riveting, anonymously sourced and feels slightly overdramatized, but it has the odious smell of truth.

STATE OF WAR The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. By James Risen. 240 pp. The Free Press. $26.

In these regards, the anecdote is like the scene in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein`s ``Final Days,`` when Nixon, very close to his resignation, begins to cry as he asks Henry Kissinger to kneel and pray with him. Indeed, James Risen may have become the new Woodward and Bernstein. His Page 1 articles in The New York Times exposed, for better or worse, the government`s national security wiretapping program. And now he has produced an ``All the President`s Men`` inside narrative based on anonymous sources.

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The warriors, from top: President Bush;
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice;
former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
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The former director of central intelligence
George Tenet; Vice President Dick Cheney;
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
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At its heart is one of the great questions of the post-9/11 era: how far should we Americans be willing to go, in terms of permitting things like wiretapping and torture, to fight terrorism? Risen doesn`t seem to think it`s his role to probe too deeply into this. Instead, he appears to feel that if something is secret and interesting, it should be exposed.

That raises some more parochial but still important journalistic questions. When should the press censor itself in deference to national security concerns? And how much should it rely on leaks from anonymous sources? The best way to begin to answer these questions is actually to read the book rather than depend on the cable television crossfire about it, a task that is not really all that arduous since it is fast paced, quite mesmerizing and pretty short.

The bulk of Risen`s reporting deals with the litany of intelligence failures widely attributed to ideological pressures from Bush, Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Risen`s archvillain is George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, whom Risen portrays, through a brutal procession of leaked anecdotes, as so eager to be liked by Bush that he prostitutes his agency.

When Tenet tells Bush that a captured terrorist has not been giving much information because he was sedated after being shot, Bush is said (by ``a well-placed source``) to have asked, ``Who authorized putting him on pain medication?`` It may have been a joke, or half a joke or perhaps something Bush never said at all. But according to Risen, it set Tenet on a mission, intended to please Bush but opposed by many career officers at the agency, that eventually led to the prison abuse scandals and the rendering of detainees to countries where they might be tortured.

Risen is kinder to Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency, which was responsible for the electronic eavesdropping that caused the greatest headlines from this book. That program, which involves electronically scanning hundreds of calls and email messages, is the type of new technological approach that Hayden most likely could have (and should have) justified to Congress or one of the special courts that oversee intelligence agency warrants. But the administration insisted on circumventing these procedures. It did so not merely to protect the details from leaking, but also out of a fear that the program would be disapproved and out of an arrogant conviction that presidents should not be subject to such restraints.

Risen`s tales are filled with color and details that lend credibility — as well as drama — to his reporting. This includes an account of what apparently was a botched plan to give Iran flawed blueprints for a nuclear-weapon triggering device. He also reports on a C.I.A. scheme during the prelude to the Iraq war in which an Iraqi scientist`s sister, who lived in America, was recruited to extract information from her brother on Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction programs. Like 30 or so others who were recruited for such missions, she came back with the news that Hussein had been forced to abandon these efforts. But the C.I.A. did not circulate this information to policy makers, and the eager Tenet instead famously declared to Bush that the case against Hussein was a ``slam dunk.``

The Bush administration asked The Times not to print some of Risen`s reporting, especially about the wiretapping program, and the paper honored that request for a year. But when Risen was about to publish this book, which included the revelations that The Times had withheld, the newspaper decided to end its self-restraint. This provoked the typical Timesian tsunami of criticism, both from liberals who felt it should have published the information earlier and from conservatives who felt it should not have published it at all.

Risen does not reflect on this issue, and his willingness to expose government secrets is not matched, alas, by a similar commitment to reporting on the decisions made by his newspaper, which were also important and interesting. But his book does provide some evidence that The Times probably acted in what was actually a prudent manner. The information in ``State of War,`` like that reported in the newspaper just before the book`s publication, appears to take care to avoid revealing (although I fear that we cannot be sure) any technical procedures or details that would be useful to Qaeda operatives, who presumably had already surmised that the United States was trying to eavesdrop on them. The justification for publishing the N.S.A. article is that, as Risen shows, the program went on for more than a year with indifference to the requirement that there be some court authorization or Congressional approval of domestic wiretapping. Even those of us who like the idea of the intelligence agencies using data-mining and electronic surveillance to detect terrorist communications are uncomfortable with the possibility that future presidents, with murkier agendas, might secretly use such techniques, without any authorization, for any purpose they alone deem part of their war-making powers.

In these cases, oversight is supposed to come from Congress, the special intelligence courts and the lawyers at the Justice Department, C.I.A. and White House. But in an administration that has little appreciation for Congressional authority or for meddling lawyers, and in a town where the president`s party controls all branches of government, there were no such checks or balances.

Except the press. Whether on torture or wiretapping, the news media have become a de facto fourth branch that provides some small check on executive power. That is why so many concerned or disgruntled sources, especially from within the intelligence agencies, came forward to give Risen information.

So what are we to believe in a book that relies heavily on leaks from disgruntled sources? We are in an age where the consumer of information has to make an educated guess about what percentage of assertions in books like this are true. My own guess is that Risen has earnest sources for everything he reports but that they don`t all know the full story, thus resulting in a book that smells like it`s 80 percent true. If that sounds deeply flawed, let me add that if he had relied on no anonymous sources and reported instead only the on-the-record line from official spinners, the result would very likely have been only half as true.

In fact, the new way we consume information provides a good argument for the role of an independent press that relies on leakers. Other journalists will and should build on, or debunk, the allegations reported by Risen. This will prompt many of the players to publish their own version of the facts. L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq after the invasion, has just come out with his book pointing fingers at the C.I.A. for giving him flawed intelligence and at Donald Rumsfeld for not giving him the troops he actually wanted. And Tenet, one hopes, will someday cash in on a hefty book contract by clamping cigar in mouth and pen in hand to give evidence that he was not the buffoonish toady Rumsfeld`s aides portray him to be. Besides being fun to watch, this process is a boon for future historians.

So welcome to the new age of impressionistic history. Like an Impressionist painting, it relies on dots of varying hues and intensity. Some come from leakers like those who spoke to Risen. Other dots come from the memoirs and comments of the players. Eventually, a picture emerges, slowly getting clearer. It`s up to us to connect the dots and find our own meanings in this landscape.

As long as we remember that the truth these days comes not as one pronouncement but as part of a process, we can properly value ``State of War`` for being not only colorful and fascinating, but also one of the ways that facts and historical narratives emerge in an information- age democracy. So let the process begin! After all, many other reporters followed up with their own sources on that Woodward and Bernstein story about Nixon`s emotional outburst in the White House. And it all turned out to be true.

Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, is a former managing editor of Time and chief executive of CNN. He is the author of ``Benjamin Franklin: An American Life`` and is working on a biography of Einstein.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

February 5, 2006
First Chapter
`State of War`
By JAMES RISEN

The Hunt for WMD

Doctor Sawsan Alhaddad was very busy when she received the strange phone call. She was so busy, and the call was so strange, that she wasn`t quite certain whether to follow up. It was May 2002, and the caller said he was from the CIA and that he wanted to meet with her. He didn`t sound crazy, but she wasn`t sure.

A quiet, petite, olive-skinned woman in her fifties, Sawsan wondered why a CIA officer who said he was calling from Pittsburgh would want to talk to an anesthesiologist in Cleveland.

Curiosity finally got the better of her. Fear got to her, too; old fears of police and security men that had receded gradually over the last two decades, as she and her husband had built a wonderful new American life, with a beautiful daughter, in a plush and sprawling home, in one of Cleveland`s most luxurious outer suburbs. Sawsan thought she had left her fears behind when she and her husband escaped from Iraq in 1979, lying to their bosses at the hospital in Baghdad about their plans for a brief vacation in London. It was before anybody in America had given much thought to Saddam Hussein, back before the United States thought much about granting Iraqi exiles political asylum from a mad dictator. Eventually, they managed to rebuild their lives and become American citizens.

Sawsan decided to check out the mysterious caller before agreeing to meet him. She found someone at the FBI`s Cleveland field office who would listen to her story. Was there such a person in Pittsburgh working for the CIA? Sawsan was surprised when the FBI agent called her back. He had checked with FBI headquarters in Washington, and it turned out that the man in Pittsburgh was real, and the call was genuine. The CIA really did want to talk to Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of the Cleveland Clinic. So she finally agreed to meet with "Chris" from Pittsburgh.

As Chris was trying to contact Sawsan Alhaddad, it was becoming clear that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address the previous January, Bush had warned of an "axis of evil," of which Iraq was one of only three members. Bush and his aides charged that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States because he possessed weapons of mass destruction and because his regime harbored terrorists. Saddam might use his weapons against America, or give them to terrorists to do the job instead. In either case, an attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons would make September 11 look like child`s play. It was a risk, George W. Bush said, that a post-9/11 United States was not willing to take.

Throughout that spring, the Bush administration had been steadily ratcheting up the rhetoric about the threat posed by terrorists, weapons of mass destruction - and Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney went on television to say he was "almost certain" of more terrorist attacks on the United States, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that it was only a matter of time before terrorists would get weapons of mass destruction from rogue states like Iraq. In late May, Bush spoke in Berlin, where he warned that once terrorists obtained chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from countries like Iraq, "no inner voice of reason, no hint of conscience would prevent their use." With the war in Afghanistan winding down, George Bush`s Washington was inexorably turning its attention toward Baghdad.

Sawsan told Chris that it was not possible for her to meet with him right away. Her mother had come to Cleveland from Iraq for advanced treatment for colon cancer, and Sawsan had to care for her. Maybe they could talk later, she told the CIA man. In June, Sawsan`s mother died, and the Iraqi woman was buried in the American heartland. Soon, Sawsan was ready for the CIA.

The White House drumbeat on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction kept building that summer. It was filling the front pages and the airwaves by the time Chris finally sat down with Sawsan at a Cleveland Starbucks in early August. The president and his lieutenants insisted that no decision about whether to invade Iraq had been made, but in a major foreign policy speech at West Point in June, Bush had forcefully made the case for taking preemptive action against dictatorships such as Iraq that harbored weapons of mass destruction. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies," Bush told the graduating class at West Point. "We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." By July, the Pentagon`s plans for an invasion of Iraq had leaked to the press, and it was becoming more difficult by the day for Bush to hide his intentions. Inside the government, meanwhile, more secret documents were written to bolster the case against Iraq. On August 1, the CIA issued a classified paper that was distributed to senior Bush administration officials. It concluded that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes from China to Iraq was a sign that Iraq was reviving its uranium enrichment program in order to build an atomic bomb.

Chris stunned Sawsan when he explained why he had come to talk to her. He told her that she could help in President Bush`s new war on terror. She could help by going to Baghdad on a secret mission for the CIA. Chris explained that the CIA wanted Sawsan, a middle-aged mother from Cleveland, to travel to Iraq and become a spy.

The CIA had identified Saad Tawfiq, Sawsan`s brother, a British-trained electrical engineer living in Bagdhad with his wife and three children, as a key figure in Saddam Hussein`s clandestine nuclear weapons program. The CIA knew who he was, Chris told Sawsan, but it didn`t have any way to try to talk to him. So the CIA wanted Sawsan to go to Baghdad to talk to her brother and see if he would be willing to defect, through the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq. The CIA couldn`t help him cross into the Kurdish zone, but if he got there on his own, the CIA could get him out to the West. If he wasn`t ready to defect, the CIA wanted Sawsan to ask him a series of questions about Saddam Hussein`s efforts to build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The CIA was convinced that Saad Tawfiq knew the most sensitive secrets about Iraq`s weapons programs and that he might be willing to tell his sister the truth about Saddam Hussein`s ambitions.

Sawsan found it hard to believe that the CIA didn`t have some other way to get information out of Baghdad. But after thinking hard about it, she decided she was willing to do her part. She had not seen her brother since 1989, on a brief and nervous visit to pre-Gulf War Iraq, but she thought he might want to help. She told Chris she was willing to try.

Sawsan was volunteering for a late, desperate Hail Mary pass by the CIA. As President Bush and other administration officials were turning up the rhetorical heat on Iraq, key leaders within the CIA faced an uncomfortable fact: the United States did not have the proof to back up what the president was saying publicly about Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. Worse, the CIA had been operating virtually in the blind about Iraq for years. Its evidence was either old and obsolete, or from secondhand, thirdhand, or fourthhand sources, defectors and exiles who had their own political agendas. Almost every analyst at the CIA assumed that Iraq had WMD - but they didn`t have hard evidence to back it up. What was worse, many of them knew it.

In 1998 the United Nations had withdrawn its weapons inspectors from Iraq after a showdown with Saddam Hussein over access to key sites in the country. President Bill Clinton launched a four-day bombing campaign to punish Iraq for its refusal to cooperate with the UN inspectors, but the bombs had no real effect. The withdrawal of the inspectors severely hampered the CIA`s ability to keep track of Iraqi weapons efforts in the years before the 2003 war. Throughout the 1990s, the CIA had relied almost entirely on the UN inspectors for intelligence about Iraq`s weapons programs. After their withdrawal, the CIA failed to develop reliable sources of its own inside Iraq to report on Baghdad`s weapons programs.

In the year before the 2003 war, the CIA had only one case officer spying from inside Baghdad. He was posing undercover as a diplomat working in the embassy of another country. But that case officer did not develop or recruit any sources who knew the status of Iraq`s weapons programs. The agency had also developed sources within the Iraqi military, largely through the Iraqi National Accord, an exile group led by Ayad Allawi (a CIA asset who later became the interim prime minister of Iraq), but none of those military officers had any firsthand knowledge about Iraqi WMD. By mid-2002, most of the agency`s information was at least four years out of date.

Charlie Allen, the CIA`s assistant director for collection and a legendary figure within the agency, was the highest-ranking CIA official willing to try to do something about the problem. Allen had carved a unique niche for himself within the U.S. intelligence community. He looked for collection "gaps," intelligence targets that were not being adequately covered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. He realized that Iraqi WMD represented an enormous intelligence gap.

While other top CIA officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, dithered and failed to mount any serious operations to get more spies into Iraq to find out what was going on, Allen, an old hand who had little time for Tenet and the circle of yes-men and yes-women on Tenet`s senior staff, began a renegade effort to search for new sources of information.

He pushed for several new collection programs, including one that called for approaching members of the families of Iraqi scientists who were believed to be involved in secret weapons programs. At the time, the CIA had no direct access to key Iraqi scientists, and so using family members as intermediaries to find out what the scientists were doing seemed like the next best thing. Most of the key scientists who had been involved in the weapons programs in the past had been interviewed repeatedly by UN inspectors during the 1990s. During those earlier interviews, they had all insisted that the weapons programs had been abandoned. But the United States was convinced that the scientists had been lying, since they were always closely watched by Iraqi security during the interviews. At least, thanks to the UN inspections, the CIA had a fairly comprehensive list of Iraq`s senior weapons scientists. Charlie Allen realized that list gave him something to go on.

Allen`s collection team began contacting family members living outside of Iraq, asking them whether they would be willing to help the agency by going back to Iraq to talk to their relatives about their scientific work. At least thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists agreed to cooperate, including Sawsan Alhaddad. The CIA was eager to get her on board. Saad Tawfiq had long since been identified as one of the senior figures in the Iraqi nuclear program. He was a Shia Muslim, never completely trusted by the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein, yet Saad was one of the true technical experts that Iraq couldn`t do without. The CIA had initially contacted his younger brother, who was living in Houston. After he rebuffed them, Charlie Allen`s team approached Sawsan in Cleveland.

Throughout August 2002, Chris became a regular in Cleveland, meeting Sawsan at restaurants and at her home in suburban Moreland Hills, finally bringing a CIA technician along to train Sawsan in the rudiments of espionage. The agency had put together a long list of questions she was to ask her brother, but Sawsan couldn`t just walk into Bagdhad carrying a memo from the CIA. So the technician tried to teach her the art of secret writing, showing her how to read and write using invisible ink on fast-burning paper. Sawsan was a practical woman, and she realized that the CIA`s techniques were too cumbersome and dangerous if done incorrectly in the heart of Iraq. She finally told Chris she would skip the secret communications and would memorize the questions instead. Privately, she decided to use her favorite crossword puzzles to guide her. She wrote mnemonic aids into crossword puzzles that she could take with her on the plane to Iraq, key words to remind her of the questions she was supposed to ask.

Before sending Sawsan, the CIA wanted to make certain that her brother would be willing to talk with her once she got there. Sawsan offered the perfect intermediary to get word to him. Her mother-in-law was visiting Cleveland from Baghdad and was due to return home in early September. She could tell Saad that the CIA wanted to talk to him through Sawsan, and could ask him if he would do it.

Frightened but willing, the mother-in-law agreed, returned home to Baghdad, and found a moment to talk to Saad on the street outside his home, away from the listening devices that were almost certainly planted inside.

They want to talk to you, and they will send Sawsan, the old woman told Saad Tawfiq. Sawsan will call you tonight, and ask how you are feeling. If you are willing, tell her that you are okay.

Sawsan called her brother, asked him how he was feeling, and he said that he was okay. She repeated the question three times to make certain that she heard him right.

Sawsan left for Baghdad a few days later, explaining to Iraqi authorities that her mother had just died and that she needed to settle her estate. Since she was now carrying an American passport with her married name (which was different from the family name on her old Iraqi passport) it didn`t register with the Iraqis that this was the same woman who had escaped so many years before.

It was early September. The Bush administration was now raising the stakes on Iraq, warning that Saddam Hussein`s nuclear weapons program posed an immediate threat to the United States and the White House was strongly suggesting that war could not be delayed. On September 8, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice coined a memorably ominous phrase on a Sunday talk show when she said, "while there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly" Saddam Hussein can acquire nuclear weapons, "we don`t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Just as Rice was making the public case against Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified report entitled "Iraq`s Reemerging Nuclear Weapons Program," which concluded that Baghdad was on its way to building the bomb. Vice President Cheney, sounding impatient with any further debate, went on a Sunday talk show to add that "this problem [Iraq] has to be dealt with one way or another."

To ratchet up the pressure, the Bush administration leaked information to the American press. The New York Times published a story on September 8 - the same day Rice issued her mushroom cloud warning - making public the evidence that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes to rebuild its nuclear weapons program. The story stated that "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today."

* * * When Sawsan stepped off the plane at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, she didn`t even recognize her brother. When they finally spotted each other, it was a joyous reunion. Saad had a friend in the Iraqi security services, and he helped Sawsan sail through the Iraqi customs and immigration bureaucracy. On the ride into town, Sawsan could also barely recognize the city of her youth, Baghdad had changed so dramatically. She was surprised to see that so many women were now covered. Baghdad didn`t seem as secular and open as it once did. . . .


Excerpted from State of War by James Risen Copyright © 2006 by James Risen.


* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Wenn für CFR das Doppeldefizits existiert, und dessen Mitglieder sich darüber sorgen machen, können die Verteidiger der Sprachreglung des ZK in D.C.und dessen Zentralorgans WSJ nicht einfach die mögliche Gefährdung abstreiten. Aber das Kennzeichen von Ideologen ist deren Uneinsichtigkeit.

February 1, 2006
Q&A: Two Deficits, Fed Turnover
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9707/two_deficits_fed_turnove…

By LEE HUDSON TESLIK

From the Council on Foreign Relations, February 1, 2006

Unchecked spending

Two decades ago, the United States was the world`s largest creditor; now it`s the world`s largest debtor. As Ben Bernanke assumes the post of Federal Reserve chairman, succeeding Alan Greenspan, opinion is split over how much America`s profligacy actually matters. The Economist recently suggested that Greenspan, hailed by many as a hero, is in fact leaving behind him "the biggest economic imbalances in American history." Jeffrey Frankel, professor of capital formation and growth at Harvard`s Kennedy School of Government, says that irresponsible spending is America`s "worst economic problem in the last twenty-five years, and will be the dominant problem over our next twenty-five." And yet, despite warnings, American consumers (and the federal government) just keep spending, and growth remains strong. Most experts agree that some kind of correction will ultimately be in order, but how this might come, and when, remains far less obvious.

Two deficits?

We should be worried about two deficits, not one, according to a [url2005 CFR Task Force Report]http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/Twin_DeficitsTF.pdf[/url] by Menzie D. Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin`s LaFollette School. The "twin deficits" to which Chinn refers are the current account deficit, which reflects how much America spends internationally (imports) versus how much it makes (exports); and the budget deficit, or the gap between government tax revenues and total government spending. Each of these deficits reached record levels in 2005. Americans are importing far more than they export, and the Federal government is spending far more than it raises each year in revenues.

Are these deficits necessarily harmful for the American economy?

Most experts agree that the account and budget deficits could be damaging to the American economy, though there is a significant variance of opinion about how damaging, and when that damage might come. "It`s unlikely that international investors will continue to agree to hold ever-larger amounts of U.S. debt," Chinn told cfr.org. But he hesitates to predict a time-frame. "With private investors, we certainly haven`t seen any movement yet. And with central banks, you just don`t know when they are going to switch. It`s like reading tea leaves."

What`s less enigmatic is how damaging the effects of an international mood-swing could be. Foreign debt and a giddy real-estate market have allowed American consumers to consume more than they earn for ten years on end. Grounding could be unpleasant either way, but sharp grounding could prompt painful corrections in the American stock and real estate markets, and an eventual curtailing of American demand. It`s ominous to consider the fallout, not only in the U.S. but also in the developing world, where American demand plays an enormous role as a catalyst of both financial and political reforms.

Fortunately, most experts think a worst-case scenario is improbable. Roger Kubarych, senior fellow for international economics and finance at CFR, says it is most likely that consumer spending will decrease as part of a natural process. "In the future, U.S. consumers will save more, when it becomes clear that their retirement accounts are insufficient to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed," Kubarych says.

Nor is it a foregone conclusion that American spending patterns are irrational. "It`s not a done deal," Chinn says. "It may turn out that we`re going to be much wealthier in the future, so we can pay off all this debt we`ve accumulated." Still, Chinn recommends caution: "If I had to guess, I would say, to some extent, Americans are making poor decisions for the future."

What can Ben Bernanke do about America`s deficits?

The Federal Reserve Board has limited powers. "The Fed directly controls very little" says Benn Steil, senior fellow and director of international economics at CFR. It is responsible for setting short-term interest rates, but it cannot directly control legislative policy. This can put a chairman in an awkward position, particularly when legislative bodies make policy that is economically unwise. Still, though the Reserve Board only controls monetary policy, Bernanke will have means of influencing legislation.

Alan Greenspan assumed a role more public than that of most chairmen. N. Gregory Mankiw, professor of economics at Harvard (and chairman of the president`s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003-2005), summarized in an open letter to Bernanke that "Greenspan is a rock star, at least by the standards of the American Economic Association. So high has his profile been that I am surprised that we have not yet seen a TV drama written around the life of a central banker." Over his tenure at the Federal Reserve, Greenspan spoke up when he felt legislative policy bristled against America`s economic interests.

But a number of economists believe that Greenspan`s outspokenness did harm as well as good. "I often agreed with what Greenspan said," says Steil, "but he often spoke his mind about areas that were not under his control." This is a problem, Steil says, both because it has spread the perception that the Fed chairman has more power than he actually does, and because it can lead to instability. In his letter to Bernanke, Mankiw also recommends against Bernanke seeking a high profile: "The central bank`s job is to create stability, not excitement."

If Bernanke chooses to keep quiet on legislative matters, his monetary policy, in itself, can do only so much to influence the American deficits. Raising interest rates would tend to encourage saving, and could also help bring the lofty real estate market under control. This would almost certainly effect a tightening of American pockets. But experts are uncertain whether such an approach is ideal, especially given that Greenspan has already significantly raised rates. "[Bernanke] may like to slow the housing boom," says Kubarych, "but my suspicion is that both the consumer and the housing market are going to simmer down on their own. After all, Fed funds are up by nearly 3 ½ percentage points in little more than a year and a half. Bernanke will come in with a much less energized economy."

What are the foreign policy implications of America`s deficits?

1.

The need to retain foreign investment: Edwin M. Truman, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, says that for the U.S. to support its deficits, it will be absolutely necessary to keep money flowing into the country. To do this, America must effectively market its exports, everything from stocks and bonds to airplanes and automobiles. "It`s the issue of confidence," Truman says. "Eighty percent of total holdings of U.S. assets are held by the private sector. It is individuals you have to convince, not only to hold on to their [American] claims, but to add to their claims."

A mass exodus from U.S. commodities is unlikely. As Kubarych points out, "the rationales for foreign purchases of U.S. assets are unchanged: safety, liquidity, yield, political benefits, trade benefits." But given current spending imbalances, a more subtle shift could also prove damaging. According to the Economist, Chinese officials recently hinted that they are interested in diversifying their foreign exchange reserves. (China has historically financed U.S. debt by accumulating dollar assets, in an effort to hold down the value of the Yuan and bolster Chinese exports. Analysts estimate that three quarters of China`s reserves--which this year are expected to reach $1 trillion, surpassing Japan as the world`s largest--are held in dollars.) But according to Steil, "Asian countries are very concerned about a rapid rise [in the value of their currencies]," and one of the best means they have for keeping these values down is stockpiling U.S. dollars. So the chances of large-scale dollar-dumping are limited, at least in the short-run. In the long-run, however, America will still need to confront the fundamental imbalances which feed its deficits.
2.

The need to reduce spending, at home and abroad: Convincing the rest of the world to buy American goods is only half the equation. America also needs to reduce its own spending, both internationally and domestically, if it is to control its twin deficits. Mankiw gives a stark assessment of America`s domestic spending concerns in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: "The federal budget is on an unsustainable path. I know that when the baby-boom generation retires and becomes eligible for Social Security and Medicare, all hell is going to break loose. I know that the choices aren`t pretty-either large cuts in promised benefits or taxes vastly higher than anything ever experienced in U.S. history."

Internationally, America faces similarly hard choices. In his report for CFR, Chinn suggests that beyond reducing the federal budget, the two most significant steps America could take to achieve sustainable account balances are reducing the quantity of oil imports and coordinating a revaluation of East Asian currencies.

The prospects for accomplishing either goal are murky. Kubarych thinks the idea of reducing oil imports is particularly far-fetched: "We are going to see no efforts whatsoever to reduce oil imports. Prices are crushing a lot of nice people. You want to see them go up further? Voters don`t, so forget it."

But prompting a significant shift in Asian currencies may be no less tricky. The argument that a revaluation would benefit Asian countries in the short-term is tenuous, given their broad dependence on the ability to cheaply export goods. But the chances of substantially upping American exports without such a shift are dauntingly thin. "Ultimately there`s no doubt in my mind that if the U.S. current account deficit is to be reduced, then that will involve a significant revaluation of Asian currencies," says Truman.

Fed turnover, if anything, tends to exacerbate preexisting problems. The stock markets crashed in 1987, just months after Greenspan took office. Despite the U.S. economy`s happy last few years--and maybe in part because of them--Ben Bernanke will have little margin for error his new post. The Fed`s primary objectives to keep inflation low and employment high may even conflict with hopes of dampening spending and reducing the deficits. In any case, the primary burden of policy change must fall to the legislature. But whether change comes sooner or later, and whatever role Bernanke takes rallying it, a cooling-off may well be inevitable. "Something will have to happen, anyhow," says Truman. "If the current account is to be narrowed, then demand has to be curtailed relative to supply. It`s just a matter of how you get there."


* Copyright 2006

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Where the Shadows Have Shadows
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CAMOUFLAGE It`s hard, in Iraq, to tell an enemy from an enemy`s enemy. A villager can be an insurgent; a uniform can hide loyalty
to a militia; a terrorist group can change its names.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/weekinreview/05filkins.htm…

By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: February 5, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq
ON a Baghdad street last month, one of the darker visions of Iraq`s future suddenly materialized.

A group of about 20 uniformed Iraqi men, with a prisoner in its possession, was halted at a checkpoint. The men were wearing the telltale camouflage outfits of the police commandos, an American-trained paramilitary force that Sunni leaders here accuse of carrying out widespread atrocities. They were carrying ID cards from the Ministry of Interior. They seemed legitimate.

But, after some checking, the Iraqis manning the checkpoint discovered that the men were not commandos after all. They were taking their prisoner to be shot.

"We believe we captured a death squad," said Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, the American commander who oversees the training of Iraqi police forces. "They had an individual, and they were going to kill him."

The incident described by General Peterson, a tough, imposing man from Hawaii, revealed much about the sectarian violence that is shredding the social fabric in towns and neighborhoods across central Iraq.

About the renegade commandos, there seemed two possibilities: either the Iraqi men had formed a government death squad from inside the Ministry of the Interior; or they were gunmen for one of the numerous militias that roam the city, and they were impersonating government forces.

In the chaotic atmosphere of today`s Baghdad, it`s not clear which of those possibilities would be worse.

"We are trying to find out who they are," General Peterson said in an interview. "Who they work for. Are they part of a militia? Jaish al-Mehdi, Badr Corps, who are they?"

In a larger way, the scene with the death squad pointed up the ambiguous nature of so much that pervades Iraq these days. There is the sheen on the surface, the official insignia and the press release, and then there is the thing that lurks behind it.

On many days here, it`s the shadowy figure in the background that seems to matter most.

For months, reports have circulated that Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group believed to be led by a Jordanian, is clashing violently with Iraqi insurgents. The local insurgents say they resent Al Qaeda`s Islamic extremism and its focus on killing Shiite civilians. Al Qaeda and Iraqi guerrillas have fought battles in Taji, Qaim, Ramadi and Samarra.

Then, last month, something unusual happened: Al Qaeda in Iraq changed its name. Or it seemed to. In a series of Internet messages posted on jihadi Web sites, Al Qaeda in Iraq announced that it had joined something called the Mujahadeen Shura, a council of insurgent leaders that was headed — surprise — by an Iraqi. The leader`s name, in case anyone missed the point, was Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

Clearly, the message was that Al Qaeda and the Iraqis were getting along just fine.

The communiqué was signed by Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, the same name that has been attached to messages issued by Al Qaeda for months. Now, instead of Al Qaeda`s taking credit for an attack, the Mujahadeen Shura does.

Not everyone is convinced. A senior Iraqi security official, who insisted on not being identified by name, said he had been following "Mr. Baghdadi`s" writings, and found them remarkably similar to those of Al Qaeda`s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (Zarqawi means from Zarqa, a town in Jordan.) "The books all have the same line," said the Iraqi official, who insisted on anonymity for fear that he would be killed.

Such tricks are hardly limited to Al Qaeda. For months, gunmen with the Badr Corps, the Iranian-trained militia loyal to the Supreme Council, an Iraqi political party, have guarded the home of the party`s chief, Abdul Aziz Hakim. Badr gunmen are believed to have killed hundreds of Baath Party officials in the months after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Last week, in a drive past Mr. Hakim`s home, the guards stood out front. They wore the same uniforms and the same black boots. Only this time, the guards wore shoulder patches that said they were from the Ministry of Interior. Earlier this year, one of the Supreme Council`s leaders, Bayan Jabr, was installed as head of the ministry. According to American officials, thousands of Badr gunmen moved into the ranks of the police and commandos. "Self-incorporated" was how one American official described it.

Now, it`s hard to tell the difference. And it`s difficult to know who works for whom.

Any political scientist would tell you that the first requirement of a real government is to have a monopoly on the use of force. In the swirling anarchy of Iraq, the violence often seems to be a free-for-all, a potluck affair, where everyone makes his own.

But like so much in Iraq, the story does not end there. Even as the militias flourish, the huge American effort to rebuild Iraq`s security services is gathering steam. Arriving here in October — he volunteered for the job — General Peterson has set in motion an ambitious plan to train and equip some 200,000 police and other Interior Ministry forces by year`s end.

Unlike earlier efforts, which, in the words of American commanders here, emphasized quantity over quality, the new campaign is placing some 4,000 American advisers in police stations and commando units around the country, in part to curtail the rise of death squads. That effort mirrors the American military`s effort to place hundreds of advisers directly into Iraqi army units.

In recent months, the American effort has begun to show results. In Baghdad, Iraqi police and soldiers man checkpoints in greater numbers than ever. Attacks on American and Iraqi forces and civilians have fluctuated, but are now down by about 40 percent from October. Big, spectacular suicide attacks, of the kind that have killed thousands of civilians, have fallen, too.

What is intriguing is that the drop in violence has occurred as the Americans have handed over more responsibility to the Iraqis. The Iraqi army and police now control about 40 percent of the "battle space" in Iraq, American officials say. By the summer, if the plan holds, the Iraqis will control the majority.

On the streets, Americans soldiers are rarer than ever. More and more, it`s Iraqi soldiers and the Iraqi police who check the cars and guard the buildings. As American leaders in Washington debate the future of America`s commitment to Iraq, in Baghdad the withdrawal has already started.

"Our security forces have reached a critical mass," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq`s national security adviser.

It`s uncertain, of course, whether the relative calm will last. There have been lulls before. And statements by American officers attesting to the strength and prowess of the Iraqi police and soldiers have often preceded their collapse.

It is also unclear whether the drop in violence is due to the greater role of the Iraqis. More probably, it`s that American soldiers, who have never been numerous enough to bring this fractious country under control, are finally getting some help.

For some illumination, one need look no farther than the short stretch of road that leads to Baghdad International Airport. For months, the road, one of the most violent in all the world, stood as an emblem of the chaos that the Americans could not control. Late last year, the American presence on the road was finally supplemented by a series of checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers. The change was immediate. Today, the road is dotted with Iraqi flags and Iraqi armored cars. It now feels like one of the safest drives in the country.

The insurgency may be weakening, but sectarian violence is not. By almost anyone`s judgment, it`s surging: Sunni on Shiite, Shiite on Sunni. One Iraqi government official said there had been 700 sectarian assassinations in the past year. Mr. Rubaie, the national security adviser, noted the "huge, mass relocation of people in so many areas."

No one knows why sectarian killings are rising so quickly, but there are a lot of theories. Mr. Zarqawi, as the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, has deliberately made targets of Shiite civilians in hopes of igniting a civil war. Al Qaeda`s campaign has prompted reprisals by Shiites, some of them in a semi-organized way, in operations by the Badr Corps or the Ministry of Interior.

But one theory, advanced by the senior Iraqi intelligence official, is that much of the Sunni-on-Shiite violence actually serves a strategic purpose. The insurgents — even those not in Al Qaeda — have been systematically cleansing mixed neighborhoods of Shiites to construct what he calls "intelligence free zones": places where Sunni insurgents can operate freely, without fear of being targets.

"The extreme Baathists are trying to shape the battlefield," the Iraqi official said.

What is perhaps most worrisome about sectarian violence is, of course, that it could lead to a full-scale civil war, which could even invite the intervention of Iraq`s neighbors. But the prospect inspires fear for another reason, at least among Iraqi officials: stopping it will be up to them. The Americans, ever ready to help fight the insurgents, won`t step into the middle of a sectarian war.

"The Americans don`t want to intervene," Mr. Rubaie said.

At least to some Iraqi officials, that would be the bitter paradox in Iraq`s struggle: to defeat the insurgency only to fall into a sectarian bloodbath.

Of all the visions of Iraq`s future, that might be the darkest.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Iran the Great Unifier? The Arab World Is Wary
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Power Play Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have regional ambitions, but the Mideast`s Sunni
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By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: February 5, 2006
TEHRAN

THE streets of Tehran are decorated with black banners and black flags. Children parade through the Martyr`s Cemetery with headbands that read "Hussein" and stores sell metal chains that some people will use to beat themselves, all part of a period of public mourning that commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad`s grandson, during a battle 1,300 years ago in Karbala, Iraq. That military defeat solidified a split between what became the two main branches of Islam, the Shiite and the Sunni.

Now Iran, the world`s only Shiite Islamic government, is reaching across the divide, hoping to unite Arab Muslims, the vast majority of whom are Sunni, and draw them beneath an overarching banner of Islam to fight common enemies in Israel and the West.

It is a difficult sell, though, after centuries of distrust between the two sects. Moreover, a wide gap separates the Arab and Persian cultures, and a general sense of distrust lingers among Arab leaders who saw post-revolutionary Iran try to instigate unrest within their own borders.

"As a gulf area, we don`t want to see Iran as the major power in the area," said Muhammad Abdullah al-Zulfa, a member of the Shura Council of Saudi Arabia. "And we don`t want to see Iran having this nuclear weapon where it will be a major threat to the stability of the gulf area and even to the Arab world altogether."

As Iran`s leadership pursues an aggressive, confrontational foreign policy, it is effectively trying to become a regional superpower seeking to fill the void left by the collapse of Arab nationalism and by the absence of any one dominant nation. While the United States and Europe hope that the United Nations Security Council will help tame Iran, officials here see such outside pressure as adding to their bona fides among Arab Muslims.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran is currently the axis of a tireless international identity, which relies on religious faith and challenges the global arrogances," said the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during a recent awards ceremony.

But many Arabs do not see Iran`s overture that way.

While Iran has been using its drive for nuclear power to realign the balance of power in the Middle East, and trying to reinsert itself into issues of regional security that took a back seat after the Islamic revolution of 1979, Sunni Muslim leaders fear that their neighbor is trying to hem them in with a sphere of influence stretching from Iraq to Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Their view was echoed in a comment by King Abdullah II of Jordan who said he was concerned Iran was trying to impose a "crescent" of influence on the region.

"If Iran developed a nuclear power, then it is a big disaster because it already supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, then what is left?" said Essam el-Erian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. "We would have the Shiite crescent that the Jordanian king warned against."

On the question of confronting the West and Israel, Iran`s oratory has, in the past, resonated with many average Arabs — and Iran has financed non-Shiite religious movements like Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that wants to restore Jerusalem to Islamic control. Indeed, when Iran`s Islamic Revolution succeeded in 1979, it lit a fire under other Muslim movements in the region, Sunni and Shiite.

Now, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bashing the United States and Europe, calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and claiming that the Holocaust is a myth, many people from taxi drivers in Morocco to street sweepers in Cairo are saying that they like the man and his vision.

But once they get past that emotional response of the public, Arab leaders may well be just as disturbed by Iran`s regional ambitions as any of their counterparts in the West. They also see a threat to their faith.

"If Iran acted like an Islamic power, just Islam without Shiism, then Arabs would accept it as a regional Islamic power," said Sheik Adel al-Mawada, a deputy speaker and member of the Sunni fundamentalist Salafi bloc in the parliament of Bahrain. "But if it came to us with the Shia agenda as a Shiite power, then it will not succeed and it will be powerful, but despised and hated." Bahrain has a restive Shiite population.

The concept of a unified Arab world is often called into question when leaders gather for Arab League meetings, which seem to highlight their differences. Stepping back, the suggestion that one Islamic Middle East could unite behind a set of social, political and economic goals becomes even more far-fetched — especially when the net includes the Iranians.

For example, Iran would like to join the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of gulf states that try to coordinate economic policy. But the council`s leadership is not eager to let Iran in, because Iran`s economic clout would dwarf that of most other members.

The Arab countries know what Iran covets "in the region in terms of oil and in terms of the sacred places," said Anwar Majid Eshki, head of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, an independent institute in Saudi Arabia.

At the moment, Iran is finding that its best chance for spreading its influence is in areas where groups actively oppose the United States. Its influence in Iraq has grown considerably with the emergence of religious Shiite movements that have done well in elections and are likely to dominate Iraq`s government.

In Lebanon, Iran still has close ties to Hezbollah, the militia group turned political party that takes credit for driving Israel out of southern Lebanon.

Iran also has a strong ally in Syria. Hamas and other groups sworn to fight Israel have offices in Damascus, while Iran remains a strong supporter of Hamas, which recently won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Parliament.

The West is wrestling with whether to continue pumping millions of dollars into the Palestinian governing authority if Hamas does not renounce its commitment to destroy Israel. Some diplomats and political analysts here say the Iranians hope the West will abandon the Palestinians, because Tehran would be happy to fill the void.

In reaching for such opportunities, there also is a chance for Iran to stumble, at least in terms of its relations with its Arab neighbors. Iraq is the prime example.

While a vicious insurgency takes aim at American forces there, a battle has also begun between Iraq`s Sunni minority and the Shiite majority. It has cost many Iraqi lives, and now Sunnis are watching carefully to see how Iran`s influence affects their own lives.

"Iraq is the test case for Iran — it either chooses to prove that it is an Islamic power, or a Shiite Persian power that deepens strife," said Sheik Mawada of Bahrain. "Though Iran has the upper hand in Iraq, the Sunni did not just accept and keep quiet."

Iran will have to face other challenges too, as it tries to extend its reach. If it goes too far and builds a bomb, some Iranians worry that it could set off a regional arms race and push states like Saudi Arabia to make their own bombs. Saudi Arabia has its own restive Shiite population — living primarily in the area of its oil fields — and does not want to see that minority empowered.

Finally, there is the matter of religion itself, and its influence on regional politics. While the initial split between Sunni and Shiite Islam occurred because of a disagreement over who would lead Muslims after the Prophet Muhammad`s death, both groups have developed distinct political and social ideologies. And neither side is looking to cede any ground.

Mona el-Naggar and Abeer Allam contributed reporting from Cairo for this article.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Nach der Aufdeckung der Abramoff-Affäre sind die lobbyisten in D.C. sehr stark ins Gerede gekommen.
Hier erst mal ein Flash:

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/02/05/weekinreview/20060205_LOBBY_GRAPHIC.html Das Bild anklicken! You Can Get There From Here Many Congressional aides have made the lucrative leap from the offices of senators and representatives to Washington lobbying firms. K Street is shorthand for the industry that is largely headquartered in a district along K, which passes three blocks north of the White House (another productive source of lobbyists).

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February 5, 2006
The Nation
Once Just an Aide, Now a King of K Street
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/weekinreview/05kornblut.ht…

By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

WASHINGTON

ONCE, the archetype of the Capitol Hill aide was a humble policy wonk fresh from graduate school who moved to Washington to pursue a gratifying but mostly anonymous life in public service.

In recent years, a more high-flying path for the Congressional aide has emerged: lobbyist-in-training.

The pay in Congressional offices still stinks. The hours are still grueling. But the job, once an end in itself, is increasingly seen as a ticket to be punched — and sometimes comes with the almost explicit promise of hitting pay dirt after a reasonably short stint. "It`s the new business school," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who formed his own public relations business after serving in the Clinton White House.

Nothing has pulled the curtain back on this trend more than the story surrounding the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. With his help, several young Hill staff members jumped into the private sector after just a few years in public service, tripling their salaries overnight. In return, they used their ties to those still "on the inside" to maneuver on behalf of his business clients.

The spotlight on the case has turned attention to the widespread phenomenon of the aide-turned-lobbyist. Last week, after House Republicans elected John Boehner of Ohio as majority leader, government watchdog groups were quick to note that at least 14 former aides had turned their connections to Mr. Boehner, chairman of the Education Committee, into K Street lobbying jobs.

Democrats pounced on this figure as evidence that he was as inextricably linked to lobbyists as was his predecessor, Tom DeLay, who was forced to resign as majority leader in part because of his connections to Mr. Abramoff. (A former press secretary to Mr. DeLay, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials, and is cooperating in the Abramoff case after earning tens of millions of dollars through his public affairs firm.)

When did the dutiful Hill staffer become a wheeler-dealer with such amazing clout? Members of Congress have long used the revolving door to cycle out into the private sector and make big salaries. But a legislative director? Or a chief of staff?

Paradoxically, new lobbying restrictions being considered in the wake of the Abramoff scandal may only tip the scales further, making a long career on the Hill too onerous for all but the most earnest public servants.

"The first question you get whenever you move on is, `Are you going to stay on the Hill or go off?` " said Kevin Madden, who left his job as press secretary to Representative DeLay last week and has not yet decided whether to move into the private sector or remain on Capitol Hill.

"I think everybody does recognize it`s a timing game," said Mr. Madden, who also worked for another Republican congressman, the Bush campaign and Justice Department before working for Mr. DeLay. "The question is, when is all the experience you`re getting on Capitol Hill enough?"

Some of the biggest names in lobbying in recent years have been former aides who emerged from Congress or the White House with extensive contacts and a deep understanding of how legislation moves.

Ed Gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee who started out as a top aide to Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, is perhaps the most visible. Mr. Gillespie`s firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, is routinely ranked in the top 10 among lobbying powerhouses; in 2004, the firm had $13.9 million in revenue, according to the magazine Influence, which covers the lobbying industry.

Superlobbyists might earn up to $1 million a year. Newer recruits earn at least six figures, sometimes starting as high as $200,000 a year, a great leap from the Hill, where salaries vary from office to office but where aides are lucky to break $50,000 a year. Only a small percentage of the more than 16,000 Capitol Hill staff members make more than $100,000.

"What`s happened is that the disparity in salaries — between what members and staff make versus what lobbyists make downtown — it`s gotten so enormous that you could be a medium-high-level Congressional staffer, and you go downtown and the first day be making more money than your boss, the senator, made," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "And I think that`s sort of distorted the pecking order."

Democrats say that this disparity worsened with the so-called K Street Project, a moniker for several different Republican lobbying efforts, but generally synonymous with Mr. DeLay`s insistence, after his party took control of the House in 1996, that K Street firms hire Republicans. Aides to the party`s legislators had more and more access to those high-paying jobs.

But another factor promoting the revolving door was, paradoxically, the effort to reform the campaign finance system. By making it harder for candidates to raise contributions, senators and representatives of both parties relied on others — including lobbying firms that double as fund-raisers — for this purpose. What could make a representative happier than having a former staff member jump to K Street and help raise money?

The revolving door of aides and lobbyists has changed Congress itself, according to John Engler, the former Republican governor of Michigan who is president and chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers.

There are now many aides, he said, who don`t have much of a background in anything. Yet, "the complexity of the issues they`re handling has only increased," said Mr. Engler. "You don`t walk in in January and become an expert in Medicaid by February. It takes years to understand the intricacies."

Some aides argue that Congressional jobs will lose more luster as lobbying rules continue to tighten, shrinking the number of perks, like travel junkets, that Hill aides can take. Several staff members said that as rules have tightened, the work has become less enjoyable.

Another contributing factor in recent decades is the pension plan: In 1984, Congress went from giving workers a traditional civil service pension, which paid out an inflation-adjusted benefit after retirement, to a savings plan that works more like a 401(k). Congress is also considering a requirement that former aides wait two years before they lobby their old offices.

"For some, the Hill experience is really a ticket to a more lucrative job, so I think there really could be an exodus to beat the new restrictions," Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said.

It was not always thus. Ms. Collins began her career more than three decades ago as a Hill staffer, working for former Representative William Cohen of Maine.

"I ended up staying nearly 12 years, and it never occurred to me, toward the end of those 12 years, to think of becoming a lobbyist," Senator Collins said. Now, she said, she has several longtime staff members as devoted to public service as she was.

But, she said: "What I do notice is for some of the younger staff, the Hill is a place to make a contribution, get some experience, do a bit of public service, but with the ultimate goal of working as a lobbyist. And some of them glamorize what a lobbyist job is going to be like."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 5, 2006
Pentagon Hones Its Strategy on Terrorism
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/politics/05strategy.html

By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has completed a new, classified counterterrorism strategy that for the first time orders the military to focus on nine areas identified as necessary for any terrorist network to operate, senior Pentagon officials say, and warns that ill-conceived military operations could add to terrorists` ranks.

Dated Feb. 1, signed by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and endorsed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the strategy document orders the Defense Department to undertake a broad campaign to find and attack or neutralize terrorist leaders, their havens, financial networks, methods of communication and ability to move around the globe. It also orders the military to focus on terrorist information-gathering systems, personnel and ideology.

The document orders the military to defeat terrorists, specifying that doing so requires "continuous military operations to develop the situation and generate the intelligence that allows us to attack global terrorist organizations."

The complete strategy will be distributed across the military in coming days, Pentagon officials said. An unclassified version, from which a series of top-secret appendices detailing intelligence activities and military operations had been removed, was provided to The New York Times by a senior Pentagon official. Military officials would speak about the document only on condition of anonymity.

A military officer said that among the classified parts were the specific terrorist networks and leadership to be targets, and projected timelines for those missions. Success will be achieved, the document states, when "violent extremist ideology and terrorist attacks" are "eliminated as a threat to the way of life of free and open societies," and with the establishment of "a global environment that is inhospitable to violent extremism, wherein countries have the capacity to govern their own territories" and "have in place laws, information sharing and other arrangements that allow them to defeat terrorists as they emerge."

The new document takes the place of a classified counterterrorism strategy written two years ago by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but never released for public review. It establishes a system for measuring the military`s counterterrorism efforts, with a review of progress on the nine target areas every six months. The reviews are intended to determine whether more terrorists are being captured, killed or persuaded to give up their violent struggle than are being created.

One senior Pentagon official involved in writing the strategy said the Defense Department had identified more than 30 new terrorist organizations affiliated with Al Qaeda that had sprung to life since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The document`s unusual admission of the negative impact military actions can have cited no examples, but said: "The way we conduct operations — choosing whether, when, where and how — can affect ideological support for terrorism. Knowledge of indigenous population`s cultural and religious sensitivities and understanding of how the enemy uses the U.S. military`s actions against us should inform the way the U.S. military operates."

That has been clear in the situations ranging from disgrace suffered by the United States after revelations of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib to instances when Arab media emphasized pictures of crosses or rosaries hung from artillery tubes by American soldiers. Such photographs were used to argue that the counterterrorism effort was a war on Islam. Pentagon officials involved in writing the strategy point out that the American military`s efforts to aid tsunami victims in southeast Asia and to assist victims of Pakistan`s earthquake did more to counter terrorist ideology than any attack mission.

The senior Pentagon official said a major challenge the military faced was finding ways to fight terrorist networks operating in nations with which the United States was not at war. That job, the document states, requires the American military to help other nations improve their own counterterrorism abilities.

The document also orders the military to halt proliferation of unconventional weapons and to recover or eliminate uncontrolled chemical, biological or nuclear materials, which includes efforts to detect and monitor the acquisition and development of unconventional weapons.

A central piece of the plan, the document says, is the concept of "supporting mainstream efforts to reject violent extremism." The effort requires encouraging those segments of the Islamic world that support inclusion, moderation and tolerance.

It also calls on all members of the military "to be aware of the culture, customs, language and philosophy of affected populations and the enemy, to more effectively counter extremism, and encourage democracy, freedom and economic prosperity abroad." Among other classified parts of the plan are descriptions of current intelligence operations, as well as specific tasks and tactics. The classified version also includes goals, or "termination objectives."

The senior Pentagon official said the guidance was issued "to integrate a number of conflicting opinions and views about what the military strategy should be." The job of writing the specifics of the military`s counterterrorism effort falls to the Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, Fla.

The more detailed "global campaign plan for the war on terror" is expected from Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, in coming weeks.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects
NSA`s Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 5, 2006; A01

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you`re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush`s circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program`s lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation`s second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers "have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off." Other officials, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the prevalence of false leads is especially pronounced when U.S. citizens or residents are surveilled. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that "terrorist . . . operatives inside our country," as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.

The Bush administration declined to address the washout rate or answer any other question for this article about the policies and operations of its warrantless eavesdropping.

Vice President Cheney has made the administration`s strongest claim about the program`s intelligence value, telling CNN in December that eavesdropping without warrants "has saved thousands of lives." Asked about that Thursday, Hayden told senators he "cannot personally estimate" such a figure but that the program supplied information "that would not otherwise have been available." FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the same hearing that the information helped identify "individuals who were providing material support to terrorists."

Supporters speaking unofficially said the program is designed to warn of unexpected threats, and they argued that success cannot be measured by the number of suspects it confirms. Even unwitting Americans, they said, can take part in communications -- arranging a car rental, for example, without knowing its purpose -- that supply "indications and warnings" of an attack. Contributors to the technology said it is a triumph for artificial intelligence if a fraction of 1 percent of the computer-flagged conversations guide human analysts to meaningful leads.

Those arguments point to a conflict between the program`s operational aims and the legal and political limits described by the president and his advisers. For purposes of threat detection, officials said, the analysis of a telephone call is indifferent to whether an American is on the line. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a former CIA official said, "there is a lot of discussion" among analysts "that we shouldn`t be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists." But under the Constitution, and in the Bush administration`s portrait of its warrantless eavesdropping, the distinction is fundamental.

Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be "right for one out of every two guys at least." Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, "knew they could never meet that standard -- that`s why they didn`t go through" the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI`s national security law unit until 2002, said in an e-mail interview that even using the lesser standard of a "reasonable basis" requires evidence "that would lead a prudent, appropriately experienced person" to believe the American is a terrorist agent. If a factor returned "a large number of false positives, I would have to conclude that the factor is not a sufficiently reliable indicator and thus would carry less (or no) weight."

Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that "we will not listen inside this country" without a warrant. Hayden said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to "drill down," as he put it, "to the degree that we need all communications."

Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush`s program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person`s overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.

Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing "uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate." Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.
New Imperatives

Recent interviews have described the program`s origins after Sept. 11 in what Hayden has called a three-way collision of "operational, technical and legal imperatives."

Intelligence agencies had an urgent mission to find hidden plotters before they could strike again.

About the same time, advances in technology -- involving acoustic engineering, statistical theory and efficient use of computing power to apply them -- offered new hope of plucking valuable messages from the vast flow of global voice and data traffic. And rapidly changing commercial trends, which had worked against the NSA in the 1990s as traffic shifted from satellites to fiber-optic cable, now presented the eavesdroppers with a gift. Market forces were steering as much as a third of global communications traffic on routes that passed through the United States.

The Bush administration had incentive and capabilities for a new kind of espionage, but 23 years of law and White House policy stood in the way.

FISA, passed in 1978, was ambiguous about some of the president`s plans, according to current and retired government national security lawyers. But other features of the eavesdropping program fell outside its boundaries.

One thing the NSA wanted was access to the growing fraction of global telecommunications that passed through junctions on U.S. territory. According to former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Intelligence Committee at the time, briefers told him in Cheney`s office in October 2002 that Bush had authorized the agency to tap into those junctions. That decision, Graham said in an interview first reported in The Washington Post on Dec. 18, allowed the NSA to intercept "conversations that . . . went through a transit facility inside the United States."

According to surveys by TeleGeography Inc., nearly all voice and data traffic to and from the United States now travels by fiber-optic cable. About one-third of that volume is in transit from one foreign country to another, traversing U.S. networks along its route. The traffic passes through cable landing stations, where undersea communications lines meet the East and West coasts; warehouse-size gateways where competing international carriers join their networks; and major Internet hubs known as metropolitan area ethernets.

Until Bush secretly changed the rules, the government could not tap into access points on U.S. soil without a warrant to collect the "contents" of any communication "to or from a person in the United States." But the FISA law was silent on calls and e-mails that began and ended abroad.

Even for U.S. communications, the law was less than clear about whether the NSA could harvest information about that communication that was not part of its "contents."

"We debated a lot of issues involving the `metadata,` " one government lawyer said. Valuable for analyzing calling patterns, the metadata for telephone calls identify their origin, destination, duration and time. E-mail headers carry much the same information, along with the numeric address of each network switch through which a message has passed.

Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.

"I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about," the intelligence official said.
`Subtly Softer Trigger`

Hayden has described a "subtly softer trigger" for eavesdropping, based on a powerful "line of logic," but no Bush administration official has acknowledged explicitly that automated filters play a role in selecting American targets. But Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, referred in a recent letter to "mechanical surveillance" that is taking place before U.S. citizens and residents are "subject to human surveillance."

Machine selection would be simple if the typical U.S. eavesdropping subject took part in direct calls to or from the "phone numbers of known al Qaeda" terrorists, the only criterion Bush has mentioned.

That is unusual. The NSA more commonly looks for less-obvious clues in the "terabytes of speech, text, and image data" that its global operations collect each day, according to an unclassified report by the National Science Foundation soliciting research on behalf of U.S. intelligence.

NSA Inspector General Joel F. Brenner said in 2004 that the agency`s intelligence officers have no choice but to rely on "electronic filtering, sorting and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication but that are imperfect."

One method in use, the NSF report said, is "link analysis." It takes an established starting point -- such as a terrorist just captured or killed -- and looks for associated people, places, things and events. Those links can be far more tenuous than they initially appear.

In an unclassified report for the Pentagon`s since-abandoned Total Information Awareness program, consultant Mary DeRosa showed how "degrees of separation" among the Sept. 11 conspirators concealed the significance of clues that linked them.

Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers, was on a government watch list for terrorists and thus a known suspect. Mohamed Atta, another hijacker, was linked to Almihdhar by one degree of separation because he used the same contact address when booking his flight. Wail M. Alshehri, another hijacker, was linked by two degrees of separation because he shared a telephone number with Atta. Satam M.A. Al Suqami, still another hijacker, shared a post office box with Alshehri and, therefore, had three degrees of separation from the original suspect.
`Look for Patterns`

Those links were not obvious before the identity of the hijackers became known. A major problem for analysts is that a given suspect may have hundreds of links to others with one degree of separation, including high school classmates and former neighbors in a high-rise building who never knew his name. Most people are linked to thousands or tens of thousands of people by two degrees of separation, and hundreds of thousands or millions by three degrees.

Published government reports say the NSA and other data miners use mathematical techniques to form hypotheses about which of the countless theoretical ties are likeliest to represent a real-world relationship.

A more fundamental problem, according to a high-ranking former official with firsthand knowledge, is that "the number of identifiable terrorist entities is decreasing." There are fewer starting points, he said, for link analysis.

"At that point, your only recourse is to look for patterns," the official said.

Pattern analysis, also described in the NSF and DeRosa reports, does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.

"These people don`t want to be on the phone too long," said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.

Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.

Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data "and says, `There must be a secret in there.` "

But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that "look at people`s behavior to predict terrorist intent," he said, "are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that`s necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."
`A Lot Better Than Chance`

Even with 38,000 employees, the NSA is incapable of translating, transcribing and analyzing more than a fraction of the conversations it intercepts. For years, including in public testimony by Hayden, the agency has acknowledged use of automated equipment to analyze the contents and guide analysts to the most important ones.

According to one knowledgeable source, the warrantless program also uses those methods. That is significant to the public debate because this kind of filtering intrudes into content, and machines "listen" to more Americans than humans do. NSA rules since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have said "acquisition" of content does not take place until a conversation is intercepted and processed "into an intelligible form intended for human inspection."

The agency`s filters are capable of comparing spoken language to a "dictionary" of key words, but Roger W. Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until late 2002, said terrorists and other surveillance subjects make frequent changes in their code words. He said, " `Wedding` was martyrdom day and the `bride` and `groom` were the martyrs." But al Qaeda has stopped using those codes.

An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA`s work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on "decomposing an audio signal" to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.

A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.

This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Frankly, we`ll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time," he said, "but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions."

Researcher Julie Tate and staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post 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/

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Nearly 2 Dozen Dead in Attacks
US, UK to Seek Long-Term Bases

[urlBush is asking for yet another commitment of $120 billion for Iraq]http://www.elitestv.com/pub/2006/Feb/EEN43e3c36675389.html[/url] (and a little of it is for Afghanistan). He does this twice a year, off the regular Federal budget, which has swollen to $2.7 trillion under Bush, hundreds of billions of it borrowed. I.e. our children and grandchildren will be tax slaves paying for Bush`s military-industrial establishment. Just to add a little insult to injury, he is cutting back medicare and other domestic programs.

The discovery of 14 dead Sunnis in Baghdad on Saturday prompted warnings of civil war from Sunni clerical authorities and politicians. A prominent member of the (neo-Baathist) National Dialogue Council, Khalaf al-Ilyan, said, ‘The government is pushing hard toward a civil war.’’ The Sunni Arabs believe the young men are being kidnapped by Shiite militias, and sometimes by militiamen who have infiltrated the Interior Ministry`s police commando units. A member of the Iraqi Islamic Party (an Iraqi offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) renewed the threat of a campaign of civil disobedience by Sunnis.

The Washington Post has more details on the 14 deaths, and also on a deadly jailbreak by guerrillas at Tikrit.

A Shiite mosque north of Baghdad took mortar fire, killing one and wounding 12.

Also in Iraq on Saturday, a guerrilla opened fire on a crowd of Shiites in Nasiriyah engaged in a religious procession, killing 3. I should signal that this incident is far more serious than it appears on the surface. For a Sunni guerrilla to kill Shiites during this particular religious ritual will inflame passions. A roadside bomb in Kirkuk wounded 5 Iraqi policemen. It can never be pointed out too often Kirkuk is a cauldron of ethnic tensions and a powderkeg in the midst of flying sparks. Incidentally, the Kurds are continuing to invite in foreign companies for oil exploration and development without bothering to check with the federal government in Baghdad.

[urlThe London Times reveals]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2025456,00.html[/url] that a tribal sheikh in Ramadi who agreed to meet and negotiate with the Americans in December was killed soon after, and that this fate has befallen 2 other tribal leaders. Some of the man`s tribe had become supporters of "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" and felt that he was too soft on the Americans.

Scotland on Sunday reports that there are secret British pla… near Baghdad with a few hundred troops. It says that the US plans a base outside Baghdad. Some fear that the US and the UK plan to use the bases as leverage for their longterm involvement in the Iraqi petroleum industry. The British base would have a fig leaf as a training facility, it is suggested.

Bases can be important pivots for foreign intervention. The RAF base at Habbaniyah was used that way by Britain in the early twentieth century, and it spearheaded the British recolonization of Iraq during World War II when it successfully resisted an attack by officers who had made a pro-Axis coup.

But I personally doubt that there will still be a US or UK base in Iraq in 10 years. I have probably said this before, but there are no such things as permanent military bases in other countries (the referenced report has "permanent" in its headline). One country can keep a base in another country only by mutual consent. None of the army bases I grew up on still exists, in France or Eritrea. Wheeler Air Force base in Libya is a dim memory. The US naval bases in the Philippines, which seemed eternal, are gone. If the Iraqi parliament asks the UK and the US to leave, they will have to. Japan and South Korea have not done so mainly because of fear of powerful neighbors. No similar dynamic now exists in the Gulf region; Iraqi politicians are not afraid of their neighbors and don`t think they need the UK and the US to protect them. Even if Grand Ayatollah Sistani just gave a fatwa against US/UK bases, that would probably be the end of them.

And, think about the composition of the new parliament. The Sadr bloc has at least 32, and the Sadrist Virtue Party has 15, for 47. These Shiite hardliners all want the US and UK out on a short timetable. Then you have 58 Sunni Arabs (National Dialogue Council, Iraqi Accord Front, and Conciliation), who want the US out, as well. That is 105, only 33 seats short of a simple parliamentary majority. There are surely 33 parliamentarians from among the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, or other small Shiite religious parties who want the US out. A parliamentary resolution calling for an early US/UK withdrawal could come within the year. It is also rumored that Sistani`s patience with the foreign presence is running out.

Al-Adalah reports that [Ar.] Mithal al-Alusi, who just has one seat in parliament, has explained his reasoning in announcing that he will vote with the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist coalition. He says that the UIA won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, and therefore deserves to form the government. He admits that some aspects of their program are objectionable, but says the objections do not nullify the coalition`s victory. Alusi is a sort of Sunni humanist and pluralist, so it is a little unexpected that he says he will vote with the Shiites. One suspects that he hopes thereby to exercise a moderating influence, which is not impossible given that the UIA will be hard pressed to maintain a cobbled-together majority. With Alusi and three seats from other small parties, the UIA has 132. They need 138 for a simple majority.

The NYT reports that petroleum smuggling and control of petr… are key to funding the guerrilla movement in Iraq. The report also alleges the involvement in high-level oil graft of Mishaan Juburi, a prominent Iraqi Sunni Arab parliamentarian whose small list, the Conciliation and Liberation Bloc, has 3 seats in parliament. Juburi had once been in the running to be speaker of Iraq`s new parliament, but was excluded on the grounds that the had once been close to Saddam and was suspected of being currently close to the Syrian Baath Party. He and his son have fled to Syria. The internal Iraqi petroleum wars are the background to the mortar attack last Thursday on processing facilities at Kirkuk, which has further hurt hopes for a turnaround in Iraqi production this year.

The NYT`s report draws the veil away from an important and little-reported corner of the guerrilla movement-- its connections to prominent Sunni Arabs behind the scenes and its access to revenues from smuggled petroleum. One reason the Jaafari government gave for tripling fuel prices was that it would reduce the revenues the guerrillas could raise from smuggling petroleum products abroad.

[urlThe Washington Post is more cautious about the allegations against Juburi]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/04/AR2006020401172.html[/url] than the NYT, pointing out that the arrest warrant for him was issued by Dawa Party apparatchik Jawad al-Maliki. Ellen Knickmeyer quotes a US military official saying he did not think Juburi was heavily involved with the tribal levies that had been raised to guard pipelines, and she keeps an open mind as to whether the charges against Juburi are trumped up.

The good news is that Yemen is trying 14 men accused of going off to Iraq to join jihadis and kill Americans. The bad news is that fourteen dangerous al-Qaeda operatives were among the 23 inmates who staged a jailbreak. Among those who fled are the perpetrators of the attack on the USS Cole. This one, for me, is personal. Al-Hayat worries that the escape will damage security relations between Yemen and the US.

[urlA UN study of post-conflict situations suggests]http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060204/cm_huffpost/015112[/url] that the Americans are not doing it right in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[urlIran is pursuing industrial cooperation with Iraq]http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news%5C2006-02-04%5C177.htm[/url], even to the point of planning factories there. I doubt Iraq could afford to join in a UN economic boycott of Iran if any such thing materializes.

[urlIraq is plagued by a cement shortage,]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/04/BUGG4H2KGJ1.DTL[/url] according to the SF Chronicle. The problems in production come in part from guerrilla sabotage of fuel and electricity.

[urlHenry T. Azzam discusses the investment climate in the Middle East]http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=124187[/url] in the light of the Hamas win in Palestine, the continued instability in Iraq, and the prospect of economic sanctions on Iran. He brings up the possibility of $90 a barrel petroleum. Ouch.

posted by Juan @ [url2/05/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/nearly-2-dozen-dead-in-attacks-us-uk.html[/url] 0 comments

Muslim Protests Against Anti-Muhammad Caricatures

Several readers have asked what I think about the protests among Muslims against the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper.

Of course people are upset when their sacred figures are attacked! But the hurt is magnified many times when the party doing the injuring is first-world, and the injured have a long history of being ruled, oppressed and marginalized. Moreover, most Muslims live in societies with strong traditions of state censorship, so they often assume that if something appears in the press, the government allowed it to do so and is therefore culpable.

Westerners cannot feel the pain of Muslims in this instance. First, Westerners mostly live in secular societies where religious sentiments have themselves been marginalized. Second, the Muslims honor Moses and Jesus, so there is no symmetry between Christian attacks on Muhammad and Muslim critiques of the West. No Muslim cartoonist would ever lampoon the Jewish and Christian holy figures in sacred history, since Muslims believe in them, too, even if they see them all as human prophets. Third, Westerners have the security of being the first world, with their culture coded as "universal," and widely respected and imitated. Cultures like that of the Muslims in the global South receive far less respect. Finally, societies in the global South are less policed and have less security than in Western Europe or North America, allowing greater space to violent vigilateism, which would just be stopped if it were tried in the industrialized democracies. (Even wearing a t-shirt with the wrong message can get you arrested over here.)

What Muslims are saying is that depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban is insupportable. It is often assumed that in the West we believe in free speech, so there is nothing that is insupportable.

But that simply is not true. Muslims mind caricatures of Muhammad because they view him as the exemplar of all that is good in human beings. Most Western taboos are instead negative ones, not disallowal of attacks on symbols of goodness but the questioning of symbols of evil.

Thus, it is insupportable to say that the Nazi ideology was right and to praise Hitler. In Germany if one took that sort of thing too far one would be breaking the law. Even in France, Bernard Lewis was fined for playing down the Armenian holocaust. It is insupportable to say that slavery was right, and if you proclaimed that in the wrong urban neighborhoods, you could count on a violent response.

So once you admit that there are things that can be said that are insupportable, then the Muslim feelings about the caricatures become one reaction in an entire set of such reactions.

But you don`t have to look far for other issues that would exercise Westerners just as much as attacks on Muhammad do Muslims. In secular societies, a keen concern with race often underlies ideas of social hierarchy. Thus, any act that might bring into question the superiority of so-called white people in their own territory can provoke demonstrations and even violence such as lynchings. consider the recent Australian race riots, which were in part about keeping the world ordered with whites on top.

Had the Danish newspaper published antisemitic cartoons that showed, e.g., Moses as an exploitative money lender and brought into question the Holocaust, there would also have been a firestorm of protest. For the secular world, the injuries and unspoken hierarchies of race are what cannot be attacked.

Muslims are not, as you will be told, the only community that is touchy about attacks on its holy figures or even just ordinary heros. Thousands of Muslims were killed in the early 1990s by enraged Hindus in India over the Ayodhya Mosque, which Hindus insisted was built on the site of a shrine to a Hindu holy figure. No one accuses Hindus in general of being unusually narrowminded and aggressive as a result. Or, the Likudniks in Israel protested the withdrawal from Gaza, and there were dark mutterings about what happened to Rabin recurring in the case of Sharon. The "sacred" principle at stake there is just not one most people in the outsider world would agree with the Likudniks about.

Human beings are all alike. Where they are distinctive, it comes out of a special set of historical circumstances. The Muslims are protesting this incident vigorously, and consider the caricatures insupportable. We would protest other things, and consider them insupportable.

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Huntingdon, der in den letzten Tagen wieder Hochkonjunktur hat, ist nichts anderes als ein Rassist.
Wer das nicht glaubt, soll sich sein neueres Buch `Who Are We : The Challenges to America`s National Identity` zu Gemüte führen oder wenigstens einige Kritiken.
Aber in der augenblicklichen aufgeheizten Stimmung wird alles genommen, was dem Zweck dient.

Robert Fisk: Don`t be fooled, this isn`t an issue of Islam versus secularism
`The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet but millions of Muslims do`
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article343111.ece

The Independent

Published: 04 February 2006

So now it`s cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven`s sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we`re witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.

So let`s start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam. For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost cariacatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea`s "long, withdrawing roar". That`s why we talk about "the West versus Islam" rather than "Christians versus Islam" - because there aren`t an awful lot of Christians left in Europe. There is no way we can get round this by setting up all the other world religions and asking why we are not allowed to make fun of Mohamed.

Besides, we can exercise our own hypocrisy over religious feelings. I happen to remember how, more than a decade ago, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus making love to a woman. In Paris, someone set fire to the cinema showing the movie, killing a young man. I also happen to remember a US university which invited me to give a lecture three years ago. I did. It was entitled "September 11, 2001: ask who did it but, for God`s sake, don`t ask why". When I arrived, I found that the university had deleted the phrase "for God`s sake" because "we didn`t want to offend certain sensibilities". Ah-ha, so we have "sensibilities" too.

In other words, while we claim that Muslims must be good secularists when it comes to free speech - or cheap cartoons - we can worry about adherents to our own precious religion just as much. I also enjoyed the pompous claims of European statesmen that they cannot control free speech or newspapers. This is also nonsense. Had that cartoon of the Prophet shown instead a chief rabbi with a bomb-shaped hat, we would have had "anti-Semitism" screamed into our ears - and rightly so - just as we often hear the Israelis complain about anti-Semitic cartoons in Egyptian newspapers.

Furthermore, in some European nations - France is one, Germany and Austria are among the others - it is forbidden by law to deny acts of genocide. In France, for example, it is illegal to say that the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Holocaust did not happen. So it is, in fact, impermissable to make certain statements in European nations. I`m still uncertain whether these laws attain their objectives; however much you may prescribe Holocaust denial, anti-Semites will always try to find a way round. We can hardly exercise our political restraints to prevent Holocaust deniers and then start screaming about secularism when we find that Muslims object to our provocative and insulting image of the Prophet.

For many Muslims, the "Islamic" reaction to this affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some element of reform introduced to their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded. But it was clearly intended to be provocative. It was so outrageous that it only caused reaction.

And this is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a "clash of civilisations". Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that`s what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of "Palestine". There`s a message here, isn`t there? That America`s policies - "regime change" in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.

For the Danish cartoon to be dumped on top of this fire is dangerous indeed.

In any event, it`s not about whether the Prophet should be pictured. The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet even though millions of Muslims do. The problem is that these cartoons portrayed Mohamed as a bin Laden-type image of violence. They portrayed Islam as a violent religion. It is not. Or do we want to make it so?

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#192:
Samuel P. Huntington heißt der Herr!

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Fight against terror is a latter day edition of Indian wars
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- John Brown
Sunday, February 5, 2006

Like all historical events, the global war on terror is unique. But I`d like to suggest another way of looking at the war: as a 21st-century continuation of the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received little attention. Here are a half-dozen reasons why I`m making this suggestion:

-- The essential paradigm of the war on terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mind set of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Va. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them -- savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson stated: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military might" has been compared to George W. Bush`s modus operandi, noted in his "Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act" (Dec. 8, 1830):

"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, ... and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"

Us versus them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy -- seen by war-on-terror supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent in the war on terror as it was in the Indian wars.

-- The war on terror is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put off "potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As Professor Jack Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:

"Bush has declared that the U.S. will attack first before an `enemy` has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called `the Pearl Harbor strategy` since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that (Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader) Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west."

-- U.S. mainstream thinking about war-on-terror enemies is that they are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics and social organization -- but there are Americans who believe that individuals in these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and thus be rendered harmless through training, education or democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts against remaining evil-doers.

-- The war on terror is fought abroad, but it`s also a war at home, as the creation after Sept. 11, 2001, of a Department of Homeland Security illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2, 1924, that Congress granted citizenship to all American Indians born in the United States.)

In the Indian wars, the United States fought without the help of foreign governments; such has essentially been the case with the war on terror, despite the support of a few countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.

-- As for the current states that are major battlefields of the war on terror, Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future, far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the United States proves willing to engage in long-term garrisoning -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (oil), and American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable -- will doubtless be lured there in search of opportunities. Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red Zone -- terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.

-- As the war on terror increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the 17th century to the end of the 19th -- the longest war in American history. There were numerous battles of varying intensity with no central point of confrontation -- like the war on terror, despite its emphasis on Iraq. And the war on terror is being fought, like the Indian wars over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation`s Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

John Brown is a former foreign service officer who resigned over the war in Iraq. He compiles the Public Diplomacy Press Review, which can be obtained free by e-mail at www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbrown_main. Contact us at [e-mail].

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Political Islam rises on Bush`s doctrine
Voters give power to fundamentalists
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 5, 2006

The plan, according to the Bush administration, was to build a firewall around Islamic terrorism in the Middle East by promoting democracy. So how did it happen that the most democratic mechanism of all -- free and fair elections -- brought to power Hamas, a radical Islamic party the United States considers a terrorist group?

From Egypt to Pakistan, the nascent, Washington-backed democratic process has bolstered political forces that are dismissive of, or hostile to, the United States. The recent gains at the ballot box of parties and organizations the United States abhors appear to repudiate the White House`s contention that promoting people power is the answer to extremism, forcing experts to examine why the democratic machinery brought extremists to power and whether political Islam is destined to be the future of democracy in the region.

Voters handed a plurality of seats in a permanent Iraqi parliament to Shiite clerics in December, and a fifth of the seats in the Egyptian parliament to the banned Muslim Brotherhood last fall. When Lebanon held its first free vote in decades last year, the Shiite Islamist party Hezbollah -- considered, like Hamas, a terrorist group by the West -- emerged as the main opposition force in parliament.

Doron Ben-Atar, a history professor at Fordham University in New York who specializes in international affairs, says the ascent of political Islam through democratic means epitomizes the mood in the region.

"It looks like, given a choice, the population of the Middle East leans toward Islamic fundamentalism," Ben-Atar said. "Their culture is a Muslim culture, and they look at Islamist parties as the parties that represent them more, culturally, than the secular pro-Western parties."

But other analysts say the trend points less to the Islam`s appeal than to the lack of civil society and the oppression of secular opposition groups.

"It`s really very simplistic to think that free and fair elections is all you need to have to have democracy, and it`s also simplistic to think that people vote for Islamist parties because they`re fanatic, they`re anti-American," said Mark Tessler, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Islam and democracy.

Part of the problem, Tessler said, is that many Middle Eastern nations don`t have in place all the mechanisms necessary to develop a democratic process, such as free media and independent courts.

The West -- and the United States in particular -- should focus more on helping local governments create an environment in which these institutions would thrive, said Larry Diamond, an expert on budding democracies at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

"We need to create more space for political discourse: freedom of speech, civil societies, time for opposition political parties to emerge freely without intimidation to compete," said Diamond, who served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from January to March 2004.

"You can`t have democracy without elections," said Lorne Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, which promotes civil society worldwide. "But what happens between elections is at least as important. You can`t just have elections every four, six years and in between not try to build up civil society."

These democratic institutions can take decades to develop, Craner said. "We Americans have the expectations of things happening fast," he said. "It`s gonna take a lot longer."

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Bush reiterated that the United States will continue to endorse political reform in the region -- even if the results may not always be something Washington prefers.

"Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change," Bush said. But he acknowledges that the political choices of the region`s peoples will not always correspond with choices preferable to Americans. "Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens."

The United States spends millions of American taxpayers` dollars annually to promote democracy across the Middle East through U.S. government-sponsored and private organizations. For example, the National Democratic Institute spent $4 million over the last 18 months to train Palestinian election officials and monitors in West Bank and Gaza, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $43 million to promote civil society in Iraq since 2003.

Most governments in countries where political Islam thrives maintain tight control over the media and curb the activities of human rights organizations and opposition groups, stunting the growth of secular movements that could threaten the ruling elites, said Leslie Campbell, regional director for Middle East and North Africa programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

The only place most governments do not control is the mosque, which opposition Islamist groups use to promote their political views during Friday prayers.

"In much of the Middle East for the last 10 years ... the only political choices have been the authoritarians who use and abuse public resources to perpetuate their rule, and ... the Islamist groups who have the mosque and use the mosque to perpetuate their political views and organize," said Campbell. "And in between you have nothing. Moderate groups have neither the resources nor institutions like the mosque to organize."

In the Palestinian territories, for example, while the ruling Fatah party misused Palestinian Authority resources to promote itself ahead of last week`s elections, Hamas "misused the mosque," he said.

"In Ramallah you could barely go by a mosque without seeing it plastered with Hamas election posters. There are pretty inherent disadvantages to being in the moderate middle," said Campbell, who was in that West Bank city on election day.

Radical Islam plays into the hand of authoritarian leaders who want to show that they are the only alternative to fundamentalist religious movements, said Craner. "You have leaders who want to present the world with a choice. They say to the Americans: `OK, you want democracy? It`s either me or the lunatic Islamist,` " he said.

"You see this in Pakistan," where the pro-U.S. government of President Pervez Musharraf is confronted by an alliance of religious parties that controls 20 percent of the seats in the parliament, Craner said, while in Egypt, "they go after the Muslim Brotherhood, but they`re going after the new more moderate political opponent even harder, so that they can present the United States with a choice: It`s either me or the Islamist lunatic." He was referring to Ayman Nour, who was jailed after losing the presidential race to long-time incumbent Hosni Mubarak on forgery charges that were decried by human rights groups as a blatant attempt to shut down the opposition.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalists also reflects the people`s grievances with the religiously moderate parties in power, said Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

"Secularism has lost a lot of its appeal in the Muslim world precisely because we have had secular regimes that are extremely authoritarian and oppressive ... like (Iraq`s former leader) Saddam Hussein and Mubarak in Egypt," Masmoudi said.

In the Palestinian territories, for example, Hamas has always had support in the cramped, dusty urban mazes of the impoverished Gaza Strip, where it set up a network of services that proved far more effective than the Palestinian Authority could manage. But the frustrations of the Palestinians with the secular Fatah party`s corrupt rule led to the militant group`s growing popularity in the West Bank, said Clayton Swisher, who served as an election monitor with the joint National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center delegation on Jan 25. He cited as an example Tulkarem -- a West Bank town whose farmlands were slashed by the separation barrier Israel is erecting -- where he observed the voting.

"Hamas gets out there, delivers zakat (charity), they provide the basic services to the extent that they can," said Swisher, the programs director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Under Hamas influence, he said, the Tulkarem population is becoming more conservative. "When you see women veiling from head to toe, you`ve got to sit up."

The ascent of religious groups hostile to the United States should come as no surprise, said Tessler of the University of Michigan.

"Because we are so unpopular in that part of the world, in a fair election there`s a reasonably good chance that a government will come to power that doesn`t like us very much, because it represents people who don`t like us very much, and we need to kind of factor that into our calculations," said Tessler.

This does not mean, however, that the future of democracy in the region is inextricably linked to radical Islam, said Masmoudi. He cited the example of Turkey, where the pro-Islamic government, hemmed in by the armed forces historically opposed to the sway of religious parties, runs as a secular state.

"Turkey ... shows that if moderate Islamic parties are allowed to participate in the political process, they will mature and they will move away from slogans such as `Islam is the answer` " -- the slogan the Muslim Brotherhood used in Egypt -- "and move toward practical solutions and pragmatic programs," he said.

As democracy in the region matures, so will the moderate opposition, presenting people in the region with more political options, predicted Tamara Wittis, an expert on the Middle East at the Brookings Institution`s Saban Center.

"It shouldn`t surprise anyone that in the first election in which alternatives are allowed to compete in a free atmosphere, Islamists come to power," said Wittis. "But it doesn`t mean that the future of democracy in the region is an Islamist future."

E-mail Anna Badkhen at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Exclusive: Can the President Order a Killing on U.S. Soil?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11180519/site/newsweek/

Newsweek

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department`s Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush`s surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.
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Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a Qaeda suspect was holed up with a dirty bomb and was about to attack? University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda empowered the president to kill 9/11 perpetrators, or people who assisted their plot, whether they were overseas or inside the United States. On the other hand, Sunstein says, the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.

A Justice Department official, who asked not to be ID`d because of the sensitive subject, said Bradbury`s remarks were made during an "academic discussion" of theoretical contingencies. In real life, the official said, the highest priority of those hunting a terrorist on U.S. soil would be to capture that person alive and interrogate him. At a public intel-committee hearing, Feinstein was told by intel czar John Negroponte and FBI chief Robert Mueller that they were unaware of any case in which a U.S. agency was authorized to kill a Qaeda-linked person on U.S. soil. Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokeswoman, told NEWSWEEK: "Mr. Bradbury`s meeting was an informal, off-the-record briefing about the legal analysis behind the president`s terrorist-surveillance program. He was not presenting the legal views of the Justice Department on hypothetical scenarios outside of the terrorist-surveillance program."

—Mark Hosenball
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11180519/site/newsweek/

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All the other species are dying and so will we. I’m whistling as I walk past the graveyard... whistling as beautifully as I can
[urlKurt Vonnegut: A requiem for the USA]http://www.sundayherald.com/53886[/url]


Sunday Herald - 05 February 2006

‘‘The blues was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like the USA. Foreigners love us for our jazz. They don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us for our arrogance.’’

Vonnegut`s Blues for America
http://www.sundayherald.com/53889


No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.

When I went to grade school in Indian apolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit – ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead – the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That’s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That’s correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

I’m kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about 10 to one.

I’M going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.”

But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s licence – look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: “What is life all about?’” I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

© Kurt Vonnegut

Extracted from A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush’s America


Copyright © 2006 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088

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February 6, 2006 Op-Chart 31 Days in Iraq By ADRIANA LINS de ALBUQUERQUE and ALICIA CHENG In January more than 800 people — soldiers, security officers and civilians — were killed as a result of the insurgency in Iraq. While the daily toll is noted in the newspapers and on TV, it is hard for many Americans to see these isolated reports in a broader context. The map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths for the first month of the year. Given the fog of war, the information may be incomplete. Nonetheless, it is our effort to visually depict the continuing human cost of the Iraq war. Adriana Lins de Albuquerque is a doctoral student in political science at Columbia University. Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer at mgmt. design in Brooklyn. * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Do You Know What They Know?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/opinion/06herbert.html

By BOB HERBERT

Has the National Security Agency referred your name to the F.B.I. as a result of information it picked up from its illegal domestic eavesdropping program?

You don`t know, do you? And the Bush administration, which has linked its mania for secrecy with its fetish for collecting data on Americans, is not saying.

The big problem related to this program, as far as the administration is concerned, is not its metastasizing threat to constitutional government, the rule of law, the privacy of innocent Americans, the venerable system of checks and balances, and the American way of life as we`ve known it.

No, the big problem for Bush & Co. — the thing that makes the president and his apologists apoplectic — is the mere fact that this domestic spying program has come to light. Investigations are under way to determine who might have leaked information about the supersecret program to The New York Times, which disclosed its existence, and others.

This is not a time for Congress or the media to bow before the intimidation tactics of a bullying administration. This is a time to heed the words of a federal judge named Damon Keith, who reminded us back in 2002 that "democracies die behind closed doors."

The attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is scheduled to testify about the N.S.A. program today at a public hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Here are some of the questions that need to be asked:

Who is being spied upon, and why?

How many Americans here in the United States — or others who were lawfully in the country — have had their phone conversations or e-mails intercepted without a warrant?

Who determines what calls or e-mails are to be monitored in the U.S. without warrants, and what are their guidelines?

How many of those who were spied upon were found to have been involved in terror-related activities? How many were referred to the F.B.I. or other agencies for further investigation?

Of those who were referred, how many were cleared of wrongdoing?

What kind of information is being collected about people who are spied upon without warrants but are not referred to law enforcement agencies? How is that data being used, and how is it stored?

Is the government collecting information about the political views of the people who are being spied upon? With whom is that information being shared?

What has been the nature and the extent of the objections from people inside the government to the warrantless spying?

Until recently, no one was above the law in the U.S., not even the president. Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment and run out of town for thumbing his nose at the Constitution. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his sex life.

The Bush administration, by exploiting the very real fear of terrorism, and with the connivance of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, has run roughshod over constitutional guarantees that had long been taken for granted. The prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment? Habeas corpus? The right to face one`s accuser? When it suits the Bush crowd, such protections are simply ignored.

The president would have you believe that the warrantless N.S.A. spy program is a very limited operation, narrowly focused on international communications involving "people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."

If that were true, there would be no reason not to get a warrant from the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The most logical reason for not getting a warrant is that the president`s intelligence acolytes, who behave as though they graduated from the Laurel and Hardy school of data mining, have not been able to demonstrate that the people being spied upon are connected to Al Qaeda or any other terror organization.

The National Security Agency sent so much useless information to the F.B.I. in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that agents began to joke that the tips would result in more "calls to Pizza Hut." The Times reported that thousands of tips a month came pouring in, virtually all of them leading to dead ends or innocent Americans.

The American public needs to know what`s really going on with this spy program. "Liberty," said John Adams, "cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Effectiveness Thing
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/opinion/06krugman.html

By PAUL KRUGMAN

We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the Medicare drug program, has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government.

Given the Bush administration`s evident inability to govern, Democratic electoral victories should be a sure thing. But they aren`t. Why?

Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion — which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail — that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn`t. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under the elder George Bush, FEMA was used as a dumping ground for political cronies, with predictable results. Descriptions of FEMA`s response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 sound just like the response to Katrina: for three days FEMA was nowhere to be found, and when it finally arrived its relief efforts were utterly incompetent.

Bill Clinton changed all that by choosing James Lee Witt, who knew a lot about disaster management, to run FEMA, and encouraging him to run the agency professionally. The result was a spectacular improvement in performance. FEMA, formerly considered one of the worst agencies in the federal government, won praise for its quick and effective responses to events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

But George W. Bush restored the practice of stuffing FEMA with cronies; the ludicrous Michael Brown is gone, but others remain. And the agency has reverted to impotence and incompetence.

As FEMA went, so went government as a whole.

On one side, FEMA`s rebirth under Mr. Clinton wasn`t unique. For example, a similar tale of miraculous turnaround can be told about the Veterans Health Administration. And I`d argue that there was a broad improvement in the government`s professionalism during the Clinton era.

On the other side, what happened to FEMA starting in 2001 is typical: politicization and cronyism have become standard operating procedure throughout the federal government, even when the need for professionalism is obvious. (Recall how unqualified political loyalists were sent to run Iraq during the crucial first year.) That`s one main reason President Bush has failed at everything he`s tried except cutting taxes — and winning elections.

Which brings me to the political puzzle. Our leaders` bungling hasn`t escaped public notice: more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure. Yet it`s not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains — because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn`t think of Democrats as being effective.

A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: they focus mainly on Washington, and many news organizations — especially the broadcast media — prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority in Congress, shut out of power; they`re an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues.

The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual.

Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they`d probably have a lot of public support. You`d never know it from the range of views represented on the Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.`s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal.

And the public`s views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position — or, rather, what the Democratic position would probably be if the Democrats could agree on one — even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Noch einmal das Thema Verhandlungen zwischen Sunniten und den USA im Irak:

February 05, 2006

Sunni leader killed for joining ceasefire talks
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2025456,00.html

Hala Jaber

A SUNNI tribal leader was murdered in the Iraqi city of Ramadi a day after taking part in talks with American and Iraqi officials aimed at curbing violence there.

Sheikh Nasser Kareem al-Fahdawi, head of the al-Bu Fahad tribe and a physics professor at Anbar University, was shot by insurgents opposed to the talks in late December.

His killing came 24 hours after he had joined tribal leaders representing insurgent groups in a meeting with Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, and Ibrahim Jaafari, the Shi’ite prime minister.

A source within the tribe, who is also a member of Al-Qaeda, indicated that he believed al-Fahdawi had been too sympathetic towards the United States during talks. “He was a traitor who deserved to be killed,” he said.

Two other tribal leaders have also been killed after revealing that they took part in talks and encouraging people to heed the American demands.

The Sunday Times revealed last June that US officials had held secret meetings with insurgents to try to draw them into the political process.

Sources present said the atmosphere at the December meeting, held at the American base in Ramadi, became heated.

Saab al-Rawi, a former senior Iraqi general who took part on the insurgents’ side, called for the withdrawal of US forces from Ramadi and their replacement by a brigade made up of former soldiers from the area, an end to checkpoints in the city and the release of all prisoners. He also urged the Iraqi government to allocate money for rebuilding large parts of the city which had been destroyed by bombing and fighting.

In reply General George Casey, the senior American commander in Iraq, joined Iraqi government representatives in calling for an end to the presence of all armed insurgents in the city and a handover of weapons. He also insisted that help for Al-Qaeda should be halted and all foreign Arab fighters expelled.

Al-Rawi demanded the removal of American forces. Casey slammed his fist on the table and accused him of merely wanting to drive US forces out of the city so that insurgents could take over. “If we leave before you meet our demands then Ramadi will become a second Falluja,” he is said to have told them. Fighting in Falluja has left 36,000 of the 50,000 homes destroyed.

Al-Rawi replied that his own forces had protected the city for six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “You have not protected this city and can never do so for you are foreigners here — unwanted and unwelcome,” he apparently said.

Another tribal leader accused Jaafari of blocking funds which had been earmarked for the reconstruction of Falluja. Jaafari shouted back that his government would not spend any money in Ramadi as long as attacks were being carried out against the police, army and American forces there.



Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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The gullibility that led us into the last war could yet bring us a new conflict

Our leaders were never trustworthy, yet many people were only too willing to believe them - and they may do so again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1702935,00.html

Gary Younge
Monday February 6, 2006

Guardian
The day after Colin Powell did his show-and-tell before the United Nations security council in an attempt to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in February 2003, the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote a column entitled "I`m persuaded". Describing how Vietnam "came close to making me [a pacifist]", McGrory conceded that "nobody I know was for the war". But something about Powell`s performance made her reconsider: "I don`t know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell`s `J`accuse` speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince."

Two and a half years later Powell referred to the episode as "a painful blot" on his record - a pack of lies and half truths that has led to an ever-increasing mound of corpses.

The power of both illusion and delusion should never be underestimated. The compulsion to believe in something we need and want to be true, rather than see reality for what it is, can at times be astounding.

Remember those eyewitness accounts of the Brazilian student Jean Charles de Menezes before he was shot dead on the underground? Not all of them were made up by the police, although they did nothing to deny them. Mark Whitby, a plumber from Brixton, thought he saw a Pakistani terrorist being chased and gunned down by plain-clothes policemen. Less than a month later Mr Whitby told the Daily Telegraph "he now believes that what he actually saw was the surveillance officer being thrown out of the way" as Mr Menezes was being killed.

Anthony Larkin, who was on the train, said he saw "this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out". The Pakistani in the puffa jacket who vaulted the barriers, it transpired, was a Brazilian in a light denim jacket who picked up a free paper and used his Oyster card.

I am not talking here about lying. The potency of downright fabrication is self-evident. What is truly insidious is the propensity of people to arrange an array of possibles, probables, maybes and might-bes, and construct from them a reality that is both definite and wrong.

The power of suggestion, assumption and presumption is everything. The day before Menezes was shot, London saw an attempt to launch a second terrorist attack in two weeks. What Whitby and Larkin saw had been refracted through a prism of fear and stereotypes, and emerged completely distorted. The price was right; the market was ripe; people bought into it.

The war in Iraq has revealed just how truly bullish and persistent this market in bad ideas based on flawed preconceptions can be. Bad ideas helped take us into the war; and unless we examine what they were and why some managed to believe them, they will prevent us from getting out.

In such a market there will always be sellers aplenty. Someone, somewhere, will forever be peddling war, bigotry, conspiracy, profiling, persecution and plunder. It is only when the buyers come forward in large numbers that we really have to worry. For at critical moments people do not just consume these bad ideas; they invest heavily in them too. So when reality refuses to match up to the idea, they do not change their ideas; they change reality.

There were of course lies; huge whoppers served up on both sides of the Atlantic. On February 23 2003 Tony Blair told the Commons that the government was giving Saddam "one further final chance to disarm voluntarily" through the United Nations. Three weeks earlier President George Bush told him the war was going ahead regardless of what the UN decided. Blair replied that he was "solidly" behind him.

This is of course disgraceful, not least because those who lied have never accepted responsibility for their actions. But it was not a surprise. The case was always flimsy and those who made it were never trustworthy. What is shocking is the number of people who not only bought it but wore it and are still trying to sell it on.

Last October the former Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said: "I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full measure of the Bush administration`s duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they have abused so badly. I know I would not."

If Kerry did not have the full measure of Bush`s duplicitous and incompetent nature by that stage then he is a poor judge of character. The overwhelming majority of people in the rest of the world - who had far less access to information than he did - managed to see the war for what it was. But then they weren`t going to run for president.

In November the former Powell aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson told the Today programme: "You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder ... was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I`m beginning to have my concerns." Go figure. Shouldn`t the speculation begin before the bombs drop rather than after?

Everybody has the right to change their mind and make mistakes. The growing number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who believe it was wrong to go to war is heartening. But since the war has already been going for almost three years these regrets are only of any use, beyond personal expiation, if they help to correct the consequences of the original sin.

These particular turnarounds fail on two fronts. First, they expose the anti-war case to the charge of opportunism. People such as Kerry backed the war not on principle but because it was expedient to do so. They oppose it today for the same reason.

Second, there is little point in claiming you were tricked unless you address what made you so gullible in the first place. The basic idea that the US has a historic duty to bring progress, democracy and enlightenment at the barrel of a gun seems about as firmly ingrained in the American mindset as its record of doing the opposite in Central and South America and south-east Asia is in American history. Nothing that has happened in Iraq seems to have shifted that perception in the US. A significant minority were against the war from the start. For the rest, the trouble with the war is not that they invaded a sovereign country on a false pretext and killed hundreds of thousands. It`s that they`re not winning.

"We can`t leave Iraq. We simply can`t," says Colonel Wilkerson. "We`re there, we`ve done it, and we cannot leave." Kerry`s position is similar. A Pew research survey in December showed that 48% of Americans believe that invading Iraq was wrong. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week revealed that 57% of Americans support military intervention if Iran builds itself a nuclear capability.

With each exposé of torture, subjugation, blunder and plunder you keep hearing that Americans have lost their innocence. Somehow they always find it again just in time to buy into the next bad idea.

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Latest Update: #35174 04.02.06 19:11:20 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 03, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2456 , US: 2252 , Feb.06: 11

Iraker 02/05/06 Total: 92
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=56990

Tomgram: Bushwhacked in Bushworld
"Beam Me Up, Scottie!"
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=56990

By Tom Engelhardt

Just in case you hadn`t noticed, we`re in a Bushworld too absurd for words. But that hasn`t stopped this administration from yakking its collective head off.

Over the last week: The President came out for an ethanol-powered globe -- that`s corn on the cob to you, buddy -- while his Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld announced that our poor planet had somehow gotten more terroristically dangerous since George took the helm. (No fault of his, natch.) Last Tuesday night, of course, the Great Helmsman stood on the congressional deck of state -- perhaps confusing it with the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (Didn`t anyone hear me? Mission accomplished!) -- and declared that we were on nothing less than the "road to victory" in Iraq. (Unfortunately, the message seems not to have gotten through to Iraqis lining that road with IEDs, possibly due to power outages in that country.) Intelligence "Tsar" John Negroponte visited Congress to deliver the news that Earth was virtually swarming with terrorist groups which already had their hands on WMD. (Sleep well, Virginia.) At the same time, multitasking like mad, the administration continued its noble war on T-shirts; the Pentagon put political cartoonists on notice that the military high command wasn`t going to take a pen jab lying down (no sir!); and KBR, one of two subsidiaries of the Halliburton Corporation (the other being the U.S. government), received an almost $400 million dollar contract to build emergency "detention facilities" in the homeland (after much practice at Guantanamo). Oh yes, and in their spare time, the President and his closest advisors happily continued to exercise another of those handy prerogatives of the Commander-in-Chief in wartime by essentially amending the Constitution to wipe out the odd check or balance.

Am I going too fast for you? Then, take a breath, buckle on your seatbelt, put on your helmet, check your oxygen gauge, and then let me beam these stories up to you one at a time (along with a few other gems stored in the Mother Ship of my brain).

George`s Half-Step Program to Energy Independence So this was the year that the President of Oil discovered we were "addicted" to the stuff and, worse yet, that it came from "unstable parts of the world" -- hold on a sec, while I fill my gas tank -- but he also came up with a solution! Thanks to his Advanced Energy Initiative, ethanol, essentially a corn product, would power us into the future along with hybrid car engines and the odd nuclear power plant. Twenty years from now, he assured us in his State of the Union Address, we more or less won`t know the Middle East exists.

Though our brush-cutting President did mention wood chips and switch grass, ethanol is essentially a corn product; and corn is our petroleum farm crop of choice, since growing it in quantity involves massive infusions of oil-based chemical fertilizer. So maybe we should consider George`s ethanol-fix like one of those nicotine patches for cigarette smokers. Throw in some leftover radioactive waste from those nuclear plants his administration would love to hug into existence and it all made perfect sense to me... until the next day when an administration that had never heard of no-backsies took it all back. The President`s suggestion about making 75% of Middle Eastern oil imports go away "was purely an example," insisted an embarrassed Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. And anyway, it turned out that none of it really mattered since, as Paul Krugman pointed out: "[T]he National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. ‘A veteran researcher,` reports The New York Times, ‘said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol.`" Of course, the President and his men generated enough wind last week to create a little extra power -- if only we`d put some money into alternative fuels.

By the way, elsewhere in the world -- and yes, in case you didn`t notice, there is an elsewhere -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia set off on his first trip outside the Middle East, perfectly timed to the President`s desire to ditch the whole region. (And given what`s happened to him there, you can`t blame the guy, can you?) The Saudi king, in search of reliable allies, boarded his plane and promptly headed for... China. At his blog, The Dreyfuss Report, Robert Dreyfuss sums up administration oil planning in the Middle East thusly:

"America`s military effort to secure hegemony over the world`s oil deposits in the Gulf looks like this: Iraq, a mess, governed by Iran-linked Shiites; Iran, angry once again at the Great Satan and looking toward Russia and China; and Saudi Arabia, the big enchilada, starting to learn to speak Chinese. Some hegemony."

Encouraging Energy Independence in Iraq: In his State of the Union Address, the President once again invoked victory in discussing the war in Iraq -- "Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning. (Applause.) The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home." At a taxpayer cost of at least $4.5 billion a month, the price of "victory" in Iraq is now (in case you`re curious) an estimated $100,000 a minute. Strangely, though, the President never mentioned how Iraq, with staggering oil reserves, might actually aid his plan for American energy independence from the Middle East. Who remembers those three to five million barrels of oil that Paul Wolfowitz and other administration neocons once knew the Iraqis would be pumping in next to no time at all, giving them the wherewithal to pay for us for occupying them, setting up permanent bases on their territory, and (unlike ET) never going home. After all, as Wolfowitz put it way back in May 2003, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil." ("The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We`re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.")

Well, in the years since our "cakewalk" invasion, oil production in Iraq has taken a slightly different turn. At about 2.5 million barrels a day in the final days of Saddam`s rule, output nosedived by another 8% last year, reaching 1.5 million barrels a day, and is probably significantly below that now. In fact, it`s been dropping faster than the President`s polling numbers -- and last week, just as George was touting our coming victory in Iraq, rebels there mortared a major petroleum facility in Kirkuk, setting it ablaze, and hitting an important pipeline to Turkey. An Iraqi executive with the North Oil Co. called it the "most severe attack we have ever faced on an oil installation." So far, thanks to American "reconstruction" and insurgent sabotage, Baghdad has been liberated from all but a few hours a day of electricity. Soon, the whole country (and so the world) may be able to declare its independence from any significant amount of exportable Iraqi oil -- making it a model for energy independence on the planet.

Oh, and while we`re talking about Iraq, we Americans are a proud, traditionalist nation and one of our more regular traditions of recent years has been firing missiles into crowded streets, or small villages across those lands long labeled an "arc of instability," knocking off innocent civilians, including women and children. After each such incident, our military announces an investigation that fades into space and out of media memory without any spokesperson ever having to utter the words, "We`re sorry." (That`s a matter of principle!)

On January 13, a Predator drone shot a Hellfire missile into a house in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border in a botched assassination attempt against al-Qaeda number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Of course, the requisite group of women and children was murdered in the process. Then, last Thursday, a U.S. helicopter, reportedly fired on by gunmen from a rooftop in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in Baghdad, sent one or more missiles into a crowded street, killing a 20 year old woman, Ikhlas Abdul-Hussein, and wounding a two-year old child. Admittedly, we haven`t hit a wedding party -- a sub-specialty of our Air Force -- since 2004, but last week American soldiers did their best to make up for that oversight by extending another small tradition, shooting up the cars of diplomats in and around Baghdad. A trigger-happy gunner on an American convoy in that city`s Green Zone riddled a vehicle ("with a Maple Leaf flag plastered to the windshield") occupied by a group of Canadian diplomats, including the Acting Ambassador. Miraculously, no one was hit. The Canadians, a sober lot, claimed they were driving slowly and at a careful distance from the convoy. The Americans insisted their car was overtaking the convoy at a rapid speed and that they had ignored warning hand-signals. The obligatory meaningless investigation is now underway, while "the Bush administration voiced regret but, so far, no official apology." (Canada, mind you, has just elected a conservative Prime Minister, friendly to Washington, but never saying sorry is a near-Constitutional matter and allies, after all, are only allies.)

Meanwhile, from the news desk of the future -- but released this week -- the Pentagon has plans to create a new "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron" under the ever-expanding U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Undoubtedly, in the never-ending search for victims, it will be tasked "to go boldly where no drone has gone before."

Money Makes the World Go Boom! Here`s a genuine surprise: In his new budget, the President, who last week declared himself boldly determined, as the Washington Post put it, to "constrain the massive entitlement programs for the elderly and the poor," and "carve money from Medicaid," is proposing a 5% rise in funds for the hapless Department of Homeland Confusion (er... Security), and another 5% rise for the Pentagon. The Pentagon`s budget is slated to come in at a mere $439.3 billion, but here`s the curious thing -- it includes no funds for the Afghan or Iraqi wars, minimally estimated at $120 billion next year. Makes sense, no? Who would put the costs of actual warfare in the budget of what was once the War Department before we spread our military across the globe and renamed it the Department of Defense?

The Pentagon`s just released Quadrennial Defense Review puts great weight on fighting the war on terror for eons to come and, in preparation, a series of weapons systems that have nothing to do with that "war" are getting infusions of extra funds. Following the sort of sacrificial behavior for which the Pentagon is well known, not a single major weapons system has even been modestly cut back. In other words, weapons-entitlement programs are alive and well in America. (As the insider Nelson Report pointed out recently: Since 2001, in current dollars, the Pentagon budget has experienced "a 41% increase, exclusive of the supplemental allocations for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the [Global War on Terror].")

To celebrate their prospective good fortune, the six Chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointedly launched... a letter-writing assault on a cartoonist. No kidding. As Paul Woodward of the War in Context website put it, this "24-star letter" was aimed at protesting a Tom Toles cartoon ("beyond tasteless") in the Washington Post that used an armless, legless soldier in a hospital bed to mock Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for "breaking" the Army. You can only hope that the Chiefs are better at fighting a war than (mis)interpreting a cartoon.

A small sartorial suggestion to head Chief, Gen. Peter Pace: I wouldn`t put that "beyond tasteless" slogan on a T-shirt and wear it to an official do in Washington, given the endless T-shirt wars the Bush administration has been fighting for years at its campaign events nationwide. These burst out again in the galleries of the House of Representatives the night of the State of the Union. Police roughly arrested, handcuffed, and briefly charged Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq and a guest of Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, for wearing a T-shirt with the treasonous slogan, "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" They also ejected Beverly Young, wife of Republican Representative Bill Young of Florida, Chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, for wearing a T-shirt "bearing words of support for U.S. Troops." (Then again, if I remember my song lyrics correctly, isn`t freedom just another word for nothing left to wear?)

While the Joint Chiefs face down a cartoonist and the administration fights its war on T-shirt terror, let me return to the subject of mega-money and entitlements for a moment. Last week, the President reassured Exxon Mobil Corporation, which had just announced record profits of $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter of 2005, that Americans should not expect any price breaks from a genuinely entitled winner while waiting for their future ethanol fix. "I think that basically the price is determined by the marketplace," he told the Associated Press, "and that`s the way it should be."

Hi-ho, Hi-ho, It`s Off to the Longest War We Go: Language, what would the Bush administration do without it? One of John Wayne`s famous lines was, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." And the Bush administration is actively of that linguistic school. Of course, when reality bites you in the you-know-what and you can`t do a heck of a lot about it, what are you going to do but re-label your product? In this way, the "war on terror," aka, "the Global War on Terror," aka "GWOT," aka "World War IV," aka "the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism," has just become, by administration fiat, "the Longest War" (a phrase that`s been hanging around unloved in Neocon Land for a long time, though it`s now being attributed to former Centcom Commander John Abizaid. It`s undoubtedly been chosen because the President`s lovely global "war" has gone on remarkably... well, long.

The phrase was on the President`s lips last Tuesday night. It led off the Pentagon`s Quadrennial Defense Review, released last week. It was mentioned by various administration officials and promoted heavily by Donald Rumsfeld, who was also plugging a world in which, as Lolita Baldor of AP reported, "despite progress in fighting terrorism, the threat today may be greater than ever before because the available weapons are far more dangerous." In a speech at the National Press Club, subtly entitled, "The Long War," the Don touched all the bases. He compared Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, and claimed we were in a "generational conflict" like the Cold War of which Iraq and Afghanistan were merely the "early battles." Meanwhile, across town, our intelligence tsar was assuring Congress that U.S. "intelligence reporting" -- why am I already losing confidence in this statement? -- "indicates that nearly 40 terrorist organizations, insurgencies, or cults have used, possessed, or expressed an interest in chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents or weapons." (Somewhere in all this, I think I can hear Karl Rove conducting a midterm election campaign based on the only card this administration still has in its hand: the fear of terrorism.)

Still, I suspect "the Long War" will soon join the "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" in the dust bin of history. In fact, on naming its terror war, the Bush administration could probably use a little help. How about the Scare-You-to-Death-Struggle-for-Global-Ethanol-Independence-and-Republican-Electoral-Victories War (or SYTDSFGEIAREVW)? If that doesn`t work for you, the Nation magazine`s Katrina van den Heuvel is ready to lend a hand. Having already published her hilarious The Dictionary of Republicanisms, she`s now launching a contest to capture the essence of GWOT-ability (a little like guacamole) in a single, punchy name.

Club Homeland Detention: Halliburton, the first corporation into Iraq, contractually speaking, and the biggest financial winner in the "reconstruction" sweepstakes for that deconstructed country, fortuitously also found itself perched right atop the list of post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction contractors. Now, through its subsidiary KBR, known for building military bases to last, as well as Guantanamo`s infamous "cages," Halliburton gets a shot at the real American thing -- actual emergency detention centers for "immigrants" -- or, hey, in a crisis, for whomever. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded it a contract last month -- though the story only oozed out this week -- worth up to $385 million (not including the near-obligatory overcharges) for, according to the New York Times, "an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space." It`s those "new programs" that give special pause.

They Fought the Law and the Law Lost: Finally, in the week that just was, our President and his top officials continued their vigorous efforts to rewrite the Constitution. They took up the National Security Agency warrantless spying, evidently had an unannounced constitutional convention in the White House, called on the peerless minds of various White House and justice department lawyers, asked the Attorney General (former White House Counsel, former General Counsel, and friend) Alberto Gonzales for his honest opinion, and then had the good sense to double check with lawyers at the NSA to make sure everything that agency had been doing was genuinely and legally below board and utterly constitutional. Finally, they turned the whole ball of wax over to Karl Rove, who recognized an election issue when he saw one, and next thing you knew, there was the President, at the State of the Union, insisting, as in some Avon ad, that al-Qaeda was calling and it was darn tootin` constitutional as all get out to listen in on what`s conveniently been relabeled "a terrorist surveillance program" (no genuine citizens allowed to join!).

I suppose, based on that unbelievably dreary textbook you had to read back in junior high civics class, you thought amending the Constitution took a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and then passage by three-quarters of the states. Silly you! It only takes two-thirds of the President`s brain, three-quarters of the Vice President`s brain, and 100% of his Chief of Staff David Addington`s brain; toss in the odd administration lawyer or two to check the fine print, and, as they say in one province of Canada (don`t shoot!), Voilà!

Now, unbuckle those straps, take that helmet off, and relax. It`s a new week. Enjoy yourself!

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. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

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[urlSA Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/04/AR2006020401373.html[/url]
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Das Problem mit der Demokratie
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1726

von Robert Fisk
The Independent / ZNet 01.02.2006
Samstag, 28. Januar 2006: Horror über Horror, die Palästinenser haben die falsche Partei an die Macht gewählt!

Oh nein! Bitte nicht noch mehr Demokratie! Haben wir den Algeriern nicht schon 1990 die Demokratie gebracht? Und haben uns die Algerier nicht mit einem netten Geschenk belohnt, mit einer Islamistenregierung? Freundlicherweise haben sie daraufhin die zweite Wahlrunde gecancelt. Gott sei dank!

Stimmt, die Afghanen haben tatsächlich gewählt. Leider zählen zu den gewählten Repräsentanten dieser Runde auch einige Warlords und Killer. Die Iraker wählten 2005 in Bagdad die Dawa-Partei an die Macht. Diese Partei war in den 80gern in Beirut verantwortlich für die meisten Entführungen von Westlern, sie war verantwortlich für das Autobombenattentat auf den (mittlerweile verstorbenen) Emir von Kuwait sowie für Anschläge auf die französische und amerikanische Botschaft in Kuwait - bloß kein Wort zu Washington.

Und nun - Horror über Horror - haben die Palästinenser also die falsche Partei an die Macht gewählt. Dabei hatte man von den Palästinensern erwartet, dass sie ihre Stimme der freundlichen, korrupten, prowestlichen und absolut proamerikanischen Fatah geben, die versprochen hatte, die Palästinenser zu "kontrollieren" - jedenfalls sollten sie ihre Stimme nicht der Hamas geben, die versprach, die Palästinenser zu repräsentieren. Bingo - wieder die Falschen gewählt.

Resultat: 76 von 132 Sitzen gingen an Hamas. Das dürfte es so ziemlich gewesen sein. Gottverdammte Demokratie! Was soll man mit Leuten machen, die einfach nicht das wählen, was sie sollen?

In den 30ger Jahren ließen die Briten Ägypter einsperren, die sich gegen die Regierung von König Farouk wandten. So wurde das Fundament für die folgenden antidemokratischen Herrschaftsstrukturen in Ägypten gelegt. Die Franzosen ließen die libanesische Regierung einsperren, die das Gleiche verlangte. Dann verließen die Franzosen den Libanon. Aber haben wir von arabischen Regierungen nicht immer erwartet, dass sie weiter tun, wie befohlen? Ja.

Heute erwarten wir von den Syrern, dass sie sich benehmen. Die Iraner sollen sich unseren atomaren Vorstellungen beugen (auch wenn sie gar nichts Illegales getan haben). Die Koreaner sollen ihre (atomaren) Waffen abgeben (sie haben welche, also kann man sie nicht angreifen).

Die Macht der Verantwortung möge schwer lasten auf der Hamas. Die Verantwortung der Menschen ebenso. Wir Briten haben uns nie auf Gespräche mit der IRA eingelassen - oder der EOKA (Zypern) oder der Mau-Mau (Kenia). Aber an irgendeinem Punkt war es dann so weit, dass Gerry Adams von der IRA, Erzbischof Makarios (Zypern) und Jomo Kenyatta (Kenia) mit unserer Queen Tee tranken. Natürlich haben die Amerikaner nie mit ihren vietnamesischen Feinden gesprochen - aber irgendwann eben doch, in Paris.

Nein, Al Kaida würde das nie tun - aber die irakischen Führer des Aufstands in Mesopotamien schon. 1920 ließen sich solche Führer auf Gespräche mit den Briten ein, 2006 lassen sie sich auf Gespräche mit den Amerikanern ein.

1983 führte Hamas Gespräche mit Israel. Man sprach ganz direkt mit den Israelis - über religiösen Unterricht, über die Ausbreitung der Moscheen. Die israelische Armee brüstete sich auf der Titelseite der Jerusalem Post damit. Damals sah es so aus, als würde sich die PLO nicht auf die Oslo-Resolutionen einlassen. Man schien nichts Falsches darin zu sehen, die Gespräche mit Hamas fortzusetzen. Warum soll es heute also unmöglich sein, mit Hamas zu reden?

Kurz nachdem die Führung der Hamas nach Südlibanon rausgeworfen wurde, hörte ein führendes Mitglied der Organisation zufällig mit, wie ich sagte, ich sei auf dem Weg nach Israel.

"Rufen Sie besser Schimon Peres an", riet er mir, "hier seine Privatnummer". Die Nummer stimmte tatsächlich. Für mich der Beweis, dass hochrangige israelische Politiker in Gesprächskontakt mit hochrangigen Mitgliedern selbst der extremistischsten Bewegungen der Palästinenser standen.

Die Israelis kennen die Hamas-Führung gut - und umgekehrt. Wir Journalisten können nichts Gegenteiliges vermelden. Aus unseren Feinden werden unweigerlich unsere größten Freunde - wie aus Freunden traurigerweise oft Feinde.

Was für eine furchtbare Gleichung. Dazu muss man sich aber die Geschichte der eigenen Väter ansehen. Mein Vater kämpfte als Soldat im Ersten Weltkrieg. Er hinterließ mir eine Landkarte, auf der die Herrschaftsgebiete der Briten und der Franzosen im Nahen/Mittleren Osten eingetragen waren. Seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg haben die Amerikaner versucht, diese Herrschaft (laut Landkarte) anzutreten. Vergeblich, sie sind gescheitert. Seither lastet auf uns der Fluch, die Herrschaft wiederaufzunehmen.

Schrecklich, mit jenen reden zu müssen, die unsere Söhne getötet haben. Unbeschreiblich das Gefühl, mit jenen Kontakt zu pflegen, an deren Händen das Blut unserer Brüder klebt. So werden die Amerikaner, die (im Amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg) an die Unabhängigkeit glaubten, über die Engländer gedacht haben, die auf sie feuerten.

Um Al Kaida werden sich die Iraker selber kümmern müssen. Diese Last bleibt ihnen - nicht uns. Aber im Laufe der Geschichte haben wir am Schluss immer mit unseren Feinden geredet. Mit dem Kaiser von Japan, zum Beispiel. Schließlich mussten wir auch die Kapitulation des Deutschen Reichs aus den Händen von Hitlers Nachfolger akzeptieren. Heute treiben wir mit den Japanern, den Italienern und Deutschen ganz unbefangen Handel.

Der Nahe/Mittlere Osten war nie der Nachfolger des Dritten Reiches (Nazi-Deutschland) oder des faschistischen Italien - welchen Blödsinn Bush und Blair auch immer von sich geben. Wie lange wird es wohl noch dauern, bis wir die Last des titanischsten aller Kriege (Zweiter Weltkrieg) abwerfen können und unsere Zukunft nicht in der Vergangenheit suchen sondern in der Wirklichkeit?

In einer Zeit, in der Regierungen nicht mehr aus Frauen und Männern bestehen, die den Krieg noch selbst miterlebt haben, muss man das Volk mit anderem Verständnis führen - mit einem Verständnis dafür, was Krieg eigentlich ist. Krieg ist etwas anderes als Hollywood, etwas anderes als ein Dokumentarfilm. Und Demokratie bedeutet wahre Freiheit - Freiheit nicht nur für jene, von denen wir wünschen, dass sie an die Macht gewählt werden.

Genau darin liegt jedoch das Problem im Nahen/Mittleren Osten.

Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "The problem with democracy"

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Die USA unter Bush hat in den letzten Jahren große Hilfen für Entwicklungsländer, besonders auch bei der AIDS Propylaxe angekündigt, die zwar meistens nicht gezahlt wurden, aber wenn sie gezahlt wurden, mußten die Kliniken und Hilfsstationen sich verpflichten, keine Verhütungsmittel zu verteilen und in den unterstützen Kliniken durften keine Abtreibungen stattfinden.
Dadurch haben viele Kliniken weniger Geld bekommen und die Abtreibungen wurden auf der Straße durchgeführt.
Nun versucht man von anderer Seitze für diese Kliniken Geld zusammen zu bekommen.

Britain defies US with funding to boost safe abortion services
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1703257,00.html

· Attempt to replace lost dollars after `global gag`
· 70,000 died last year in backstreet operations
Sarah Boseley
Monday February 6, 2006

Guardian
The British government will today publicly defy the United States by giving money for safe abortion services in developing countries to organisations that have been cut off from American funding.

Nearly 70,000 women and girls died last year because they went to back-street abortionists. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered serious injuries.

Critics of America`s aid policy say some might have lived if the US had not withdrawn funding from clinics that provide safe services - or that simply tell women where to find them.

The "global gag" rule, as it has become known, was imposed by President George Bush in 2001. It requires any organisation applying for US funds to sign an undertaking not to counsel women on abortion - other than advising against it - or provide abortion services.

The UK will today become the founder donor of a fund set up specifically to attempt to replace the lost dollars and increase safe abortion services.

The Department for International Development will contribute £3m over two years. DFID and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) - whose clinics across the world have suffered badly - hope that others, particularly the Scandinavians, Dutch and Canadians, will be emboldened to put money in too.

"I think the UK is being very brave and very progressive in making this commitment," said Steven Sinding, director general of the IPPF. "We`re deeply grateful for this gesture not only financially but also politically.

"Tens of thousands of women who depend on our services are not able to get them. We`re committed to the expansion of safe abortion because in any society no matter how efficiently contraception is made available there will be unplanned and unwanted pregnancies."

The "global gag", he said, had increased the number of unsafe abortions by stopping funding to clinics that primarily provide contraception. "What I`ve never been able to figure out about American policy is why they persist in cutting down funding to organisations that are about preventing unwanted pregnancies."

International development minister Gareth Thomas said the government hoped the US position would change: "We work very closely with the Americans but we have a very different view from them on abortion. Friends can disagree.

"I recognise that the Americans are not going to want to contribute at the moment. We obviously continue to hope that the position will change. It is a position that has been decided by Congress so we`re very aware of it and they know that."

DFID asked IPPF to produce a report on the scale of the damage caused by unsafe abortion. Death and Denial: Unsafe Abortion and Poverty, is published today. It reveals that an estimated 19 million women will risk the consequences of an unsafe abortion this year, of whom 70,000 will die. This accounts for 13% of the 500,000 maternal deaths each year. Reducing unsafe abortions is critical to reaching the UN`s Millennium Development Goal on cutting maternal mortality, said Mr Thomas.

Women`s low status in many poor countries makes them vulnerable to sexual coercion, abuse and exploitation, says the report. Almost 50% of sexual assaults worldwide are against girls aged 15 or less.

The death and injury toll is highest in countries where abortion is illegal or severely restricted, as in Kenya, where some 30% to 50% of maternal deaths are a result of unsafe abortion.

The Family Planning Association of Kenya, an IPPF member, chose to forfeit US funds rather than sign the "global gag" clause. It was forced to close three reproductive health clinics, scale back others and slash outreach programmes.

Many other organisations are affected by the global gag, including Marie Stopes, which is bigger in some countries than IPPF. The money from the new fund will be equitably shared among all those who have lost US funds. IPPF, which has itself lost $15m (£9m) a year for the past five years, together with the provision of contraceptives worth $2m to $4m, hopes the fund may eventually raise up to $35m.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Editorial: Feingold pins Gonzales
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/index.php?ntid=71577

An editorial
February 6, 2006
When the Senate Judiciary Committee begins the most important oversight hearing in recent congressional history this week, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold will go after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for what appears to be a deliberate deception of the committee and Congress.

This is not a political game. This is not posturing to score ideological or intellectual points.

By every measure, Feingold has the goods on Gonzales.

In advance of the Judiciary Committee hearings on President Bush`s authorization of the warrantless wiretapping of the telephones of Americans, Feingold sent a letter to Gonzales asking that the attorney general prepare to explain why, during his confirmation hearings in January 2005, he responded by saying "it`s not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes" - a statement that appears to have been a lie.

In his letter, Feingold recalls an exchange during the confirmation hearings in which he specifically asked if Gonzales felt the Bush administration had the authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps in violation of statutory prohibitions. According to the transcript of the exchange, the nominee attempted to avoid answering by dismissing it as "hypothetical."

But Feingold did not let Gonzales dodge the question. The senator pressed him on the matter until Gonzales finally responded, "Senator, this president is not - it`s not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."

Feingold continued the line of questioning, asking, "Finally, will you commit to notify Congress if the president makes this type of decision and not wait two years until a memo is leaked about it?"

Gonzales answered: "I will commit to advise the Congress as soon as I reasonably can, yes, sir."

In his letter to Gonzales, Feingold writes, "In light of recent revelations that the president specifically authorized wiretapping of Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and did so years prior to your confirmation hearing at a time when you were White House counsel, I find this testimony misleading, and deeply troubling. I will expect a full explanation at the hearing."

Gonzales is not an honest man, especially with regard to questions of abuses of power by the president. So it is a given that he will attempt to avoid answering Feingold`s questions, and if he is pressed there is every reason to believe that he will attempt once more to deceive Congress.

But it certainly appears that, this time, the attorney general has been caught in his web of lies.

Feingold is right to hold him to account, and the rest of the members of the Judiciary Committee need to back up the senator from Wisconsin. That goes especially for Republicans on the committee, including Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Specter deserves credit for calling the hearing, which had been billed as an examination of "Wartime Executive Power and the NSA`s Surveillance Authority" but is really an inquiry into this White House`s assaults on the Constitution. But, knowing what he now knows about past lies to the committee, Specter cannot allow this hearing to become another vehicle for executive branch spin and deception.

If Gonzales refuses to cooperate with the committee, he should be sanctioned. If he is proved to have lied to the committee or to have deliberately thwarted its dictates, then appropriate steps should be taken to remove Gonzales from a position of public trust that he has chosen to abuse.




madison.com is operated by Capital Newspapers, publishers of the Wisconsin State Journal, The Capital Times, Agri-View and Apartment Showcase. All contents Copyright ©2006, Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved.

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The Fury

Religious fury threatens to wrest control from secular governments

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article343456.ece

By Robert Fisk

02/06/06 "The Independent" -- -- After Syria, the fires fanned by Denmark`s anti-Prophet cartoons spread to Lebanon yesterday with sectarian intensity.

Anger flashing through the Muslim world over the weekend saw protesters burn Danish flags and attack buildings from Lahore to Gaza. The Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the main insurgent groups, made a blood-curdling call yesterday for violence against citizens of countries where caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed have been published.

"We swear to God, if we catch one of their citizens in Iraq, we will cut him to pieces, to take revenge for Prophet," it said in an unverified internet statement.

In Lebanon yesterday, 2,000troops fought demonstrators in the heart of Christian Beirut during the day as the Danish consulate was set on fire and a large church was attacked by a mob. Other demonstrators headed for the Lebanese foreign ministry. One protester at the consulate was trapped by flames and died after jumping from the third floor.

Yestereday`s violence may have been inspired by the previous day`s assaults on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus - or were perhaps encouraged by the same Baath party which must have originally permitted the Syrian demonstrations to take place.

More likely, the crowds in both cities were allowed by the authorities to stage protests, but the demonstrators quickly became overwhelmed as Sunni extremists - in Lebanon, perhaps from the Salafist Hezb al-Tahrir party in Tripoli, and equally Wahhabi-minded Palestinians from the Ein el-Helweh refugee camp - arrived with sticks and stones to assault the Danish property and then to attack the St Maroun church and march on the Lebanese foreign ministry.

If this is true, it shows how quickly two nationalist Arab governments can be challenged by Islamists within their own countries. The 2,000-strong Lebanese security forces had to be deployed in east Beirut to fire tear gas and live rounds into the air to hold back the rioters.

For Lebanon, divided along sectarian lines as it has been since its creation by the French in the 1920s, it was a grim and bitter day - perhaps the worst since ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated on 14 February last year - which brought Muslim demonstrators into the centre of Christian east Beirut where the Danish consulate is - or rather was - located. Burning fire engines and smashing cars parked in the streets, however, brought back ugly memories of the 15-year Lebanese civil war.

Little wonder, then, that Charles Rizk, the Justice Minister, asked angrily: "What is the guilt of the people of Ashrafieh for cartoons published in Denmark?`` Ashrafieh, needless to say, is an almost entirely Christian sector of Beirut.

Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese Prime Minister - who, under the country`s unwritten constitution, must be a Sunni - insisted that this was not the way for Muslims to express their anger. One Sunni prelate who appeared on the streets in a vain attempt to calm the demonstrators remarked that "they have done more damage to the name of the Prophet today than the cartoons in Denmark``.

Lebanon`s Interior Minister, Hassan al-Sabaa, resigned yesterday, becoming the first political casualty of the crisis.

At least 30 people were arrested and the Lebanese authorities later announced - predictably - that most were "foreigners". Whenever any civil unrest occurs in Lebanon, foreigners are always blamed - just as they were throughout the civil war - although it will be interesting to see if there are any Syrians among their number. Christian politicians complain that the Lebanese government, which knew that there would be demonstrations, should have dealt more "firmly" with the demonstrators - for "firmly", read "fatally".

But, in fact, the Lebanese troops managed to avoid shooting any of the protesters dead; "martyrs" would only have provided room for more violent demonstrations - and yesterday`s battle in east Beirut was in marked contrast to the way Israeli soldiers deal with Arab demonstrators. The Lebanese, far from firing bullets into the surging crowds, pushed them back with water cannons.

There is no doubting that those preposterous cartoons originally published in Copenhagen last September have lit a small inferno across the Middle East. In Nablus, Palestinian gunmen stormed the French cultural centre yesterday. In Qatar, the government announced it would no longer accept trade delegations from Denmark. Iran recalled its ambassador from Copenhagen.

Muslim demonstrators could be seen on the streets of Beirut yesterday with green banners bearing the legend: "Oh Nation of Mohamed, Wake Up!`` The danger for the West - as well as the dictatorships and semi-democracies of the Middle East - is that rather a lot of members of the nation of Mohamed will do just that.

Syria is a largely Sunni nation ruled by Alawites - a branch of Shiism - and it is not difficult to see how even minimum Baathist encouragement of Saturday`s demonstrators quickly turned into a Sunni protest.The Norwegian embassy had demanded extra protection from Syria - but was not provided with the security forces it asked for. There will be many questions asked about this among Europeans in Damascus; for it is the same old problem: who runs Syria?

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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In #221 kaufe ich ein `h` für Prophylaxe

[rv_2011]

[URLWeiter im Fragebogen

Wie man sich von der Demokratie befreien kann: Marica Pally stellt einen deutsch-amerikanischen Kulturvergleich an
]http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/feuilleton/?cnt=800425[/URL]

VON MARCIA PALLY

Der Fragebogen für Einwanderer, den das Land Baden-Württemberg eingeführt hat, hat zu politisch korrekten Reaktionen der üblichen Verdächtigen geführt. Das Land legt allen Bewerbern um die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft, an deren Eignung man zweifelt, einen speziellen Fragenkatalog vor. Nun jammern Bürgerrechtler und muslimische Aktivisten, der Fragebogen diskriminiere die Muslime und behindere ihre Integration.

Wozu die ganze Aufregung? Liest man sich den Fragebogen durch, sieht man doch gleich, dass er den Prinzipien unserer christlichen US-Regierung treu ist, die mildtätigem Regierungshandeln in aller Welt Vorbild und Maßstab bietet. Eine Frage auf dem Fragebogen lautet: "Was halten Sie davon, dass Eltern ihre Kinder zwangsweise verheiraten?" Warum stört man sich in Deutschland an dieser Frage? Patriotische amerikanische Christenbürger lassen ihre Kinder nicht irgendein Gspusi heiraten, auf das sie mal stoßen (und das gewiss nicht körperlich). Woher, glauben Sie, kommt der Boom de evangelikalen Colleges, die von vornherein dafür sorgen sollen, dass man die richtigen Freunde findet? Natürlich muss man sicherstellen, dass muslimische Eltern bei der Überwachung des Paarungsverhaltens ihrer Kinder dieselben strengen Maßstäbe anlegen. Sie wollen doch schließlich nicht, dass sie sich mit deutschen Blut vermischen - genauso wenig wie die amerikanischen Evangelikalen wollen, dass ihre Kinder sich mit Juden verbinden oder gar Agnostikern.

Und noch eine verwirrende Frage

Weiter im Fragebogen: "Ihre volljährige Tochter/Ihre Frau möchte sich gern so kleiden wie andere deutsche Mädchen und Frauen auch. Würden Sie versuchen, das zu verhindern? Wenn ja: Mit welchen Mitteln?"

Verwirrende Frage: Wollen deutsche Eltern etwa, dass ihre Töchter wie die babylonischen Huren aussehen? Gute Christen bei uns wollen das sicher nicht - und Pornofilmzeugs oder sowas kommt uns auch nicht ins Haus. Und noch eine verwirrende Frage: "Stellen Sie sich vor, Ihr volljähriger Sohn kommt zu Ihnen und erklärt, er sei homosexuell und möchte gerne mit einem anderen Mann zusammen leben. Wie reagieren Sie?" Ich halte es mit 3. Mose 22, 18: "Du sollst nicht bei einem Mann liegen wie bei einer Frau; es ist ein Gräuel." Natürlich muss man Bewerben um die Staatsbürgerschaft solche Fragen stellen, denn ihre Söhne sollen doch keine Gräueltaten verüben, oder? Deshalb ist unser Präsident auch gegen die Schwulenehe: damit Schwule keine Kinder bekommen können, die Gräueltaten begehen.

Und nun zu dieser Frage: "Wie stehen Sie zu der Aussage, dass die Frau ihrem Ehemann gehorchen soll und dass dieser sie schlagen darf, wenn sie ihm nicht gehorsam ist?" Das mit dem Prügeln ist vielleicht schlechte PR, aber nach christlicher Doktrin steht der Mann dem Haushalt vor. Natürlich sollten die Frauen Baden-Württembergs ihrem Mannsvolk gehorchen. Die rein männliche evangelikale Gruppierung der "Promise Keepers" hält es so: "Setze dich zu deinem Weib und sage ihr zum Beispiel: ,Honey, ich habe einen schrecklichen Fehler begangen. Ich habe dich meine Rolle einnehmen lassen... Nun muss ich diese Rolle zurückfordern.` Ich sage nicht, ihr sollt darum bitten, Ihre Rolle wieder einnehmen zu dürfen, ich dränge euch, sie zurückzufordern... Da kann es keine Kompromisse geben." (aus der Broschüre "Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper", Hervorhebungen im Original)

An einer Schlüsselstelle verlangt der baden-württemberger Fragebogen einen Kommentar zum folgenden Text: "Die Menschheit hat noch nie eine so dunkle Phase wie unter der Demokratie erlebt. Damit der Mensch sich von der Demokratie befreien kann, muss er zuerst begreifen, dass die Demokratie den Menschen nichts Gutes geben kann." Lang leben die baden-württemberger Bürokraten: Genau dasselbe hat Samuel Alito in seinen Bestätigungs-Anhörungen für seinen Posten am Supreme Court auch gesagt - die amerikanische Präsidentschaft sei "imperial". Wozu demokratische Kontrolle; wozu eine unabhängige Justiz und das ganze demokratische Getue. Natürlich muss man die zukünftigen deutschen Staatsbürger prüfen, ob sie bereit sind, dem US-amerikanischen Vorbild zu folgen.

Und nicht nur Alito hat sich von der Bürde der Demokratie befreit. Unser Präsident hat ihr rastlos entgegengearbeitet. In Guantánamo Bay hat er das Habeas-Corpus-Recht bekämpft. Sein Militär hat unter Bruch der US-Vorschriften Gefangene gefoltert und andere in geheime Verhörzentren in Nahost, Polen und Rumänien ausgeflogen. Er hat seine eigene Bevölkerung ausspionieren lassen, unter Verletzung des Auslandsspionagegesetzes von 1978. Damit hat er sich über das Gesetz gestellt - ein erster Schritt hin zur Befreiung von der Demokratie.

Und nicht nur das: Bushs Geheimnistuerei übertrifft die jedes anderen Präsidenten der jüngeren Vergangenheit. Im Haushaltsjahr 2004 hat die Bundesregierung eine Rekordzahl von über 15,6 Millionen Dokumenten als geheim eingestuft. Bush hat nicht nur gelogen, als es um die Massenvernichtungswaffen im Irak ging, er hat dem Kongress auch seine täglichen Briefings vorenthalten, in denen die Anschuldigungen gegen den Irak betreffs Massenvernichtungswaffen und Al Qaeda-Verbindungen zurückgewiesen worden waren. Ende 2005 weigerte Bush sich noch immer, seine Briefings aus den Jahren 2002 und 2003 offen zu legen, und auch aus dem Bericht der National Security Agency über Geheimhaltungstaktiken der Regierung im Vietnamkrieg aus dem Jahr 2001 machte er ein Geheimnis.


Wer kritisiert, hilft dem Feind

Bush und Cheney haben dem Kongress die Teilnehmerliste und Empfehlungen von Cheneys "Energy Commission" vorenthalten, in der die Energiepolitik der Nation bestimmt wurde. Während der Anhörungen des neuen Obersten Richters am Supreme Court, John Roberts, im vergangenen Herbst weigerte Bush sich, dem Kongress Roberts juristische Schriften als stellvertretender Generalstaatsanwalt zugänglich zu machen. Nun enthält er dem Kongress die Protokolle der Beratungen im Weißen Haus während des Katrina-Debakels vor. Er verachtet eine unabhängige Presse und sagt, wer seine Politik kritisiert, "hilft dem Feind".

Und so ist es recht, will von der Demokratie man sich befreien.

Fest steht Baden-Württemberg an der Seite der USA. Wir sind seiner politischen Führung dafür dankbar, dass sie sicherstellt, dass all seine Bürger mit unserem Vorgehen einverstanden sind und unserem christlichen Beispiel folgen. Möge ganz Deutschland bald einmal so handeln. Amen. Gott schütze das Fatherland.

Deutsch von Robin Detje

FR-Serie: Flatiron Letters

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Tolerance Toward Intolerance
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff
Tuesday, February 7, 2006; A21

Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It was the right thing to do.

When the cartoons were first published in Denmark in September, nobody in Germany took notice. Had our publication been offered the drawings at that point, in all likelihood we would have declined to print them. At least one of them seems to equate Islam with radical Islamism. That is exactly the direction nobody wants the debate about fundamentalism to take -- even though the very nature of a political cartoon is overstatement. We would not have printed the caricature out of a sense of moderation and respect for the Muslim minority in our country. News people make judgments about taste all the time. We do not show sexually explicit pictures or body parts after a terrorist attack. We try to keep racism and anti-Semitism out of the paper. Freedom of the press comes with a responsibility.

But the criteria change when material that is seen as offensive becomes newsworthy. That`s why we saw bodies falling out of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. That`s why we saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib. On such issues we print what we usually wouldn`t. The very nature of the discourse is to find parameters of what is culturally acceptable. How many times have we seen Janet Jackson`s breast in the course of a discussion of the limits of family entertainment? How many times have we printed material that Jews might consider offensive in an attempt to define the extent of anti-Semitism? It seems odd that most U.S. papers patronize their readers by withholding cartoons that the whole world talks about. To publish does not mean to endorse. Context matters.

It`s worth remembering that the controversy started out as a well-meaning attempt to write a children`s book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. The book was designed to promote religious tolerance. But the author encountered the consequences of religious hatred when he looked for an illustrator. He could not find one. Denmark`s artists seemed to fear for their lives. In turning down the job they mentioned the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist for harshly criticizing fundamentalism.

When this episode percolated to the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the paper`s cultural editor commissioned the caricatures. He wanted to see whether cartoonists would self-censor their work for fear of violence from Muslim radicals. Still, the European media ignored this story in a small Scandinavian country. It took months, a boycott of Danish products in the Arab world and the intervention of such champions of religious freedom as the governments of Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya (all of which withdrew their ambassadors from Copenhagen) for some European papers to reconsider their stance on the cartoons. By last week it was not an obscure topic anymore but front-page news. And it wasn`t about religious sensibilities as much as about free speech. That`s when the cartoons started to show up in papers all over Europe.

Much of the U.S. reporting about the fracas made it appear as if Europeans just don`t get it -- again. They struggle with immigration. They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. Bill Clinton even detected an "anti-Islamic prejudice" and equated it with a previous "anti-Semitic prejudice."

The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe`s supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?

On Friday the State Department found it appropriate to intervene. It blasted the publication of the cartoons as unacceptable incitement to religious hatred. It is a peculiar moment when the government of the United States, which likes to see itself as the home of free speech, suggests to European journalists what not to print.

The writer is Washington bureau chief of the German newsweekly Die Zeit.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Tax Cut Lunacy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, February 7, 2006; A21

The roots of our fiscal madness, on display once again yesterday with the unveiling of President Bush`s new budget and its deficit in excess of $350 billion, were planted on Oct. 27, 1990.

Ironically, that`s the day when the first President Bush embraced the last genuinely bipartisan budget reduction package to include both tax increases and spending cuts.

It can be seen in retrospect as one of Bush 41`s admirable long-term achievements. (Another, of course, was his success in driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.) In tandem with Bill Clinton`s tax increases three years later, the 1990 agreement set off a decade of fiscal responsibility and exceptional economic growth.

But Bush 41 could not embrace his budget victory as a triumph, because the agreement split his party and because he had won election just two years earlier promising "no new taxes." So he backed away from his achievement as soon as it was in hand.

There is something lovable about the way the elder, broccoli-phobic Bush talks, and what he said on that late October day proved to be significant:

"I feel that every once in a while the president has to do something he doesn`t like and that is to compromise. . . . I can`t say this is the best thing that`s happened to us since sliced bread or the elimination of broccoli . . . . It has got some good things in it. But if we were doing it my way . . . it would be very, very different. . . . So please don`t ask me to relive the agony of a budget agreement that I am glad is signed and is now behind us."

Never again would the Republican Party compromise and "relive the agony of a budget agreement" that involved tax increases. That is definitely "behind us."

Ever since Bush 41`s defeat in 1992, Republicans -- especially Bush 43 -- have committed themselves to the proposition that they will never, ever cross the tax-cutting Republican right. Taxes will be cut in good times and in bad. They will not be raised, no matter how much the government decides to spend. If preserving Republican unity requires throwing the entire cost of the war in Iraq onto the next generation, go for it. Does the Pentagon need big spending increases? Fine, but don`t even think about paying for them with new taxes.

Tax cutting is now the idol of the Republican shrine.

And so far the party`s theological attitude toward taxes has been amply rewarded. When Clinton`s tax increases went through in 1993, not a single Republican -- not even one of those so-called moderates -- voted for them. And because the benefits of the 1993 tax increases did not start kicking in until later in the decade, the Democrats were routed in the 1994 midterm elections.

Deficit hawks harp on the costs of programs for the elderly. The retirement of the baby boomers will indeed be expensive, in large part because of increases in health care spending. So some of the cuts in Medicare reimbursements that Bush proposes in this year`s budget might make sense. But Bush`s long-term spending cuts are dwarfed in this budget by his proposed tax cuts, and Medicare reductions should not be debated independently of their effect on the rest of the health care system.

Yet if Republicans suffer from Bush 41`s tax increase trauma of 1990, Democrats suffer from the Clinton health care trauma of 1994. Rational discussion of our fiscal problems will be blocked as long as politicians indulge their twin phobias about tax increases and comprehensive health care solutions.

And sane budgeting will be impossible unless the sometimes self-righteous deficit hawks get off their exquisitely nonpartisan Mount Olympus and forcefully challenge the Republican Party`s worship of tax cuts.

In particular, they should press moderate Republicans to act publicly on what they know privately: No matter how much conservatives talk about cutting spending, they will never cut enough to pay for their extravagant tax reductions. That is the lesson of Monday`s budget, and of every budget this president has put forward since Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush 41 may have made campaign promises on taxes that he couldn`t keep. But when it came down to it, he held to what now seems like the antiquated view that government should try to keep some balance between what it spends and what it raises in taxes. That may not have been the best idea since sliced bread or the elimination of broccoli, but it is still a good idea.

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Feb 7, 2006

Why can`t Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html

Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular West, but it came with a price.

More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes after the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the French revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide toward secularism.

Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, muses the secular West after the Danish cartoon catastrophe, "Why can`t a Muslim be more like a Jew?" After all, Arab newspapers daily publish hideous caricatures of Jews, who do not burn down Arab embassies in response. But the Jews learned to swallow humiliation at a dreadful cost. When Rome defiled their temple at Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jews rebelled. Rome crushed them, but they rose again in AD 132, fighting more Roman legions under Hadrian than had conquered Britain. After most Jews were dead or exiled, the remnant invented self-deprecating humor. [1]

Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity`s 2,000-year history. Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery of the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy was a certain William Gott, who received nine months` imprisonment in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.

"To hell with them if they can`t take a joke!" artillerymen say after one of their shells kills their own comrades. Mockery cuts a swath of destruction through traditional society, which, experience tells us, often dies hard - by the hand of a Hadrian, or a Napoleon. The Jyllens-Posten cartoon affair is even worse than it looks. The Mohammed cartoons are tame compared with other topics that the mainstream media avoid. The cartoon controversy barely qualifies as a skirmish in a greater war.
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With freedom of choice and access to information come doubt. Western scholars doubt whether Mohammed ever existed [2] or, if he existed, whether the Koran was invented two centuries after his death, or indeed whether the Koran even was written in Arabic. Christianity and Judaism are bloodied - indeed, drained almost dry - by nearly two centuries of scriptural criticism; Islam`s turn barely has begun.

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more dangerous material previously available. Newsweek`s "Challenging the Koran" story of July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine`s website. The government of Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German philologist`s contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western media have steered clear of the subject.

It is well and good for Western newspapers to republish the Mohammed cartoons in solidarity with Jyllens-Posten. But not one major news outlet has reported the most controversial religion story of the year, the debate among the pope and his advisers about whether and to what extent Islam is capable of reform (see When even the pope has to whisper, January 10). Close friends accused me of endangering the life of Pope Benedict XVI by publishing a report already available on the Internet. If it is true that the pope cannot speak to the subject for fear of assassination, then he is a prisoner in the Vatican as much as was the unfortunate wartime pope Pius XII.

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3] That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.
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Doubt has all but killed Christian and Jewish faith, despite the efforts of the theologians to tame it. Doubt is indispensable to faith, wrote Pope Benedict in 1967 when he was the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger: "It is the basic pattern of man`s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty." The Gates of Hell, however, have won more rounds than St Peter. As Cardinal Avery Dulles told Paul Elie of Atlantic Monthly in January:

The breakdown of traditional societies and the indifference of modern people to religious faith have left us with a burden of re-evangelization ... Germany and the Low Countries give us no reason to be optimistic. Quebec is a desert. Ireland is very nearly lost to prosperity ... With [American] society`s freedom of choice come our selfishness and competition, which are now being exported all over the world. We are not immune to the forces of secularization that are being felt in Europe. Is the Christian residue in America strong enough to resist them? I worry that it is not.

With stable institutions and material wealth, the secular West evinces a slow decline. Not so the Muslim world, where loss of faith implies sudden deracination and ruin. In the space of a generation, Islam must make an adjustment that Christianity made with great difficulty over half a millennium. Both for theological and social reasons, it is unequipped to do so. Muslims might as well fight over a cartoon now; they have very little to lose.

Throughout the world, literacy erodes traditional society, and the collapse of traditional society leads to declining population growth rates. But in the Muslim world these trends hit like a shock wave. Both the traditional life of Muslims as well as Muslim theology have been frozen in time, such that Muslims are repeating in compressed time trends long at work in the West. The result is devastating.

Most members of religious groups adhere to their beliefs because they were born into a faith and learned no other way to live. Traditional society admits of no heresy or atheism because religion governs the socialization of individuals. Once a traditional people has the opportunity to choose its beliefs, however, the result most often is a sudden fall-off in religious practice. We observe a close statistical relationship between literacy and the percentage of non-religious people in a population in the cross-section of countries.

Once the literacy rate reaches 90%, the percentage of non-religious jumps into two digits. That is as true for Muslim countries as well as for non-Muslim countries. Because the Muslim literacy rate is so far below the average, though, few Muslim countries have a high proportion of non-religious people.

Globally, we discern a clear link among literacy, secularism, and birth rates; the high birth rates of traditional society fall sharply with greater literacy and weaker religious belief. In the non-Muslim world (Exhibit 2), literacy alone explains 46% of variation in population growth.

In the Muslim world, however, the link between rising literacy and falling population growth is much more pronounced. In the Muslim world (Exhibit 3), variation in literacy explains nearly 60% of the variation in population growth, not a surprising result considering that the Muslim world begins with extremely high population growth and extremely low literacy rates.

Of all the large Muslim countries, Iran is most at risk, with a literacy rate of 71% and a population growth rate of 1.3%, projected to decline to zero within a generation. I have elaborated elsewhere on the devastating implications of a large population of dependent aged for a poor country (Demographics and Iran`s imperial design, September 13, 2005). These considerations prompted me to predict early on that Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad no more would shrink from confrontation with the West than did Adolf Hitler. But the rest of the Muslim world faces the same pressures.

The global relationship among literacy rates, secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons. The first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.
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It is not a good thing to come late to the table of globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become actors on the world economic stage. Of China`s 1.3 billion people, 400 million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can hope to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other locations, most recently in reporting the pope`s seminar at Castelgandolfo. Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI`s classic Introduction to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West well inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal, unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons. I do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

Notes
1. On February 2 fell the 150th death anniversary of the greatest of Jewish humorists, the poet Heinrich Heine. Heine knew that Jewish humor was a salve, not a cure, for humiliation. In a poem called "To Edom", using the rabbis` ancient derogatory term for the Christian world, Heine remonstrated that Christians and Jews "tolerate each other fraternally. I tolerate your rages, and you tolerate my breathing." He also wrote (as translated by Aaron Kramer):
"And the tears flow on forever
Southward in silent ranks
They flow to the Jordan river
And overrun the banks."

2. See for example Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren (Prometheus Books: New York 2003).

3. See Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World Part 2: The Islamist response, November 8, 2005.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Dec 16, 2003

SPENGLER
Why Americans can`t laugh at American culture
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EL16Aa01.html
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[/TABLE]Laughing at one`s own cultural quirks is one of the grand themes of European literature, from Miguel Cervantes` Don Quixote to Luis Bunuel`s Viridiana, from Fernando de Roja`s La Celestina to Gilbert and Sullivan`s Mikado. Sadly, Americans cannot laugh at their own culture. That deficiency, in fact, is the defining trait of American culture, omitted from my November 18 essay (What is American culture?) With the help of the readers of Asia Times Online, I now can demonstrate this fact experimentally. I am grateful to the readers who wrote to denounce the essay as "a disappointing screed", "classist piffle", a "black mark on the rest of the articles on your site", "trash", "garbage", "condescending", "plain silly", "boorish", and so forth. They have proven that in the matter of culture, Americans cannot take a joke.

To be precise, the problem is not that Americans do not like to laugh at their own culture, but that they cannot, whether they wish to or not. At first glance that seems out of character. As individuals, Americans will laugh at themselves all day long. So much do they love self-deprecating humor that few politicians attain high office without a knack for it. "I sure hope you guys are Republicans," Reagan told the surgeons as they wheeled him into the operating room after John Hinckley shot him. Nevertheless, they cannot laugh at their culture. Consider American humor in general: a tell-tale trait of it is the absence of "American" jokes, that is, jokes about Americans as such. Americans tell ethnic jokes, regional jokes, or generic jokes. But there are no characteristically American jokes, for the simple reason that there are no American characteristics.

By contrast, jokes that other nations tell about themselves refer to cultural characteristics whose instant recognition makes them funny. For example:

Australia: Lassitude. A brewery worker drowns in a beer vat. The shop steward breaks the sad news to his wife, who asks, "Did he suffer much?" "I don`t think so. He got out to go to the loo four times."

Spain: Honor. A member of the minor nobility in Spain is dying. His confessor asks, "Would you like to confess your sins?" "I have no sins." "Then would you like to forgive your enemies?" "I have no enemies. I killed them all."

Arabia: Megalomania. A man goes to the caliph and announces that he is God. "Careful what you say," warns the caliph, "A man came to me last year claiming to be a prophet and I put him to death." "It is well you did so," the lunatic replies, "for I did not send him."

France: Pretension. "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo." (Jean Cocteau).

Scandinavia: Taciturnity. After drinking for hours in silence, Sven says to Ole, "Skol." Ole replies, "Did you come here to drink or to talk?"

England: Diffidence. An Englishmen comes home and discovers his wife in bed with his best friend. "I have to do this, Nigel," says the cuckold, "but whatever possessed you?"

Ireland: Drinking (anything involving a leprechaun and a pint of Guinness will do).

To the contrary, not being American is the premise of the most characteristically "American" jokes. For example: The Lone Ranger (a Western sort of knight errant) and Tonto (his faithful American Indian companion) ride through a deep valley, when suddenly an army of hostile Apaches appears on the ridges above them. "Kimosavee, looks like we`re in trouble," says the Ranger. Tonto replies: "What do you mean `we`, paleface?" Americans cannot laugh at their "culture" because they do not quite know what it is. They laugh at themselves as individuals, but cannot laugh at themselves as a people. One cannot laugh at what one cannot define, and definition is the essence of humor; it is the flash of unexpected recognition that evokes laughter. In post-modern usage, humor is essentialist, or to say the same thing, post-modernism is humorless.

Trivial as these examples may seem, I will explain later why precisely the same criteria apply to high culture. Bear with me for a few paragraphs. Lampooning T S Eliot`s resume of English culture, I listed some irritating features of American life as a reductio ad absurdum on November 18. As Asia Times Online readers protested, it was quite unfair to reduce American culture to weak tea, oak-flavored chardonnay, driving slowly in the fast lane, shopping malls, and so forth. Reading over their remonstrations, however, it is striking how little they agree among themselves as to what American culture might be. Of course I was "wrong". But what is right? The question would not even come up in other countries. Ask an Englishman who epitomizes his culture, and without hesitation he will reply: "Shakespeare." From other Europeans one will hear Goethe, Dante, Pushkin, Hugo, Ibsen, Cervantes, and so forth.

But who defines American culture? Is it Herman Melville and his white whale, which so impressed Joe Nichols? Richard Einhorn of New York believes that Annie Hall compares favorably with Moliere. Will Hawkes of New York invokes Noam Chomsky`s claim that memorization of baseball statistics demonstrates a high degree of intelligence. A Mr Liebman of North Carolina prefers Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, as well as mystery writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They agree with each other no more than they do with me. Let us begin with American 1978 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Saul Bellow of Chicago. Bellow, not incidentally, is a denizen of the Straussian inner sanctum at the University of Chicago (his novel Ravenstein portrays his friend the late Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss` best-known popularizer). But Bellow has done much more than impress the Swedish Academy. England`s cleverest writer of fiction, Martin Amis, hails Bellow as "the supreme American novelist" in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly. In fact, Amis takes us straight to the heart of the matter at hand. The American novel is "dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow," Amis writes. "It transpired that there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the inevitabilities - of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, `At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life`. The archaic rule is somber, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomized, unreflecting, and unclean."

America is not the subject of Bellow`s joke; America is the "atomized" and "unreflecting" melting pot into which Bellow`s hapless heroes dissolve. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. The melting pot offers no solace. It is more like the Button-Maker`s casting ladle in Henrik Ibsen`s Peer Gynt, in which Peer`s soul will be melted down, leaving no trace of the original. It should be no surprise that Bellow gravitated toward Leo Strauss and his circle, Eurocentric intellectual snobs to their fingertips. After all, his literary subject is the crash of Old World sensibilities against American materialism.

"What do you mean `we`, paleface?," rejoined Tonto. Americans cannot laugh at themselves as a "we", because there is no "we" to laugh at. "American" jokes invert the problem; the punch-line depends on recognition that there is no "we" to begin with. The outsider is the premise of the characteristically "American" joke, that is, the joke that requires an American setting: Tonto, Augie March, the Scandinavian residents of Lake Woebegone or Fargo, the Clintons of Arkansas. The same genetic trait defines the Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto joke and the Nobel Prize winning novel. Americans cannot tell jokes about their own culture because there is no "there" there. It is "atomized", in Amis` word. That is why they make jokes about other cultures, in Bellow`s case Jewish culture. There is no essential American to put in the joke, so they laugh at Tonto or Augie.

That is true with the best of intentions, and all intentions are not of the best. Some Americans resemble Moliere`s bourgeois gentleman, who was pleased to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. These people are pleased to discover that they have had a culture all along without knowing - cinema, situation comedies, pulp magazines - and repair to the American studies department of a major university to write a doctoral dissertation. We shall leave these unfortunates to their fate. The Kulturnationen often choose as their national poet the one who makes them laugh the best at their own culture. Cervantes, whose Don Quixote lampoons Spanish chivalry, is the clearest case. Dante Alighieri invented an Inferno full of the foibles of the Italians. One also might mention in this context Gilbert and Sullivan, the lampooners of English silliness. Heinrich Heine did the same for the Germans, Ibsen for the Scandinavians, and so forth. Among the Europeans, only the French cannot laugh at their high culture, for it was a political instrument from the time of Cardinal Richelieu, as Anthony Levi has shown.

My interest in Bellow is strictly diagnostic, as the obsessions of Jewish immigrants with materialistic America never have concerned me. But Amis is correct to crown him the rightful king of American literature. Critics of an older generation, eg, the Jewish immigrants Harold Bloom and Alfred Kazin, held Walt Whitman to be the definitive American poet. They oozed with adoration for an American ideal just beyond their grasp. Bellow popped their sentimental soap-bubble, for the reading public now recognizes Bloom and Kazin as characters in a Bellow story. Woody Allen? He is a madman who thinks he is Saul Bellow.

American writers only can produce comedy (George Bush, tragic character, November 25). Mark Twain, America`s most endearing writer because the least pretentious, forewarns the reader of Huckleberry Finn that he has written Don Quixote in dialect. American efforts at tragedy miscarry. Contrast two recent American reworkings of the Odyssey. The Coen brothers` film O Brother Where Art Thou? gives us a madcap Odyssey with everything in reverse; Homer`s fast-talking hero is a bungling escaped convict who can do nothing right, Penelope wants to be rid of him and remarry as quickly as possible, and so forth. It is slender stuff, but delightful in its own sphere. Charles Frazier`s novel Cold Mountain, which sets the Odysseus tale in the American Civil War, makes the skin crawl.

Irate readers of Asia Times Online will forgive me for making them experimental subjects. Not to have a national culture is both a blessing and a curse. Culture restricts our vision of the future to what we drag with us from the past. It is destiny, too often a tragic one. If we identify culture in the loosest sense with language, then we must admit that the end of nearly every culture is a miserable one. Of the 6,000 or so distinct languages spoken today, I have observed before, two become extinct every week. Whole peoples go to their death in the hopeless defense of a culture which long since should have been relegated to the libraries. America has no high culture, but it has the capacity to reinvent itself. Where is the high culture of the Europeans? Its highest expression was classical music. Asian classical musicians now comprise more than half the student body at the great American conservatories. They bear the remnants of the high culture, even while it falls into neglect in the lands of its origin.

America cannot understand the culture of other nations, because it has no culture of its own. In my November 25 essay I stated the same idea in a different way, namely, that the American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to understand the tragedy of other peoples. Is America condemned forever to win the war and lose the peace? Will the force of American arms always roll the stone uphill like Sisyphus, while the weakness of American diplomacy always sends it crashing down again? Is there some link between this tragic pattern of American history, and the way Americans see (or fail to see) the world - that is, American culture? At stake is something far greater than Americans` preferred entertainment. For all the military power at its command, America is uniquely under-equipped to fight a civilizational, that is, a cultural war.

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

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Feb 8, 2006

US places guns before butter
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32056

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Despite his administration`s growing concerns about preventing the collapse of states in strategic parts of the world, US President George W Bush has proposed cuts in development and disaster assistance while increasing the defense budget by almost 7%.

Under his 2007 budget request submitted to Congress on Monday, Pentagon spending next year would rise to some US$440 billion, not including another $120 billion that the administration is expected to ask for as a supplemental appropriation to fund US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September, when fiscal 2006 ends.

By contrast, Bush`s proposed 2007 foreign-aid request will remain roughly the same as last year`s at some $24 billion, the equivalent of what Washington spends in less than five months in Iraq.

Moreover, the president is calling for a nearly 20% cut in development aid - from roughly $1.5 billion $1.26 billion in development aid - and similar cuts in disaster assistance and child-survival and health programs.

"This administration has said there are three components to national security - diplomacy, defense and development," said Mohammad Akhter, president of InterAction, a coalition of some 160 US non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in developing countries. "We see that diplomacy and defense are well taken care of, but development is the weakest tool in our kit. Yet that`s where our long-term security lies."

While reducing aid in those areas, however, Bush asked for major increases in his two signature aid programs: the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which was set up to reward "good performers" among poor countries, and his three-year-old PEPFAR (President`s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ), to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - most of which is to be spent in 14 selected countries in Africa and the Caribbean as well as Vietnam.

He is asking for a total of $4 billion for the latter, including only $300 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - a multilateral agency especially favored by AIDS activists who oppose US conditions on the aid - and $3 billion for the MCA, an increase of $1.25 billion from the current level.

While Congress has generally approved the administration`s AIDS-related requests, however, it has not hesitated to slash requests for the MCA, in large part because the fund has been very slow to qualify eligible countries for the assistance.

"Historical precedent suggests that the Millennium Development Corporation [which administers the MCA] may not come out with the funding requested," noted Stewart Patrick, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development. He also said Congress was likely to increase aid for child survival, as it has in the past.

The defense and foreign-aid requests were contained in a proposed 2007 budget that totals $2.7 trillion, an increase of 2.3% over the current fiscal year. Despite the increase, the federal deficit, if approved, would decline from this year`s current estimate of a record $423 billion to $354 billion, according to the administration. However, its deficit forecasts have consistently proven over-optimistic.

With such a large increase in proposed Pentagon (Defense Department) spending, Bush`s 2007 budget calls for either holding the line or reducing spending in social and education programs, and even in community policing. In what could prove especially controversial in an election year, he is also calling for cuts in anticipated spending for Medicare, a popular health insurance program for elderly and disabled people.

Bush combined the release of his budget proposal with a new appeal to make permanent tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy that were enacted during his first term. In a Washington Post column published Sunday, Bush`s former top economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, warned that tax increases were inevitable unless the budget and the size of the government were reduced.

With the Pentagon budget trajectory still headed upward, however, such a prospect looks increasingly doubtful. On Friday, the Defense Department released its latest Quadrennial Defense Report (QDR), which, while rejecting calls to increase the size of its over-stretched ground forces in the army and Marines, urged major increases in its special operations forces, which are particularly costly to train and equip.

Also as part of its "war on terror", which the Pentagon has renamed "the long war", it is pushing full speed ahead on expensive new weapons systems that can intimidate potential rivals, such as China or Russia.

"Like the QDR, the fiscal 2007 budget reflects the department`s continuum of change as we defend our nation, engage in the long war against terrorist extremism and prepare for future potential adversaries," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday.

The proposed foreign-aid bill also suggested continuity with the recent past despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice`s recent call for major changes in the ways Washington conducts its business overseas, a process she called "transformational diplomacy".

Apart from Bush`s pet anti-AIDS and MCA programs, the new foreign-aid bill calls for a 70% increase in anti-drug spending, to some $1.5 billion worldwide. Much of that will be spent in Afghanistan which, since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001, has become by far the world`s biggest source of opium and heroin. "The drug war comes out a real winner in the budget allocation," Patrick said.

He also expressed disappointment that development and disaster-aid programs, which are designed to promote good governance and help the poorest and most vulnerable sectors in countries that risk becoming "failed states", fared relatively poorly in the budget request compared to the MCA, which is targeted exclusively on countries that perform well in both areas.

"It reaffirms the fears of a lot of folks that the creation of these signature programs, particularly PEPFAR and MCC, will lead to a gradual decrease in some of the other accounts that are critical for righting poverty and advancing development," he added.

The point was echoed by InterAction`s Akhter. "It doesn`t really make any sense to cut that component because, until you provide development assistance and health, people won`t arrive at a point where they can take advantage of the MCA," he said.

State Department officials said some of the declines in the child-survival and health accounts will be made up in the expanded PEFAR program. They also said funding for malaria prevention would increase significantly under the proposed budget.

Aside from changes in the overall spending on development and disaster aid and counter-drug assistance, most of the levels to both specific countries and multilateral programs, including the United Nations and peacekeeping operations, are similar to those approved by Congress for 2006.

Economic aid to Central and Eastern Europe, including parts of the former Soviet Union, would decline. On the other hand, State Department-administered economic assistance for Iraq, previously part of an $18 billion package controlled by the Pentagon, will skyrocket from just $60 million this year to nearly $500 million in 2007. Substantial increases in economic aid are planned for Afghanistan, Sudan and Indonesia.

Some $6.2 billion altogether is earmarked for countries that are considered key strategic allies in the "war on terror".

Military aid and sales overseen by the State Department - nearly $5 billion - would remain roughly the same, with the bulk going to Washington`s two biggest economic and military aid recipients, Israel and Egypt.

Patrick said he was surprised the budget did not feature stronger support for democracy promotion and other political and institutional initiatives designed to strengthen states and make them more responsive to its citizens, particularly given the administration`s recent rhetoric.

"A main premise of Rice`s transformational diplomacy is that the US needs to marshal all of its resources to advance democracy and good governance in weak and failing states," he said. "But it`s not clear how this budget request addresses the challenge."

A nearly $100 million Democracy Fund established by Congress last year will be parceled out to other existing programs under Bush`s proposal, while mainly nominal increases are planned for Middle East democratization initiatives, the National Endowment for Democracy, and even public diplomacy.

(Inter Press Service)

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Washington digs in for a `long war` as Rumsfeld issues global call to arms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,,1703991,00.…

Simon Tisdall
Tuesday February 7, 2006

Guardian
The Bush administration`s re-characterisation of its "global war on terror" as the "long war" will be seen by critics as an admission that the US has started something it cannot finish. But from the Pentagon`s perspective, the change reflects a significant upgrading of the "generational" threat posed by worldwide Islamist militancy which it believes to have been seriously underestimated.

The reassessment, contained in the Pentagon`s quadrennial defence review presented to Congress yesterday, presages a new US drive to rally international allies for an ongoing conflict unlimited by time and space. That presents a problematic political, financial and military prospect for many European Nato members including Britain, as well as Middle Eastern governments.

According to the review, a "large-scale, potentially long duration, irregular warfare campaign including counter-insurgency and security, stability, transition and reconstruction operations" is necessary and unavoidable. Gone is the talk of swift victories that preceded the 2003 Iraq invasion. This will be a war of attrition, it says, fought on many fronts.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, suggested at the weekend that western democracies must acknowledge they are locked in a life or death struggle comparable to those against fascism and communism. "The enemy have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."

Mr Rumsfeld denied the Iraq invasion had proved a catalyst for terrorist recruiting - but said al-Qaida and its allies wanted to use Iraq as a central front in the longer struggle. "A war has been declared on all of our nations [whose] futures depend on determination and unity," he said. "As during the cold war, the struggle ahead promises to be a long war."

The Pentagon review proposes a series of measures to equip the US and its allies for the long haul, built around a whopping overall 2007 defence budget request of more than $550bn. They include increased numbers of special forces and unmanned spy aircraft or drones, expanded psychological warfare and civil affairs units (for winning "hearts and minds"), and more sea-borne, conventionally armed long-range missiles. Countries such as Iran will note plans for covert teams to "detect, locate and render safe" nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Addressing the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London yesterday, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of US central command covering the Middle East, said winning the "long war" would necessitate increased "security assistance, intelligence-sharing and advice" for allies. "Regional nations must participate and lead the fight," he said.

A revived, enlarged international coalition would enable the US to "re-posture" its Middle East ground forces once stability in Iraq and Afghanistan was achieved, he said. Ground forces that remained would be quickly deployable elsewhere; and their area of operations would grow to include old and new theatres in south-east Asia and east and north Africa.

Just as important, Gen Kimmitt said, was enhancement of the coalition`s ability to forge long-term diplomatic and law enforcement networks to counter the "astonishing" use by al-Qaida and its allies of "physical and virtual domains" such as the internet.

`The fundamental forces at play in the long war should not be underestimated," he said. "An extremist ideology seeks to go back to the era of theocratic dictatorship, repression and intolerance" while employing the latest technology to do so. The movement`s aim was to end western influence in the Muslim world and overthrow "apostate" Middle Eastern regimes, he said, and it would not hesitate to use WMD.

The "long war" doctrine, formalising President Bush`s earlier division of the world into good guys and evil-doers, is likely to prove highly controversial as its wider implications unfold. Washington will be accused of scaremongering and exacerbating the clash of cultures. In the US itself, the human and moral cost of the post-9/11 wars is already under critical scrutiny, from soldiers` families to the former president Jimmy Carter.

Gen Kimmitt admitted the biggest battle could be at home: "It will require strong leadership to continue to make the case to the people that this war is necessary and must be prosecuted for perhaps another generation."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Iranian paper to run Holocaust cartoons

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Latest Update: #35215 06.02.06 15:22:38 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 06, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2462 , US: 2258 , Feb.06: 17 Es werden keine US-Flaggen verbrannt, sondern GI getötet.

Iraker 02/07/06: Total: 98
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Just cartoons?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/07/E…

- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group
Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Washington -- The cartoons aren`t exactly knee-slappers. Quite the contrary: Even allowing for the fact that political cartoons usually defy translation no matter how funny or incisive they are, the 12 drawings published last September by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten strike me as lame and unsophisticated, crudely equating Islam`s prophet Muhammad -- and thus, by clear implication, all of Islam -- with terrorism and ignorance. They look like the provocation they were intended to be.

And they worked, especially after other newspapers in Europe and elsewhere began republishing the cartoons in solidarity. The Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and the Danish consulate in Beirut were burned by angry mobs over the weekend, while street protests have raged around the world, not just in the Middle East and Europe but as far away as placid New Zealand, where people are far outnumbered by sheep.

So one defends the right of Jyllands-Posten to free expression, because, yes, that right has to be absolute, encompassing cartoons that spit in the face of an entire religion. One laments the fact that the cartoonists also now enjoy the right to withdraw into hiding under threat of assassination, living the way novelist Salman Rushdie had to live all those years. And one knows that the terrorist overlord Osama bin Laden, the nuke-happy Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others bent on hastening apocalypse are the real winners in this whole unnecessary episode.

You could dispute my verdict "unnecessary," but everyone involved made choices. The editor of Jyllands-Posten commissioned the cartoons specifically to make the point that the European press, in his view, was exercising a pernicious self-censorship when it came to Islam. The cartoonists chose to participate -- some others who were invited declined -- and chose how they would depict Muhammad, including one who drew him with a turban that on closer inspection turns out to be bomb with a lit fuse.

And, of course, the Muslims who are offended that any image of their prophet would be published, let alone these images, could have expressed their displeasure with a barrage of letters to the editor or angry e-mails rather than take to the streets.

I wonder, though, what the reaction would have been, say, 30 years ago. My guess is that it would have been more letter-writing than rock-throwing. People don`t normally burn down embassies over a few cartoons in a newspaper they`ve never even heard of, much less ever read. The widespread hair-trigger outrage, I think, grows out of the sense that the world of Islam has been used and abused for many years by a powerful and evil entity called "the West" -- and that this mistreatment is getting worse, not better.

Which is precisely the kind of paranoia that jihadists such as bin Laden and radical fundamentalists such as Ahmadinejad love to cultivate.

The focus this time is on Europe, which has awakened to the fact that it is home to millions of Muslim immigrants who do not necessarily care to assimilate. I think the solution for Europe is to embrace multiculturalism, and I would hope that even those who disagree would at least consider the possibility that crude caricatures of Muhammad might not be the best starting point for constructive dialogue.

But eventually the focus of this conflict will shift back to the United States, the undisputed leader of "the West." With all his talk of freedom as a universal right, President Bush pretends to understand that U.S. support of corrupt dictatorships in places such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan contributes to the feeling that Muslims are under attack and helps give strength to fundamentalism and jihad. Yet the Bush administration continues to prop up these same autocrats, some of whom happen to sit on huge reserves of oil, while giving little more than lip service to those in the crowds who took to the streets over some undistinguished Danish cartoons.

The United States and its allies easily conquered Iraq, only to see religious parties dominate the recent elections. The radical religious movement Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority and the religious Muslim Brotherhood is now the only coherent opposition force in Egypt.

Those Danish cartoonists and their editor set out to teach Muslims a lesson about free speech. They ended up giving the rest of us a startling illustration that while Bush and his allies speak of a post-Sept. 11 global war against terrorism, terrorism is nothing but a tactic. This is really a war of ideas, a battle for hearts and minds, and it`s a war in which the West will lose ground until its deeds are more consonant with its high-minded words.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/07/E…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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[urlWhen cartoons are the news / Artists confront issue of how to address protests sparked by Muhammad`s image
]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/07/MNGBRH41HF1.DTLBendib`s cartoons are consistently critical of the war in Iraq. Here he takes on free speech. Cartoon by Khalil Bendib [/url]

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Martin Luther Kings Vermächtnis erstickt unter den freundlichen Worten
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1727

von Norman Solomon
ZNet 03.02.2006
Wenige Stunden nach Coretta Scott Kings Tod hielt Präsident Bush seine State of the Union Address (Rede zum Zustand der Nation). Er begann, indem er Coretta Scott King als eine "geliebte, elegante und mutige Frau" pries, "die Amerika wieder an seine Gründerideale gemahnt und einen noblen Traum weitergeführt hat". Weil es sich so gehört, erwähnte Bush zum Schluss seiner Rede ehrerbietig den Namen ihres Ehemannes, Martin Luther King Jr., der den Märtyrertod starb.

Präsident Bush ist einer von vielen Politikern, die leidenschaftlich gegen so ziemlich alles sind, wofür Dr. King gekämpft hat - während sie gleichzeitig seinen Namen in süßlichen Worten preisen. Wäre es so falsch, öffentlich zu den fundamentalen Diskrepanzen zu stehen? Nein. Stattdessen aber geben Bush und seine Verbündeten Platitüden zum besten und tun so, als habe Kings Arbeit mit seinem Kampf gegen die Rassentrennung geendet.

Mit dem Tod der King-Witwe wird dieser Prozess des Honig-ums-Maul-Schmierens noch einfacher: Preiset Martin Luther King, unseren geliebten Bürgerrechtsführer, aber tut so, als hätte es die letzten Jahre seines Lebens nicht gegeben - den Kampf für wirtschaftliche Gerechtigkeit und für Frieden. Ignoriert einfach, wie vehement King gegen unsere heutigen Haushaltsprioritäten und den Militarismus sein würde.

In seiner Ansprache zum Zustand der Nation bemühte sich Bush, wie ein glühender Bewunderer Martin Luther Kings dazustehen. Aber schon tags darauf verabschiedete dieselbe Kammer, vor der Bush seine Rede gehalten hatte, einige üble Haushaltskürzungen - die Bush-Administration hatte die Maßnahmen durchgedrückt. Vorgesehen sind Streichungen in Höhe von $39 Milliarden in den nächsten fünf Jahren - meist zu Lasten von Studentenkrediten und Medicaid für Arme.

Vor fast 38 Jahren wurde Dr. King in Memphis getötet, während er den Marsch der Armen (Poor People`s Campaign) anführte. Dieser Marsch forderte eine Bill of Rights der ökonomischen Rechte. Dem Kongress hatte King damals "Feindseligkeit gegenüber den Armen" vorgeworfen. Die Bundesregierung, so King, betreibe "die Finanzierung des Militärs großzügig und mit Eifer", die "Finanzierung der Armen" jedoch "voller Geiz".

Die heutige Generation knauseriger Politiker kaschiert mit geschmeidigen rhetorischen Formeln, dass sie einerseits Kings Vermächtnis preist, während sie andererseits diesem Vermächtnis den Dolchstoß versetzt.

Diese Doppelzüngigkeit wird durch die Medien vereinfacht. Der Grundzug medialer Berichterstattung läuft auf das automatische Recyceln jener verstümmelten Version der Geschichte von Martin Luther King hinaus, wie sie jene Politiker promoten, die in Washington das Sagen haben. Zumindest vage dürfte diesen Politikertypen jenes Schlüsselaxiom geläufig sein, das George Orwell so formuliert hat: "Wer die Vergangenheit kontrolliert, kontrolliert die Zukunft. Wer die Gegenwart kontrolliert, kontrolliert die Vergangenheit".

Ihr interessiert euch nicht für die Forderungen nach progressiver Veränderung der ökonomischen Machtstrukturen im Land? Okay, dann zitiert aber auch nicht Martin Luther Kings Satz: "Wahres Mitgefühl bedeutet mehr, als einem Bettler eine Münze zuwerfen. Es bedeutet, jene Form, die Bettler erzeugt, muss umstrukturiert werden".

Ihr wollt nicht wahrhaben, was King über den globalen Klassenkampf sagte? Okay, dann belasst es bei seiner Rede "I have a dream" (1963) und macht einen Bogen um seine späteren Statements wie, "die westlichen Kapitalisten investieren große Geldsummen in Asien, Afrika und Südamerika - nur um des Profites willen, sie haben kein Interesse an der Verbesserung der sozialen Lage dieser Länder".

Ihr wollt King in eine Schublade stecken, auf der steht, `er war ein Gegner des Jim-Crow-(Stereotyps) aber nicht viel mehr`? In diesem Fall ignoriert seine leidenschaftliche Opposition zum Vietnamkrieg und seine generelle Verurteilung dessen, was King als "Wahnsinn des Militarismus" bezeichnet hat.

Es liegt nicht in Präsident Bushs taktischem Interesse, die Schlüsselfragen der Haltung Kings in dessen letzten Lebensjahren zu kritisieren. Unterstützt durch die Medien - die ängstlich bemüht sind, Kings politische Entwicklung glatt zu bügeln -, können Bush und dessen rechte Gesinnungsgenossen sich als Bewunderer von Martin Luther King gerieren, während sie gleichzeitig bei jeder Gelegenheit das geistige Erbe Kings entweihen.

Nach Coretta Scott Kings Tod sagte der Präsident des Rechtshilfe- und Bildungsfonds des NAACP, Theodore Shaw: "Ich befürchte, die Leute könnten ihren Tod als Chance sehen, die Anliegen, für die sie, ihr Mann und andere gestanden haben, weiter zu antiquieren". Shaw fügt hinzu: "Jeder, der denkt, die Arbeit sei getan, ist entweder schrecklich dumm oder verschließt bewusst die Augen".

In welcher Form sich seine ignorante Verblendung, seine bewusste Vermeidungsstrategie auch jeweils äußern mögen, Präsident Bush ist der Anführer jener Kräfte, die dafür kämpfen, Kings Vermächtnis - Aktivismus, soziale Gerechtigkeit, Frieden - rückgängig zu machen. Traurigerweise sind die News Medien nach wie vor Teil dieses retrograden politischen Prozesses: `Whitewashing` statt `informing` lautet die Devise.

Norman Solomons neuestes Buch heißt: `War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death` www.WarMadeEasy.com

Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Smothering the King Legacy With Kind Words"

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[urlIran a Growing Danger, Bush Gaining on Spy Issue]http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=269
85% See U.S. Addicted to Oil - 50% Say We Can Quit[/url]

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Civil Liberties


The revelation that President Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on telephone communications without a court warrant has caused no surge in public concern about civil liberties. In fact, there are signs that the president has achieved at least some success over the past month in persuading the public that his policies are the right ones for the country.

By a 50% to 33% margin, more Americans are concerned that the government hasn`t yet gone far enough in protecting the country against terrorism than are concerned that the government has gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Concern about government infringement on civil liberties has remained unchanged over the past two years, and has not moved in response to the NSA spying controversy.

Public interest in the wiretap story, if anything, is growing. Fully 37% say they have been following news on Bush authorizing wiretaps of suspected terrorists very closely, which is nearly as many as paid close attention to the situation in Iraq. That compares with 32% who followed this story very closely last month. Democrats, Republicans and independents show similar levels of interest.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

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http://www.workingforchange.com/columnists.cfm?autype=x

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February 6, 2006
Who Will Save America?
My Epiphany
http://counterpunch.org/roberts02062006.html

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

A number of readers have asked me when did I undergo my epiphany, abandon right-wing Reaganism and become an apostle of truth and justice.

I appreciate the friendly sentiment, but there is a great deal of misconception in the question.

When I saw that the neoconservative response to 9/11 was to turn a war against stateless terrorism into military attacks on Muslim states, I realized that the Bush administration was committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences for the US that, in the end, would destroy Bush, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.

My warning was not prompted by an effort to save Bush`s bacon. I have never been any party`s political or ideological servant. I used my positions in the congressional staff and the Reagan administration to change the economic policy of the United States. In my efforts, I found more allies among influential Democrats, such as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long, Joint Economic Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen and my Georgia Tech fraternity brother Sam Nunn, than I did among traditional Republicans who were only concerned about the budget deficit.

My goals were to reverse the Keynesian policy mix that caused worsening "Phillips curve" trade-offs between employment and inflation and to cure the stagflation that destroyed Jimmy Carter`s presidency. No one has seen a "Phillips curve" trade-off or experienced stagflation since the supply-side policy was implemented. (These gains are now being eroded by the labor arbitrage that is replacing American workers with foreign ones. In January 2004 I teamed up with Democratic Senator Charles Schumer in the New York Times and at a Brookings Institution conference in a joint effort to call attention to the erosion of the US economy and Americans` job prospects by outsourcing.)

The supply-side policy used reductions in the marginal rate of taxation on additional income to create incentives to expand production so that consumer demand would result in increased real output instead of higher prices. No doubt, the rich benefitted, but ordinary people were no longer faced simultaneously with rising inflation and lost jobs. Employment expanded for the remainder of the century without having to pay for it with high and rising rates of inflation. Don`t ever forget that Reagan was elected and re-elected by blue collar Democrats.

The left-wing`s demonization of Ronald Reagan owes much to the Republican Establishment. The Republican Establishment regarded Reagan as a threat to its hegemony over the party. They saw Jack Kemp the same way. Kemp, a professional football star quarterback, represented an essentially Democratic district. Kemp was aggressive in challenging Republican orthodoxy. Both Reagan and Kemp spoke to ordinary people. As a high official in the Reagan administration, I was battered by the Republican Establishment, which wanted enough Reagan success so as not to jeopardize the party`s "lock on the presidency" but enough failure so as to block the succession to another outsider. Anyone who reads my book, The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1984) will see what the real issues were.

If I had time to research my writings over the past 30 years, I could find examples of partisan articles in behalf of Republicans and against Democrats. However, political partisanship is not the corpus of my writings. I had a 16-year stint as Business Week`s first outside columnist, despite hostility within the magazine and from the editor`s New York social set, because the editor regarded me as the most trenchant critic of the George H.W. Bush administration in the business. The White House felt the same way and lobbied to have me removed from the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Earlier when I resigned from the Reagan administration to accept appointment to the new chair, CSIS was part of Georgetown University. The University`s liberal president, Timothy Healy, objected to having anyone from the Reagan administration in a chair affiliated with Georgetown University. CSIS had to defuse the situation by appointing a distinguished panel of scholars from outside universities, including Harvard, to ratify my appointment.

I can truly say that at one time or the other both sides have tried to shut me down. I have experienced the same from "free thinking" libertarians, who are free thinking only inside their own box.

In Reagan`s time we did not recognize that neoconservatives had a Jacobin frame of mind. Perhaps we were not paying close enough attention. We saw neoconservatives as former left-wingers who had realized that the Soviet Union might be a threat after all. We regarded them as allies against Henry Kissinger`s inclination to reach an unfavorable accommodation with the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought, or was believed to think, that Americans had no stomach for a drawn-out contest and that he needed to strike a deal before the Soviets staked the future on a lack of American resolution.

Reagan was certainly no neoconservative. He went along with some of their schemes, but when neoconservatives went too far, he fired them. George W. Bush promotes them. The left-wing might object that the offending neocons in the Reagan administration were later pardoned, but there was sincere objection to criminalizing what was seen, rightly or wrongly, as stalwartness in standing up to communism.

Neoconservatives were disappointed with Reagan. Reagan`s goal was to END the cold war, not to WIN it. He made common purpose with Gorbachev and ENDED the cold war. It is the new Jacobins, the neoconservatives, who have exploited this victory by taking military bases to Russian borders.

I have always objected to injustice. My writings about prosecutorial abuse have put me at odds with "law and order conservatives." I have written extensively about wrongful convictions, both of the rich and famous and the poor and unknown. My thirty-odd columns on the frame-up of 26 innocent people in the Wenatchee, Washington, child sex abuse witch hunt played a role in the eventual overturning of the wrongful convictions.

My book, with Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, details the erosion of the legal rights that make law a shield of the innocent instead of a weapon in the hands of government. Without the protection of law, rich and poor alike are at the mercy of government. In their hatred of "the rich," the left-wing overlooks that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government. The class genocide of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history.

Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. As the government`s power grows, the people are eclipsed.

We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.

The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. As everyone must know by now, the New York Times has totally failed its First Amendment obligations, allowing Judith Miller to make war propaganda for the Bush administration, suppressing for an entire year the news that the Bush administration was illegally spying on American citizens, and denying coverage to Al Gore`s speech that challenged the criminal deeds of the Bush administration.

The TV networks mimic Fox News` faux patriotism. Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda.

The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don`t want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.

Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors. They undermine our protection by trashing the Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees. Those with a tyrannical turn of mind have always used fear and hysteria to overcome obstacles to their power and to gain new means of silencing opposition.

Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush`s critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?

If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability. People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.

I am certain that there are more Bush critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.

How long before members of the opposition party, should there be one, find that they cannot return to Washington for important votes, because they have been placed on the no-fly list? What oversight does Congress or a panel of federal judges exercise over the list to make sure there are valid reasons for placing people on the list?

If the government can have a no-fly list, it can have a no-drive list. The Iraqi resistance has demonstrated the destructive potential of car bombs. If we are to believe the government`s story about the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh showed that a rental truck bomb could destroy a large office building. Indeed, what is to prevent the government from having a list of people who are not allowed to leave their homes? If the Bush administration can continue its policy of picking up people anywhere in the world and detaining them indefinitely without having to show any evidence for their detention, it can do whatever it wishes.

Many readers have told me, some gleefully, that I will be placed on the no-fly list along with all other outspoken critics of the growth in unaccountable executive power and war based on lies and deception. It is just a matter of time. Unchecked, unaccountable power grows more audacious by the day. As one reader recently wrote, "when the president of the United States can openly brag about being a felon, without fear of the consequences, the game is all but over."

Congress and the media have no fight in them, and neither, apparently, do the American people. Considering the feebleness of the opposition, perhaps the best strategy is for the opposition to shut up, not merely for our own safety but, more importantly, to remove any impediments to Bush administration self-destruction. The sooner the Bush administration realizes its goals of attacking Iran, Syria, and the Shia militias in Lebanon, the more likely the administration will collapse in the maelstrom before it achieves a viable police state. Hamas` victory in the recent Palestinian elections indicates that Muslim outrage over further US aggression in the Middle East has the potential to produce uprisings in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Not even Karl Rove and Fox "News" could spin Bush out of the catastrophe.

Perhaps we should go further and join the neocon chorus, urging on invasions of Iran and Syria and sending in the Marines to disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon. Not even plots of the German High Command could get rid of Hitler, but when Hitler marched German armies into Russia he destroyed himself. If Iraq hasn`t beat the hubris out of what Gordon Prather aptly terms the "neo-crazies," US military adventures against Iran and Hizbullah will teach humility to the neo-crazies.

Many patriotic readers have written to me expressing their frustration that fact and common sense cannot gain a toehold in a debate guided by hysteria and disinformation. Other readers write that 9/11 shields Bush from accountability, They challenge me to explain why three World Trade Center buildings on one day collapsed into their own footprints at free fall speed, an event outside the laws of physics except under conditions of controlled demolition. They insist that there is no stopping war and a police state as long as the government`s story on 9/11 remains unchallenged.

They could be right. There are not many editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of the 9/11 Commission Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11.

Debate is dead in America for two reasons: One is that the media concentration permitted in the 1990s has put news and opinion in the hands of a few corporate executives who do not dare risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side of government, or their advertising revenues by becoming "controversial." The media follows a safe line and purveys only politically correct information. The other reason is that Americans today are no longer enthralled by debate. They just want to hear what they want to hear. The right-wing, left-wing, and libertarians alike preach to the faithful. Democracy cannot succeed when there is no debate.

Americans need to understand that many interests are using the "war on terror" to achieve their agendas. The Federalist Society is using the "war on terror" to achieve its agenda of concentrating power in the executive and packing the Supreme Court to this effect. The neocons are using the war to achieve their agenda of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Police agencies are using the war to remove constraints on their powers and to make themselves less accountable. Republicans are using the war to achieve one-party rule--theirs. The Bush administration is using the war to avoid accountability and evade constraints on executive powers. Arms industries, or what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex," are using the war to fatten profits. Terrorism experts are using the war to gain visibility. Security firms are using it to gain customers. Readers can add to this list at will. The lack of debate gives carte blanche to these agendas.

One certainty prevails. Bush is committing America to a path of violence and coercion, and he is getting away with it.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: [e-mail]

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February 5, 2006
Q&A: NSA EAVESDROPPING: Privacy vs. National Security?
http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot2_020506.html

By LIONEL BEEHNER

From the Council on Foreign Relations, February 5, 2006

Lionel Beehner is a staff writer for the Council on Foreign Relations website, cfr.org.

Introduction

President Bush has defended his post-9/11 decision to grant the National Security Agency powers to wiretap without warrants as "vital" to protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. "If al-Qaeda is calling someone in America, we want to know what they`re saying on that call," he says. Critics, however, charge the program violates the separation of powers delineated in the U.S. Constitution, as well as Fourth Amendment protections from illegal search and seizure and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA established a secret court to grant surveillance warrants to intelligence agencies monitoring communications between Americans on U.S. soil and suspected terrorists abroad.

In the politically charged atmosphere of Washington, the issue has caused Democrats to charge the executive branch with overreaching its authority. But the issue is not a completely partisan affair; some Republicans have also expressed an interest in establishing the legal foundations of the eavesdropping program. "[The program] violates FISA--there`s no doubt about that," Arlen Specter (R-PA) recently told reporters. On February 6, the Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings on the "domestic spying" issue.

What are the Senate Judiciary Committee`s concerns about the NSA surveillance program?

The committee will raise a number of issues, among them the legality of the surveillance program, the protection of civil liberties, and the powers of the presidency versus those of Congress during war. The Judiciary Committee has requested several classified legal memos from the Justice Department, but was rebuffed on the grounds that the Bush administration already released a detailed 42-page white paper on January 19, 2006, explaining its legal arguments (The White House denies publicly that the requested memos even exist, according to the New York Times). The lone witness in next week`s hearings will be Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

What is the White House`s argument?

Experts predict Gonzales will argue that the president`s authority to spy on U.S. citizens or groups communicating with suspected terrorists abroad was granted by Congress one week after September 11, 2001. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), without specifically mentioning wiretapping, grants the president broad authority to "use all necessary...force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the [9/11] terrorist attacks." Administration officials argue this authority includes the power to secretly gather intelligence on al-Qaeda and associated groups. Their argument was upheld by the Supreme Court`s 2004 ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which--though related to the detention of U.S. citizens during war time--suggests the AUMF affords the president implicit powers to monitor U.S. citizens corresponding with suspected terrorists. "It`s long been the case, as long as we`ve had electronic surveillance, that the United States has engaged in electronic surveillance of the enemy during a time of war," Gonzales said in a January 24 interview with National Public Radio. Gonzales will also say Congress was informed when Bush notified the so-called Gang of Eight, mostly high-ranking members of both houses. He`ll further argue that FISA is an outdated law-enforcement mechanism that is overly time-consuming and not conducive to current intelligence-gathering demands. "FISA does not anticipate a post-September 11 situation," wrote John Schmidt, former associate attorney general, in the Chicago Tribune last December. Moreover, administration officials have portrayed the program not as domestic surveillance, but as a monitoring program for terrorists abroad. Officials have begun publicly referring to the operation as " Terrorist Surveillance Program."

What arguments run counter to the administration`s position?

Critics of the program levy an array of charges against the NSA spying program, including:

*

It is illegal. Critics often point to a 1972 Supreme Court case, United States v. United States District Court (often referred to as the "Keith" case) involving a plot to blow up a CIA office. The court ruled the executive branch, even when issues of national security are at stake, has no authority to spy on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without a warrant. (The White House says this decision does not involve communications with foreign entities and is irrelevant). Critics also accuse the White House of violating FISA. The secret court set up in 1978 was created expressly for this kind of covert surveillance, they say, and in its history, the court has rarely denied the executive branch a wiretapping warrant. It even allows federal agencies to request "after-the-fact" warrants for up to three days. "Congress was very clear about procedures to use for domestic surveillance," says Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond. Further, critics in Congress argue that AUMF, passed in the days after 9/11, does not explicitly authorize warrantless wiretapping on U.S.citizens.
*

It is ineffective. According to a January 17 New York Times article, most of the tips by the wiretaps led to "dead ends" and swamped the FBI, which must follow up on them. This contradicts assertions by administration officials that the program has saved "thousands of lives." On January 23, General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director for national intelligence, said that had such a program been in place prior to September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks may have been avoided. William Arkin, who covers national-security issues for the Washington Post, calls this a "pretty bad overstatement."
*

It violates Americans` civil liberties. There have been a slew of court cases against the NSA by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as well as by scholars like the Hoover Institution`s Larry Diamond and Vanity Fair`s Christopher Hitchens, who communicate actively with contacts in the Middle East. U.S. telecommunications company AT&T has been sued by Electronic Frontier Foundation for collaborating with the NSA in intercepting phone calls with court approval. Still, White House officials stress that unless a U.S. citizen is communicating with a terrorist suspect or organization overseas, their correspondence would not be monitored.
*

It has been presented inconsistently. On one hand, Gonzales has suggested the White House originally considered legislation to legalize its secret wiretaps, but thought it would not pass Congress. He and other officials later backtracked and said a bill to reform FISA was not sought because the program`s details would be made public, thus endangering its effectiveness. Critics have also pointed to earlier contradictory statements made by administration officials denying the existence of the domestic-spying program. "When we`re talking about chasing down terrorists, we`re talking about getting a court order before we do so," President Bush said in an April 2004 speech in Buffalo. "Nothing has changed."
*

It was enacted without Congressional oversight. Most on Capitol Hill outside of the "gang of eight" were kept out of the loop of the domestic-spying program. "What is unique about this one particular program among all the other sensitive NSA programs that justifies keeping Congress in the dark?" Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a member of the group, recently asked. Congress is likely to press for procedural reforms and more openness when briefed on national-security matters. Gonzales has said that notifying all Congressional members was unnecessary because of the AUMF granted by Congress after September 11.

Are current efforts in Congress likely to force changes in U.S. surveillance efforts?

Experts are doubtful the White House will reveal any of its legal memos or disclose more information than what`s already been revealed. "It`s a showcase event, not an investigation," Arkin says. Though the NSA is unlikely to stop its domestic spying, a number of reforms, mostly of a procedural nature, could emerge, experts say. "Congress will say in the future you guys [the White House] will have to find another way of telling us about this," he says. "They`ll say, `We`ve met the enemy and it`s our own procedures.`" Two more hearings are expected in the days and weeks ahead, according to the Washington Post, and Specter, who chairs the judiciary panel, is expected to call former Justice Department officials and members of the FISA court to testify. Some high-ranking Democrats have suggested subpoenaing Bush administration officials.

Will FISA be reformed?

Experts are unsure. On one hand, if legislation is drafted to legalize the NSA wiretapping, as Bush points out, "We`ll show the enemy what we`re doing." Further, as Arkin says, "FISA is a law-enforcement mechanism and we`re talking about intelligence-gathering." Or, as an administration official told Time magazine, "FISA was very much focused on getting one particular guy." But some experts say FISA can and should be revised to accommodate some of the legal issues Congressional members are raising. For example, the legal standard the Justice Department must meet under FISA to be granted a wiretapping warrant could be lowered from "probable cause" to "reasonable suspicion." The law currently allows the attorney general seventy-two hours to obtain court approval after authorizing a wire tap; that time period could be lengthened. Finally, FISA could be amended to allow intelligence agencies to monitor large numbers of phone calls without seeking individual warrants for each wiretap.

Will the domestic-spying issue affect the midterm elections?

It`s not clear, experts say. Recent polls by WashingtonPost/ABC News reveal that three-quarters of Republicans support the NSA wiretapping program, while just one-third of Democrats do. Democrats, however, are careful not to appear soft on national security. Karl Rove, President Bush`s chief adviser, is intent on making national security and the war on terror a central issue of the upcoming elections, experts say. He recently accused Democrats of holding "a pre-9/11 view of the world." Hillary R. Clinton (D-NY) responded by saying," I support tracking down terrorists...but I think it can be done in a lawful way."

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February 8, 2006
The Globalist
Can the U.S. Use Iraq to Get Through to Iran?
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2006/02/08/international/IHT-0…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

The decision to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear weapons program represents a diplomatic success for the Bush administration, which showed unusual flexibility in coaxing Russia and China to back the move.

For the United States to support an International Atomic Energy Agency resolution chiding Israel by championing "a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction," as it did to secure the Russian and Chinese support, represents a form of pliancy never seen in President George W. Bush`s first term. Such give-and-take, the essence of diplomacy, might have helped on Iraq.

It might have also ensured that things never reached this point with Iran. The current diplomatic cohesion of major powers is striking, but I cannot say the prospect of a Security Council debate, and possible punitive measures against Iran, fills me with hope.

On the contrary, it fills me with a sense of opportunities lost. The great void of Iranian-American relations is also the great, and perhaps most dangerous, anomaly of international relations today. It need not have been this way.

Before the arrival last year of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his foul rabble-rousing rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel, the presence of his moderate predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, and the helpful Iranian role in Afghanistan had offered openings for dialogue.

There were Iranian-American contacts, at a modest level. Iran`s interest in the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, provided a new convergence of interests. Khatami, the face of at least one Iran, favored engagement with the West. His was the most visible expression of a significant current of Iranian culture.

Clever diplomacy might at last have overcome a rupture that has festered since Iran`s theocratic revolution and seizure of American hostages in 1979. But the Bush administration was then in its giddiest mode, and the axis-of-evil view of Iran prevailed.

Now it is Iran`s turn to be giddy with its power and uninterested in concessions. It is, without much doubt, the emergent dominant power of the Middle East.

Its pride is not compromised by a colonial past, its wealth is assured by soaring oil prices, its enemies have been removed to east and west, and its influence is spreading through Iraq to the southern suburbs of Beirut on a buoyant tide of resurgent Shiism, the branch of Islam with which it is powerfully identified.

So, when Ahmadinejad says, "You can issue as many resolutions as you like and have fun with it, but you cannot prevent Iran`s progress," he should be taken at his word.

Iran is not in pliant mode because it does not yet see any compelling reason to be so. Progress, for Iran, means strengthening its regional hand, which is where the dubious nuclear program it insists is peaceful comes in. In this context, it is more likely that any Security Council resolution will goad rather than tame a restive power.

There is a parallel diplomatic course that the United States might contemplate. As the first and second most influential forces in the new Iraq, America and Iran have been cooperating, albeit uneasily, at close quarters and their interests converge in several respects. The possibility exists to leverage this convergence into dialogue.

As James Dobbins, the director of the international security and defense policy center at the Rand Corporation, put it: "American and Iranian objectives in Iraq are not greatly in conflict, and success there will depend substantially on convergent guidance from the major outside players."

Both the United States and Iran want Iraq`s democratic experiment to achieve stability, the former because it wants to set a regional example, the latter because it wants Shiite and Kurdish power delivered through the urns consolidated.

Iran does not want a triumphant United States on its borders, delivering a model that could undermine the theocracy of Tehran. But nor does it want the United States to leave Iraq and so deliver the country into a civil war of unpredictable outcome. On balance, it favors America`s presence as the long as the Shiite resurgence continues.

"Iranian policy here is simple," said Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, in a recent interview in Baghdad. "It is to keep the Shiites in a victorious position, prevent Sunni Arabs from ruling the country again and ensure security so Shiite pilgrims can go to the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala."

Talabani, a Kurd who received much support from Iran during a long fight against Saddam, continued: "I have asked the Iranians to help me against terrorism and stop any animosity toward the United States because they delivered the Iranian dream of Saddam`s removal."

Of course, that animosity has not stopped. But Iran has shown restraint in Iraq. The United States has responded with its own moderation, trying to keep the bitterness of bilateral ties off Iraqi territory, while insisting that any Iranian transfer of weapons cease, along with any military training of Iraqis.

"We have not sought to impose our overall differences on the situation here, or say Iraq must adopt a hostile policy to Iran," said Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, a potential future prime minister from the most influential Shiite party, suggested he saw the possibility of mediating. "When we meet American officials, we do not hide our friendship with Iran. Nor do we hide to Iran our interest in better relations with the U.S. There are interests here that can be developed."

Khalilzad has made it clear he is ready to meet with the Iranians, but only to discuss Iraq-related matters. The offer has led nowhere. Still, he said it was "not at all impossible" that a meeting might take place.

In the long term, engagement with Iran, even that of Ahmadinejad, is in America`s interest. Iraq offers an avenue, and a venue, to start talking. It will not happen soon, but a Nixon-to-China moment in American-Iranian relations is the only way to turn events from a destructive spiral.

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February 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who`s Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/opinion/08dowd.html

By MAUREEN DOWD

The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic.

In 2000 and 2004, G.O.P. gunslingers played into the Western myth and mined images of manliness, feminizing Al Gore as a Beta Tree-Hugger, John Kerry as a Waffling War Wimp With a Hectoring Wife and John Edwards as his true bride, the Breck Girl.

Now, in the distaff version of Swift-boating, they are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies, a knife-wielding Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and a snarling Scarlett Johansson in "Match Point." (How many pregnant mistresses does Woody Allen have to kill off in movies before he feels he`s reversed Dostoyevsky and proved that if the crime is worth it, there should be no punishment?)

Republicans think that men who already have nagging, bitter women in their lives will not want for president the sort of woman who gave W. a dyspeptic smile or eye-rolling appraisal during State of the Union addresses.

In "Commander in Chief," writers were careful to make Geena Davis`s chief executive calm and controlled under pressure — even when her rival, played by Donald Sutherland, made an insulting menopause crack.

The hit on Hillary may seem crude and transparent. But in the void created by dormant Democrats, crouching in what Barack Obama calls "a reactive posture," crude and transparent ploys work for the Republicans. Just look at how far the Bushies` sulfurous scaremongering on terror, and cynical linkage of Saddam and Osama, have gotten them.

The gambit handcuffs Hillary: If she doesn`t speak out strongly against President Bush, she`s timid and girlie. If she does, she`s a witch and a shrew. That plays particularly well in the South, where it would be hard for an uppity Hillary to capture many more Bubbas than the one she already has.

It`s the riddle of the Sphinx that has been floating around since the selection of Geraldine Ferraro. Betty Friedan worried then that a woman seen as a threat to men would not get to the White House. But how can a woman who`s not a threat to men get there?

The G.O.P. honcho Ken Mehlman kicked off the misogynistic attack on George Stephanopoulos`s Sunday show. "I don`t think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates," he said. Referring to Hillary`s recent taunts about Republicans, he added, "Whether it`s the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger."

Hillary did not sound angry when she made those comments — she`s learned since her tea-and-cookies outburst in the `92 campaign. A man who wants to undermine a woman`s arguments can ignore the substance and simply dismiss her as unstable and shrill. It`s a hoary tactic: women are more mercurial than men; they get depressed more often and pop pills more often. As a top psychiatrist once told me, women are "hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable."

But as the G.O.P. tars Hillary as hysterical, it is important to note that women are affected by lunar tides only once a month, while Dick Cheney has rampaging hormones every day.

Republicans have also labeled men hysterical (from the Greek for "womb"). Howard Dean was skewered on the Scream. And when John McCain was soaring in the 2000 primaries, Bush supporters viciously whispered that his fits of temper signaled that he had come back from Vietnam with snakes in his head.

Senator McCain went over the top again this week in a letter to Senator Obama. Although Mr. McCain tried to cast his "I`m the reformer — you back off, new guy" letter as "straight talk" after an Obama dis, it was snide and bitchy, more like an angry missive of a spurned lover to an ex-boyfriend than a note from a respected senior senator to a respected junior one.

Mr. McCain could take a lesson from Condi Rice, who gets hyperarticulate and bristly when she`s mad, but not bitchy. Or Oprah, whose anger at James Frey had a Mosaic dignity.

Hillary`s problem isn`t that she`s angry. It`s that she`s not angry enough. From Iraq to Katrina and the assault on the Constitution, from Schiavo to Alito and N.S.A. snooping to Congressional corruption, Hillary has failed to lead in voicing outrage. She`s been too busy triangulating and calculating to be good at articulating.

The Republicans can`t marginalize Hillary. She has already marginalized herself.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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NAFTA and Nativism
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; A19

Everybody talks about globalization; nobody ever does anything about it. The world labor market looms over every horizon with its promise of cheaper goods and lower pay. The public is skeptical, rightly, about the benefits of globalization, but the process of harnessing it, of writing enforceable rules that would benefit not just investors but most of our citizens, is hard to even conceive. And so globalization is experienced by many Americans as a loss of control. Manufacturing moves to China, engineering to India; que sera, sera .

Except on our borders. With the number of immigrants illegally in the United States estimated at 11 million, the tensions between Americans and Mexicans -- chiefly, working-class Americans and working-class Mexicans -- are rising. And those are tensions that congressional Republicans, who don`t look to have a lot of other issues they can run on this fall, are eager to stoke.

In December the House approved a bill by Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin that would turn all those undocumented immigrants into felons. It would supersede local ordinances that keep police from inquiring into the status of people coming forth to report crimes or help in investigations. It would help create a permanent underground population in our midst, with no hope of ever attaining legal status.

But the most striking aspect of the assault on undocumented immigrants is that it has no theory of causality. Over 40 percent of the Mexicans who have come, legally and illegally, to the United States have done so in the past 15 years. The boom in undocumenteds is even more concentrated than that: There were just 2.5 million such immigrants in the United States in 1995; fully 8 million have arrived since then.

Why? It`s not because we`ve let down our guard at the border; to the contrary, the border is more militarized now than it`s ever been. The answer is actually simpler than that. In large part, it`s NAFTA.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold, of course, as a boon to the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico -- guaranteed both to raise incomes and lower prices, however improbably, throughout the continent. Bipartisan elites promised that it would stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, too. "There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," said President Bill Clinton as he was building support for the measure in the spring of 1993.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, could not have been more precisely crafted to increase immigration -- chiefly because of its devastating effect on Mexican agriculture. As liberal economist Jeff Faux points out in "The Global Class War," his just-published indictment of the actual workings of the new economy, Mexico had been home to a poor agrarian sector for generations, which the government helped sustain through price supports on corn and beans. NAFTA, though, put those farmers in direct competition with incomparably more efficient U.S. agribusinesses. It proved to be no contest: From 1993 through 2002, at least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land.

The experience of Mexican industrial workers under NAFTA hasn`t been a whole lot better. With the passage of NAFTA, the maquiladoras on the border boomed. But the raison d`etre for these factories was to produce exports at the lowest wages possible, and with the Mexican government determined to keep its workers from unionizing, the NAFTA boom for Mexican workers never materialized. In the pre-NAFTA days of 1975, Faux documents, Mexican wages came to 23 percent of U.S. wages; in 1993-94, just before NAFTA, they amounted to 15 percent; and by 2002 they had sunk to a mere 12 percent.

The official Mexican poverty rate rose from 45.6 percent in 1994 to 50.3 percent in 2000. And that was before competition from China began to shutter the maquiladoras and reduce Mexican wages even more.

So if Sensenbrenner wants to identify a responsible party for the immigration he so deplores, he might take a peek in the mirror. In the winter of `93, he voted for NAFTA. He helped establish a system that increased investment opportunities for major corporations and diminished the rights, power and, in many instances, living standards of workers on both sides of the border. Now he and his Republican colleagues are stirring the resentments of the same American workers they placed in jeopardy by supporting the corporate trade agenda.

Walls on the border won`t fix this problem, nor will forcing cops to arrest entire barrios. So long as the global economy is designed, as NAFTA was, to keep workers powerless, Mexican desperation and American anger will only grow. Forget the fence. We need a new rulebook for the world.

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Guerrilla Violence Leaves 9 Iraqis, 4 GIs Dead
Shiites Targeted during Festival

CBS says that Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is increasing, as is Sunni frustration with Shiite death squads.

Bombings and other violence in Iraq killed 9 Iraqis on Tuesday. The head of the Fallujah city council was shot dead, as was a clerical follower of Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad.

Four American GIs were also killed.

On Monday, guerrillas had attacked Shiites in Baqubah and then in the shrine center of Kahdimiyah in northeast Baghdad. The country is tense because Thursday is Ashura, a big day of processions and mourning sessions commemorated the martyred grandson of the Prophet, Husayn. Since the American invasion, Ashura has often seen bloody violence from Sunni guerrillas targeting Shiites in hopes of provoking a civil war.

Guerrillas targeted the Iraqi minister of education with a roadside bomb, but the assassination attempt failed.

Senator John Warner upbraided Secretary of Defense Donald Ru… over the mistakes made in Iraqi reconstruction. Rumsfeld now says that rebuilding Iraq`s infrastructue could take decades and that the US should not make Iraqis "dependent" (apparently by helping them out of the mess Bush and Rumsfeld have made of the country).

Rumsfeld, whose administration of Iraq has been the most corrupt Western government of a colony since King Leopold of Belgium looted the Congo, [urlhad the gall to blame Iraqi problems on Iraqi corruption.]http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13814451.htm[/url]

Al-Zaman alleges that a secret agreement between the Iraqi government and the International Monetary fund provides for at least some private sector involvement in the Iraqi petroleum industry (state-owned since 1971), as well as the end of the UN oil for food deliveries to families. The latter have kept many Iraqis from feeling the worst effects of the horrible economy.

[urlThe US invasion and the subsequent guerrilla war]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/3cc0cac335fab74648694a544e3038d6.htm[/url] has been damaging to the mental health of Iraq`s children.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the United Iraqi Alliance now won`t try to choose a prime minister until Saturday. The Virtue Party (Fadhila) says that it was offered a powerful cabinet post if its candidate for prime minister would withdraw.

Kurdish independent politician Mahmoud Othman is alleging that the US encouraged the foreign jihadis to come to Iraq, so that it could fight them there. He blamed the US and the Iraqi governments for the deteriorating security situation in the country. Othman, a member of parliament, once served on the Interim Governing Council, but seems to be becoming more and more anti-American. You wonder if it is a larger trend. (-Al-Sharq al-Awsat)

posted by Juan @ [url2/08/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/guerrilla-violence-leaves-9-iraqis-4.html[/url] 0 comments

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Dial M for Morales: Bush`s phone offensive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,,1704966,00.…

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday February 8, 2006

Guardian
It would normally have been seen as a routine courtesy. But when Bolivia`s newly elected populist president, Evo Morales, received a congratulatory telephone call from the White House last week, he confessed he was surprised.The US has made no secret of its concerns over Mr Morales`s plans to legalise coca cultivation, strengthen state control of Bolivia`s energy resources, and his fraternal links with Hugo Chávez, Venezuela`s fiercely anti-American leader. But here was George Bush on the phone commending Bolivia`s "strong commitment to the democratic process" and, says his spokesman, urging "constructive dialogue".

It is a measure of the US`s uneasy relations with many Latin American governments that Mr Bush`s call was regarded as unusual. Conventional wisdom, after a raft of election successes by left-of-centre politicians and a fractious regional summit in November, is that the US is losing control in its own backyard.

But Mr Bush has increasingly urgent reasons to raise his game. They include Mr Chávez`s confrontational stance, his regional oil politics and his alliance with Fidel Castro`s Cuba. This week he called on Venezuelans to arm themselves and "launch a counter-attack against US imperialism". His speech followed tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions.

The US is also concerned that China, hungry for raw materials and energy deals, is filling a Latin American vacuum caused by post 9/11 neglect. Washington`s security, immigration, and drug worries are all linked to the so-called "slow growth trap" in which many regional countries are stuck despite the current commodity led export boom.

"Washington`s tattered relations with Latin America have mainly translated into a series of lost opportunities for both sides," said Peter Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue in Foreign Affairs magazine. "The US could end up paying a stiff price for the region`s economic reversals and unsettled politics ... Washington can do better."

That message now seems to have been heard and is spurring a US counter-offensive. Its twin objectives appear to be the isolation of Mr Chávez and his Cuban "axis" and deepening engagement with states such as Bolivia.

Mr Bush`s conciliatory words were echoed by General Bantz Craddock, commander of US southern command, who said Washington could and should work with Mr Morales. Playing to the Bolivian leader`s radical bent, he said the biggest threat to regional security was poverty and social inequality.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the US has begun inviting Bolivian indigenous student leaders, a key Morales` constituency, for free, month-long trips. Potentially more influential is the dangled carrot of free trade agreements and reduced tariffs.

Deputy commerce secretary David Sampson says the US, building on pacts with Mexico, Chile and central American countries, is considering bilateral deals with Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. Brazil and others could follow. Mr Hakim said that was hardly surprising. Despite old antipathies and present disagreements, productive economic ties were "what the majority of Latin American countries most want and need from the US".

Pulling these and other levers, the US hopes to thwart Mr Chávez`s attempts to broaden his anti-American alliance. And for all his talk of revolutionary solidarity and multinational oil company "conspiracies", Mr Morales may yet succumb to Washington`s blandishments.

Overcoming his surprise at Mr Bush`s call, he made one request: lower US trade barriers. If he wanted to discuss it, he said, the man Mr Chávez dubs "Mr Danger" was welcome to visit any time.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Iraqi voices are drowned out in a blizzard of occupiers` spin

The deception that launched the invasion of Iraq now increasingly shapes media coverage of the occupation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1704737,00.html

Sami Ramadani
Wednesday February 8, 2006

Guardian
Three years after invading Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair are still dipping into the trough of deception and disinformation that launched the war: hailing non-existent progress, declaring sanctimonious satisfaction with sectarian elections and holding out the mirage of early withdrawal. In reality, the occupation and divide-and-rule tactics have spawned death squads, torture, kidnappings, chemical attacks, polluted water, depleted uranium, bombardment of civilians, probably more than 100,000 people dead and a relentless deterioration in Iraqis` daily lives.

Much of this goes unreported in the British and American media, stripped of context or consigned to the small print. The headlines are reserved for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s terrorism, Saddam Hussein`s farcical trial and the perennial "exit strategy". We are fed the occupiers` spin, while words of scepticism are deemed jarring. Invited to join a popular BBC radio programme for Iraq`s recent elections, I quoted George Bush`s accidental brush with reality when he declared: "You can`t have free and fair elections in Lebanon under Syrian occupation." An editor politely said: "Sorry Sami, but we are sticking to a positive spin on this one. I am sure we will invite you on other occasions."

A few days ago, a large-scale opinion poll conducted by Maryland University showed that 87% of Iraqis (including 64% of Kurds) endorsed a demand for a timetabled withdrawal of the occupiers. The findings were mostly ignored by the British media.

Admittedly, reports on the ground are difficult and dangerous. But while western media are not averse to revealing deceptions around the WMD scare and pre-war lies, occupier-generated news still takes pride of place, and anti-occupation Iraqi voices of all sects - particularly Shia clergy such as Ayatollahs Hassani, Baghdadi and Khalisi - are ignored.

A few months before US soldiers boasted of using white phosphorus, the BBC`s Paul Wood defended his reporting from Falluja in the November 2004 siege, telling Medialens: "I repeat the point made by my editors, over weeks of total access to the military operation, at all levels: we did not see banned weapons being used ... or even discussed. We cannot therefore report their use." Doctors and refugees fleeing US bombardment talked of "chemical attacks" and people "melting to death". But for the BBC, eyewitness testimony from Iraqis is way down the pecking order of objectivity.

It would clearly be wrong to portray victims` claims as uncontested facts, but there is a duty to publish and investigate them. Had, for example, Iraqi families` claims been highlighted shortly after the occupation began, the world would not have waited over a year to learn of torture at US-run jails. It was not until US soldiers gleefully circulated sickening pictures of tortured Iraqis that the media paid attention.

Many Iraqis have persistently accused US-led forces of "controlling" an assortment of death squads or private militias and "turning a blind eye" to many terrorist attacks. Almost every week, handcuffed and blindfolded men are found lying next to one another, each killed by a single bullet to the head. Who is methodically torturing and killing these people? Who has so far assassinated more than 200 academics and scientists? Iraqis not linked to the Green Zone regime are convinced that US forces and US-backed mercenaries are involved.

Support for some Iraqi claims, however, comes from unexpected sources: two US generals have admitted the presence of targeted killing squads, and last February the Wall Street Journal let slip the presence of six US-trained secret militias. In the same month, Lt General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, told the New York Times: "I think we`re doing what the Phoenix programme was designed to do, without all the secrecy." US death squads assassinated about 40,000 people in Vietnam before Congress halted "Operation Phoenix".

A retired general, Wayne Downing, the former head of special operations forces, affirmed that US-led killing squads started operating immediately after the March 2003 invasion. He told a bemused NBC interviewer: "Katie, it`s a nasty situation in Iraq right now, and this may help it get better."

But the occupiers` "Sunni v Shia" mantra dictates the agenda and clouds the issues. The daily news intake is moulded by senior occupation forces` PR officers and embassy officials camped in the Green Zone - once Saddam`s fortress, now a vast monstrosity housing the occupation authorities and their competing and corrupt Iraqi proteges of all sects.

The lie of WMD embroiled Britain in an immoral, illegal war. Disinformation about the war is the pretext for keeping troops and bases in Iraq. Cosmetic sovereignty and partial withdrawal will not convince Iraqis witnessing the completion of permanent US bases, and US advisers controlling "sovereign" ministries and planning back-door oil privatisation.

Only complete withdrawal will satisfy most Iraqis. And if genuine liberty and independence are not forthcoming, the spiral of violence will intensify from Afghanistan to Palestine.

· Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam`s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University [e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Tomdispatch: Alfred McCoy on How Not to Ban Torture in Congress
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=57336

Alfred McCoy, an expert on the CIA and its history of torture, has some actual news -- the sort that`s been sitting unnoticed right in front of our collective, reportorial eyes. Last year`s clash between John McCain and the Bush administration over the senator`s successful attempt to attach a ban on torture and other abusive interrogation techniques to the Defense Appropriations Bill was heavily reported. After all, it was a heroic tale of a man -- himself tortured pitilessly earlier in his life -- who held off the powers-that-be, rejected their attempts to amend his ban, and finally triumphed by a handy margin in Congress. The ban, now in place, is the law. End of story. Only one problem, reality turns out to lurk in the fine print -– and the McCain amendment has some striking fine print that mainstream reporters failed to attend to; in fact, McCoy tells us, it has a loophole big enough to absolve torturers of their acts and, in combination with an amendment by Senator Lindsey Graham, drive testimony obtained by torture directly into our courts. I would call that news.



While the torture debate is somewhat in abeyance in the United States right now, it continues in Europe. There, a major scandal brews over the ways in which Eastern European countries were used as CIA secret prison sites, European citizens and others were kidnapped from European soil, and CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights used European air space and airports. All this, by the way, seems to have happened with the support of various European intelligence services which, by the evidence, may work as much for the Bush administration as for their own governments.



The Council of Europe has deputized Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty to conduct an extensive investigation of both alleged CIA "black" sites and Agency rendition flights. His preliminary report to the Council on January 22 concluded, albeit tentatively, that six Agency aircraft had, since 2001, made 800 rendition flights -- a level of covert activity far beyond anything reported in the U.S. press. Marty is under significant pressure to get to the bottom of this scandal, which may end up producing more torture headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, various American media outlets continue to investigate the torture story, insuring occasional bombshells like ABC TV`s sensational November 18 story detailing CIA "waterboarding" techniques and its December 5 exposé of the locations of secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.



Finally, it`s well known that only those in the lowest ranks of the military are being held in any way accountable for torture practices mandated from the top and overseen by top civilian, military, and intelligence officials. Even at the lowest levels, accountability has proved, at best, a moving target, as is clear from the most recent torture case tried in this country. After Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush voluntarily surrendered in November 2003, he was tortured with rubber hoses by "Iraqi nationals, reportedly in the employ of the CIA," while Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., 43, of the U.S. Army looked on. Mowhoush then suffered other mistreatment before he fell into Welshofer`s waiting hands. Welshofer has since used the Nuremberg defense -- that he was just following orders in coming up with "creative interrogation techniques" to make Mowhoush talk –- to explain his subsequent actions. He forced Mowhoush, face-first, into a sleeping bag, wrapped him in electrical wire, and sat on the 57-year old prisoner`s chest. After twenty minutes, Mowhoush was dead.



Recently, Welshofer faced American military justice for his crimes. While tried on murder charges, he was convicted only of the lesser counts of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty. These still carried a maximum three-year prison sentence and dismissal from the service (which would have denied him his pension). In the end, however, a military jury sentenced Welshofer to no prison time and only a formal reprimand. He was given 60 days restriction to his home, office, and church; and a forfeiture of $6,000 -- apparently the going rate for an Iraqi life. No one in our self-professed "no-torture" administration thought this worth a comment.



The American Empire Project series I co-edit has just published McCoy`s newest book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. I can testify that, while the book`s focus is grim indeed -- a half-century-plus history of CIA torture research and how it was applied globally -- it is also, simply put, riveting to read. It offers a window into an almost unknown world that we ignore at our peril. I could not recommend it to all of you more strongly. To get a taste of its early sections, check out McCoy`s previous Tomdispatch piece (from which the book developed) or read a Buzzflash review of the book. Tom

Why the McCain Torture Ban Won`t Work
The Bush Legacy of Legalized Torture
By Alfred W. McCoy

Just before Christmas, two of the world`s most venerable legislative bodies engaged in erudite, impassioned debate over what the right balance should be between the imperatives of national security and international prohibitions on torture. They arrived at starkly divergent conclusions that reveal the depth of damage the war on terror is doing to this country`s civil liberties.

On December 7, the House of Lords, reviewing cases in which a dozen Muslim militants were to be deported, spoke with moral clarity on the issue of torture, branding it "an unqualified evil" which should have no place in the proud, thousand-year tradition of British justice. Just a week later, the U.S. Senate amended the Defense Appropriations Bill to prohibit the "abuse" of detainees in American custody, including the many Muslims at our Guantanamo prison, but did so on the purely pragmatic, almost amoral grounds that it "leads to bad intelligence." Under pressure from the White House, the senators also loaded this legislation with loopholes that may soon allow coerced testimony -- extracted through torture -- into American courts for the first time in two centuries.

This disconcerting contrast is but one sign that, under the Bush administration, the United States is moving to publicly legitimate the use of torture, even to the point of twisting this congressional ban on inhumane interrogation in ways that could ultimately legalize such acts. And following their President`s lead, the American people seem to be developing a tolerance, even a taste, for torture.

This country may, in fact, be undergoing an historic shift with profound implications for America`s international standing. It seems to be moving from the wide-ranging but highly secretive tortures wielded by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War decades to an open, even proud use of coercive interrogation as a formal weapon in the arsenal of American power, acceptable both to U.S. courts and the American people.

In the early years of its war on terror, the administration maintained the long-standing yet informal executive policy of ordering clandestine CIA torture in times of crisis. Minutes after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President Bush barked to his aides, "I don`t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

As administration lawyers translated these words into formal directives, they carefully cloaked this otherwise unlawful demand in three controversial constitutional arguments -- that the president`s commander-in-chief powers allow him to override all laws and treaties; that U.S. anti-torture laws can be stretched to provide a winning legal defense for any CIA interrogator accused of torture; and most tenuously of all, that the detainee prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was not on American territory and so was beyond the writ of U.S. courts.

Two years later, when the infamous photos from Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison exposed the administration`s illegal interrogation tactics in lurid color, the White House was faced with an historic choice that, in practice, proved no choice at all: either definitively ban torture or defy the international community by promoting the practice.

Bartering Away Legal Birthrights

That the upper deliberative bodies of the United States and Great Britain found themselves facing the question of torture at exactly the same moment had a certain ironic appropriateness. After all, the two countries share a secret history of torture reaching back to the dark early days of the Cold War. In 1951, these two nations collaborated in a covert CIA-run mind-control research project into which the American government ultimately poured several billion dollars. Late in that decade, CIA scientists elaborated that research into a revolutionary new form of torture, more psychological than physical, that would prove both legally elusive and highly destructive to the human psyche.

Even though this "no-touch" psychological form of torture generally did greater lasting damage than its physical variant, it was surrounded by an appealing scientific aura and was, at least in theory, devoid of the obvious signs of brutality that might trouble the public and provide telling evidence for prosecutors.

For the next 20 years, Washington deployed these torture techniques against communists and other revolutionaries in Asia and Latin America. Simultaneously, London used them to fight nationalists in its far-flung territories during the long, bloody eclipse of the British empire -- in places like Aden, Brunei, British Guiana, and Northern Ireland.

In 1978, charged before the European Court of Human Rights with torturing IRA suspects, Britain swore "a solemn undertaking" that it would never again deploy these psychological torture techniques. Last month, in reversing the deportations of Muslims convicted on "evidence procured by torture inflicted by foreign officials," London`s law lords cited this case in ruling that "bedrock moral principle" from centuries of common law and recent international conventions made torture anathema in the country`s courts.

By contrast, confronted with strong evidence of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the Bush White House has fought back by defending torture as a presidential prerogative and so precipitating an epic political struggle in this country. As a powerfully symbolic state practice, synonymous with brutal autocrats, torture, even of the few, raises profound moral and legal questions about the limits of presidential power, the quality of our justice, and ultimately the character of this American civilization.

While the Bush White House has protected and promoted senior officials implicated in the torture scandal, an ad hoc civil-society coalition of courts, media, and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case, Rasul v. Bush, that the Guantanamo detainees were indeed on U.S. territory, no matter what the administration`s lawyers claimed, and so deserved access to American courts. This decision prompted some of the country`s top law firms, working pro bono, to file 160 habeas corpus cases on behalf of some 300 Guantanamo detainees.

Last summer, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment to the must-pass Defense Appropriation Bill that would ban all "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees and set the U.S. Army Field Manual as the standard for any interrogation, whether by the military or the CIA. President Bush reacted by vowing to veto the bill, should it somehow pass the Republican-controlled Congress.

When Bush`s bluff failed, the White House began lobbying for the insertion of loopholes into the proposed prohibition. First, Vice President Cheney pressed McCain to exempt the CIA from his ban. The senator refused. Next, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley weighed in, urging broad legal exemptions for CIA torturers. Again, the senator stood his ground. Suddenly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s Pentagon rewrote the Army Field Manual to teach interrogators, as the New York Times reported, "how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogation" -- changes one Defense official termed "a stick in McCain`s eye."

To placate the White House, McCain eventually softened his prohibition by adding a legal defense for accused CIA and military interrogators that mimes the extreme exculpatory logic of the Justice Department`s notorious August 2002 Bybee memo. Drafted to protect CIA interrogators after 9/11, this now-disavowed document argued that torture, as defined under U.S. law, required that the suffering inflicted "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." In a section of McCain`s amendment called "Protection of United States Government Personnel," the final legislation opened a little noticed but similarly cavernous legal loophole for future torturers. It allowed U.S. officials "engaging in specific operational practices that involve interrogation of aliens" to claim, if charged, that they "did not know that the practices [they used] were unlawful."

After the Senate passed McCain`s torture ban by a resounding 90-9 vote, ending any hope of a presidential veto, the administration tried to further neutralize its impact by backing an amendment authored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. As originally drafted, this amendment would have allowed the courts to consider all evidence collected under any but the most outrageous uses of "undue coercion." No less startlingly, it denied detainees in places like Guantanamo -- those "unlawful combatants" - any right to challenge their detention by filing writs of habeas corpus in U.S. courts. Complaining that "Non-Citizen Terrorists" at Guantanamo were filing cases over "the quality of their food," Graham urged passage of his amendment to spare "our troops fighting in the War on Terror" from being "sued in every court in the land by our enemies." For a mess of partisan pottage, the senator was bartering away this nation`s constitutional birthright of habeas corpus, a foundational legal protection born of Parliament`s long struggle to ban royal torture writs by the infamous Court of Star Chamber.

After the Senate approved Graham`s amendment by a 49-42 vote on November 10, reformers led by Democratic Senator Carl Levin fought an uphill battle to moderate these extreme proposals -- replacing the bill`s blanket acceptance of "coerced" evidence with ground rules for its evaluation by the courts and trying to limit the ban on habeas corpus appeals from Guantanamo to future cases, allowing those already filed to proceed.

But in the final legislation, titled "The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005," McCain`s now-compromised ban on cruel treatment of detainees was effectively eviscerated by Graham`s denial of legal redress. To nullify the landmark Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo is, in fact, American territory and so falls under the purview of U.S. courts, Graham also stipulated in the final legislation that "the term `United States,` when used in a geographic sense, does not include the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay." In this way, he tried once again to deny detainees any legal basis for access to the courts. In effect, McCain`s motion more or less bans torture, but Graham`s removes any real mechanism for enforcing such a ban.

The Media Mirage of a Torture Ban

Last December 15, all these tensions seemed to dissolve in a dramatic Oval Office handshake between Senator McCain and President Bush who announced that the landmark legislation made it "clear to the world that this government does not torture."

That White House photo-op was, however, a complete media mirage. Within hours, the administration began moving deftly to pull any teeth left in this legislation. Speaking to CNN, Attorney General Antonio Gonzales quickly dismissed McCain`s reform as insignificant, insisting that existing legislation only banned the infliction of "severe" physical or psychological pain in interrogations -- the same linguistic legerdemain that had allowed the administration to start torturing back in 2002. The attorney general seemed to be echoing the opinions of his subordinates who, according to the Washington Post, were already arguing that the McCain amendment would, "under certain circumstances," still allow "waterboarding" -- the same method that the French Inquisition had once called the "question de l`eau" (water question) or "torturae Gallicae ordinariae" (standard Gallic torture) -- and other harsh techniques.

On December 30, right after signing a defense bill that included the McCain amendment at his Crawford ranch, President Bush issued a "signing statement" -- carefully released at the extremely unnewsworthy hour of 8:00 pm that Friday night -- insisting that his powers as commander-in-chief and head of the "unitary executive branch" still allowed him to do whatever was necessary to defend America. So much for McCain`s efforts as the year ended.

Just four days into 2006, Senator McCain, though claiming confidence that the "President understands Congress`s intent" in passing the torture ban, promised "strict oversight to monitor the Administration`s implementation of the new law." Faced with nullification by the presidential signing statement, Senator Edward Kennedy warned, during Judge Alito`s confirmation hearings, that President Bush was insisting "whatever the law of the land might be, whatever Congress might have written, the executive branch has the right to authorize torture without fear of judicial review."

As if to confirm this pessimistic view, the administration quickly deployed the new Detainee Treatment Act to quash any judicial oversight of its actions -- particularly the dubious designation of detainees as "unlawful enemy combatants" unworthy of any protection by the Geneva Conventions or the U.S. Constitution.

On January 3, the Justice Department, citing this new law, notified federal judges that it would soon seek the immediate dismissal of all 160 habeas corpus cases already filed for 300 Guantanamo detainees. On January 12, the Solicitor General, again citing the new law, told the Supreme Court it no longer had jurisdiction over Guantanamo and asked the justices to dismiss another potential landmark "unlawful combatant" case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Then, putting the cherry atop the administration`s many-layered legal confection, on January 24 the Army changed its standing orders to allow military executions at Guantanamo, thus keeping the U.S. courts from intervening in any drum-head death sentences for detainees.

All these maneuvers were part of a White House campaign essentially aimed at formalizing those three dubious legal doctrines that had long underpinned its torture policy. Recoiling from the prospect of an "Imperial Presidency" implicit in these moves, the New York Times of January 15 called on Congress "to curtail Mr. Bush`s expansion of power" and his "unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law."

Looking through a glass darkly into the future, the possible implications of these trends for the quality of American justice are troubling indeed. The military tribunals at Guantanamo are not required to reveal the sources of their evidence against the 500 detainees on trial, even though significant parts of it undoubtedly come from torture and abuse of either the accused or other detainees. Moreover, under the Detainee Treatment Act, federal courts will be able to consider the use of this same coerced information in hearing any appeals from Guantanamo. In a sharp, sad contrast with Britain`s law lords, our congressional legislation allows the courts to weigh the probative value of tortured testimony, potentially introducing coerced evidence into the federal courts for the first time in our nation`s history.

One question seldom asked is: Why has the public response to issues that cut to the very core of America`s national identity been so muted? The short answer: The administration`s increasingly unapologetic advocacy of torture has echoed subtly but effectively with the trauma of 9/11.

With the horrific reality of the Twin Towers attack still resonating and endless nuclear-bomb-in-Times-Square/ticking-bomb interrogation scenarios ricocheting around the media and pop culture, torture seems to have gained an eerie emotional traction. Polls taken over the last three years have confirmed this. With a complex reality reduced to a few terrifyingly simple, fantasy-ridden scenarios, torture in defense of the "homeland" has gained surprisingly wide acceptance, while the torture debate has been reframed -- to the administration`s great advantage -- as a choice between public safety and the lives of millions or private morality and bleeding-heart qualms over a few slaps up the side of the head. In this way, old-fashioned morality has been made to seem little short of immoral.

Through the invisible tendrils that tie a state to its society, the media has often reflected aspects of administration policy on such subjects. Television, in particular, has had a powerful effect in its repeated portrayals of harsh, even abusive interrogations as effective and morally justified acts --when, in fact, they are neither. After years of watching television shows such as "NYPD Blue" and "24" with plots that mimic the ticking-bomb scenario, millions of ordinary Americans seem to believe that we have entered an era when abuse, or even torture, is necessary to save lives.

Each week, for instance, up to 20 million Americans have watched the fictional detectives of "NYPD Blue" use harsh methods to "tune up" suspects in the "pokey,`" or interrogation room, risking their careers to extract information that regularly saved lives and made the city safer. Accepting the need to torture just one criminal in this week`s episode, or just one terrorist with a ticking bomb in Fox Television`s popular CIA drama "24," opens ordinary Americans to consider whether the torture of real terrorists is not only justifiable but imperative. It seems likely that these televised scenarios have lent a hand in creating a public climate tolerant of governmental torture.

Does Bush administration policy really reflect a fundamental shift in moral choices by the American public? Have we really developed a taste for torture?

As a people, we are now faced with a decision that will influence the character of our nation and its reputation in the eyes of the world. We can agree with the Bush administration`s decision to make torture a permanent weapon in the American arsenal -- or we can reject this policy and join the international community by honoring our commitments under the UN convention, as well as under U.S. law, and banning torture unconditionally.

Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books, The American Empire Project, 2006) and a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Copyright 2006 Alfred W. McCoy


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Latest Update: #35244 07.02.06 14:59:26 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 07, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Feb.06: 20

Iraker 02/07/06: Total: 102
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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It`s a war on terrorism, not on poverty
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate
Wednesday, February 8, 2006

WHERE would the Bush administration be without terrorism? Like the Cold War before it, the "war on terror" is a conveniently sweeping rationale for all manner of irrational governance, such as the outrageous $2.77 trillion budget the president proposed to Congress on Monday.

Without terrorism, how could Bush justify to fiscal conservatives the whopping budget deficits that he has ballooned via his tax cuts for the wealthy that he now seeks to make permanent? Without terrorism, how could he convince government corruption watchdogs that the huge increases in military and homeland security -- 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively -- aren`t simply payback to the defense contractors who so heavily support the Republicans every election cycle? Without terrorism, how could the president get away with blindly dumping another $120 billion into the war in Afghanistan and the bungled occupation of Iraq that the Bush administration had once promised would be financed by Iraqi oil sales?

In order to pay for the money pit that is Iraq, the Bush budget demands draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36 billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next five years. This from a president re-elected after promising to expand rather than curtail health-care services to seniors.

Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years, and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program that provides food assistance to low-income seniors, needy pregnant women and children.

These attacks on the social safety net for the most vulnerable members of our society are not only patently unfair, in light of Bush`s tax cuts for the wealthy, but the simultaneous blank check for the Pentagon cannot be honestly justified by the fight against terrorism. And although the president insists that it is unpatriotic to question his strategies in fighting terrorism, let me risk his opprobrium, and that of the pseudo-conservative bully boys that shill for him in the media, by doing just that.

To begin with, we must remember that this "war" was launched against an enemy, still mostly at large, who on Sept. 11 accomplished phenomenal destruction and suffering with armaments no fiercer or costly than some box-cutters. Their key weapon, in fact, was suicidal fanaticism.

Yet, rather than sensibly investing in aggressive global detective work, collaborating with our European allies, engaging meaningfully with an independent and skeptical Arab world, and working to protect vulnerable U.S. sites such as nuclear-power plants, our leaders decided to turn logic on its head and make ignorance about the enemy into a virtue, slash civil liberties and recklessly invade a major Muslim country that had no connection to the attacks.

In other words, our response to Sept. 11 has been almost completely military in nature, granting the Defense Department an excuse to increase spending by 48 percent in just four years. Yet, despite all this spending, and the loss of life that has accompanied it, our standing in the Muslim world has been in freefall since we invaded Iraq, we have never captured or killed Osama bin Laden or his top strongman, we don`t know how to "fix" Iraq or Afghanistan, and we have greatly strengthened the hand of our rivals in Iran.

We don`t even know, as the Sept. 11 commission report revealed, much of anything about the 15 Saudi hijackers and their four leaders from other parts of the Arab world who committed the Sept. 11 attacks. We do know, however, that they weren`t from Iraq, weren`t funded by Iraq and weren`t trained by or in Iraq; nevertheless, the huge elephant in the Bush budget is the war and occupation of Iraq, now approaching its third anniversary, not the effort to dismantle al Qaeda.

"Since 2001, the administration ... liberated nearly 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan," boasts the Bush budget document. Ah, but if they have been liberated, then why the need for an additional $50 billion emergency "bridge funding" in 2007, itself coming on the heels of a supplementary $70 billion budget request last week? The answer provided by the report is that Iraq is far from being stabilized and that in Afghanistan "enemy activity has increased over the past year."

Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Congress is still unwilling to challenge the necessity of "winning" the war in Iraq and, as a result, its complaints about cutting needed domestic programs are framed exclusively as an argument against making Bush`s tax cuts permanent. It is a losing argument, because it leaves Bush as both the big spender and the big tax-cutter once again, posturing as the savior of the taxpayer when he is in fact quite the opposite for all but the wealthiest Americans.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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Feb 9, 2006

Galileo: Why the US is unhappy with China
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HB09Ad01.html

By Federico Bordonaro

It`s simply useless to deny it: access to Galileo`s cutting-edge satellite-navigation technology will increase Beijing`s military power, despite the fact that the European positioning system is under totally civilian, non-military control.

The accuracy of the information that the new system will provide is superior to that currently assured by Washington`s Global Positioning System (GPS), which means that Beijing`s cruise and ballistic missiles, combat aircraft and navy will have highly effective navigation and target-finding instruments at their disposal.

Consequently, a couple of crucial questions will attract a lot of attention: first, whether the European Union military embargo against China retains any meaning; and second, how Sino-European strategic relations will affect the global balance of power.

A high-tech jewel
Satellite navigation entered a new era at the end of 2005. On December 28, an experimental 600-kilogram spacecraft named Giove-A was launched into orbit on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Its mission: demonstrating the key technologies required by Galileo, the EU sat-nav system.

Once fully deployed, the EU system will feature 30 satellites (27 operational plus three active spares), positioned on three circular medium earth orbit (MEO) planes - at an altitude of 23,616 kilometers above Earth - with an orbital plane inclination of 56 degrees with reference to the equatorial plane.

Galileo will provide a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control, and assure interoperability with the other two global satellite navigation systems, the United States` GPS and Russia`s GLONASS (Global Orbiting Navigation Satellite System).

This year, the EU plans to launch up to four operational satellites for the in-orbit validation (IOV) phase. It is hoped that the full operational capability (FOC) phase will be reached in 2008, thanks to the remaining satellites.

Since Galileo will make its service available under all but the most extreme circumstances - and will inform users within seconds of a failure of any satellite - it will mark a significant improvement in sat-nav technology. It will thus be regarded as a priceless tool for applications in which safety is crucial, such as running trains, driving cars and landing aircraft.

Because of the military nature of America`s GPS system, Washington cannot in fact guarantee service continuity in the event of a major crisis. The EU countries, along with China and Israel, have therefore been insisting on the need to launch an independent, civilian-run system to overcome this drawback.

But here comes the tricky part. Yes, the Galileo system is under civilian control. And yes, the EU assures the US it won`t use it for military purposes. However, America`s attitude to the system has remained suspicious. And probably not without good reason.

It`s not only about commercial uses
A quick look at how Washington has reacted to the EU`s sat-nav ambitions since they were first expressed speaks volumes about Galileo`s strategic potential. On December 1, 2001, then US deputy secretary of state Paul Wolfowitz sent a letter to EU defense ministers to "convey [his] concerns about security ramifications for future NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] operations if EU proceeds with Galileo satellite navigation services". [1]

Wolfowitz and the Pentagon were convinced the EU sat-nav infrastructure could hamper the ability of the US to deny GPS to enemies in times of military operations; moreover, he wrote, the US was concerned that Galileo`s Public Regulated Service (PRS) would have "features of the GPS military signal", and that the "civil forum" used by the European Commission could not "provide the proper venue to fully assess" [2] Galileo`s security implications.

In January 2002, a spokesman for the Galileo project declared to the press that the project was "almost dead" as a result of US pressures, but in March 2002 the EU and the European Space Agency agreed to fund the project. Not only had Washington`s pressures failed to stop the program, they had irritated France, Germany and other EU members at a time of looming trans-Atlantic discord over the Iraqi crisis.

Then, after the project had been officially launched in May 2003, China joined up a few months later, in September 2003, by investing US$259 million in the satellite tracking system. The US now had two main worries about Galileo: how to avoid possible malfunctions and useless duplications in the trans-Atlantic security system, and, above all, what to do about China`s participation.

The EU appeared sensitive to US concerns, and key members such as the United Kingdom and Germany proved receptive to Washington`s lobbying against possible military-oriented applications of Galileo (a solution palatable to France).

After four months of negotiations, the EU and the US reached an agreement on Galileo and GPS at the end of the summit held in Ireland on June 26, 2004: the two systems would "navigate side-by-side", avoiding interference with each other`s signals. The deal stressed the commercial nature of Galileo, but its military potential remains obviously unaffected by such statements.

In fact, after the United States` first vigorous reactions in 2001-02, the rise of the independent EU-sponsored sat-nav system has been proceeding consistently since 2003, along with a new phase in de facto Sino-European strategic relations.

And it`s not difficult to understand why China wants to take a ride on the EU`s high-tech spacecraft: in today`s strategic environment, space power is the decisive enabler of air power.

"When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the first coalition assets to make their presence felt on the scene were not air, naval or land forces but rather the allied space systems already on orbit high above the gathering storm." [3]

The supporting role of GPS was pivotal in assuring strategic air dominance to the US in the Gulf War, and since then the world definitively discovered how the concept of air power - and of power itself - had changed thanks to space technology.

Undoubtedly, "Galileo will improve the ability of armed forces to coordinate the movement of units in battle, increasing their effectiveness." But it will also "improve the precision of weapons-guidance systems so that bombs and missiles hit their targets more accurately". [4]

When Galileo is fully operative, it will not be difficult to take advantage of it for military purposes. China, no less than the EU and the US, is well aware that the potential for transforming civilian utilizations into military ones already exists in the project. By installing transmitting devices in bombs, the precision strike capabilities of the attacking side would be tremendously enhanced, thanks to signals sent by Galileo`s satellites.

No wonder, then, that Taiwan - and its security provider, the US - is not so terribly happy about Beijing`s access to the EU`s high-tech pearl. The very balance of power in China`s maritime realm is at stake.

A now-meaningless embargo?
In today`s context of quickly changing geopolitical equilibria, the EU and US arms embargo on China is by right one of the hottest issues. And the interesting thing is that although the question of lifting this embargo is frequently debated at the highest political level in trans-Atlantic and European institutions, few seem to be aware that its strategic meaningfulness may already be waning - not only, or not primarily, because of Paris`s increasing eagerness to end it, but because of three structural aspects.

First and foremost, Europe`s move to characterize its cutting-edge satellite system as civilian-only is driven by two main considerations. The first is its careful diplomatic stance in relation to Washington`s worries. The second is that anything and everything of a declaredly military nature tends to be unpopular with European citizens, and thus becomes more difficult to fund. But in the end, few can doubt that the next generation of Chinese cruise missiles will be guided by Galileo`s (civilian) signals.

Second, concepts such as "battlefield digitalization", "anti-satellite weapons", "cyberwar" and "space strategy" have already made their way into Beijing`s strategic discourse, not merely as trendy loan-words but as strategic projects, at a time of fast-growing Chinese technological capabilities.

Third, despite the EU`s political cautiousness and its close partnership in trans-Atlantic security institutions, a Sino-European strategic relationship seems to be already in an early, but increasingly important, stage of development. And at a glance, its first effect on the global balance of power will be to strengthen Beijing`s influence in the Pacific region.

Notes
1. Christophe Guillemin, Comment la diplomatie americaine s`emploie a court-circuiter Galileo, March 13, 2002.
2. Ibid.
3. Benjamin S Lambeth, "Air Power, Space Power, and Geography", in Colin Gray, Geoffrey Sloan (eds), Geopolitics: Geography and Strategy, Frank Cass 1999, p 73.
4. "Let`s avoid another transatlantic feud", International Herald Tribune, January 13, 2006.

Federico Bordonaro is senior analyst with the Power and Interest News Report. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Feb 9, 2006

US digs in for `Long War`
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB09Ak01.html

By Ehsan Ahrari

"Long War" is the Pentagon`s latest template to fight the "war on terror". The importance of this concept will be signified by the fact that it will be capitalized in all future official military documents, a la "Cold War". The expectation is that eventually it will catch on the same way as "war on terror", which was in the process of being replaced by another phrase, "war against extremism". However, that phrase was not catchy enough. The expectation is that "Long War" will be.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used "Long War" in 2001, but few defense strategists could have imagined then that it would eventually emerge as a broad template for fighting global terrorism. During one of his congressional testimonies in 2001, Rumsfeld said the conflict in Afghanistan would be a "long and hard" war. By 2004, General John Abizaid, the current commander of the US Central Command, was frequently using that phrase to underscore the long-term challenge that al-Qaeda posed to the United States.

In the early months of 2005, it was becoming clear that the administration of President George W Bush was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the use of "GWOT", as some identified the "global war on terrorism", since Islamist propagandists argued that it was in reality just a euphemism for America`s war against Islam. Last September General Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used "Long War" in his parting press conference.

"Long War" holds considerable promise of being catchy and martial in tone and and a sound propaganda tool. The "warriors" (not a pejorative phrase) of the Pentagon would also be able to use it compactly in their daily briefings to make their case. Consequently, even before releasing its Quadrennial Defense Review 2005, the Pentagon has initiated its public campaign of popularizing the concept.

The Long War is an intricate concept. No one should dismiss it as just one more mindless phrase-making exercise in the jargon-laden world of the Pentagon. A lot of thinking seems to have been done before deciding to underscore it. There also appears to be an elaborate coordination between the Pentagon and the newly created office of the director of national intelligence (DNI). In his maiden appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee as DNI, John Negroponte identified terrorism as "the pre-eminent threat" to the US, both domestically and abroad, and the globalization of technology as a reason underlying the spread of weapons of mass destruction. (No one then missed the significance of the ongoing conflict between Iran and the US on the issue.)

In emphasizing the Long War, the US is developing its thinking along the same path that formulated the intricate concept of the Cold War. Considering that the US won that war, a powerful driving force underlying the Long War is that an elaborate and enduring strategy - which also contains a repertoire of political-military operations and tactics - would result in another victory.

Given the highly plan-oriented world of the US military, resources have to be allocated for several years in a row. For that reason alone, a military-oriented anchor had to be found to make a case for future military campaigns. During the Cold War years, there was that mammoth Soviet Union, which was depicted as a supposedly indefatigable and unrelenting enemy. However, when it imploded in 1991 - largely as a result of its acute internal contradictions and as a result of the severely misplaced planning that emphasized expenditures to build military power at the expense of economic power - no other enemy of a colossal proportion took its place. (China is being envisaged now in that capacity in Washington. However, realistically speaking, the military capabilities of that rising power are no match for the awesome conventional and nuclear prowess of the US.)

Then came the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda was responsible for it; however, it was no match in its military power and killing capacity to what the former Soviet Union could do. In principle, the US could wipe out wherever al-Qaeda exists or from where it operates within a matters of days. But the human cost ("collateral damage", to use the military jargon) would be massive and is not deemed worth the price. In the meantime, thanks to the US invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda became less of a threat as an organization, but appeared hard to defeat (not quite indefatigable a la the Soviet Union) as a movement within a short span of time. Soon, the US came to a conclusion that it is really faced with an enduring war, which will last for many years, even after the eradication of al-Qaeda as an organization.

There is an uncanny similarity between the treatment of communism as a movement that drove the US military preparedness of the Cold War years and the current thinking related to the Long War. Communism was treated as a global conspiracy. At first, the thinking among US strategic thinkers was that it was also monolithic. However, when the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict exploded into the border wars of the early 1970s, that "monolithic" depiction was quickly abandoned. The theoretical underpinnings of the Long War are based on defeating global jihad. It is not being viewed as monolithic. But there is a growing awareness that it is highly interconnected, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Indonesia and from Kyrgyzstan to Morocco, thereby requiring an elaborate strategy like the ones related to the Cold War.

In a synchronized endeavor, the US intelligence agencies (the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation) are preparing themselves to understand the intricacies related to global jihad. They stress whenever possible the long-term threats that global jihadis pose to the US, and are coordinating their actions and linking intelligence with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the security agencies of America`s allies.

What are the operational and tactical modalities of waging the Long War in the next few years? The US military will not ignore future "conventional" enemies. It will maintain its capabilities to fight two simultaneous major wars, but will also focus on "unconventional" threats.

In terms of military preparedness, the Special Forces will be given high emphasis. In fact, small rapid-response teams - fully equipped with a variety of high-tech gizmos and drones - will be used, more now than in the past, to kill or capture "high-value" targets. The emphasis here is to enhance the element of uncertainty in the hearts and minds of the terrorists that has been their source of strength.

Two important operational and tactical features of the military preparedness are fighting counter-insurgencies and conducting stabilization operations. In this emphasis, the US military is tacitly admitting its failure to deal with the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies. In addition, its failure to conduct stability operations (another euphemism for nation-building) is generally regarded as one of the developments that resulted in the chaos that emanated from the quick collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003. That chaos is generally regarded as one of the reasons for the escalated popularity of the Iraqi insurgency among the Sunni Iraqis.

Thus an important feature of the Long War is to develop long-term post-conflict stability operations. It might also be viewed as the military`s way of saying that the Bush administration might also be planning for further regime changes in the coming months (beware Iran and Syria).

In the final analysis, one may argue that the notion of Long War is not entirely new. Its critics are already questioning the validity and the rationality of comparing Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong or Vladimir Lenin. Undoubtedly, bin Laden does not have the kind of military forces that were at the disposal of those historical tyrants.

However, he is armed with an idea - that of global jihad - which, even if it may not turn out to be as powerful as the communist framework of taking over the world - still holds ominous potentials in that direction, at least in the thinking of current US civil and military leadership. If they were to be proved wrong, the military preparedness related to the Long War would not hurt America`s strategic interests. However, if they are right, it might turn out to be a viable blueprint of military preparedness.

Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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[urlThe Cartoon That Could End The World]http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2006/02/the_cartoon_tha.html[/url]


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http://www.lewrockwell.com/

Rothbard on the Fall and Rise and Fall of Liberty
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken111.html

By Ryan McMaken

02/08/06 "Lew Rockwell" -- -- George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that those who control the present control the past. It would be difficult to prove Orwell wrong, for surely it is not a mere coincidence that the dim picture of history taught in the government schools and the even more vague history repeated incessantly by the public intellectuals, just happen to create a worldview in which governments through the centuries have made possible everything that is good and decent in the world today.

The myth goes something like this: Prior to the rise of the modern States in the modern world, all had been darkness. A backward feudal system existed with bloodthirsty warlords and tyrannical bishops spreading war and despotism across Europe. Then, one day, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, breaking the power of the superstitious and ignorant Old Order, and establishing in its place, a rational, enlightened system of States. The States of this new Age of Reason were admittedly not democratic, but they were certainly a vast improvement on the old State of affairs. Over time, the kings gave way to democracy for a few people, and eventually, to democracy for everyone, making the State, at long last, the benevolent servant of "the people." At the same time, the Industrial Revolution took hold, but capitalism exploited the workers and polluted the environment. Fortunately, the State was able to bring the capitalists under control and bring an end to mistreatment of workers, long hours of toil, and widespread environmental degradation. The 20th century provided some challenges to the spread of democracy, but those were conquered, just as we knew they would be, and today, justice, equality, and protection from all enemies of the great democratic order is provided for but a meager sum of tax funds. Civil rights and economic prosperity are improving all the time while foreign enemies are being cleared away, and the day will surely come when the end of history itself arrives, and we will all be thankful that we had such just and powerful governments at our disposal.

Murray Rothbard called this theory of history the State’s "Great March Upward into the Light," and much of his work, especially his newly republished History of Economic Thought, is devoted to debunking it. Always at the center of this march to perfection is the State. For the socialists and the left, the State will bring the society of perfect equality. For the neoconservatives and the right, the State will bring the millennial Pax Americana and the End of History. Few believers of the myth will deny that there have been some minor setbacks, yet they are firm in their contention that there can never be true progress without the State. Without the armies, and agencies, and weapons of the State, humanity would degenerate back into superstition, war, ignorance, and want. Depending on one’s point of view, a world without the State holds the prospect of capitalists, or terrorists, or communists, or Christian theocrats returning humanity to the presumed lowly State of the pre-modern world. The modern defenders of the State never speak in terms of "the State," and they may not even think in such explicit terms. Yet, the end result is the same whether one is explicit about it or not. States are at the center of their world, providing the necessary means to combat the evils of our time, destroying the oppressions of the past, and securing a safe and just future.

Rothbard had little patience for this pat view of human history. The myth of the modern State as freeing mankind from a dark past was particularly insidious to Rothbard. Whether discussing the American Revolution, the Great Depression, or the history of economic thought, we find in Rothbard’s work a thorough insistence that the political and intellectual history of modernity is the history of a battle against the State.

Rothbard’s view of history revolves around at least three central assertions. First, the history of liberty does not begin with the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or any other modern era claiming to be born out of an earlier, darker age. The foundations of liberty are established much earlier, in an era of increasingly free trade and of weak and decentralized medieval States. The intellectual birth of liberty begins with the foundations of natural law and natural rights laid down by the medieval scholastics. Second, the industrial revolution must be regarded as a good thing. In fact, it should be regarded as one of the best things to ever happen in human history. Third, the material prosperity made possible by the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the ancient ideas of natural law and natural rights, is a potent enemy of the State and the reason that liberty is likely to prevail in the long run.

In his essay "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Rothbard sums up his view of the "Old Order":

The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.



Contrary to the myth, the rise of modernity did not make the State more just or more enlightened. It just became bigger, stronger, and more likely to abuse its power. The States of the Middle Ages had been decentralized, weak, and couldn’t even qualify as "sovereign States." Thanks to overlapping political jurisdiction and the influence of the Church, no king of this era could claim total control over internal affairs. Yet, the absolutist States that heralded the arrival of the modern era were exactly the opposite. They were centralized, vast, powerful, and their rulers could indeed claim total internal sovereignty over their subjects

The political theory of the Middle Ages also constrained the power of the States. In The History of Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Rothbard focuses on the influence of scholasticism. Associated closely with Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism revolved around theories of natural law that governed all men and all institutions which were in turn expected to adhere to immutable divine laws of justice and governance. Kings and rulers who did not rule according to natural law were subject to morally justified rebellion and even regicide.

Scholasticism, of course was closely associated with the Catholic Church, and as the power of the Church declined in the Late Middle Ages, so did scholasticism and the intellectual rigor it relied on. The rise of the modern State accelerated with the Reformation and with efforts to overturn scholastic critiques of political power. From the German princes in the north to the rulers of the Italian city-states in the south, kings and princes seized on the Reformation as an opportunity to increase their power.

Having abandoned the scholastic tradition, the original Reformers were forced to fall back on proof-texting scripture for guidance on political affairs, concluding that "absolute obedience and non-resistance" was what scripture commanded. At the same time, Niccolò Machiavelli would add to the assault on reason arguing that States and princes should not be restrained by natural law, reason, or any other external force, but only by the arbitrary and often irrational will of the prince himself."

In the wake of this intellectual and political revolution came Absolutism. The new absolute monarchs went to war against the merchant classes that had arisen during the High Middle Ages. Kings used their new bureaucracies to impose taxes, enforce regulations, and wage large-scale wars against their enemies. It was the age of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and it was a great step backward for liberty. Yet, even as the new vast modern States were consolidating their power, theories of natural law and natural rights continued to be developed. Theorists like John Locke and Richard Cantillon would reclaim the natural law tradition and go on to use "rational scholastic methods" and forward compelling defenses of private property, commerce, and human freedom. Thus, by the 18th century, the natural law theories of the scholastics had been revived and were being reworked into liberalism, the new ideology of individualism, liberty, and capitalism.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe in spite of State attempts to control trade, knowledge, and even the movement of capitalists themselves. The great enemy of the Industrial Revolution, of course, has always been the State, and mercantilism ruled the day with its price controls, tariffs, taxes, regulations, and endless favors for friends of the ruling regime. The "intellectual" justifications for mercantilism were never anything more than irrational appeals to nationalism and privilege, while the liberals maintained that mercantilism was not only despotic and contrary to natural law, but inefficient and crippling to the economy. Naturally, those who ruled also happened to benefit from the largesse of the mercantilist despotism. But slowly, throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, liberalism gained ground. In "The Meaning of Revolution," Rothbard outlines the struggle:

Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent "revolutions" that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution.

Eventually, liberalism swept Europe as a mass movement putting forth the natural rights of men against the State. Yet, by the early 20th century, liberalism had retreated. Various forms of nationalism and socialism had begun to overtake liberalism in the 19th century, and by World War I, liberalism had disappeared as the dominant ideology of Europe. Liberalism’s intimate connection with capitalism and the industrial revolution was particularly damaging. Communists, socialists, nationalists, romantics, and primitivists all denounced the Industrial Revolution for being exploitive, for corrupting the morals of society, and for breaking down the alleged virtues of the distant past. The drive against the Industrial Revolution was thoroughly anti-intellectual as well, with the opponents of capital pining for the days of yesteryear when men could live by their wits in the wilderness and not be constrained by the evils of the modern industrial world. Rothbard’s writings exhibit particularly enthusiastic scorn for arguments such as these, unleashing a rhetorical torrent of contempt on the romantics and primitivists who had conveniently forgotten that the real history of subsistence farming and the pre-industrial age was one of famine, toil, and death.

In spite of the political revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing acceptance of natural rights as an immutable restraint on the power of States, the 20th century was a disaster for liberalism. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, Communism in Eastern Europe, and the militarized welfare-warfare State in America did much to destroy the liberalism that had expanded throughout the previous century. Serious talk of global nuclear war, the continued rise of socialism in Europe and the Americas, and the marginalization of liberal intellectuals had all but relegated liberalism to the dustbin of history.

Yet, even in 1965, before the fall of Soviet communism, before the internet, and before the Chinese government decided it preferred industrial revolutions to cultural revolutions, Rothbard was optimistic. In "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," he writes:

"What the Marxists would call ‘objective conditions’ for the triumph of liberty exist everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals."

In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and "Enlightenment" intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although "the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire."

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] Ryan McMaken teaches political science in Colorado.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

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Birds of a Feather Still Flocking Together
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Presidential assistant Donald Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy Richard Cheney meet with reporters at the White House in Washington, D.C., in this Thursday, Nov. 7, 1975 file photo. Rumsfeld was named by President Ford to replace James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense and Cheney was to replace Rumsfeld. Newly disclosedhistoric government documents obtained by the Associated Pre… include one with startling similarity to Washington`s current atmosphere over disclosures of classified information by the media....George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, wanted to ensure "no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence" under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department. Bush also complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge`s approval. Such a refusal "seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community," Bush wrote.

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In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

February 9, 2006
Tough U.S. Steps in Hunger Strike at Camp in Cuba
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/politics/09gitmo.html?hp&e…

By TIM GOLDEN

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers. The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center. Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate`s life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person`s life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn`t matter whether you`re at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees` lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Mr. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Mr. Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives.

Detainees` lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees` access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers` motions on the detainees` treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Mr. Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Mr. Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers` throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Mr. Wilner said.

On Jan. 9, Mr. Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Mr. Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee`s urging, Mr. Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day.

Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum`ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Mr. Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum`ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized
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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, second from left, was among the Middle East leaders at a meeting in December in Mecca, where
Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad were discussed.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/middleeast/0…

By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: February 9, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Feb. 8 — As leaders of the world`s 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

The closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed "concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries" as well as over "using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions."

The meeting in Mecca, a Saudi city from which non-Muslims are barred, drew minimal international press coverage even though such leaders as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran were in attendance. But on the road from quiet outrage in a small Muslim community in northern Europe to a set of international brush fires, the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — and the role its member governments played in the outrage — was something of a turning point.

After that meeting, anger at the Danish caricatures, especially at an official government level, became more public. In some countries, like Syria and Iran, that meant heavy press coverage in official news media and virtual government approval of demonstrations that ended with Danish embassies in flames.

In recent days, some governments in Muslim countries have tried to calm the rage, worried by the increasing level of violence and deaths in some cases.

But the pressure began building as early as October, when Danish Islamists were lobbying Arab ambassadors and Arab ambassadors lobbied Arab governments.

"It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it," said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, `Look, this is the democracy they`re talking about.` "

The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.

At first, the agitation was limited to Denmark. Ahmed Akkari, 28, a Lebanese-born Dane, acts as spokesman for the European Committee for Honoring the Prophet, an umbrella group of 27 Danish Muslim organizations to press the Danish government into action over the cartoons.

Mr. Akkari said the group had worked for more than two months in Denmark without eliciting any response. "We collected 17,000 signatures and delivered them to the office of the prime minister, we saw the minister of culture, we talked to the editor of the Jyllands-Posten, we took many steps within Denmark, but could get no action," Mr. Akkari said, referring to the newspaper that published the cartoons. He added that the prime minister`s office had not even responded to the petition.

Frustrated, he said, the group turned to the ambassadors of Muslim countries in Denmark and asked them to speak to the prime minister on their behalf. He refused them too.

"Then the case moved to a new stage," Mr. Akkari recalled. "We decided then that to be heard, it must come from influential people in the Muslim world."

The group put together a 43-page dossier, including the offending cartoons and three more shocking images that had been sent to Danish Muslims who had spoken out against the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

Mr. Akkari denied that the three other offending images had contributed to the violent reaction, saying the images, received in the mail by Muslims who had complained about the cartoons, were included to show the response that Muslims got when they spoke out in Denmark.

In early December, the group`s first delegation of Danish Muslims flew to Cairo, where they met with the grand mufti, Muhammad Sayid Tantawy, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League.

"After that, there was a certain response," Mr. Akkari said, adding that the Cairo government and the Arab League both summoned the Danish ambassador to Egypt for talks.

Mr. Akkari denies that the group had meant to misinform, but concedes that there were misunderstandings along the way.

In Cairo, for example, the group also met with journalists from Egypt`s media. During a news conference, they spoke about a proposal from the far-right Danish People`s Party to ban the Koran in Denmark because of some 200 verses that are alleged to encourage violence.

Several newspapers then ran articles claiming that Denmark planned to issue a censored version of the Koran. The delegation returned to Denmark, but the dossier continued to make waves in the Middle East. Egypt`s foreign minister had taken the dossier with him to the Mecca meeting, where he showed it around. The Danish group also sent a second delegation to Lebanon to meet religious and political leaders there.

Mr. Akkari went on that trip. The delegation met with the grand mufti in Lebanon, Muhammad Rashid Kabbani, and the spiritual head of Lebanon`s Shiite Muslims, Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, as well as the patriarch of the Maronite Church, Nasrallah Sfeir. The group also appeared on Hezbollah`s satellite station Al Manar TV, which is seen throughout the Arab world.

Mr. Akkari also made a side trip to Damascus, Syria, to deliver a copy of the dossier to that country`s grand mufti, Sheik Ahmed Badr-Eddine Hassoun.

Lebanon`s foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, says he agreed to meet in mid-December with Egypt`s ambassador to Lebanon, who presented him with a letter from his foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, urging him to get involved in the issue. Attached to the letter were copies of some of the drawings.

At the end of December, the pace picked up as talk of a boycott became more prominent. The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, comprising more than 50 states, published on its Web site a statement condemning "the aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its Prophet" by Jyllands-Posten, and officials of the organization said member nations should impose a boycott on Denmark until an apology was offered for the drawings.

"We encourage the organization`s members to boycott Denmark both economically and politically until Denmark presents an official apology for the drawings that have offended the world`s Muslims," said Abdulaziz Othman al-Twaijri, the organization`s secretary general.

In a few weeks, the Jordanian Parliament condemned the cartoons, as had several other Arab governments.

On Jan. 10, as anti-Danish pressure built, a Norwegian newspaper republished the caricatures in an act of solidarity with the Danes, leading many Muslims to believe that a real campaign against them had begun.

On Jan. 26, in a key move, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark, and Libya followed suit. Saudi clerics began sounding the call for a boycott, and within a day, most Danish products were pulled off supermarket shelves.

"The Saudis did this because they have to score against Islamic fundamentalists," said Mr. Said, the Cairo political scientist. "Syria made an even worse miscalculation," he added, alluding to the sense that the protest had gotten out of hand. The issue of the cartoons came at a critical time in the Muslim world because of Muslim anger over the occupation of Iraq and a sense that Muslims were under siege. Strong showings by Islamists in elections in Egypt and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections had given new momentum to Islamic movements in the region, and many economies, especially those in the Persian Gulf, realized their economic power as it pertained to Denmark.

"The cartoons were a fuse that lit a bigger fire," said Rami Khouri, editor at large at the English-language Daily Star of Beirut. "It is this deepening sense of vulnerability combines with a sense that the Islamists were on a roll that made it happen."

The wave swept many in the region. Sheik Muhammad Abu Zaid, an imam from the Lebanese town of Saida, said he began hearing of the caricatures from several Palestinian friends visiting from Denmark in December but made little of it.

"For me, honestly, this didn`t seem so important," Sheik Abu Zaid said, comparing the drawings to those made of Jesus in Christian countries. "I thought, I know that this is something typical in such countries."

Then, he started to hear that ambassadors of Arab countries had tried to meet with the prime minister of Denmark and had been snubbed, and he began to feel differently.

"It started to seem that this way of thinking was an insult to us," he said. "It is fine to say, `This is our freedom, this is our way of thinking.` But we began to believe that their freedom was something that hurts us."

Last week, Sheik Abu Zaid heard about a march being planned on the Danish Consulate in Beirut, and he decided to join. He and 600 others boarded buses bound for Beirut. Within an hour of arriving, some of the demonstrators — none of his people, he insisted — became violent, and began attacking the building that housed the embassy. It was just two days after a similar attack against the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in Damascus.

"In the demonstration, I believe 99 percent of the people were good and peaceful, but I could hear people saying, `We don`t want to demonstrate peacefully; we want to burn,` " the sheik said.

He tried in vain to calm people down, he said. "I was calling to the people, `Please, please follow us and go back.` " he said. "We were hoping to calm people down, and we were hoping to help the peaceful people who were caught in the middle of the fight."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Craig S. Smith from Paris, Katherine Zoepf from Beirut, Suha Maayeh from Amman, Abeer Allam from Cairo and Massoud A. Derhally from Dubai.

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Man muß halt zufrieden sein mit dem, was man kriegt und nicht hoffen auf das, was man wünscht zu bekommen! Nach Rumsfeld.

February 9, 2006
Army Effort to Enlist Hispanics Draws Recruits, and Criticism
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/09recruit.html?hp…

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

DENVER — As Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Army`s "special missions": to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers.

He approaches a couple of sheepish looking teenage boys in the automotive aisle and seamlessly slides into Spanish, letting loose his pitch: "Have you ever thought about joining the Army?" "Did you know you can get up to $40,000 in bonuses?" "I`m from Mexico, too. Michoacán."

In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Army`s top priorities. From 2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent.

The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years.

Not all Latinos, though, are in step with the military`s recruitment goals. In some cities with large Hispanic populations, the focus on recruitment has polarized Latinos, prompting some to organize against recruiters and to help immigrants learn their rights.

Critics say recruiters, who are under pressure to meet quotas, often use their charm and an arsenal of tactics, including repeated calls to a recruit, lunch at a favorite restaurant and trips to the gym. The Army also parades rigged-out, juiced-up Hummers wherever youths gather as promotional tools.

"We see a lot of confusion among immigrant parents, and recruiters are preying on that confusion," said Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam veteran who is director of the Chicano/Latino Arts and Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego, and is active in the counterrecruitment movement.

While the military emphasizes that it works to enlist all qualified people, not just Hispanics, military experts say that bringing in more Latinos is overdue. Hispanics have long been underrepresented in the Army and in the military as a whole. While Latinos make up 10.8 percent of the Army`s active-duty force, a better rate than the Air Force or Navy, they account for 14 percent of the population as a whole.

Hispanics also make up the fastest-growing pool of military age people in the United States, and they are more likely to complete boot camp and finish their military service, according to a 2004 study on Marine recruitment by CNA, a research group that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. Recruitment studies show that Hispanics` re-enlistment rates are also the highest among any group of soldiers.

"They are extremely patriotic," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Brodeur, commanding officer of the Recruitment Battalion covering Colorado, Wyoming, parts of Montana and Nebraska.

That many Latinos in the military are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, typically engenders a sense of gratitude for the United States and its opportunities, something recruiters stress in their pitch.

Poorer and less educated than the average American, some Hispanics view the military as a way to feel accepted. Others enlist for the same reasons that may attract any recruit: the money, the job training, the education benefits and the escape from poverty or small-town life.

Edgar Santana, a skinny 17-year-old senior who recently hovered around the Army recruiting table at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs, said he was attracted by all those reasons, despite the war in Iraq. "I get the freedoms, and I can enjoy them, so I believe I have to pay back that debt," Mr. Santana said.

Tony Mendoza Jr., 18, a senior at North High School in Denver, has already enlisted in the Army and will enter boot camp this summer. For him, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were what drove him into boots. "My parents think I`m going to go in the Army and die, but I wanted to do it," Mr. Mendoza said.

Patriotism alone, though, does not account for the rise in Hispanic enlistment. The increase has gone hand in hand with a vast Army marketing campaign that includes Spanish-language advertisements on Univision and Telemundo, the country`s two largest Spanish-language networks, and on the radio and in Hispanic publications. The budget for this campaign has increased by at least $55 million in four years.

The Army has also expanded a small pilot project that allows 200 Latinos each year to undergo rigorous English language classes and then retake the Army qualifications tests. Ten cities now offer that option, up from five.

Recruiters have noticeably stepped up their presence in schools and neighborhoods with Hispanic populations. "You see them today where you would never see them three or four years ago," said Rick Jahnkow, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and non-Military Opportunities in San Diego.

In addition, the Army has made better use of bilingual recruiters to reach out to Latino communities. In the Colorado area, the number of bilingual recruiters has increased in the past 18 months to 13 from 4.

Recognizing the importance of family and its weight in the process is crucial in Hispanic families, recruiters say. Since a mother`s approval can make or break a deal, recruiters spend considerable time with Latino families. They have dinner, chat often on the telephone and remain patient. They even attend local Latino churches.

Sgt. First Class Luis M. Galicia, a bilingual recruiter based in Colorado Springs, is always quick to say he was born in Mexico and raised, on little money, in California. He and his family picked grapes for extra cash. He says that his experience helps him connect.; "there is a trust issue."

One incentive meant to appeal to this community, President Bush`s 2002 executive order that permits legal residents in the military to apply for citizenship within one year, as opposed to three years, has actually done little to entice Latinos. In fact, the number of Army soldiers who are not citizens has declined since 2002 to 2,447 last year from 3,312. The same is true for enlistments.

Simply speeding up the application process for people already in this country legally does not seem to provide enough incentive to counter the risks of joining up in a time of war.

The recruitment campaign has in fact divided the Latino community. Some of the country`s high-profile Latino organizations, like the League of United Latin American Citizens, support the military`s efforts, viewing it as an important path to socioeconomic advancement.

"The fact that Latinos are underrepresented in the service causes us concern because the service is often a way to the middle class for many immigrants," said Brent Wilkes, national director of the league. "If you don`t have a lot of options, would you rather go into the service and get a middle-class career, or stay in the fields all these years?"

But community activists in places like California and Puerto Rico call that logic wrongheaded. "This is not the time to sign up," said Sonia Santiago, a psychologist and a counterrecruiter in Puerto Rico who founded Mothers Against the War after her son, a marine, was sent to Iraq in 2003. Dr. Santiago has routinely confronted recruiters outside schools. "Those benefits don`t mean anything, if they are buried or sick for the rest of their lives," she said.

Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines. African-Americans saw the same thing happen during the 1970`s and 1980`s, an accusation that still reverberates. Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military`s officer corps.

"The fear is that the military is going to try to replace, consciously or unconsciously, African-Americans with Hispanics," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

For bilingual recruiters, tapping into the Latino population has its own set of frustrations. Often, Latinos are willing to join the Army, but cannot. During his rounds at the Wal-Mart, Sergeant Barron encountered a number of illegal immigrants; they are immediately disqualified. Other Latinos lack adequate English skills or high school degrees, he said.

In the past year, a Latino counterrecruitment movement has arisen in several major cities with the goal of blunting what organizers call overly aggressive and suggestive recruitment in Latino neighborhoods. Some critics say recruiters sometimes gloss over the risks and mislead potential recruits and their parents. Latino parents, especially those who speak little English and know little about the military, are especially susceptible to a recruiter`s persistence and charm, critics say.

Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was a marine and died in Iraq in 2003, founded Aztec Warrior Project for Peace to help counsel Latinos on the military. He said he often encountered parents who did not understand the intricacies of the process. One set of parents in Southern California, he said, mistakenly signed papers allowing their 17-year-old to join the military on his 18th birthday, believing that the government required military service, something the recruiter did not clarify.

Michael I. Marsh, a lawyer who represents migrant workers in Oxnard, Calif., said he wrote a letter to a local recruitment battalion last year after a 17-year-old`s parents signed off on his Army Reserve enlistment at 18. The parents told him they were under the impression that they were signing to authorize a physical exam and blood work. When the youth later tried to nullify the contract, he was told it was too late and that if he tried to pull out, he would be ineligible for school money and federal employment.

After Mr. Marsh sent the letter, the teenager was allowed to withdraw his enlistment, Mr. Marsh said. Military contracts are not binding until a person takes a second oath of enlistment.

"The recruiter does not lie, but he does not tell the whole truth," Mr. Suarez said. "If you don`t know the question to ask, you don`t get the information. With language and cultural differences, it`s complicated."

S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army`s recruiting command, said that the Army investigated allegations of misconduct and that, while recruiters were expected to encourage people to enlist, they must be honest about risks and benefits.

"Given the fact that we are a nation at war, recruiters have to be up front about the risks," he said.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Die nächsten Riots stehen uns bevor:
A Pulpit Online for Critics of `The Da Vinci Code` Film
[url"The Da Vinci Code."]http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=309461&inline=nyt_ttl[/url]

The site,http://thedavincichallenge.com/, will post essays by about 45 Christian writers, scholars and leaders of evangelical organizations.
Scheint noch `under construction`

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February 9, 2006
Washington Memo
The Nation`s Dual Political Dynasties Are Growing Closer Than Arm`s Length
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/politics/09memo.html

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — When the Bushes and Clintons held hands before 15,000 mourners at Coretta Scott King`s funeral on Tuesday, it looked like a prayerful moment in the life of the nation. But as almost anyone watching America`s two leading political families knew, underneath the tranquil image was a drama of ambition, rivalry, love and alliance that could shape the 2008 presidential election.

The scene, a riveting tableau in the six-hour celebration of Mrs. King`s life and the political power of black America, offered complex layers of interconnecting relationships: father and son, husband and wife, president and former president, adversary turned ally and first lady turned senator turned probable presidential candidate.

It was one of the most public manifestations to date of the odd friendship and mutual need of two dynasties that, on the surface at least, have almost nothing in common. But as President Bush put it in an interview with CBS News last month, "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton." Mr. Bush made the remark in a telling exchange with Bob Schieffer, who said, "Well, you know, if Senator Clinton becomes president."

"There we go," Mr. Bush said.

"Maybe we`ll see a day," Mr. Schieffer continued.

"Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," Mr. Bush responded.

Earlier in the interview, when Mr. Schieffer noted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was "running pretty hard right now for the Democratic nomination," Mr. Bush jumped in and called her "formidable," an unusually friendly assessment that may have been one reason that Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, fired back at Mrs. Clinton on Sunday as a candidate with a "left-wing record" and "a lot of anger."

People who know both the Clintons and the Bushes said Mr. Bush`s remark about Mrs. Clinton was the more honest personal view. It reflected, they said, the growing friendship between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush`s father, the first President Bush, and the powers of a shared experience that just five men alive — the two Bushes, Mr. Clinton and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford — wholly understand.

"They`ve got this secret handshake that nobody else knows about," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who was a top White House adviser to Mr. Clinton.

Friends of both men say the current President Bush and Mr. Clinton have grown to like each other in Mr. Bush`s time in office, even after Mr. Bush had disdained Mr. Clinton`s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

"Yes, President Bush had a personal distaste for Bill Clinton`s private behavior," said Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer who ran White House damage control in the Clinton scandals and who has been friends with Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton for 30 years. "But President Bush would be the first to say that he went through a period of his life where his personal conduct was not something to be proud of. And so both of them have been through hard times, learned humility and learned to differentiate politics from the personal."

The friendship, Democrats and Republicans say, has a political dimension in that Mr. Clinton appears more statesmanlike and Mrs. Clinton more centrist in an embrace with the Bushes, even though the embrace is often fleeting.

By Wednesday morning, Mrs. Clinton had initiated a broad attack on the Bush administration as "playing the fear card" of terrorism to win elections. To the degree that Mr. Clinton and his personal conduct in office become an issue for Mrs. Clinton should she seek the presidency, the implied character reference from two generations of Bushes could be important insulation.

In the meantime, associates of former President Bush and Mr. Clinton say that the two have moved beyond their road show for tsunami and hurricane relief into a genuine friendship and that they have told members of each of their parties to stop complaining about the bond.

In June, Mr. Clinton stayed with Mr. Bush at the former president`s retreat in Kennebunkport, Me., where they played golf and raced in Mr. Bush`s speedboat. They have also gotten together about a dozen times in the past year for meetings, television tapings and private meals.

The former President Bush has also told friends how much he appreciates Mr. Clinton`s deference to him. Last year, when the two men were headed for a four-day trip to the tsunami area, Mr. Clinton, now 59, insisted that Mr. Bush, now 81, take the bedroom on the Air Force plane on the flight over.

"I said, `No, come on, you go in there, and I`ll take the next leg,` " Mr. Bush told Time magazine in December. " `No, no,` he said. I guess he wanted to play cards all night. But nevertheless, that means something to me. I`m older, and it was a very great courtesy. So the relationship is fun for me. And you have this feeling of doing something important, doing something bigger than ourselves."

Mrs. Clinton`s staff members appear ambivalent about the friendship and its effects on her potential race in 2008. Asked what the friendship meant to Mrs. Clinton politically, Howard Wolfson, a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton, said: "Beats me. And it didn`t stop the chairman of the Republican Party from attacking her this week."

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February 9, 2006
Iraq Utilities Are Falling Short of Prewar Performance
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/middleeast/0…

By JAMES GLANZ

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq`s oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below preinvasion values even though $16 billion of American taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.
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Of seven measures of public services performance presented at the committee hearing by the inspector general`s office, only one was above preinvasion values.

Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service.

Only the hours of power available to Iraqis outside Baghdad had increased over prewar values.

In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low.

At the same time, as Iraq`s oil exports plummet and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office.

And those may not be the most serious problems facing Iraq`s pipelines, storage tanks, power lines, electrical switching stations and other structures, said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office.

In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers "misses the point," Mr. Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack.

"What`s happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs," Mr. Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors.

The chairman of the committee, Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America`s original ambitions in the rebuilding program are likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the United States Congress and international donors are still prepared to spend on the task.

This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion American taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Mr. Christoff of the accountability office. Of that money, $23 billion has already been obligated to specific rebuilding contracts, and $16 billion of that amount has been disbursed, Mr. Christoff said.

Mr. Bowen`s office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein`s regime was also made available for reconstruction and other tasks at one time or another. Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former United States government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Mr. Bowen pointed out in his testimony that the news on reconstruction in Iraq is not all bad. Despite the recent financing and performance shortfalls, the rebuilding program now seems to be much less ridden by fraud, corruption and chaos than it was in the early days when people like Mr. Stein were in charge.

James R. Kunder, assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East at the United States Agency for International Development, in the State Department, emphasized things like what he called a 30 percent "potential increase" in electricity output because of new and reconditioned power generators in Iraq.

"We have done a lot of reconstruction work in Iraq over the last couple of years," Mr. Kunder said. "We did not meet all of the goals, the ambitious goals, we originally intended," he conceded.

Mr. Christoff of the accounting office said the latest numbers may actually overstate how well Iraqis have been served by the reconstruction program.

Water numbers, for example, often focus on how much drinkable water is generated at central plants, he said. But he said 65 percent of that water was subject to leaking from porous distribution pipes, which often run next to sewage facilities.

"So we really don`t know how many households get potable, drinkable water," Mr. Christoff said.

Mr. Christoff also brought another new figure to the hearing: he said that on a recent trip to Baghdad, the American forces there had told him that they would need another $3.9 billion to continue training and equipping Iraqi forces, in part so that they can better protect the infrastructure.

The money would presumably be included in a 2006 supplemental funding request in which the Bush administration has said it would ask for more money to support the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, an official at the Office of Management and Budget said. The administration "told us it would include this type of expenses," the official said, adding that no total for Iraqi security forces has yet come directly from the White House.

If the $3.9 billion that the American forces believe they need is actually appropriated, it would bring the total amount spent simply on training and equipping the Iraqi Army and the police to about $15 billion.

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Irgendwann wird Bush auch ein Pferd zum Senator ernennen!

February 9, 2006
Editorial
Censoring Truth
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/opinion/09thu2.html

The Bush administration long ago secured a special place in history for the audacity with which it manipulates science to suit its political ends. But it set a new standard of cynicism when it allowed NASA`s leading authority on global warming to be mugged by a 24-year-old presidential appointee who, quite apart from having no training on that issue, had inflated his résumé.

In early December, James Hansen, the space agency`s top climate specialist, called for accelerated efforts to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming. After his speech, he told Andrew C. Revkin of The Times, he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for aggressive action.

This was not the first time Dr. Hansen had been rebuked by the Bush team, which has spent the better part of five years avoiding the issue of global warming. It was merely one piece of a larger pattern of deception and denial.

The administration has sought to influence the policy debate by muzzling the people who disagree with it or — as was the case with two major reports from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and 2003 — editing out inconvenient truths or censoring them entirely.

In this case, the censor was George Deutsch, a functionary in NASA`s public affairs office whose chief credential appears to have been his service with President Bush`s re-election campaign and inaugural committee. On his résumé, Mr. Deutsch claimed a 2003 bachelor`s degree in journalism from Texas A&M, but the university, alerted by a blogger, said that was not true. Mr. Deutsch has now resigned.

The shocker was not NASA`s failure to vet Mr. Deutsch`s credentials, but that this young politico with no qualifications was able to impose his ideology on other agency employees. At one point, he told a Web designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang.

As Dr. Hansen observed, Mr. Deutsch was only a "bit player" in the administration`s dishonest game of politicizing science on issues like warming, birth control, forest policy and clean air. This from a president who promised in his State of the Union address to improve American competitiveness by spending more on science.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Ich schätze einige i.A. hier im Board sehr aktive Poster werden den Cartoon lieben, der im Artikel beschrieben wird

February 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Drafting Hitler
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/opinion/09brooks.html

By DAVID BROOKS

You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we`ll also know how you feel.

Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her, "Write this one in your diary, Anne." But I still don`t know how you feel.[urloops]http://www.arabeuropean.org/newsdetail.php?ID=95[/url] I still don`t feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don`t feel your rage. I don`t feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.

At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it`s impolite to trample on other people`s religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don`t just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.

We in the West were born into a world that reflects the legacy of Socrates and the agora. In our world, images, statistics and arguments swarm around from all directions. There are movies and blogs, books and sermons. There`s the profound and the vulgar, the high and the low.

In our world we spend our time sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive. We aim, in Michael Oakeshott`s words, to live amid the conversation — "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."

We believe in progress and in personal growth. By swimming in this flurry of perspectives, by facing unpleasant facts, we try to come closer and closer to understanding.

But you have a different way. When I say you, I don`t mean you Muslims. I don`t mean you genuine Islamic scholars and learners. I mean you Islamists. I mean you young men who were well educated in the West, but who have retreated in disgust from the inconclusiveness and chaos of our conversation. You`ve retreated from the agora into an exaggerated version of Muslim purity.

You frame the contrast between your world and our world more bluntly than we outsiders would ever dare to. In London the protesters held signs reading "Freedom Go to Hell," "Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam," "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust" and "Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on the Way." In Copenhagen, an imam declared, "In the West, freedom of speech is sacred; to us, the prophet is sacred" — as if the two were necessarily opposed.

Our mind-set is progressive and rational. Your mind-set is pre-Enlightenment and mythological. In your worldview, history doesn`t move forward through gradual understanding. In your worldview, history is resolved during the apocalyptic conflict between the supernaturally pure jihadist and the supernaturally evil Jew.

You seize on any shred — even a months-old cartoon from an obscure Danish paper — to prove to yourself that the Jew and the crusader are on the offensive, that the apocalyptic confrontation is at hand. You invent primitive stories — like the one about Jews who kill children for their blood — to reinforce your image of Jewish evil. You deny the Holocaust because if the Jews were as powerful as you say, they would never have allowed it to happen.

In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the infidel battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.

So, of course, what started in Denmark ended up for you with Hitler, the Holocaust and the Jew. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democracy is coming to your region, and democracy brings the conversation. Mainstream leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are embracing democracy and denouncing your riots as "misguided and oppressive."

You fundamentalists have turned yourselves into a superpower of dysfunction, demanding our attention week after week. But it is hard to intimidate people forever into silence, to bottle up the conversation, to lock the world into an epic war only you want. While I don`t share your rage, I do understand your panic.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Illegal and Inept
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/opinion/09herbert.html

By BOB HERBERT

While testifying about the Bush administration`s warrantless eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked to explain how the program had been damaged by the disclosure of its existence in the press.

Senator Joseph Biden suggested that Al Qaeda operatives have most likely been aware for some time that the government is trying to intercept their phone calls.

Mr. Gonzales agreed. "You would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance," he said. "But if they`re not reminded about it all the time in newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget."

Senator Biden managed to laugh. Probably to keep from crying. This was the attorney general of the United States speaking, yet another straight man for an administration that has raised governing to new heights of witlessness. Watching the Bush administration in action would be hilarious, if its ineptitude and brutally misguided policies didn`t end so often in needless suffering and sorrow.

The public should be aware of two important points about the president`s domestic spying program: it`s illegal, and it`s not catching terrorists.

If the program were legal, there is no chance so many Republicans would be upset about it. While questioning Mr. Gonzales at Monday`s Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, assailed both of the rationales used by the administration to justify the program.

Referring to the administration`s repeated insistence that the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda gave the president the power to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Senator Graham said:

"I`ll be the first to say, when I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche."

Senator Graham then addressed the argument that the president has the inherent power under the Constitution to authorize the warrantless wiretapping. Such a view, said Senator Graham, would undermine the principle of checks and balances. "Taken to its logical conclusion," he said, "it concerns me that it could basically neuter the Congress and weaken the courts."

Moments later, he added, "And when the nation`s at war, I would argue, Mr. Attorney General, you need checks and balances more than ever."

Other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who expressed skepticism or voiced serious doubts about the program included Mike DeWine and Sam Brownback, and the chairman, Arlen Specter. "You think you`re right," Senator Specter told Mr. Gonzales. "But there are a lot of people who think you`re wrong."

Apart from the legal issues, it`s increasingly clear that the president`s program is contributing little if anything to the effort to protect Americans from Qaeda-type terrorism.

Senator Biden asked Mr. Gonzales whether the program had achieved any results. Mr. Gonzales said it had helped identify "would-be terrorists here in the United States."

"Have we arrested those people?" asked Mr. Biden. "Have we arrested the people we`ve identified as terrorists in the United States?"

The attorney general`s reply left people shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. "When we can use our law enforcement tools to go after the bad guys," he said, "we do that."

Senator Biden tried to push the issue, but Mr. Gonzales would not elaborate. Mr. Biden finally said: "Well, I hope we arrested them — if you identified them. I mean, it kind of worries me because you all talk about how you identify these people, and I`ve not heard anything about anybody being arrested."

A clue to Mr. Gonzales`s reluctance to discuss the achievements of the president`s domestic spying program could be found on the front page of The Washington Post on Sunday. A long article about the program began as follows:

"Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use."

To laugh or to cry — that is the question as we contemplate three more years of this theater of the absurd known as the Bush administration.

* Copyright 2006The 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/

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Cole on Danish Caricatures in Salon.com

My article on cartoongate is out over at [urlSalon.com.]http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/09/culture/[/url]

Excerpt:


` After the cartoons were published on Sept. 30, right-wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reacted to the angry response by refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries and sternly lecturing Muslims on their need to put up with the caricatures. He finally sounded a more conciliatory note this week, complaining of a global crisis. He was clearly worried, like another Dane, Prince Hamlet, about what would happen "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me."

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."

Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the Holocaust against the Jews also often colored the language of colonial administrators in places like Algeria about their subjects. A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammed with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes of a century and a half ago, wherein Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good.

(It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country`s rapists.) `



An English translation of [urlFlemming Rose`s interview with Pipes is here]http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=158638[/url]. Rose deliberately sought the caricatures.

posted by Juan @ [url2/09/2006 06:40:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/cole-on-danish-caricatures-in-salon_09.html[/url] 0 comments

Everything the West and the Middle East Need Could have been Learned in Kindergarten

1. Don`t make fun of people for things they were born with, like big noses, skin color or their religion.

Danish newspaper carries caricatures offensive to Muslims.

2. Two wrongs don`t make a right.

Iranian newspaper plans to run caricatures about the Holocaust.

3. You can`t just take toys you want from the children who own them.

Ehud Olmert announces that Israel will unilaterally retain 40% of the West Bank, Palestinian territory captured by the Israelis in the 1967 War.

4. Don`t take your anger with one person out on another child.

Radical elements in Lebanese Muslim crowd [urlattack Christian church.]http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk02072006.html[/url]

5. Don`t tell fibs about the other children.

[urlRice blames secular, Alawi-dominated Syria Baath Party for instigating religious protests.]http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/world.aspx?ID=BD4A152204[/url] In fact, Syria did no such thing (see below.)

posted by Juan @ [url2/09/2006 06:39:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/everything-west-and-middle-east-need.html[/url] 0 comments

Condaleeza Rice is a Liar
Blames Syria, Iran for Inciting Violence over Caricatures of Prophet

Secretary of State Condi Rice on Wednesday blamed Iran and Syria for inciting violence over the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The problem is that she is lying, and this irresponsible charge is another in a long series of propaganda ploys whereby the Bush administration manipulates public opinion in the United States. [urlReuters reports]http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/world.aspx?ID=BD4A152204[/url],


` US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran and Syria, both at loggerheads with the west, of inciting violence over the cartoons for their own purposes.

Speaking at a Washington news conference with Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Rice said: “Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes — and the world ought to call them on it.”

She said nothing justified the violence and appealed to governments to urge calm.

“There are governments that have used this opportunity to incite violence,” she added, referring to Syria and Iran. `



I have done keyword searches in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, which translates radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, for all of 2005 and 2006, using "Denmark and Syria." I found nothing from 2005 mentioning the caricatures in FBIS transcriptions of the Syrian press. The only things there for 2006 concerned the past week, which saw a violent demonstration in downtown Damascus.

I then did a similar keyword search in Lexis Nexis, which includes the BBC World Monitoring of the Arab press. I again found nothing for 2005. I print below what I found for 2006; the record begins only on January 31.

In short, it simply is not true that Syria has whipped up sentiments in the Arab world about the Danish caricatures. Neither the CIA, nor the BBC monitoring, nor any of the wire services, noticed any Syrian official saying anything at all about this matter until the past week! Since Syria is ruled by a secular Arab nationalist Baath regime, this finding is not surprising. And what influence would Bashar al-Asad, a heterodox Alawite Shiite and a secular Baathist, have with his Sunni Muslim or orthodox Twelver Shiite neighbors?

It is being alleged that the Baath regime was behind the burning of the Danish embassy in Damascus, on the grounds that it could not have happened unless the police state allowed it. But things have gotten out of hand before in Syria, sometimes on a large scale. It is likely that the regime allowed the initial demonstration, which radical Sunni Muslims took advantage of to torch the embassy. The Syrian regime hates radical Islam and doesn`t like disorder, either. We cannot assume that the embassy burning was directed by the Syrian state. There is no evidence for it, and it actually doesn`t make any sense. What would Bashar have to gain from that?

Rice and Bush have decided to get Syria, and are using the current crisis as a stick with which to beat it, and are lying shamelessly to the American public.

As for Iran, its embassy was active in Copenhagen pushing for an apology in fall of 2005, but I can`t find in Lexis evidence of inflammatory statements until the past week. As I`ve said before, the Middle East official most concerned with whipping up this issue seems to be the Egyptian foreign minister.

In the past week, some Iranian officials [urlhave called for calm on the issue]http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=40212&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs[/url], rather than inciting it. Other officials, such as Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, have in fact said harsh things, but only very recently. Despite wild charges that the Iranian protege Hizbullah was behind the Beirut embassy burning, in fact the demonstration on Sunday was a Sunni demonstration. The Shiites don`t seem to have been part of it. Robert Fisk speculates that Sunni fundamentalist forces from Tripoli and the Palestinian camps too advantage of it to push their own agenda, and the Syrian regime was taken by surprise.

You can only imagine the Karl Rove memo: "Anythin` happens in the Middle East, blame it on Syria and Iran. Works every time!"


` Associated Press Worldstream

January 29, 2006 Sunday 11:49 AM GMT

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS

LENGTH: 289 words

HEADLINE: Syria joins chorus condemning caricatures of Islam`s prophet in Danish newspaper

DATELINE: DAMASCUS Syria

BODY:


Syria on Sunday joined the chorus of Arab and Islamic countries condemning caricatures published in a Danish newspaper deemed insulting to Islam`s prophet.

"Syria strongly condemns this insult against the supreme token of the Arab and Islamic nations," the Syrian news agency SANA quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry official as saying.

The official said the Danish government should punish the offenders.

The 12 drawings published Sept. 30, 2005, by Jyllands-Posten included one showing Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. Another portrayed him with a bushy gray beard and holding a sword, his eyes covered by a black rectangle.

Politicians and Muslim leaders across the Islamic world have denounced the caricatures as insulting to the faith and its prophet. Islam bars any depiction of the prophet, even respectful ones, out of concern that such images could lead to idolatry. Jyllands-Posten has refused to apologize for the drawings, citing freedom of speech.

The Syrian official said Damascus was "shocked" by the caricatures and called on the Danish government to take the "necessary measures to punish the offenders so that such offenses may not be repeated in the future."

On Saturday, Kuwait`s state-supported supermarkets announced a boycott of Danish products, and the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry called in a regional Danish ambassador to protest the caricatures while hundreds of Kuwaitis protested outside the Danish consulate.

Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark to protest the drawings. In Jiddah, the secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference criticized the Danish government for failing to deal with the issue in a "serious way."

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

BBC Monitoring International Reports

February 1, 2006 Wednesday

ACC-NO: A20060201C-FF27-GNW

LENGTH: 110 words

HEADLINE: SYRIA RECALLS AMBASSADOR TO DENMARK

BODY:


Text of report by Danish radio website on 1 February

Syria is recalling its ambassador from Denmark for consultations in Damascus.

According to the Ritzaus news agency the ambassador is to provide information on Danish efforts to defuse the crisis over the controversial Muhammad drawings published by Jyllands-Posten.

Syria is therefore taking the same measure as Saudi Arabia did recently. Libya has gone a stage further and has announced that it is closing down its embassy in Denmark completely.

The Syrian embassy in Stockholm will take care of representation in Denmark.

Source: Danmarks Radio website, Copenhagen, in Danish 1501 gmt 1 Feb 06 `

posted by Juan @ [url2/09/2006 06:28:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/condaleeza-rice-is-liar-blames-syria.html[/url] 0 comments


The Politics of Race and Religion in Denmark

A reader living in Denmark writes:



` I was most surprised to hear that there had been a demonstration of "as many as" 5000 Muslims here in Denmark. I do recall a demonstration, but 5000? That`s a darn big demonstration here! We didn`t a much bigger turnout here when we had to suffer the ignominy of a visit here by Bush this last summer. Perhaps there was one too many zeroes?

Your point that the Saudi gov`t or parts of it have not been responsible for the inflammation is correct. However, the source you draw on is ignorant or ignoring the local political and social situation in Denmark. That and the activity of a few Imams here who represent a very small percentage of the Muslim population of 180,000 are essential to understanding what the Danes are now experiencing as practically a 911 event.

The Venstre party of Mr. Fogh-Rasmussen is about as far right as you can get in Danish politics. The only party to the right of them represented in the Folketing is the Danske Folkeparti, run by Pia Kjærsgaard. The DF has quite a few seats and although not in the gov`t it`s support is absolutely necessary for Fogh`s gov`t. The DF is a right-wing populist party, which split off from the even more right Fremskridts (Progress) party some 10-15 years. Pia is a damn talented politician, sort of a Maggie Thatcher type. She and her party have been hammering away in particular using (and increasing) the tensions between the "Danes", the "new-Danes" and "second-generation immigrants" (these are of course all code words -- if I refer to myself as a "new-Dane" or my sin as a "second-generation", people find it funny -- has something to do with the fact that I don`t have brownish or dark skin, I guess... ).

The Jyllandsposten is a right-wing paper -- but it`s the two tabloids, BT and Ekstra Bladet, who along with the help of Pia K`s DF who been stoking the fires of racial/ethnic tension. There among the Danes a perceived anxiety and mistrust because of murders, "honor" murders, general criminality, gang rapes, arranged marriages, female circumcision, sending youngsters to madrasses and so on. The fact is, of course is that entire Muslim community, to a certain degree, is getting tarred with the same brush because of a few.

There are approx. 180,000 Muslims in Denmark. A very small number, from congregations composing 2-3% have been very visible the past couple of years -- in particular a handful of imams, two of which I should name, Abu Laban and Mohammad Fouad Albarazi have been very visible. What can I say of them? Sort of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell wannabes, I guess. Anyway they sent delegations to the Middleeast -- and misrepresented the character of the drawings. Supposedly, Mohammed was shown in sexual encounters of some sort, and was shown with a pigs nose, among other things. Also, people in the M.E. were told that the Koran was being burned. (To be fair, there was some talk of it when the Danebrog (the Danish flag) was burned -- but nothing came of it.

The Danebrog differs from most flags in that it was not designed -- it fell down from heaven in Estland in 1219!

Also, to be fair, the Imams I mention don`t know Danish, some of this group, not even English. On the other hand, this is also a source of irritation and tension -- how are they supposed to guide people on how to live as good Muslims in Denmark when they know little of our culture here?

One of the parliament members here, Nasar Kharder, has made quite a stink about Abu Laban saying one thing to the Danish media and the complete opposite to Arab media. A concrete case is that he thought the boycott wrong (to the Danish media) but to the Arab press, that it was good and that he was very happy about it . . .

Nasar Kharder is from the "Radikal Venstre" (Venstre means "Left", but it is usually translated as "Liberal"). The RV party is one that pretty much defines the center in Danish politics and has been in many governments over the years -- both to the right and to the left of center. They are not in the government at the moment, which for the past 5 years has been Konservativ / Venstre (with the support of the DF, as I mentioned before. The RV has made a point of attracting "people of other ethnic background" (code for people with Arab/Muslim/ origins into their party work -- both on the national as well as the local level.

Nasar Kharder was born in Damascus of Palestinian parents. The tabloids are making a big deal over threats being made against him and the fact that he is (again) under police protection. He`s long made a lot of effort to activate the moderate Muslims in Denmark. `

Charles E. Cliff


posted by Juan @ [url2/08/2006 10:00:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/politics-of-race-and-religion-in.html[/url] 3 comments

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/09/culture/prin…


All cartoon politics are local

Muslim outrage reflects specific national conflicts -- most of them exacerbated by Bush`s policies.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/09/culture/prin…

By Juan Cole

Feb. 09, 2006 | The global controversy over the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed continued to spin out of control this week, as Iraqis demonstrated for the withdrawal of Danish troops, and Afghans attacked NATO soldiers, leaving four dead and dozens wounded. The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere. Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration`s blundering interventions in the region. Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

After the cartoons were published on Sept. 30, right-wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reacted to the angry response by refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries and sternly lecturing Muslims on their need to put up with the caricatures. He finally sounded a more conciliatory note this week, complaining of a global crisis. He was clearly worried, like another Dane, Prince Hamlet, about what would happen "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me."

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."

Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the Holocaust against the Jews also often colored the language of colonial administrators in places like Algeria about their subjects. A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammed with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes of a century and a half ago, wherein Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good.

(It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country`s rapists.)

Muslim sensitivity about insults to Islam in Europe has a strong postcolonial context. But the decades since independence have also seen increased conflict between the often Westernized elites in Muslim societies and the traditional Muslim middle and working classes. (See Mark MacNamara`s report from Morocco.) In several countries, most notably Egypt, the ruling elites took a hard line on the cartoons in an attempt to cover their flanks from the religious right.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit has been doggedly fanning the flames of the controversy since last fall, when he thundered that the drawings were an anti-Islamic "scandal" that must not be repeated. As recently as Feb. 5 he said, "The publication of cartoons by a Danish newspaper affronting Islam`s Prophet Mohammed had triggered massive anger among Muslims worldwide," without acknowledging his own role in keeping the issue on the front pages.

Abul-Gheit`s aggressive intervention has little to do with piety and a lot to do with Egyptian politics. The cartoons gave the relatively secular military Egyptian government a free -- and much needed -- opportunity to burnish its Muslim credentials. Egypt jailed 30,000 Muslim fundamentalists in the 1990s and killed some 1,500 in running street battles. Since 2000, the Egyptian government has continued to arrest members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and to repress the movement, perhaps the largest and most important dissident organization in Egypt. Despite extensive government intervention against it, the Brotherhood managed to win 88 seats in Parliament in the recent elections, and it would surely have won more if the elections had been truly free and fair. The Brotherhood`s good showing was an indirect consequence of pressure from the Bush administration, which demanded fairer elections, thus helping polarize Egyptian politics. In response, Abul-Gheit and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak sought to increase their popularity and outflank the Brotherhood by posing as champions of Islam against a disrespectful West. The move was made all the more attractive because the only cost was to relations with a small country like Denmark.

On Tuesday, the grand sheik of the Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi -- the foremost Sunni authority -- led a procession of 20,000 students and others in a protest against the caricatures. He and other leading Egyptian clerical figures gave speeches. The Egyptian clerics are often criticized by the lay Muslim Brotherhood as mere stooges of the military government, so this controversy was a means for them, too, to assert their religious leadership.

Reactions in other parts of the Muslim world also reflected local politics. Kashmir Muslims, many of whom feel themselves wrongly dominated by Hindu India, demonstrated on Tuesday, and surely their real target was New Delhi rather than Copenhagen. In Iran, the now nearly decade-long struggle between hard-line clerics and liberal reformers has increasingly been won by the hard-liners, who want to keep Iran from falling under Western influence. The Iranian crowd that attempted to attack the Danish embassy was expressing the hard-liners` policy of isolationism. The standoff between Iran and the United States and its Israeli ally over Tehran`s nuclear energy program was also clearly part of the dynamic. Wire services said that Iran`s supreme jurisprudent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the Danish caricatures an "Israeli conspiracy" set in motion by Zionist anger over the victory of the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist party Hamas in recent elections. (Khamenei`s timeline is off, since the drawings were published last September. But the absurdity of the charge should not obscure the powerful political emotions it appeals to.)

On Tuesday, as well, the Pakistani Parliament took up two major pieces of business. One was an attempt by the secular Pakistan People`s Party to repeal an Islamic-law ordinance on adultery put into effect by the late dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. Religious-law courts had used the law to punish rape victims for coming forward, judging them to be adulteresses unless they could prove they had been unwilling. A woman`s testimony is worth half that of a man in such cases, in accordance with Zia`s version of Islamic law, and so few women could hope to convict their rapists. The other matter before Parliament was an overwhelming condemnation of the caricatures of the prophet. The obvious lesson: If you are going to try to repeal Islamic law in Pakistan, it is awfully convenient for you to have a Danish newspaper to vote against as a way of affirming your Islamic legitimacy.

Iraq witnessed similar struggles. A spokesman for the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq`s Shiites, told Agence France Presse, "The ayatollah asks the government of Denmark to take measures to discourage those who knowingly harm the position of the Prophet." Sistani went on to say that "participation in the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq by Danish forces with the said aim of helping the Iraqi people is contradictory with attacks against that which is most sacred to Iraqis and attacks on their most noble beliefs." The grand ayatollah was more or less inviting the Danish troops to leave, a radical step for him.

Although Sistani announced as early as 2003 that he viewed the foreign military occupation of Iraq as undesirable in the long run, he has not so far issued a ruling that the troops of the outsiders must depart. As a result, he has been attacked as a creature of the Americans by more hard-line Shiite groups, such as the Sadrist movement led by the young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. On Monday, the Sadrists mounted a demonstration some 5,000 strong in the southern city of Kut, famed in history as the graveyard of invading British troops during World War I, at which crowds burned Danish flags and demanded that the 530 Danish troops leave the country. A day earlier, Danish soldiers stationed in the Shiite south had been shot at.

Sistani could not afford to leave the defense of the prophet Mohammed to Muqtada al-Sadr. The competition for mantle of the best Muslim between more hard-line and more moderate leaders has helped provoke the strong reaction to the caricatures in Iraq, just as it has in Egypt.

Likewise, the demonstrations in the largely secular and cosmopolitan cities of Damascus and Beirut over the weekend, which turned violent and led to the burning of the Danish embassies in both cities, reflected strong divisions in Syria and Lebanon. In Damascus, the secular Baath government of President Bashar al-Asad has repressed the Muslim Brotherhood. In Beirut, it seems likely that pro-Syrian Sunnis demonstrating on Sunday resented the new assertiveness of the Lebanese Christians, who had successfully led a movement last spring to get Syrian troops out of the country. The Sunnis not only burned the embassy but also attacked a Christian church, over the objections of their Sunni clerical leaders.

In Afghanistan, rural tribespeople attacked NATO bases, demonstrating that they were far more impatient with the continued foreign military presence in the country than was their pro-American president, Hamid Karzai. The most important such attack came in Maimanah, in the northwest of the country near Turkmenistan, not an area that had seen strong support of the Pushtun Taliban.

Rather than merely an East-West issue or a clash of civilizations, the caricature controversy should be seen as part of a culture war within Muslim societies. Precisely because the issue is distant and not very important, it is a cost-free bandwagon on which everyone can jump in search of greater legitimacy among Muslim publics. There is no downside in the Muslim world to defending the prophet Mohammed from Western insults. Pro-American politicians such as Abul-Gheit can use it to burnish their nationalist image, while Sistani can embrace the campaign as part of his old rivalry with the Sadr movement. The cleric Tantawi can employ it to boost his popularity among the rank and file in Egypt and to offset the popularity of the lay fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. It can be used to mobilize Muslims in Kashmir who care a great deal more about Indian repression than about Danish newspapers.

The Bush administration`s impulsive intervention in Middle Eastern affairs has heated up the internal Muslim culture wars to the boiling point -- and ironically strengthened those very radical, pan-Arab and Islamist forces that Bush wanted to check. Bush handed Muqtada al-Sadr his current platform, which calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign troops from Iraq immediately, and which promises that Iraqi Shiites will defend Iran and Syria from an American attack. (The ruling elites of both Iran and Syria are Shiite.) Sistani would not feel the same need to compete with Muqtada by attacking the West if the Americans had not occupied Iraq in so thorough-going, arrogant and incompetent a manner. Bush`s pressure on the Syrian regime is an important background to the Damascus and Beirut riots. Pamphlets passed out before the Beirut demonstration denounced the U.S. presence in Iraq, and an attack on a church in Beirut is a symbolic strike at the United States, perceived as a foreign Christian power intervening in Muslim affairs.

The "global crisis" of which Rasmussen spoke has been exacerbated by the decision of the Bush administration to invade Iraq and throw the region into turmoil. It isn`t just about some cartoons. It is about independence and the genuine liberty to define yourself rather than being defined by the imperial West.

-- By Juan Cole
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Our media must give Muslims the chance to debate with each other

We used to say `When in Rome do as the Romans`; but Rome is now Tunis, Cairo and Tirana, while London is all the world
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1705411,00.html

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday February 9, 2006

Guardian
Facing me in my living room, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed says a Danish cartoonist who insulted the prophet should be tried in an Islamic court and then "he will be executed according to Islamic rules". Of course the Syrian-born Islamic cleric is not physically sitting in my living room; he`s on a television screen, live from Beirut, where the Danish embassy has just been trashed by demonstrators. That makes the death threat only slightly less threatening. Imagine how it feels to be one of those Danish cartoonists.

For centuries, there has been a good rule for the coexistence of civilisations. It said: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Globalisation has undermined that rule. Because of mass migration, peoples and their cultures are physically mixed up together. Rome is no longer just Rome; it`s also Tunis, Cairo and Tirana. Birmingham is also Kashmir and the Punjab, while London is all the world. Because of worldwide mass media, there is no longer such a thing as local offence or local intimidation. Everything can reach everyone. Competing cultures try to spread their norms around the globe: George Bush for western-style democracy, Pope Benedict XVI for Catholicism, Omar Bakri Mohammed for sharia.

How should we live in this brave new world? How can we stay free in it? Like most of my friends, I have been agonising about this over the past week. We feel this is a defining moment, for all who live in Europe. And we know that there are no simple answers. The least bad outcome will be a painful compromise between the universal right to free speech - the oxygen of all other freedoms - and the need for voluntary self-restraint in such a mixed-up world.

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image. That is the first thing to be said. I have been saddened to see British politicians and commentators, particularly on the left, hesitating for a long moment to say so clearly, or feeling it necessary to say other things first. (Do you want to leave the defence of free speech and non-violence to David Davis?) I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU`s reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime. We should have said: when you burn the Danish flag you burn our flag. Why weren`t all EU ambassadors instantly withdrawn from Damascus in protest?

Violence or the direct threat of violence - as in those posters held by London protesters that read "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" - is both morally unjustified and, rightly, brings the threat of criminal prosecution. It is right that Abu Hamza has been convicted for incitement to murder. (Incidentally, this shows that we do not need a new offence of glorification of terrorism, since he was convicted under existing laws.) Those Danish cartoons were offensive, perhaps even abusive - and I was not in favour of their re-publication in various European newspapers - but they were not threatening to any particular group or individuals. They are in no way comparable with a death threat to individual cartoonists or torching an embassy - with people dying in the process. And let`s not have any of that tired old higher nonsense about "structural violence" or "repressive tolerance".

This violence was unjustified and criminal, but perhaps it was also effective. One way of looking at the self-restraint of the British media over the past week is to say how responsible, pragmatic and sensitively multicultural they all were. Alternatively you might say they were scared of having their offices burned. Was it wisdom with a seasoning of fear, or rather fear packaged as wisdom? Throughout history, violence has often paid off, but the struggle of civilisation against barbarism is to ensure that it doesn`t.

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats. The danger at this critical moment is that we will see the beginning of a vicious spiral, with Muslim extremists blowing wind into the sails of anti-Muslim extremists (such as Nick Griffin of the BNP, and how I wish he had been convicted a couple of days before Abu Hamza), whose violent language in turn drives more moderate Muslims to support the jihadists, and so on down. But I do not agree with yesterday`s Guardian leader when it said that the BBC`s Today programme was wrong to broadcast an interview with Omar Bakri Muhammad, who was also interviewed by Channel 4 news.

On the contrary, I think the British media have done exactly what they should by letting us hear the voices of Muslim extremists but setting them against moderate and reasonable Muslim voices, as well as those of non-Muslims. There was a riveting discussion on Newsnight, in which two British Muslim women calmly argued with the ranting, demagogic, but in style and accent also recognisably British, extremist Anjem Choudary, of the al-Ghuraba groupuscule. Perhaps it would have been better still if the discussion had been chaired by, say, Zeinab Badawi rather than Jeremy Paxman; but the essential point is that it provided a civilised platform on which Muslims could argue with fellow Muslims. Reporters sweepingly write of "Muslim anger" erupting across the world, but many British Muslims are as angry with the jihadist provocateurs as they are with the Danish cartoonists, as we will doubtless see in the demonstration planned by British Muslims in London this Saturday.

The temptation, to which too many are succumbing, is to see this as a showdown between Islam and Europe or the west (although, for once, the US has been somewhat out of the firing line). That is how extremists want to frame the argument, as in the poster waved outside the Danish embassy in London: "Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer". But the real dividing line is between moderates and extremists on both sides, between men and women of reason and dialogue, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, and men and women of hatred, such as Abu Hamza or Nick Griffin. Not for the first time in recent history, the means are more important than the ends. In fact, the means you choose determine where you`ll end up.

This is not a war, and it`s not going to be won or lost by the west. It`s an argument inside Islam and inside Europe, where millions of Muslims already live. If reason prevails over hate, it will be because most British, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish and altogether European Muslims prevail over their own extremist minorities. We non-Muslim Europeans can contribute to that outcome, by our policies abroad, towards Iraq, Iran, Israel and Palestine, and at home, on immigration, education, jobs and so forth. We can also contribute by cultural sensitivity and self-restraint, but we cannot compromise on the essentials of a free society. Offering platforms of civilised free speech for European Muslims to conduct their debate with each other, as the British media have done this week, is one of the best answers we can give to hate.

www.timothygartonash.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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The president, the stripper and the attorney general

The extraordinary legal defence of George Bush`s domestic spying reads like a blend of Kafka, Le Carré and Mel Brooks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1705412,00.html

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 9, 2006

Guardian
In 1996, Governor George W Bush received a summons to serve on a jury, which would have required his admission that 20 years earlier he had been arrested for drunk driving. Already planning his presidential campaign, he did not want this information made public. His lawyer made the novel argument to the judge that Bush should not have to serve because "he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future". (The defendant was a stripper accused of drunk driving.) The judge agreed, and it was not until the closing days of the 2000 campaign that Bush`s record surfaced. On Monday, the same lawyer, Alberto Gonzales - now attorney general - appeared before the senate judiciary committee to defend "the client", as he called the president.

Gonzales was the sole witness called to explain Bush`s warrantless domestic spying, in obvious violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act (Fisa) and circumvention of the special court created to administer it. The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks, and partly by John le Carré. After not being sworn in, the absence of oath-taking having been insisted upon by the Republicans, Gonzales offered legal reasoning even more imaginative than that he used to get Bush off jury duty: a melange of mendacity, absurdity and mystery.

The attorney general argued that Fisa did and did not apply; that the administration was operating within it, while flouting it; and that it didn`t matter. The president`s "inherent" power, after all, allowed him to do whatever he wanted. It was all, Gonzales said, "totally consistent". His explanation, observed Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, "defies logic and plain English".

Congress, Gonzales elaborated, had no proper constitutional role, but in any case had already approved the president`s secret programme by voting for the authorisation of the use of military force in Afghanistan - even if members didn`t know it; or even, when informed years later that they had approved the secret programme, objected that they hadn`t known that that was what they were doing.

The legislation that was ignored, Gonzales declared, shouldn`t be amended to bring this domestic spying under the law because the secret programme was already legal, or might be legal; and anyway it doesn`t matter if Congress says it`s legal. The all-powerful president should be trusted, but when Bush states wrongly that he goes to court for warrants, it`s all right that he doesn`t know what he is talking about. "As you know," said Gonzales, "the president is not a lawyer."

Who was or wasn`t being spied on couldn`t and wouldn`t be explained. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked whether the programme could be used to "influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media", Gonzales replied: "Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible." When Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked for assurances that only al-Qaida or suspected terrorists were subjected to surveillance, Gonzales answered: "Sir, I can`t give you absolute assurance."

Nor would he say what the programme really was. "I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorised," Gonzales said. "I`m not going to respond to that. I`m not going to answer."

Gonzales`s ultimate argument was an appeal to history. George Washington, he pointed out in a display of erudition, "intercepted British mail", footnoting a 1997 CIA report on the subject. In the civil war, the telegraph was wiretapped. And during both the first and second world wars, communications were intercepted. Gonzales`s ahistoricism about technology aside (George Washington had no cell phones to tap, no computers to hack), Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt could not have broken a law that did not exist.

Through his convoluted testimony, the attorney general represented "the client" as a useful factotum again. But in his tour of history, he neglected the disclosure by the Associated Press on February 3 of about 200 pages of documents from the White House of President Gerald Ford. These papers highlighted the objections made by Ford`s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to getting court warrants for domestic surveillance. It was partly to thwart such unaccountable executive power that Congress enacted Fisa in 1978.

Once again Cheney, the power behind the throne, has found a way to relieve the frustrations of the past. But he is fulfilling more than the curdled dreams of the Nixon and Ford era. The Bush presidency is straining to realise a pre-Washington ideal - unconstitutional monarchy.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars. Email: [e-mail]
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Kritik geht querbeet. Einst umjubelte Heroen werden zu Renegaten.
Eben hörte ich, dass der `Economist` in seiner nächste Ausgabe D als Titelgeschichte haben wird.
Er prophezeit D US-Verhältnisse.
Meint damit, dass die Polarizierung der Gesellschaft das US-Niveau erreichen wird, aber ohne die Deregulationen auf den Märkten, die die USA noch immer zu einem Erfolgsmodell werden läßt.

Power without grace is a curse`

The US has long lauded John Hope Franklin, the doyen of African-American historians. But he remains as fiercely critical of his country as when he was growing up in the racist south. He tells Benny Morris why

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1705532,00.html

Benny Morris
Thursday February 9, 2006

Guardian
In 1995, when he was 80, John Hope Franklin gave a dinner party for friends in Washington DC`s exclusive Cosmos Club. He had been a member for more than three decades, the club`s first African American. The following day he was to receive the medal of freedom, America`s highest civilian award, from President Clinton. "Some of my guests hadn`t arrived and I went to find them. I went down the grand staircase - it is a grand staircase - and at the bottom this white woman saw me and said, `Here` and handed me her coat check, saying, `Go get my coat.` I told her that if she presented that check to a uniformed attendant, and all the club`s attendants were uniformed, perhaps she would get her coat. And I walked away."

Franklin, whose mind, sadly, is brimful of such anecdotes ("they dot my whole life"), has just turned 91. He is tall, thin and thoughtful, with courtly old-world manners - like a stereotypical southern gentleman, I almost wrote. He is the doyen of African-American historians. A trailblazer, he paved the way into the heart of American academe for succeeding generations of black scholars and his major work, From Slavery to Freedom (1947) is still popular today.

He was born in the dirt-poor, all-black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915, but his parents were educated and his father was a lawyer. He soon bettered even their achievements, receiving his MA and PhD from Harvard. After teaching at black colleges, he was successively the first black chairman of Brooklyn College`s history department (1956) and of the University of Chicago`s history department (1967), and wound up his career as the distinguished James B Duke professor of history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the South`s most prestigious university - a place in which "I couldn`t have been a student when I was young." I interviewed him in his spacious office in Duke`s new, lavish John Hope Franklin Center. He lives a few blocks away and cultivates orchids in his spare time.

America has been good to him. John Hope Franklin has been showered with honorary degrees and has sat on countless advisory and decision-making governmental and academic boards and committees. But he remains deeply critical of the US, and some Americans.

"This country is so arrogant, so self-certain," he says, asked whether the west is now engaged with the Muslim world in a war of civilisations. "I am not sure that is what we are confronting. [But I am also] not sure we have done what we ought to have done to cultivate the rest of the world. We`re so powerful and so presumptuous that it makes us unattractive, almost unbecoming. We don`t treat other countries and people right. Power without grace is a curse."

Franklin is also fierce in his opposition to the war in Iraq. "I don`t see any good reason why we went in there or why we are there now. The invasion has sullied our reputation as has our behaviour there. We have undertaken to spread democracy when we ourselves are not democratic."

America not democratic - how so?

"Our presidents are elected by electoral colleges, not directly. And our military is not democratic. There`s no draft. Bush`s children and my children do not serve." He points out that those who do serve are mostly from America`s poorer classes, including many blacks, driven into the professional army by economic necessity. He suggests that the Bush administration keeps down the minimum wage to prompt the poor to volunteer for the (relatively) well-paid armed services.

But Franklin also opposes war in general. "By the time the second world war came I was a pacifist. But I sought to volunteer." That could be called contradictory, I say. "Yes. But I didn`t want to be called a coward," he responds, "and I wouldn`t let [my pacifism] stand in the way of meeting the needs of my country."

In his recently published autobiography, Mirror to America, he writes, "I was prepared to use any tactics I could to avoid being drafted." Again, this seems contradictory, but, as Franklin explains, he had been down to the navy recruitment office to volunteer in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor - only to come face to face with the US armed services` policy of restricting blacks to menial tasks.

"They were terrible to me," he says. "Are you going to tell me that when they told me that I couldn`t be in the man`s army to sit at a desk and perform duties for which I was trained, that I should have accepted it and scrubbed floors and peeled potatoes because of what Hitler was doing? Hell no. Maybe you would have, not I."

He does not say so now, but Franklin`s attitude to the military services at the time was strongly influenced by what happened to his brother, Buck Franklin Jr. Buck, who had been a school headmaster when he was drafted, emerged from the second world war a wreck, unstable and depressive. He had, Franklin writes in Mirror to America, been consigned to a "kitchen brigade", where he spent his days peeling potatoes and suffered "vicious cruelty" at the hands of an "uneducated, white staff sergeant". After demobilisation, Buck fell, or jumped, from a second-floor window in Slaughter`s Hotel in Richmond, Virginia and died within weeks.

He also portrays much of the American historical establishment at that time as politically, perhaps racially, driven. He singles out one historian of the South, E Merton Coulter, who, in The South During Reconstruction (first published in 1947), described blacks as "ignorant buffoons", who were known for "chasing white women with the intention of raping them".

"This," says Franklin, "is off the deep end."

Even less overtly partisan academics were, Franklin says, "trying to explain and justify what had happened, and what was happening and what ought to happen" regarding American blacks - "and I was trying to say what had happened." If he saw his mission as one of being a countervailing witness to the truth, he concedes that his writing is, on some level, politically motivated: "Yes, there is a political message in the sense that I`m trying to call attention to the hypocrisy of this country in saying one thing, committing itself to a set of principles, and, at the same time, practising something else."

But doesn`t the historian have a responsibility to try to be objective? "I`m not attached to objectivity as such. If you say my writing is politicised with the purpose of achieving a certain goal, then I have no problem with that."

In Mirror to America, Franklin devotes a chapter, Glimpses of the Motherland, to his trips to Africa. He writes that he came to "respect and revere" Africa, starting with Ghana`s achievement of independence, which he watched from America. "Welcome home, brother," was how one Nigerian greeted him when he visited Lagos.

He seems reluctant, however, to talk about the awful state of Africa today. "I`m not going to let Europe and this country off the hook. The pattern of exploitation there has been fostered by the west. I think the country we have had most to do with is the worst-off - Liberia. It`s been around for more than 100 years and there is nothing but failure there. The same is true of Haiti."

I ask him about Sudan and the silence of the African-American community regarding the Arabs` slaughter there of hundreds of thousands of blacks, in the south, during the past four decades, and currently in Darfur. "It`s an awful thing when we find people who don`t value life." You mean the Arab janjaweed militias? "Yes, but others, and other places, come to mind. Sometimes it`s just blacks fighting each other. In Sudan, [there is a massacre by people] who want to protect their own interests. You find blacks who are just as vicious and evil. I`m not saying that those in Sudan are vicious and evil, [but] they are victims there not because they are black but because they stand in the way of the Arabs."

As to the silence of America`s blacks, "I can explain it away by saying that blacks here have enough problems of their own. But I think that they don`t have any world view; they know, but not a great deal. They are beset by problems themselves, so they can`t take time to protest against what`s going on in Darfur."

I can`t resist asking him about the Arab-Israeli conflict. At first he suggests that "it is a battleground of others more than of the Israelis and Palestinians".

"Others are egging them on," he says. But he then adds that on a visit, he was deeply impressed by "the depth of feeling" of the mutual antagonisms. "Both sides are so extreme in their positions [that] I find it difficult to see how it will ever be adjudicated ... Each side doesn`t want the other to have a state," he says. He thinks that both should have states. The problem is exacerbated "by outsiders". He is referring to the Americans.

Our talk ends on a positive note. There has been progress, he says, in the situation of blacks in America, but not nearly enough. Among those besetting problems - the ghettos and the poverty, the disproportionate number of blacks in prison or with Aids - what, I wonder, does Franklin consider the biggest obstacle facing the people whose history his writing has reclaimed. "We haven`t got rid of fundamental racism. But it`s soluble. Unless you believe that by nature blacks are inferior, but I don`t believe that for a minute."

· Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, is author most recently of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
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Latest Update: #35271 08.02.06 14:57:53 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality:
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2468 , US: 264 , Feb.06: 23

Iraker 02/08/06: Total: 107
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Life in the USA
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11846.htm

By James Rothenberg

02/09/06 "ICH" -- -- The political system has not been corrupted. It is working effectively, like always. The backbone is the patronage system. Politicians have wonderful memories. They know who they owe. Prostitution is a profession, allegorically the oldest one. Politics is a business. At one time it was popular to think that if someone rich enough were to get elected, he (at that time it would surely be a he) would be immune, but who can owe as much as the rich?

We could try term limits, a single term. In and out. Make room for the next bright face. What do politicians do during the summer? They give college commencement speeches til hoarse, all the same speech… “You are our country’s future leaders”. Meanwhile 50 years pass, the college kid is gray and that politician still has his ass on his seat. A single term would not fundamentally change the patronage system, but it would devalue it. You’re not worth as much.

Also sensible would be a switch to runoff elections, or at least instant runoff elections. But as the snide commandant in Stalag 17 told the feisty boys in Barracks 4, “Curtains vud do vunders for this barracks. You veel not get them!” Democrats and Republicans staunchly unite in opposition to such extreme measures. Why take poison unless you are trying to commit suicide?

There were no intelligence failures concerning Iraq. The invasion was not a mistake. Neither was the torture. Instead, bright, rational people acted in the best tradition of U.S. foreign policy since the birth of our great nation, the redskins being the first foreigners. Try telling Americans that their country uses violent force without moral compunction in wresting from weaker countries just what it wants from them and the air will suddenly get chillier around you. However, there is a record. Like Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

It would take more than a cell block of arrests from the president on down to make America the Beautiful’s dress pretty enough to party again, but who will arrest the arrestors? For the future we could require political office holders to speak their own words, that is, write their own speeches. That shouldn’t be too much to ask of a leader.

Americans are well trained in how to think. It occurs so naturally from birth that we are unaware of the training. The basic idea is that your country knows better than you do. The most thoroughly educated Americans treat it as undying dogma that our country is always and everywhere a force for good in the world. Those who have been deprived of formal education rely more on their nose, an organ of exceptional trustworthiness.

The primary writer of the Constitution, James Madison, stressed that the government must be set up in such a way so as “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”, such protection of the rich becoming axiomatic. Good Americans seem very comfortable with the great wealth and income divide in their country. Another founding father, first Chief Justice John Jay, felt that those who owned the country should run it. Good Americans are comfortable with that also.

In election year 2000, Al Gore claimed that the greatest beneficiaries of Bush’s proposed tax cuts would be the richest 1% of Americans, but sufficient voters, ever mindful of longstanding tradition, protected that minority.

We are not a nation of laws, despite the priestly incantations. There are plenty of people who are above and beyond the law. We say we are a nation of laws but for that statement to have the intended, hallowed effect it has to mean more than hauling some vagrant off the street. It has to mean that the punishments meted out to the weak and poor will in identical measure be meted out to the rich and powerful. We could try, Stengel-like, to look it up, but for that the record is meager.

Declaring war is a popular tactic. Thanks to modern technology we have a handy measure of its permeability throughout our culture. Googling the term “war on hunger” yields some 21,900 references. The “war on poverty” yields 646,000 references, and the “war on drugs” yields 4,310,000. Then there is the “war on terror” with 25,100,000.

We are supposed to accept the sincerity of these wars with all the seriousness that the naming is intended to imply. Looking to actual practice the war on hunger more closely resembles a war on the hungry, the war on poverty a war on poor people, and the war on drugs a war on the people who use them. Now comes the punch line, only it isn’t funny. The war on terror more closely resembles a war to terrorize (intimidate) we the people.

First, if we wanted to reduce terror, we could stop harboring terrorists, stop supporting them, stop paying them, and stop doing it ourselves. There are a couple of reasons why Americans are slow in coming to this conclusion. One is that we only acknowledge the terrorism of others, never our own. Ours is always precautionary action or legitimate self-defense. The second reason is ironclad; the State Department confines its definition of terrorism to that which is carried out by “subnational groups or clandestine agents”, so acts carried out by the United States of America are conveniently exempt.

Countries, even countries with armies so mighty they encircle the globe, cannot commit terrorism, by official decree. They do it unofficially. But they can do a lot more. They can plan and initiate a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” as adjudged at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. One of those other war crimes is Art. 6 (c) Crimes against Humanity, meaning civilians, meaning terrorism.

Americans learn early on about the unmatched freedoms we enjoy. What is all the fanfare about if these freedoms are only granted on a tentative basis? What does it mean to be free from surveillance when the government finds no pressing reason to surveil, but subject to surveillance when the government claims the need? Or to have the right to dissent when it does not greatly worry the government, only to have dissent stifled when it poses serious problems? These freedoms that our leaders boast about to succeeding generations are surely more than fair-weather freedoms. That would be bad enough but it goes one step deeper. Freedom is expressly for the bad weather, or it never really was.

The “war on terror” is our national slogan. It went into the shop for a nomenclature change last year, but emerged intact. For awhile we didn’t want to seem too warlike. Better to stress promotion of freedom and democracy, freshen up the old image. But the war on terror says it all, and it is oh so useful. The other day the man with the worst job in America, Scott McClellan, landed a blow for freedom with his retort to a questioner, “Are we a nation at war?” Of course there is an answer besides the dutiful yes but to voice it may affect your ability to continue roaming without a straitjacket.

The President must have the war because the war makes it possible to do all the things he could never do if there wasn’t a war. Ask his cover, Attorney General Gonzales, who informs the Judiciary Committee that there is no such thing as a bad inherent power. One of the senators asked Gonzales a very improper question. “How will we know when the war is over?” Gonzales could only smile at the suggestion that between these two learned men there could be any general disagreement about the usefulness of war to a country intent on dominating the world with military force.

War is not inevitable but there is something innate in our species that prepares us to march to the beat of the drum. Our primitive herd instinct makes us vulnerable to exploitation. When everybody is taught precisely the same thing, it no longer matters what is taught. The result is always orthodoxy. The military teaches a valuable strategy. After being captured, the best time to escape is as soon as you can. Of course you have to realize you are a captive.

A million men frozen at attention waiting for the signal of another to act as one. Is this not true ugliness? Ugliness is not deformity but its opposite; it is any multitude of people in constant agreement.

War as a tool of control relies on the glorification of battle and death. Humans are the only of earth’s creatures that cherish life. This is because they know it will end. This is why they invented god. But what is the historical record of the god concept? Is it used more effectively to save or take life? We could look it up.

James Rothenberg, dissident writer/activist - [e-mail]

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Der Artikel löst ein zwiespältiges Gefühl bei mir aus.

Das die Europäer sich eines allgemeinen Rassismus gegenüber dem Islam hingegeben haben, haben viele Postings allein hier im Forum bewiesen.

Nur die Behauptung die USA würden den Kampf nicht gegen den Islam führen, wird allein schon durch die führende Rolle bei diesen Vergeltungsschlägen durch die Neocons ad absurdum geführt.

Auch der Begriff Kampf der Kulturen, der aus den USA kommt, zeigt das Gegenteil, macht aber dadurch die Rolle der Europäer nicht weniger unsympatisch.

Feb 10, 2006

United states - minus United States
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB10Ak02.html

By Ehsan Ahrari

For a while after the US invasion of Iraq, it appeared that the idea of "the West" and "Western unity" had become history. But now that idea seems to be reviving precipitously.

It is interesting that the ostensible departure of that idea looked real when a Muslim country was invaded in 2003. Now Western unity is seemingly resurgent in the aftermath of the defiance by another Muslim country (Iran) of the United States (or is the West?) and at a time when Muslims are showing their outrage related to the caricature of the Prophet of Islam. In both instances, Islam has played a perceptible role. Are we about to see the emergence of a great divide, a major schism, between the world of Islam and the West? If so, how permanent is this divide likely to be?

If the history of the Cold War teaches us anything, it is that a conflict of a major proportion and of an enduring nature is a precondition for nation-states to determine on which side of that conflict they want to be. They study the conflict over a period of time, determine how that conflict affects their vital interests, and then evolve their related position. That was what happened between 1945 and 1991. Whether the community of nations now will follow a similar pattern is not quite clear yet.

Islam has already emerged as a major issue that has captured the world`s attention, especially for the past five years. As the lone superpower, and as a nation that was targeted by global terrorists on September 11, 2001, the United States got on the offensive against a fanatical government in Afghanistan soon thereafter. Since all the hijackers on September 11 were Muslims, there were a number of legal measures taken inside the US that were perceived in Muslim countries as anti-Islamic in nature. However, the US government, more than any other government in the world, went out of its way to insist that the focus of its outrage was not Islam, but those elements that are determined to perpetrate global chaos and mayhem in the name of that great religion.

Then came the US invasion of Iraq. It is the manner in which the decision was made to invade that country - and the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found - that intensified Muslim anger. Clearly there was also ample resentment related to what Muslims perceived as "unjust" concomitant public discussions in the United States linking Islam with global terrorism. Then came disclosures of brutal treatment of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison and that of the "detainees" in the Guantanamo prison. Even though the Bush administration claimed that reports of brutality related to those dungeons were exaggerated, the allegations themselves were seen in Muslim countries simply as more "evidence" of America`s ongoing "war" against Islam.

Viewing the conflict from the US side, there is no reason to dismiss the Bush administration`s position that it has no fight against Islam. The September 11 attacks legitimately frightened the US leadership, even though its machismo prevented it from saying so. The United States had to react. How much of that reaction was legitimate and at what point one could say the US went over the top was largely a matter of debate. No one can rightly claim to be objective about the issue. If you were a Muslim, you would feel that your religion was unjustifiably targeted, or the US went too far in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, if you are not, there was no such thing as overreaction. After all, the United States was attacked first - it could not have sat back and waited for another attack. By the same token, it could not have taken limited actions against those who deemed killing Americans as some sort of "religious obligation".

Europe was not a part of that fight until al-Qaeda targeted Spain in March 2004, as a tactical maneuver to force it to pull its forces out of Iraq. The fact that the Spanish government withdrew its troops soon thereafter did not persuade that organization not try to push all of Europe toward appeasement. In fact, until the terrorist attacks in Spain, the European perspective was that al-Qaeda`s major fight was with the US, and Europe would, somehow, be spared.

As Europe remained schizophrenic about its own position and ambivalent about its role in George W Bush`s "global war on terrorism", some of its members showed solidarity by committing troops in Iraq. Only France and Germany remained as major critics and consistent opponents of that "war of choice".

The London bombings of July 7, 2005, marked a point when Europe could no longer remain ambivalent about its role in the "war against terrorism". When the video of one of the terrorists in those bombings was released showing him declaring war against European countries, the die was cast. Europe could no longer remain on the sidelines. But Europe`s participation in this war became idiosyncratic of its perception of Islam, a perception that has deep historical roots.

Regarding the "global war on terrorism", there is a major difference between the United States and Europe. Americans do not have long memories of interacting with Islam or colonizing Muslim countries. Besides, in the United States, "political correctness" is more than a bumper-sticker statement. Intuitively speaking, a large number of people are genuine practitioners of not offending anyone`s faith in the name of freedom of expression. Thus a majority of Americans are at least intellectually capable of making the distinction between the perverse terrorist logic of relating their action to Islam and the religion of Islam itself.

In contrast, Europe - where anti-Islamic feelings related to the Ottoman conquests between the 12th and 16th centuries never really vanished - has shown little evidence of really comprehending that distinction. Besides, Europe was a region that produced the most nefarious evidence of anti-Semitism in the form of creating the Holocaust. Europe is also a region - if one includes Russia as an extension of it - that has the legacy of creating gulags, another depressing legacy of human suffering. In other words, Europe has historically demonstrated that, given a chance, it is capable of manifesting worse examples of hatred. Europe is also busy constantly raising the bar regarding the entry of Turkey in the European Union, largely because it is a Muslim country. That type of legacy is substantially absent from US history.

In this context, it seems that Europe is only beginning to show that it is capable of demonstrating anti-Islamic tendencies in the name of freedom of expression (eg, the cartoon episodes of the Nordic countries). The London Guardian reported on February 6 that the same Danish paper that published the caricatures of the Prophet of Islam - claiming to exercise freedom of expression - refused to publish (and rightly so) similar cartoons of Jesus three years ago for fear of offending Christians. If it decided to be circumspect then by not publishing those cartoons, why did it apply a different rule in the case of offending Muslims? At the same time, some European countries can stifle freedom of choice by conveniently passing laws against hijab, Islam`s female dress code (eg, France for now, but there are reports that European countries are also considering the passage of similar laws), when it suits their purpose.

Iran`s nuclear aspirations have to be viewed in the same context and from the European perspective: an Islamist government creating a fiction of not developing nuclear weapons while, in reality, that is where it is heading if it is allowed to continue its uranium-enrichment programs. The involvement of the EU-3 countries (the United Kingdom, France and Germany) has made that conflict very central to the EU`s future role in resolving global issues. At least that is a general perception in a number of the European capitals. In this instance, Islam is also a player, at least in the minds of the Europeans.

So it seems that a great divide is emerging between "the West" and the East. The West seems to be uniting on issues related to Islam. It is too early to surmise how long this divide is likely to last. It might not last long at all. One thing appears certain, however. As the lone superpower - since it is determined to ensure the longevity of the present unipolar order - the United States is likely to work hard to close this divide. In the case of Iran, it has wisely let the EU-3 countries play a visible role in negotiating with Iran, thereby allowing diplomacy to proceed. At the same time, it has wisely decided to create a physical distance from Europe in the caricature-related controversy. It declared them as "offensive", but also has also supported the related exercise of freedom of expression.

The Europeans might not know this, but the United States would not want the "return" of the "West" that would sow seeds of intense resentment and hatred toward that very idea in the world of Islam. The US has most to lose, not the Europeans.

Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Ich hatte heute nachmittag schon auf den Artikel hingewiesen, nachdem ich in Radio ein Interview mit dem Autor gehört habe.
Er bezog sich auf auf einen Satz aus dem Artikel:
Most importantly, if it does not start tackling its structural problems in earnest soon, it may find itself stuck with something its people dread: amerikanische Verhältnisse, or “American conditions”, code for a socially polarised society in which workers are hired and fired at an employer`s whim.
Und weiter auf die Gefahr, die daraus entsteht für den Arbeitsmarkt, wenn dieser nicht geöffnet und entbürokratiesiert wird The risk is that Germany`s labour market, in particular, will end up “Americanised”, but without the good points of the American one, such as its openness and inclusiveness Nur sagte er im Interview weiter, wenn keine größeren Anstrengungen unternommen werden, könnte ein Umbau sicherlich 10 Jahre dauern.


Waiting for a Wunder
http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_i…

Feb 9th 2006
From The Economist print edition

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Germany`s economy is picking up, and its football fans hope for a World Cup victory this summer. But a lot more will have to come right before the country gets back on track, says Ludwig Siegele

IF YOU are visiting Germany this spring, watch out for footballs. They are everywhere, on posters, buses or entire buildings, even though the World Cup which the country is due to host this summer is still four months off. A German firm is even wrapping the giant globe atop east Berlin`s landmark television tower to make it look like a football. If marketing departments had the technology, a German daily recently joked, they would project a football on to the moon.

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Nor is it just marketing people who are getting excited. For the duration of the tournament most German states will liberalise shopping hours, and the government is even thinking of deploying the army around stadiums for the first time in the Bundeswehr`s history. Germans, it seems, are taking the World Cup extremely seriously—and not just because most of them are passionate football fans. “The last time the world paid so much attention to Germany was 16 years ago when the [Berlin] Wall came down,” says Angela Merkel, the country`s new chancellor.

Germany aims to use the attention generated by this world-class event to repair its battered image. “Made in Germany” has long since lost its ring; now government and big business have teamed up in a campaign to sell the country as the “Land of Ideas”. In Berlin, where the World Cup final will be played, visitors will be treated to a “Walk of Ideas” through the capital, complete with oversized sculptures of German inventions.

The hope is that a victory, or at least a respectable result, will help cure the collective depression that descended on Germany when the economy started to sag at the beginning of this decade—just as winning the 1954 World Cup, held in Switzerland, helped to heal the national psyche after the war and kicked off the Wirtschaftswunder (the post-war economic miracle). The Wunder von Bern, as the unexpected victory came to be known, helped to restore Germans` battered pride in their country.

What are the chances that a Wunder von Berlin might kick off a similar cultural and economic rebirth? The answer depends on your perspective. Germany today is like one of those pictures where, depending on how you tilt it, you see two different images. In exports, it is already world-class. Many of its global companies have never been more competitive. With exports of nearly $1 trillion in 2005, this medium-sized country (smaller than the American state of Montana, but with 82m people) already sells more goods in the world market than any other.

Investment and domestic demand are also picking up at last, so Germany`s economic outlook at home, too, has brightened. “In case you missed it, Germany is no longer the sick man of Europe,” says Elga Bartsch, an economist at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. In 2006, she predicts, the country`s economy will grow by 1.8%, the highest rate since 2000 and in line with the European average. But the labour market does not seem to have turned the corner yet: in January, unemployment before seasonal adjustment again hit 5m, or 12.1% of the workforce.

Perhaps most importantly, after years of chronic depression, the mood is much improved. According to the Allensbach Institute, a polling organisation, 45% of Germans now say that they are hopeful for 2006 (see chart 1). Business sentiment has not been so good since the new-economy bubble. Politicians, too, have changed their tune since last autumn`s election that ushered in a grand coalition. The new-year address by Angela Merkel struck an upbeat note. “I want to encourage us to find out what we are capable of,” she told her fellow Germans. “I am convinced we will be surprised.”

Look at the country from a different angle, however, as this survey will do, and it becomes clear that even if it won the World Cup for the first time since 1990, it would have plenty left to do. Germany may be in better shape than France or Italy, and many other countries would love to have its problems, but that does not mean it is in robust health. Most importantly, if it does not start tackling its structural problems in earnest soon, it may find itself stuck with something its people dread: amerikanische Verhältnisse, or “American conditions”, code for a socially polarised society in which workers are hired and fired at an employer`s whim.

The risk is that Germany`s labour market, in particular, will end up “Americanised”, but without the good points of the American one, such as its openness and inclusiveness, argues Wolfgang Streeck, head of the Cologne-based Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In many areas, he says, the German story has been one of “a high average and a low standard deviation”: a rich society with wealth and opportunity fairly spread, with few outliers at either end of the scale. But increasingly, he says, the story is turning into one of “a low average and an exploding standard deviation”.

If think-tanks have their numbers right, Germany has already ceased to be the “equitable middle-class society” that other social scientists have described, offering a “social elevator” for everybody. When it comes to social justice, Germany is already doing less well than many other European countries, according to a recent study by BerlinPolis. For instance, the risk of poverty has greatly increased in recent years, especially for the young. About a fifth of Germans under 16 now live in households with incomes below the poverty-risk threshold.

The fault does not lie primarily with globalisation and the “locusts”, as many Germans have taken to calling foreign investors. Rather, it is the very systems meant to guarantee a well-balanced society, along with the attempts to preserve them, that are increasingly dividing German society. Those systems now serve vested interests, driving a wedge between well-provided-for insiders and marginalised outsiders.

This survey will describe the ways in which Germany`s institutions have slid from virtue to vice: in politics, in the labour market, in education, in competition policy and elsewhere. It is not that the country has not tried to change. But most of these changes have been designed to optimise existing systems rather than change them fundamentally.

This survey will journey through a country struggling with change, passing through Berlin, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Cologne and Frankfurt. It will note that in some ways the future has already arrived: it is simply distributed unevenly. Much of it can be found in places where you might least expect it—such as in the eastern city of Jena, where the journey ends.


Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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Author interview
eb 9th 2006
From Economist.com

A discussion with Ludwig Siegele, Germany correspondent of The Economist

“Germans are more or less a dying breed, and so they need immigration. They especially need highly qualified, high-potential people to come to Germany in order to fill the gaps left by the low birth rate. Now the problem of course...is that historically or culturally it is difficult for Germans to accept the fact that more foreigners have to come and that they have to integrate them.”

Listen to the audio interview (7:40 mins)
http://www.economist.com/media/audio/econ_survey_germany2006…

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Published on Thursday, February 9, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Is U.S. Military Dominance of the World a Good Idea?
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0209-32.htm

by Peter Phillips


The leadership class in the US is now dominated by a neo-conservative group of some 200 people who have the shared goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group, in cooperation with major military contractors, has become a powerful force in military unilateralism and US political processes.

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book on the power elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military, and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through "higher circles" of contact and agreement.

Neo-conservatives promoting the US Military control of the world are now in dominant policy positions within these higher circles of the US. Adbusters magazine summed up neo-conservatism as: "The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression. Such nationalism requires an external threat and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured."

In 1992, during Bush the First`s administration, Dick Cheney supported Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz in producing the "Defense Planning Guidance" report, which advocated US military dominance around the globe in a "new order." The report called for the United States to grow in military superiority and to prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge us on the world stage.

At the end of Clinton`s administration, global dominance advocates founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Among the PNAC founders were eight people affiliated with the number-one defense contractor Lockheed-Martin, and seven others associated with the number-three defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Of the twenty-five founders of PNAC twelve were later appointed to high level positions in the George W. Bush administration.

In September 2000, PNAC produced a 76-page report entitled Rebuilding America`s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. The report, similar to the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance report, called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, perform global constabulary roles, and the control of space and cyberspace. It claimed that the 1990s were a decade of defense neglect and that the US must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership as the world`s superpower. The report also recognized that: "the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event such as a new Pearl Harbor." The events of September 11, 2001 presented exactly the catastrophe that the authors of Rebuilding America`s Defenses theorized were needed to accelerate a global dominance agenda. The resulting permanent war on terror has led to massive government defense spending, the invasions of two countries, and the threatening of three others, and the rapid acceleration of the neo-conservative plans for military control of the world.

The US now spends as much for defense as the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon`s budget for buying new weapons rose from $61 billion in 2001 to over $80 billion in 2004. Lockheed Martin`s sales rose by over 30% at the same time, with tens of billions of dollars on the books for future purchases. From 2000 to 2004, Lockheed Martin`s stock value rose 300%. Northrup-Grumann saw similar growth with DoD contracts rising from $3.2 billion in 2001 to $11.1 billion in 2004. Halliburton, with Dick Cheney as former CEO, had defense contracts totaling $427 million in 2001. By 2003, they had $4.3 billion in defense contracts, of which approximately a third were sole source agreements.

At the beginning of 2006 the Global Dominance Group`s agenda is well established within higher circle policy councils and cunningly operationalized inside the US Government. They work hand in hand with defense contractors promoting deployment of US forces in over 700 bases worldwide.

There is an important difference between self-defense from external threats, and the belief in the total military control of the world. When asked, most working people in the US have serious doubts about the moral and practical acceptability of financing world domination.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored, a media research organization. A more in-depth review of the global dominance group`s agenda and a list of the 200 advocates see: http://www.projectcensored.org/downloads/Global_Dominance_Gr…

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[urlA Closer Look at Some of the Documents]http://www.nytimes.com/ref/national/nationalspecial/10katrina-docs.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin[/url]

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White House Knew of Levee`s Failure on Night of Storm
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A photo taken by a federal emergency official the day Hurricane Katrina arrived showed the broken
17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?hp…

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: February 10, 2006

February 10, 2006
The Inquiry
White House Knew of Levee`s Failure on Night of Storm
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department`s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

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Investigators have found evidence that federal officials at the White House and elsewhere learned of the levee break in New Orleans earlier than
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency`s public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.

On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.

"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.

The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.

"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren`t more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"

Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told.

Missteps at All Levels

It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government — from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall — were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees` investigative reports.

Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:

¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.

¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.

¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."

¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.

¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years` worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.

¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.

Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president`s chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don`t you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."

One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.

Eyewitness to Devastation

As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera.

"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.

"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."

Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush`s senior advisors.

But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde`s helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde`s observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.

Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.

"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS`s "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.

Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.

Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.

But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown`s authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.

"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins said in an interview.

Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn`t reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."

Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.

"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke said.

But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged.

"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address."

The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.

Focus on Highway Plan

Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.

In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.

One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators.

Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water.

The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.

Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.

"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 10, 2006
Ex-Cheney Aide Testified Leak Was Ordered, Prosecutor Says
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10leak.html

By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq`s weapons capability in June and July 2003, according to a document filed by a federal prosecutor.

The document shows that Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was actively engaged in the Bush administration`s public relations effort to rebut complaints that there was little evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed or sought weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The document is part of the prosecutors` case against Mr. Libby, who has been indicted on charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative to journalists.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said in a letter to Mr. Libby`s lawyers last month that Mr. Libby had testified before the grand jury that "he had contacts with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate (`NIE`)," that discussed Iraq`s nuclear weapons capability. "We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

Mr. Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice last October in what Mr. Fitzgerald has charged was a willful misleading of investigators about his role in exposing Valerie Wilson as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Wilson is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq`s efforts to buy uranium from the government of Niger.

Ms. Wilson`s identity was first disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, just after Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed column in The New York Times saying he had investigated the Niger claim and found little evidence to support it. Mr. Wilson charged that destroying his wife`s undercover status was a way to discredit him and his assertions.

The prosecutor`s note of Jan. 23 does not, however, make any reference to Mr. Libby`s involvement in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson`s identity. It seems, rather, to be part of an effort by the prosecutor to demonstrate that Mr. Libby was engaged in using secret information to press the administration`s case at the same time that Ms. Wilson`s identity was leaked to reporters.

The letter was first reported Thursday by the National Journal, which said its sources had identified that one of the superiors was Mr. Cheney.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which was done in October 2002, said that Iraq "will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," but it included some dissenting views. The report was classified.

But amid doubts about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq some of which were attributable to Mr. Wilson`s Op-Ed article, the administration declassified the report on July 18.

Mr. Fitzgerald said in his letter that Mr. Libby discussed the contents of the classified report in a July 8 meeting — 10 days before it was declassified — with Judith Miller, then a reporter at The Times. Ms. Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify in the leak case, has told the grand jury that Mr. Libby told her about Ms. Wilson at the same meeting.

Mr. Fitzgerald said that Mr. Libby`s testimony showed how Ms. Wilson`s status was disclosed. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring, 2003, as Libby`s testimony itself makes plain," he wrote.

Mr. Libby`s lawyers have already suggested they will mount a defense in which they will not challenge the charge that he made misstatements about how he learned of Ms. Wilson`s identity and whether he shared that information with reporters. They have said that any statements he made to investigators that might have been untrue were the result of his preoccupation with many serious matters of national security at the time.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence `Misused` to Justify War, He Says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006; A01

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies` mistakes in concluding that Hussein`s government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration`s decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community`s own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar`s critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration`s handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration`s handling of intelligence.

Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency`s leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

White House officials did not respond to a request to comment for this article. They have vehemently denied accusations that the administration manipulated intelligence to generate public support for the war.

"Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a White House briefing in November. "Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

Republicans and Democrats in Congress continue to argue over whether, or how, to investigate accusations the administration manipulated prewar intelligence.

Yesterday, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a statement to counter what it described as "the continuing Iraq pre-war intelligence myths," including charges that Bush " `misused` intelligence to justify the war." Writing that it was perfectly reasonable for the president to rely on the intelligence he was given, the paper concluded, "it is actually the critics who are misleading the American people."

In his article, Pillar said he believes that the "politicization" of intelligence on Iraq occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results. "Such attempts are rare," he writes, "and when they do occur . . . are almost always unsuccessful."

Instead, he describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding the administration`s voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Hussein`s "weapons capacities," but he said the "broad view" within the United States and overseas "was that Saddam was being kept `in his box` " by U.N. sanctions, and that the best way to deal with him was through "an aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place."

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication," Pillar wrote, "it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

Pillar describes for the first time that the intelligence community did assessments before the invasion that, he wrote, indicated a postwar Iraq "would not provide fertile ground for democracy" and would need "a Marshall Plan-type effort" to restore its economy despite its oil revenue. It also foresaw Sunnis and Shiites fighting for power.

Pillar wrote that the intelligence community "anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks -- including guerrilla warfare -- unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam."

In an interview, Pillar said the prewar assessments "were not crystal-balling, but in them we were laying out the challenges that would face us depending on decisions that were made."

Pillar wrote that the first request he received from a Bush policymaker for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq was "not until a year into the war."

That assessment, completed in August 2004, warned that the insurgency in Iraq could evolve into a guerrilla war or civil war. It was leaked to the media in September in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Bush, who had told voters that the mission in Iraq was going well, described the assessment to reporters as "just guessing."

Shortly thereafter, Pillar was identified in a column by Robert D. Novak as having prepared the assessment and having given a speech critical of Bush`s Iraq policy at a private dinner in California. The column fed the White House`s view that the CIA was in effect working against the Bush administration, and that Pillar was part of that. A columnist in the Washington Times in October 2004 called him "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism."

Leaked information "encouraged some administration supporters to charge intelligence officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the president`s policies," Pillar wrote. One effect of that, he said, was to limit challenges to consensus views on matters such as the Iraqi weapons program.

When asked why he did not quit given his concerns, Pillar said in the interview that he was doing "other worthwhile work in the nation`s interest" and never thought of resigning over the issue.

Pillar suggests that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, now under Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, remain within the executive branch but "be given greater independence."

The model he cites is the Federal Reserve, overseen by governors who serve fixed terms. That, he said, would reduce "both the politicization of the intelligence community`s own work and the public misuse of intelligence by policymakers."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Libby Testified He Was Told To Leak Data About Iraq
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006; A08

Vice President Cheney`s former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.

Cheney was one of the "superiors" I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby said had authorized him to make the disclosures, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Libby`s discussions with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame.

But it is unclear whether Cheney instructed his former top aide to release classified information, because parts of the National Intelligence Estimate were previously declassified.

The disclosure in a legal document written by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald demonstrates one way in which Cheney was involved in responding to public allegations by Plame`s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration had exaggerated questionable intelligence to justify war with Iraq.

In a letter written in January and released in court papers filed by Libby`s defense Monday, Fitzgerald wrote that Libby testified that his "superiors" authorized him to disclose information from the National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003.

The National Journal first reported on its Web site yesterday that Cheney had provided the authorization.

The intelligence estimate is a classified report prepared by intelligence officers for high-level government officials, and some parts are regularly declassified in a summary and available to the public.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride declined to comment on Cheney`s role in Libby`s discussions of the intelligence estimate, referring calls to Fitzgerald`s office. Fitzgerald`s spokesman has declined to comment on the prosecutor`s investigation and filings.

Libby was indicted in October on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in the course of the investigation. Fitzgerald has been trying to determine since January 2004 whether administration officials knowingly disclosed Plame`s identity to reporters to discredit Wilson`s allegations, a possible violation of law.

Plame`s name first appeared in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, eight days after her husband publicly accused the administration of relying on questionable information about Iraq`s weapons program to justify the war.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said the new information about Libby`s testimony exposes a possible hypocrisy within the Bush administration as it seeks to punish those who leak politically embarrassing information about secret CIA prisons and warrantless spying, but encourages leaks that aid the administration`s political strategy.

"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said in a statement. "The Vice President`s vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious."

Larry Johnson, a former intelligence officer and colleague of Plame`s who has been critical of the administration`s campaign against Wilson, said the Libby testimony helps prove that top executive branch officials were working to discredit an administration critic.

"This was not some rogue operation, but was directed at the highest levels, and specifically by Dick Cheney," Johnson said. "Libby was definitely a man with a mission, but a man who was given a mission."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Logik ist nicht seine Stärke.

February 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Driving Toward Middle East Nukes in Our S.U.V.`s
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/10friedman.html

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

LONDON

The world stands today at a very dangerous dividing line. It is the dividing line between the post-cold-war world, which we have known since 1989 — one of expanding democracy and free markets — and a post-post-cold-war world, which is unknown but almost certain to be a much less stable, prosperous and benign place.

I believe the questions that will determine whether we enter the post-post-cold-war world will come down to two: how India, China and Russia deal with Iran`s nuclear ambitions, and how the West, particularly America, deals with $60-a-barrel oil.

Let me explain: if Iran develops a nuclear bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and possibly other Sunni Arab states are bound to follow. The Sunni Arabs can overlook Israel`s bomb, but they will never stand for the Persian Shiites having a bomb and them not. That`s about brothers with a centuries-old rivalry. And if the Arab world starts to go nuclear, then you will see the crumbling of the whole global nuclear nonproliferation regime.

A world with so many nuclear powers, particularly in its primary oil-producing region, could only be a more dangerous and unstable place, compared with the post-cold-war world. Imagine Iran with $60-a-barrel oil to make all the mischief it wants, and a nuclear weapon to shield it from any retaliation. Indeed, if you want to know what the post-post-cold-war world would sound like, listen to Iran`s poisonous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was quoted in The Guardian of London the other day as saying: "Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation."

I`m convinced that the only countries capable of getting Iran to back down — through diplomacy — are China, India and Russia. Europe is too weak, and America has already used every economic sanction it can on Iran. China, India and Russia have been great beneficiaries of the post-cold-war order, and the trade, economic development and exports it has made possible. That order was largely shaped and safeguarded by the United States, with China, India and Russia often getting a free ride.

But that order will continue only if China, India and Russia get over their reluctance to get too close to America and become real stakeholders in maintaining this post-cold-war world.

I want to share power and responsibility with them — starting with the three of them, which represent half of humanity, looking Iran in the eye and telling its leadership that they will join in any and all U.N. sanctions if Iran tries to build an A-bomb. That would get Tehran`s attention.

As for America, its leadership task has shifted. If the Bush team continues to let Dick Cheney set its oil policy — one that will keep America dependent on crude oil — the post-cold-war democracy movement that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall will be either aborted, diluted or reversed. If regimes like those in Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria have the benefit of 10 years of $60-a-barrel oil, whatever democratic tide President Bush thinks he is unleashing will be stymied. The worst regimes in the world will have the most power to support the most regressive political and religious trends.

I don`t approve of the Danish newspaper cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Yes, you can see much worse in the Arab-Muslim press on any day. But why should the West get into that gutter? What I approve of even less are the blatant efforts to intimidate the world media that have printed these cartoons — an intimidation effort cynically fueled by Iran, Syria and its theocratic allies. What do you think will happen after a few more years of $60-a-barrel oil? You will see a radical arc from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah to Hamas — all financed by Iran — intimidating every moderate in the Muslim world.

A British official recalled for me that in 1946, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, remarked, "Give me 100,000 tons of coal and I will give you a foreign policy." What he meant was, Give me the energy source to heat the homes and run the businesses of Europe, and I will give you a rebuilt Europe.

Well, I say, Give me even $30-a-barrel oil and I will give you an Iranian regime that is a lot less smug — an Iran that will need to be tied into the world much more in order to create real jobs for its exploding population.

That`s why we need an urgent national effort, starting with a gasoline tax, to move the U.S. economy onto a path of more fuel-efficient cars and renewable energy. If we do it, everyone will follow.

If we don`t, then say hello to the post-post-cold-war world and say goodbye to the post-cold-war world. It was fun while it lasted.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Vanishing Future
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/10krugman.html

By PAUL KRUGMAN

At this point we`ve had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush`s special mix of blatant dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the 2000 presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration`s denials and deceptions.

Consider the case of the vanishing future.

The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first tax cut through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted that its tax-cut plans wouldn`t endanger the budget surplus bequeathed to Mr. Bush by Bill Clinton. But even some Republican senators were skeptical. So the Senate demanded a cap on the tax cut: it should not reduce revenue over the period from 2001 to 2011 by more than $1.35 trillion.

The administration met this requirement, but not by scaling back its tax-cutting ambitions. Instead, it created fictitious savings by "sunsetting" the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of 2010.

This was obviously silly. For example, under the law as written there will be no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010. But the estate tax will return in 2011 with a maximum rate of 55 percent, creating some interesting incentives.

I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw Momma From the Train Act.

It was also obvious that the administration had no intention of abiding by its concession to fiscal prudence, that it would try to eliminate the sunset clause and make the tax cuts permanent.

But it quickly became clear that the budget forecasts the administration used to justify the 2001 tax cut were wildly overoptimistic. The federal government faced a future of deficits, not surpluses, as far as the eye could see. Making the tax cut permanent would greatly worsen those future deficits. What were budget officials to do?

You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future disappear.

Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and revenues. But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years. This artificial shortsightedness greatly aided the campaign to make the 2001 tax cut permanent because it hid the costs: since budget analyses no longer covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the tax cut became invisible.

But now it`s 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period from 2007 to 2011, which means including a year in which making the Bush tax cuts permanent will cost a lot of revenue — $119.7 billion, but who`s counting? Has the administration finally run out of ways to avoid budget reality?

Not quite. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, until this year budget documents contained a standard table titled "Impact of Budget Policy," which summarized the effects of the administration`s tax and spending proposals on future outlays and revenues. But this year, that table is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what`s really going on.

Now, the administration has proposed spending cuts that are both cruel and implausible. For example, administration computer printouts obtained by the center show that the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on veterans` health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five years.

Yet even these cuts would fall far short of making up for the revenue losses from making the tax cuts permanent. The administration`s own estimate, which can be deduced from its budget tables, is that extending the tax cuts would cost an average of $235 billion in each year from 2012 through 2016.

In other words, the administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell, allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.)

At this point the administration`s budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can`t be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Friday, February 10, 2006

Cheney Authorized Libby to Disclose Classified Documents

Once upon a time, a former agent of Italian military intelligence named
B][urlRocco Martino[]http://cryptome.org/rocco-martino.htm[/url][/B], who had had some experience in the African country of Niger, came into possession of some forged, fraudulent documents.




These alleged Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium in 1999. In fact, the signatures were of Nigerien officials who had been in power a decade earlier, in the late 1980s.





So they were clumsy forgeries. Martino passed them on to the Italian magazine Panorama, which passed them to the US embassy.

Tantalizingly, President George W. Bush`s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, has an indirect connection to Italian intelligence.




Rove`s chief adviser on Iran policy is Neoconservative [urlwildman and notorious warmonger Michael Ledeen]http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/ledeen/ledeen_body.html[/url],



who has [urla longstanding connection to the darker corners of Italian intelligence]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshall.html[/url].

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney heard of the alleged uranium purchase.




Cheney asked George Tenet to look into the allegation.




The issue went to the Directorate of Operations secret unit on counter-proliferation. Among the field officers there was Valerie Plame Wilson, who had spent her life fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction under cover of a dummy corporation.





Valerie Plame Wilson was married to former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who had served bravely as acting ambassador in Iraq in 1990, and when threatened by Saddam he showed up to a press conference wearing a hanging noose instead of a necktie. President George H. W. Bush highly praised him.






Joe Wilson had not only served in Iraq, he also had been ambassador to the West African countries of Gabon and Sao Tome, and spoke fluent French. Plame Wilson brought up the possibility of sending him as a private citizen to look into the plausibility of the report that Saddam had bought Nigerien uranium.

He went, and soon saw that the uranium industry in Niger was actually under the control of French companies and was strictly monitored.




There was no possibility of corrupt Nigerien officials selling it off under the table.

A separate military mission [urlled by Marine General Carlton Fulford, Jr, deputy commander of the United States European Command (EUCOM)]http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=express&s=ackerman072303[/url], went to Niger the same month, February 2002.




Fulford quickly came to the same conclusion as Wilson, that it was implausible that al-Qaeda or anyone else could secretly buy uranium from Niger.

Wilson came back and wrote a report for Tenet, expecting that Tenet would pass it on to the high officials of the Bush administration.

Wilson was amazed when the Niger uranium story was put into Bush`s State of the Union address.

Then Libby




wanted Secretary of State Colin Powell [urlto make allegations about Saddam and al-Qaeda before the United Nations Security Council.]http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=109719[/url] Powell was also pressed by someone to bring up the Niger uranium story.

Powell is said to have exclaimed, "I`m not reading this bullshit!"

Libby appears to have been a big influence on the speech Powell gave, almost every detail of which was inaccurate, and at which United Nations officials who heard it openly laughed.





After the war, Wilson [urlwrote an opinion piece for the New York Times]http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm[/url] in which he revealed his mission and again called into question the Bush administration assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

Cheney was extremely upset by Wilson`s op-ed. He saw it as an allegation that he had personally sent Wilson and then ignored Wilson`s report. Or at least that was the spin. But Wilson had said no such thing in the article. He simply said that Cheney had asked Tenet to look into the story, which Cheney probably did.

Cheney was afraid that if the American public became convinced that there had been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war effort would collapse, along with all those billions of no-bid uncompetitive contracts for Halliburton.

Cheney, it has now come out, then [urlauthorized Libby to leak the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-060209leakzajac,1,1327968.story?coll=chi-news-hed[/url] to the press.




The [urlNIE, which may have been produced under pressure from Cheney himself, had incorrectly suggested]http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h072103.html[/url] that Iraq was only a few years from having a nuclear weapon. In fact, Iraq did not have an active weapons program at all after the early 1990s when it was dismantled by the UN inspectors. The pre-war NIE in any case was just old bad intelligence, which was contradicted by David Kay`s team on the ground in post-war Iraq, which just wasn`t finding much.





Libby now began telling reporters that Wilson`s wife was a CIA operative, itself classified information, since she was an undercover operative.




Karl Rove engaged in the same routine. Apparently Cheney, Rove and Libby (and Bush?) believed that Wilson`s credibility would be undermined if the Washington press corps could have it intimated to them that his story was a CIA plant.





Robert Novak used the information given him by the White House staff to out Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover operative. Her career was ruined. All her contacts in the global South were burned, and their lives put in danger. The CIA`s careful project combating weapons of mass destruction collapsed.





The same administration that alleges it should be able to listen to our phone calls at will for national security purposes deliberately undermined US security for petty political purposes, making us all much less safe.

The likelihood is that the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Libby and Rove so far revealed are only the tip of the iceberg.



posted by Juan @ [url2/10/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/cheney-authorized-libby-to-disclose.html[/url] 2 comments

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Just How Addicted to Oil Are We?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=58126

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=58126

On a recent sunny San Francisco Bay Area Saturday, having walked the beach at Limantour Spit and seen nature red in tooth and claw -- actually, an Osprey flying overhead, a large fish in its talons -- I paid the price for visiting the wilds. It turned out to be $2.53 a gallon for unleaded regular on my trip back to reality -- and that was by no means the worst price I saw that day.



For anyone who slips into the driver`s seat of a car -- and except for those who live in cities like New York with full-scale public transport systems, that`s most of America most of the time -- life is already a permanent energy crisis. No wonder the President stumbled across reality this year and declared before the nation that we were all oil addicts in a hooked homeland and it was time to rid ourselves of our "dependence" on Middle Eastern oil (a region where, as it turns out, oil use is surging). You know -- that horribly "unstable" part of the world the President personally destabilized with his invasion of choice.



The Saudis were mildly insulted by the presidential speech (especially since they sell us their oil at relatively cut-rate prices while energy-hungry Asian powers pay top Euro for it); the big oil execs, knowing the truth of the situation, were unflustered ("No combination of conservation measures, alternative energy sources and technological advances could realistically and economically provide a way to completely replace those imports in the short or medium term," said Exxon Mobil senior vice president Stuart McGill); and the President, it turned out, had his facts upside down. It`s true that we now import 60% of our oil from elsewhere, but because it`s cheaper to transport energy from relatively close at hand, our one-two punch in imported oil turns out to be neighbors Canada and Mexico. (The Saudis only place, and right behind the top three comes not, say, Kuwait, but... gulp... Hugo Chavez`s Venezuela.) To add insult to injury, just this week, the government`s Energy Information Administration announced that "U.S. and world oil demand growth in the second quarter (of 2006) is expected to be stronger than previously forecast."



From the beginning, the Bush administration has been an all-oil-all-the-time regime. Chevron even dubbed one of its double-hulled tankers the Condoleezza Rice because she was on the company board. (The name was changed when she became Bush`s national security adviser.) Our President and Vice President were, of course, in the business and the government has since been Halliburtonized; Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador first to Afghanistan and now to Iraq, was once an advisor to Unocal, the energy company that tried to negotiate the running of a natural-gas pipeline through the Taliban`s Afghanistan... and so on.



Though various neocons and top administration officials dreamed of a Pax Americana in the Middle East, they certainly never meant to take those heartland energy reserves for the United States. Settling permanently into bases in Iraq was to be the royal way to global dominance over other energy-desperate powers. (Imagine the frustration, then, that Iraq can now hardly get its oil out of the ground!)



Still, the President had a point. We do have a problem. Of course, problem number one was how little lay behind Bush`s words. As Valerie Marcel, energy expert at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London commented, "Bush was playing to a very, very domestic agenda. It`s just rhetoric."



What`s the point, after all, in announcing that we`re a nation of addicts, if you`re not only not planning to put money into treatment centers, but cutting funds for them? As Michael Klare so vividly points out below, we are entering what is, in essence, a permanent global state of energy crisis without significant thought or planning.



The Bush administration largely rejects the very idea of climate change -- only the Pentagon and NASA seem to take it seriously -- and the main form of alternative energy that really interests them right now, nuclear energy, is essentially another form of addiction. Elsewhere in the world, there are people putting some thought into the onrushing crisis we face, but not us. The Chinese, worried about their energy future, have not only been stomping the planet from Sudan and Iran to Venezuela looking to nail down their long-term fossil-fuel fixes, but have been putting some time, energy, and thought into renewables. Sweden has, remarkably enough, just launched a fifteen-year plan to make itself the first advanced industrial country to go permanently off oil. (Already, 26% of the energy consumed there comes from renewables.) But not us.



This is, of course, painfully shortsighted. After all, there`s the Swedish government working closely with Saab and Volvo to produce cars and trucks that will work off biofuels -- and where is our government? (Note to GM: How long will you really sell those monsters of yours in a $4 or $5 a gallon world?) So, with Michael Klare, author of the (sadly) ever more indispensable book, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America`s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, at your side, consider our predicament in the new world of eternally tight energy. Tom

The Permanent Energy Crisis
By Michael T. Klare

President Bush`s State of the Union comment that the United States is "addicted to oil" can be read as pure political opportunism. With ever more Americans expressing anxiety about high oil prices, freakish weather patterns, and abiding American ties to unsavory foreign oil potentates, it is hardly surprising that Bush sought to portray himself as an advocate of the development of alternative energy systems. But there is another, more ominous way to read his comments: that top officials have come to realize that the United States and the rest of the world face a new and growing danger – a permanent energy crisis that imperils the health and well-being of every society on earth.

To be sure, the United States has experienced severe energy crises before: the 1973-74 "oil shock" with its mile-long gas lines; the 1979-80 crisis following the fall of the Shah of Iran; the 2000-01 electricity blackouts in California, among others. But the crisis taking shape in 2006 has a new look to it. First of all, it is likely to last for decades, not just months or a handful of years; second, it will engulf the entire planet, not just a few countries; and finally, it will do more than just cripple the global economy -- its political, military, and environmental effects will be equally severe.

If you had to date it, you could say that our permanent energy crisis began, appropriately enough, on New Year`s Day, 2006, when Russia`s state-owned natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, cut off gas deliveries to Ukraine in punishment for that country`s pro-Western leanings. Although Gazprom has since resumed some deliveries, it is now evident that Moscow is fully prepared to employ its abundant energy reserves as a political weapon at a time of looming natural gas shortages worldwide. It won`t be the last country to do so in the years to come. In just the few weeks since then, the world has experienced a series of similar energy-related disturbances:

* The sabotage of natural gas pipelines to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, producing widespread public discomfort at a time of unusually frigid temperatures;

* An eruption of oil-related ethnic violence in Nigeria, resulting in a sharp reduction in that country`s petroleum output;

* Threats by Iran to cut off exports of oil and gas in retaliation for any sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council over its suspect nuclear enrichment activities;

* And as result of such developments, a series of mini-spikes in crude oil prices as well as reports in the business press that, if this pattern of instability continues, such prices could easily rise beyond $80 per barrel to hit the once unimaginable $100 per barrel range.

Vectors of Crisis

Events like these will certainly spread economic pain and hardship globally, especially to those who cannot afford higher transportation and heating-fuel costs. As it happens, though, these are not isolated, unrelated events. Think of them as expressions of a deeper crisis. Like the tremors before a major earthquake, they suggest the dangerous accumulation of powerful energy forces that will roil the planet for years to come.

Although we cannot hope to foresee all the ways such forces will affect the global human community, the primary vectors of the permanent energy crisis can be identified and charted. Three such vectors, in particular, demand attention: a slowing in the growth of energy supplies at a time of accelerating worldwide demand; rising political instability provoked by geopolitical competition for those supplies; and mounting environmental woes produced by our continuing addiction to oil, natural gas, and coal. Each of these would be cause enough for worry, but it is their intersection that we need to fear above all.

Energy experts have long warned that global oil and gas supplies are not likely to be sufficiently expandable to meet anticipated demand. As far back as the mid-1990s, peak-oil theorists like Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University and Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) insisted that the world was heading for a peak-oil moment and would soon face declining petroleum output. At first, most mainstream experts dismissed these claims as simplistic and erroneous, while government officials and representatives of the big oil companies derided them. Recently, however, a sea-change in elite opinion has been evident. First Matthew Simmons, the chairman of Simmons and Company International of Houston, America`s leading energy-industry investment bank, and then David O`Reilly, CEO of Chevron, the country`s second largest oil firm, broke ranks with their fellow oil magnates and embraced the peak-oil thesis. O`Reilly has been particularly outspoken, taking full-page ads in the New York Times and other papers to declare, "One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over."

The exact moment of peak oil`s arrival is not as important as the fact that world oil output will almost certainly fall short of global demand, given the fossil-fuel voraciousness of the older industrialized nations, especially the United States, and soaring demand from China, India, and other rapidly growing countries. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) projects global oil demand to grow by 35% between 2004 and 2025 -- from 82 million to 111 million barrels per day. The DoE predicts that daily oil output will rise by a conveniently similar amount -- from 83 million to 111 million barrels. Voilá! -- the problem of oil sufficiency disappears. But even a cursory glance at the calculations made by the DoE`s experts is enough to raise suspicions: Behind such estimates lies the assumption that key oil producers like Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia can double or triple their oil production -- unlikely in the extreme, according to most sober analysts. On top of this, the DoE has been lowering its own oil-production estimates: In 2003, it predicted that global oil output would reach 123 million barrels per day by 2025; by the end of 2005, that number had already dropped by12 million barrels, reflecting a growing pessimism even among the globe`s great oil optimists.

This is not to say that oil will disappear in the years ahead: There will still be adequate supplies for well-heeled consumers who can afford higher fuel bills. But much of the world`s easy-to-acquire petroleum has already been extracted and significant portions of what remains can only be found in places that present significant drilling challenges like the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico or the iceberg-infested waters of the North Atlantic -- or in perennially conflict-ridden and sabotage-vulnerable areas of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

No Escape from Scarcity

To make the energy picture grimmer, "spare" or "surge" capacity seems to be disappearing in the major oil-producing regions. At one time, key producers like Saudi Arabia retained an excess production capacity, allowing them to rapidly boost their output in times of potential energy crisis like the 1990-91 Gulf War. But Saudi Arabia, like the other big suppliers, is now producing at full tilt and so possesses zero capacity to increase output. In other words, any politically inspired (or sabotage related) cutoff in oil exports from countries like Russia or Iran will produce instant energy shock on a global scale and send oil prices soaring to, or through, that $100 a barrel barrier.

A chronic shortage of oil would be hard enough for the world community to cope with even if other sources of energy were in great supply. But this is not the case. Natural gas -- the world`s second leading source of energy -- is also at risk of future shortages. While there are still major deposits of gas in Russia and Iran (potentially the world`s number one and two suppliers) waiting to be tapped, obstacles to their exploitation loom large. The United States is doing everything it can to prevent Iran from exporting its gas (for example, by strong-arming India into abandoning a proposed gas pipeline from Iran), while Moscow has actively discouraged Europe from increasing its reliance on Russian gas through its recent cutoff of supplies to Ukraine and other worrisome actions.

In North America, the supply of natural gas is rapidly disappearing. In a reflection of our desperate (and demented) condition, Canada is now starting to divert some of its remaining natural gas to the manufacture of synthetic oil from tar sands, so as to ease the pressure on supplies of conventional petroleum. Given the prohibitive cost of building gas pipelines from Asia and Africa, the only practical way to get more gas supplies to North America would be to spend several hundred billion dollars (or more) on facilities for converting foreign sources of gas into liquified natural gas (LNG), shipping the LNG in giant doubled-hulled vessels across the Atlantic and Pacific, and then converting it back into a gas in "regasification" plants in American harbors. Although favored by the Bush administration, plans to construct such plants have provoked opposition in many coastal communities because of the risk of accidental explosion as well as the potential for inviting terrorist attacks.

As for renewables -- wind, solar, and biomass -- these are still at a relatively early stage of development. With a trillion dollars or so of added investment they could indeed ease some of the strain on fossil fuels in decades to come; however, at present rates of investment, this is not likely to occur. The same can be said of "safe" nuclear power and "clean" coal -- even if the severe problems associated with both of these energy options could be overcome, it would take several decades and a few trillion dollars before they could possibly replace existing energy systems. The only source of energy that can compensate for a shortage of oil and gas at this time is conventional (unclean) coal, and a rise in its consumption would increase the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The New "Great Game"

With looming energy shortages, the risk of conflict over energy access (and the wealth fossil fuels generate) is certain to grow. Throughout history, competition over the control of key supplies of vital raw materials has been a source of friction between major powers and there is every reason to assume that this will continue to be the case. "Just at it did when the Great Game was played out in the decades leading up to the First World War, ongoing industrialization is setting off a scramble for natural resources," John Gray of the London School of Economics observed in a recent article in the New York Review of Books. "The coming century could be marked by recurrent resource wars, as the great powers struggle for control of the world`s hydrocarbons."

As in the Great Game, such conflicts most likely would not arise from head-on clashes between the great powers, but rather through the escalation of local conflicts sustained by great power involvement, as was the case in the Balkans prior to World War I. In their competitive pursuit of assured energy supplies, today`s great powers -- led by the United States and China -- are developing or cementing close ties with favored suppliers in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. In many cases, this entails the delivery of large quantities of advanced weaponry, advisors, and military technology -- as the United States has long been doing with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, and China is now doing with Iran and Sudan.

Nor should the possibility of a direct clash over oil and gas between great powers be ruled out. In the East China Sea, for example, China and Japan have both laid claim to an undersea natural gas field that lies in an offshore area also claimed by both of them. In recent months, Chinese and Japanese combat ships and planes deployed in the area have made threatening moves toward one another; so far no shots have been fired, but neither Beijing nor Tokyo have displayed any willingness to compromise on the matter and the risk of escalation is growing with each new encounter.

The likelihood of internal conflict in oil-producing countries is also destined to grow in tandem with the steady rise of energy prices. The higher the price of petroleum, the greater the potential to reap mammoth profits from control of a nation`s oil exports -- and so the greater the incentive to seize power in such states or, for those already in power, to prevent the loss of control to a rival clique by any means necessary. Hence the rise of authoritarian petro-regimes in many of the oil-producing countries and the persistence of ethnic conflict between various groups seeking control over state-oil revenues -- a phenomenon notable today in Iraq (where Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds are battling over the allocation of future oil revenues) and in Nigeria (where competing tribes in the oil-rich Delta region are fighting over measly "development grants" handed out by the major foreign oil firms).

"Up to this point," Senator Richard G. Lugar told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 16, "the main issues surrounding oil have been how much we have to pay for it and whether we will experience supply disruptions. But in the decades to come, the issue may be whether the world`s supply of oil is abundant and accessible enough to support continued economic growth…. When we reach the point where the world`s oil-hungry economies are competing for insufficient supplies of energy, oil will become an even stronger magnet for conflict than it already is."

Averting Environmental Catastrophe

In addition to this danger, we face the entire range of environmental perils associated with our continuing reliance on fossil fuels. Consider this: The DoE predicted in July 2005 that worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide (the principal source of the "greenhouse gases" responsible for global warming) will rise by nearly 60% between 2002 and 2025 -- with virtually all of this increase, about 15 billion metric tons of CO2, coming from the consumption of oil, gas, and coal. If this projection proves accurate, the world will probably pass the threshold at which it will be possible to avert significant global heating, a substantial rise in sea-levels, and all the resulting environmental damage.

The surest way to slow the increase in global carbon emissions is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to alternative forms of energy. But because such alternatives are not currently capable of replacing oil, gas, and coal on a significant scale (and won`t be, at present rates of investment, for another few decades), the temptation to increase reliance on fossil fuels is likely to remain strong. We are, in fact, caught in a conundrum: the world needs more energy to satisfy rising global demand, and the only way to accomplish this at present is to squeeze out more oil, gas, and coal from the Earth, thereby hastening the onset of catastrophic climate change. In turn, the only way to avert such change is to consume less oil, gas, and coal, which would involve severe economic costs of a sort that most national leaders would be reluctant to consider. Hence, we will be trapped in a permanent crisis brought on by our collective addiction to cheap energy.

The sole way out of this trap is to bite the bullet and adopt heroic measures to curb our fossil-fuel consumption while embarking upon a massive program to develop alternative energy systems – an effort comparable to, and in some sense a reversal of, the coal-and-oil-fueled industrial revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States, this would, at an utter minimum, entail the imposition of a hefty tax on gasoline consumption, with the resulting proceeds used to fund the rapid development of renewable energy systems. All funds now slated for highway construction should instead be devoted to public transit and high-speed inter-city rail lines and all new cars sold in America after 2010 should have minimum average fuel efficiencies of 50 MPG or higher. This will prove costly and disruptive -- but what other choice is there if we want to have some hope of exiting the permanent global energy crisis before the global economy collapses or the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans.

Michael T. Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America`s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books) as well as Resource Wars, The New Landscape of Global Conflict.

Copyright 2006 Michael T. Klare


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Erschreckende Auswirkungen der Globalisierung. Irland im Trockendock.

Low-alcohol Guinness for `new Ireland`
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article344487.ece

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent
Published: 10 February 2006

The new, faster-paced lifestyle of the Irish has led Guinness to experiment with a new reduced-strength pint of its famous stout.

The company promises that the new tipple, called Guinness Mid-Strength, is identical in every way to traditional Guinness, except that its alcohol content is significantly lower - 2.8 per cent rather than the regular 4.2 per cent.

The brewery says it is a new Guinness for a new age in which Irish men want to drink but also want to keep their wits about them for more hectic and exacting lifestyles.

A Guinness executive said: "There are times when you want a couple of pints but you don`t want the fuller hit of a higher alcohol product.

"We believe this will be appealing to 25- to 45-year- old males - guys with family and work commitments."

Mid-Strength will go on sale in pubs in Limerick next month, a city which is said to have a particular fondness for Guinness.

The new approach is in line with the policy of the Irish government, which has for years expressed concern about excessive drinking and "binge" drinking, especially among the young.

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Bush soll schon vor längerer Zeit das Saufen aufgegeben haben. Aber es hilft nichts!

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Latest Update: #35308 09.02.06 14:58:00 http://www.wallstreet-online.de/ws/community/board/postingsa…
Latest Coalition Fatality: Feb 09, 2006
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Feb.06: 26

Iraker 02/09/06: Total: 120
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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[urlKommentare]http://apollo.zeit.de/kommentare/index.php?km_id=378[/url]

Eine sehr gefährliche Falle

»Kampf der Kulturen« – mit dieser These schien Samuel P. Huntington vor 13 Jahren den Schlüssel zur Erklärung der Weltlage gefunden zu haben. Hilft sie uns heute weiter?

http://www.zeit.de/2006/07/Huntington

Von Thomas Assheuer


Anfangs stand hinter dem Titel noch ein scheues Fragezeichen. »The Clash of Civilizations?« hieß der Aufsatz, den der amerikanische Politikwissenschaftler Samuel P. Huntington im Sommer 1993 in der Zeitschrift Foreign Affairs veröffentlichte und mit dem der angesehene Forscher auf einen Schlag in der breiten Öffentlichkeit berühmt wurde. Tatsächlich schien der Harvard-Professor den Schlüssel zur Erklärung der Weltlage gefunden zu haben: Im 21. Jahrhundert, so behauptete er, werde der alte Staatenkonflikt vom »Kampf der Kulturen« verdrängt. Während sein Kollege Francis Fukuyama noch fröhlich das »Ende der Geschichte« und den unblutigen Sieg von Marktwirtschaft und Liberalismus ausrief, tauchte Huntington das Weltgeschehen ins düster flackernde Licht von Konflikt, Kampf und Krieg. Sieben oder acht civilizations würden künftig in der globalen Arena aufeinander stoßen – eine westliche, konfuzianische, japanische, islamische, hinduistische, slawisch-orthodoxe, lateinamerikanische und vielleicht auch eine afrikanische. Diese Großeinheiten seien durch Sprache, Geschichte und Religion radikal voneinander geschieden, zutiefst unverträglich und zudem Feinde Amerikas. »The rest against the West.«

Das Echo auf Huntingtons These war überwältigend, aber gespalten. Viele feierten ihn als amerikanischen Oswald Spengler, der seine apokalyptischen Reiter aussendet und den US-Hegemon aus seinem hedonistischen Schlummer reißt. Andere sahen in ihm einen ideologischen Einpeitscher, der mit seiner haltlosen Kulturtheorie Amerikas Anspruch auf Weltherrschaft in Stein meißelt. Huntington selbst ließ sich nicht beirren und machte aus einer klappernden These ein dickes Buch. Kampf der Kulturen hieß es in der deutschen Übersetzung – diesmal ohne Fragezeichen.

Das Werk hat seine Wirkung nicht verfehlt. Nach jedem islamistischen Anschlag, erst recht nach dem New Yorker Massaker, fragte die Öffentlichkeit, ob Huntington nun Recht bekomme und der »Kampf der Kulturen« beginne. Seltsam nur, dass der kämpferische Gelehrte von diesem Anfangsverdacht nicht viel wissen will. In der Terrorattacke auf das World Trade Center erkennt er keinen Kulturkampf, sondern »den Angriff gemeiner Barbaren auf die zivilisierte Gesellschaft der ganzen Welt«. Eindringlich warnte Huntington vor dem Irak-Krieg, weil dieser Geister herbeiriefe, die der Westen so schnell nicht wieder loswürde. »Ein solcher Angriff würde zu einem Krieg ganz anderer Art führen. Er würde große Teile der Bevölkerung und der Regierungen in der moslemischen Welt aufbringen, die jetzt die internationale Koalition gegen den Terror unterstützen.«

Doch warum die plötzliche Zurückhaltung, die Angst des Zauberlehrlings vor der magischen Formel? Möglich, dass Huntington inzwischen klüger ist als manche, die sich triumphierend auf ihn berufen. Er scheint verstanden zu haben, dass Religion oft nur eine Maske ist, mit deren Hilfe brutale Anerkennungs- und Verteilungskonflikte getarnt werden. Vielleicht hat Huntington sogar eingesehen, dass der Fundamentalismus ein ganz und gar modernes Phänomen ist und erst mit der Kolonisierung entstand. Deshalb kommen die islamistischen Killer auch nicht aus dem Mittelalter oder einer vollends fremden und unverständlichen Kultur; sie kommen aus der Mitte der modernen Weltgesellschaft – und gerade das lässt uns am tiefsten erschrecken.

Ohnedies ist die Rede vom »Kampf der Kulturen« eine sehr gefährliche Falle. Wer sein politisches Handeln nach ihr ausrichtet, führt genau den Zustand herbei, dessen Schrecken er beschwört. Damit würde die Formel vom »Kampf der Kulturen« zu einer Diagnose, die sich selbst erfüllt. Inzwischen warnt Huntington selbst davor, den Kampf gegen den Terror auf dem Minenfeld der Kultur auszutragen, zum Beispiel als Kampf Gut gegen Böse, Licht gegen Finsternis. Er hat Recht. Nicht der Islam darf bekämpft werden, sondern nur das Verbrechen, das in seinem Namen verübt wird. Alles andere wird den Hass nur weiter anstacheln, Feindbilder bestätigen, den Hochmut zementieren und die Spirale der Gewalt weitertreiben, auf allen Seiten. Mit seiner Kulturalisierung nimmt der Konflikt die schlimmstmögliche Wendung, auch für Huntington. »Es ist nämlich das Ziel von Osama bin Laden, aus diesem Krieg einer Terrororganisation gegen die zivilisierte Gesellschaft einen Kampf der Kulturen zwischen dem Islam und dem Westen zu machen. Es wäre ein Desaster, wenn ihm das gelänge.«

DIE ZEIT 09.02.2006 Nr.7

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Im Moment hat die Kritik des Westens am Islam bei aller Berechtigung etwas von einem Süchtigen, der den Dealer beschimpft.

DIE ZEIT

Die neueste Weltordnung

Der Aufstand der Muslime, der Aufstieg Asiens: Der Westen kann den Globus nicht mehr dominieren. Wenn er trotzdem seine Prinzipien durchsetzen will, muss er sich selbst ändern

http://www.zeit.de/2006/07/Globalisierung?page=all

Von Jan Ross und Bernd Ulrich



Eigentlich müsste man es in den Köpfen knacken und rattern hören, so rasant verändert sich in diesen Wochen unser Bild von der Welt. Eine Art Weltbürgerkriegsstimmung zwischen dem radikalen Islam und dem Westen ist der dramatischste Ausdruck einer neuen, außer Kontrolle geratenen Wirklichkeit. Doch den Gefallen tut uns die Lage nicht, dass sie so einfach zu entschlüsseln wäre – »wir« gegen »die«, zwei Lager wie damals im Konflikt mit dem Ostblock, gefährlich, aber übersichtlich.

Freund und Feind sind nicht mehr so leicht zu unterscheiden. Was ist Russland in diesem historischen Augenblick? Ein Verbündeter, vielleicht die letzte Hoffnung, Iran von der Atombombe abzubringen? Eine unheimliche Halbdiktatur und ein Risiko für unsere Energieversorgung, wie Putins Drohung gezeigt hat, der Ukraine den Gashahn zuzudrehen? Was sind China und Indien – Stützen der Weltordnung von morgen oder unzuverlässige Zweckalliierte, die bei nächster Gelegenheit wieder Sonderdeals mit den Mullahs von Teheran abschließen werden, um sich das Öl für ihren Wirtschaftsboom zu sichern? Hinter dem Gefühl der Herausforderung, das die islamistischen Randalierer dem Westen zurzeit einflößen, steht noch ein anderes, tieferes, ein Gefühl der Ratlosigkeit und Desorientierung: Es gibt keinen Kompass und keine Landkarte für diesen Globus mehr.

Im Grunde versuchen wir seit 1989, seit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges, uns einen Reim auf die gewandelten Verhältnisse zu machen. Man könnte die Geschichte seither als eine Geschichte von Deutungsschüben, von Ideenbestsellern schreiben – eine hektische Weltformelproduktion, die von der Realität immer wieder überholt wurde. Schnelles Denken, noch schnellere Wirklichkeit. Es war vor nicht einmal zwanzig Jahren, als Francis Fukuyama das »end of history« verkündete: Die liberale Demokratie hat gesiegt, es gibt keine Systemalternativen mehr, sondern höchstens noch Rückzugsgefechte der Gegner. Europa und Amerika als Endstufen des historischen Fortschritts, Russland und China irgendwie auf dem Weg der Reform, am Rande des Weltgeschehens ein paar Schmutzecken wie Irak oder Libyen: Das war die Philosophie des westlichen Hochgefühls im Augenblick des Triumphs über den Kommunismus.

1993 kam der Gegenentwurf, Samuel Huntingtons »clash of civilizations«. Die Geschichte war weitergegangen, auf dem Balkan kämpften Orthodoxe gegen Katholiken, Christen gegen Muslime. Huntington malte eine Zukunft aus, in der der Westen mitnichten Fukuyamas siegreiche Universalzivilisation war, sondern eine Kultur unter mehreren, womöglich weniger vital als die islamische oder die chinesische. Huntington wird als Prophet des westlich-muslimischen Konflikts gelesen, aber prophetischer war womöglich seine Diagnose der Schwäche des Westens selbst, des Widerspruchs zwischen Absolutheitsanspruch und schwindender Macht. Der Westen ist stark genug, um eine ständige Provokation für die anderen zu sein, aber nicht stark genug, um sie zu beherrschen oder umzuerziehen. Die Welt wird immer moderner, aber sie wird davon nicht westlich; die anderen können aus der Modernität auch Waffen für ihr Anderssein schmieden.

Interessanterweise ist Huntington nicht der Klassiker des 11. September 2001 geworden. Es hatte da schon nicht mehr die Krise des Westens Konjunktur, sondern das Gegenteil: die Allmacht Amerikas. Unter Clinton war das die soft power gewesen, MacDonald’s und Hollywood in allen Ländern, das Internet, die Globalisierung, die zugleich Amerikanisierung war. Unter Bush, nach 9/11, kam die hard power zurück, und darüber wölbte sich der ganz große Ideenhimmel: Weltmacht plus Weltmission, die Vereinigten Staaten als globaler Demokratie-Exporteur, als revolutionäre Kraft, beginnend mit der »Transformation« des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens. Es war, in den Idealen, viel mehr Fukuyama als Huntington, nun aber bewaffnet, angestrengt, in Kampf- und Kriegsstimmung. Nach dem Ende der Geschichte und dem Zusammenprall der Zivilisationen war das amerikanische Imperium die Formel für die neue Zeit geworden. Im Frühjahr 2003, mit dem Sieg über Saddam Hussein, standen diese Macht und diese Deutung auf dem Höhepunkt.

Und jetzt, drei Jahre, ein Paradigma und eine Epoche weiter? Wahrheitsbruchstücke aus den Theorien von gestern haben sich erhalten. Von amerikanischer Allmacht wird so schnell niemand mehr reden, aber die USA sind noch immer die stärkste Kraft auf dem Globus. Fukuyamas Ende der Geschichte erleben wir nicht, doch es stimmt, dass Markt, Freiheit und Demokratie universale Ausstrahlung haben. Und Huntingtons clash of civilizations hat jetzt sowieso seine große Stunde.

Trotzdem hat die Wirklichkeit noch einmal zugelegt – an Tempo, an Vieldeutigkeit, an Bedrohlichkeit. Vielleicht begreifen wir erst jetzt, was Globalisierung tatsächlich bedeutet: Die Welt wird eng. Ein paar Karikaturen, die in Dänemark schon halb vergessen scheinen, können in Beirut oder Jakarta einen Aufstand entfachen. Käufer in arabischen Ländern boykottieren dänische Produkte, sie haben Konsumentenmacht und üben sie aus, wie früher nur die aufgeklärten westlichen Luxusverbraucher, die nach Chiracs Atomversuchen im Pazifik den französischen Rotwein im Regal stehen ließen. Gleichzeitig ist »der Islam« längst nicht mehr irgendwo in fernen Ländern, sondern in unseren eigenen Städten. Europa, mit seinen muslimischen Einwanderern und seiner Nachbarschaft zum Nahen Osten, ist von dieser neuen globalen Enge viel mehr betroffen als die Vereinigten Staaten.

Der saudische König machte seine erste große Auslandsreise nach Peking

Der Aufstieg Chinas und Indiens ist vom welthistorischen Gerücht zur Realität geworden, viel schneller als gedacht, fast auf einen Schlag. Auf einmal sind sie einfach da, nicht bloß als »Wachstumsregionen«, sondern als Mächte. Vielleicht wird man 2005 und 2006 einmal als die Jahre im Gedächtnis behalten, in denen das wirklich jeder bemerkt hat – auch das lässt 2003, mit dem Irak-Sieg als Krönung westlicher Vorherrschaft, so tief vergangen erscheinen. Huntington hatte Recht mit seiner Relativierung des Westens, nur hat das im Falle Asiens gar nicht so viel mit Kultur und Zivilisation zu tun. Das Öl und das Gas, das die neuen Kolosse kaufen, gibt ihnen Einfluss – der Westen braucht sie in jeder Sanktionsfront, um einen energiereichen Schurkenstaat zu isolieren, und die Schurken umwerben die Neuen, um sich dem westlichen Druck zu entwinden.

Die Welt ist tatsächlich, mit Präsident Chiracs Lieblingsformel zu reden, »multipolar« geworden, aber nicht als Folge eines politischen Projekts, um die Amerikaner in ihre Schranken zu weisen. Sie hat sich ganz ohne französisches Zutun so entwickelt, und Frankreich sitzt mit den ungeliebten USA auf demselben Pol. Die Zeit ist vorbei, als Europa und die Vereinigten Staaten der Dreh- und Angelpunkt der Weltpolitik waren, als alle Fäden bei uns zusammenliefen und einzeln zurück an die Peripherie, nach Lateinamerika, zu den Golfstaaten, nach Asien. Jetzt ist ein Netz daraus geworden, jeder kann sich mit jedem verbinden und verbünden. Der neue saudische König Abdullah hat seine erste große Auslandsreise nach Peking gemacht. Das ist vielleicht die äußerste Kränkung des Westens – nicht, dass die da draußen gegen uns wären, wie der Konflikt mit den radikalen Muslimen suggeriert, sondern dass wir nicht mehr überall dabei sind, dass es eine Welt ohne uns gibt.

Die Relativierung westlichen Einflusses hat natürlich Folgen auf dem Felde der Ethik. Schließlich war die Mission des Westens nicht nur deswegen außerordentlich erfolgreich, weil sie über so gute Argumente verfügte. Es handelt sich seit eh und je um machtverstärkte Moral. Lässt aber der wirtschaftliche und militärische Einfluss nach und bildet der Westen nicht mehr den einzigen dicken Knoten im globalen Netz, so stellen sich bald auch neue Fragen an seine Normen. Kann der moralische Unilateralismus des Westens in einer multipolaren Welt Bestand haben?

Verschärft wird diese Frage durch zwei weitere folgenreiche Entwicklungen. Weltöffentlichkeit gibt es schon länger, neu ist, dass fast alle daran partizipieren, auch der Süden, auch die Armen. Und die nehmen am globalen Informations- und Bilderfluss nicht mehr nur als Konsumenten teil, sondern – zweiter Faktor – mehr und mehr auch als politische Subjekte. Die Verbreitung von Demokratien oder zumindest Parademokratien ermöglicht es den Massen auf der Südhalbkugel, ihren Gefühlen und ihrem Willen Ausdruck zu verleihen und ihn wirksam zu machen.

Wenn man ihre Stimmabgaben der vergangenen Jahre einmal als Kommentar zur Legitimation des Westens liest, dann muss man sagen: kritisch, äußerst kritisch. Ob in Lateinamerika, in Asien oder im Mittleren Osten – fast überall wurden Männer und Frauen an die Spitze gewählt, die den Westen scharf, mitunter fanatisch kritisieren. Das war gewiss nicht immer der ausschlaggebende Grund für die Wahlentscheidungen, aber es hat jenen Politikern geholfen, gegen die da oben in Nordamerika und in Europa zu sein.

Wer die Atombombe hat, sollte nicht noch Atomarroganz an den Tag legen

Wen wundert’s? Denn wenn eine Weltöffentlichkeit erst einmal anfängt zu fragen und dies mit Macht tut, dann verstehen sich die doppelten Standards, die der Westen bislang global durchzusetzen verstand, überhaupt nicht mehr von selbst. Einen Krieg wie gegen den Irak, ohne ausreichende Legitimation, hätten die USA keinem anderen Land der Welt durchgehen lassen. Und die anderen wissen das auch. Um auf das aktuell Brisanteste zu kommen: Warum hat der Westen, unterstützt von Russland und geduldet von China, darüber zu befinden, wer eine Atombombe haben darf? Wie kommt etwa Jacques Chirac dazu, mitten hinein in den Atomkonflikt mit Iran zu erklären: Ihr dürft die Bombe nicht einmal besitzen, wir nehmen uns sogar das Recht auf ihren Ersteinsatz heraus – und zwar gegen euch!

Wer in den vergangenen zwanzig Jahren etwa die globalen Klimaverhandlungen beobachtet hat, fragte sich mehr als einmal, wieso es sich ein Westler erlauben kann, auch in Zukunft zehn- bis zwanzigmal so viel Kohlendioxyd auszustoßen wie ein Afrikaner oder ein Südamerikaner. Gleiches gilt für den Widerspruch, dass die westlichen Länder ihre Märkte nach wie vor durch Zölle und Subventionen für Produkte aus den so genannten Entwicklungsländern dicht machen und zugleich von denen da unten freien Handel fordern. Letztes, besonders obszönes Beispiel: In den Metropolen des Westens ist es üblich geworden, für gesellige Abende Kokain zu bestellen, was mittlerweile fast genauso leicht ist, wie den Pizza-Service anzurufen. Angst vor der Polizei muss man dabei kaum haben, teuer ist es auch nicht mehr. Gleichzeitig wird von den Ländern, die dieses Rauschgift produzieren, verlangt, dass sie ihre Kokabauern drangsalieren.

Man muss schon sehr viel Macht haben, um solche doppelten Standards global durchsetzen zu können. Da der Westen darüber nicht mehr verfügt, muss er sich etwas anderes überlegen, wenn er die Weltöffentlichkeit nicht dauerhaft gegen sich aufbringen will.

Natürlich wäre es utopisch, zu versuchen, mit zügiger globaler Umverteilung die Unterschiede zwischen Arm und Reich zu nivellieren. Und natürlich müssen die westlichen Staaten darauf bestehen, dass auch in puncto Atomwaffen Demokratien, Parademokratien und Despotien nicht völlig gleich behandelt werden können. Dennoch müsste der Westen eine Art Fairness-Offensive starten, ein Programm zur Milderung der doppelten Standards. Um es nur an zwei der genannten Beispiele zu verdeutlichen: Wenn die westlichen Staaten eine weitere Verbreitung von Atomwaffen nachhaltig verhindern wollen, so sind eigene weitere Aufrüstung und Drohungen mit dem Erstschlag die schlechtesten Mittel. Wer die Atombombe schon hat, sollte nicht auch noch Atomarroganz an den Tag legen, sondern möglichst das eigene Arsenal reduzieren und den Ton mildern.

Beim Klimawandel wird der Westen mehr und schneller etwas tun müssen als bisher geplant. Auch um seine Würde nicht zu verlieren: Denn die Reaktion auf den sprunghaft wachsenden Öldurst Indiens und Chinas kann doch nicht in erhöhter Abhängigkeit des Westens von den arabischen Despotien bestehen. Vor allem dann nicht, wenn man sich gleichzeitig wegen ihrer Terrorproliferation mit ihnen anlegen muss. Im Moment hat die Kritik des Westens am Islam bei aller Berechtigung etwas von einem Süchtigen, der den Dealer beschimpft.

Eine Fairness-Offensive ist weder zu verwechseln mit einem irrealen Umverteilungsversprechen noch mit Prinzipienschwäche, im Gegenteil. Appeasement-Politik, Anbiederung an die Radikalen, darf sich der Westen nicht leisten. Es wirkt ungut, wenn im Karikaturenstreit Amerikaner erleichtert sind, dass diesmal die Europäer am islamischen Pranger stehen, und es ist schäbig, wenn Bill Clinton angebliche antimuslimische Vorurteile in Europa auch noch mit dem Antisemitismus in Verbindung bringt. Auf Kosten des jeweils anderen werden Europäer und Amerikaner ihre Haut nicht retten. Worum es geht, ist nicht die Preisgabe moralischer Ansprüche, sondern ihre Anwendung auch auf uns selbst. Wenn der Westen schwächer wird, dann hat er nur die Alternative, an den richtigen Fronten nachzugeben – oder an den falschen, Fairness-Offensive oder Appeasement.

Man darf dabei nicht vergessen, was sich der Westen – durchaus zu Recht – gegenwärtig zumutet und anmaßt: Er versucht, der demokratisch gewählten palästinensischen Regierung unter Androhung von Sanktionen seinen Willen aufzudrücken. Dasselbe mit ähnlichen Druckmitteln bei Iran. Wer sich solches vornimmt, wer seine Prinzipien durchsetzen will, der kann nicht zugleich mit zwei extrem unterschiedlichen Maßstäben operieren. Das ist kein moralischer Appell, sondern eine nüchterne, politische Prognose.

Der Westen muss normativ anspruchsvoll bleiben, materiell bescheidener werden und seine Präpotenz à la Bush oder Chirac abbauen. Denn in einer Welt, in der jeder jederzeit jeden hören kann, ist es kaum mehr möglich, hier anders zu reden als dort, nach innen anders als nach außen. Es gibt medial kein innen und außen mehr. Das eigene Wort, die eigene Norm gelten überall. Oder nirgends.

Der Westen ist nicht mehr Endpunkt der Geschichte, er ist mittendrin. Er könnte auch Geschichte werden.

DIE ZEIT 09.02.2006 Nr.7

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February 8, 2006
Q&A: U.S. Should Offer Iran Security Guarantee
http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot1_020806.html?_…

By BERNARD GWERTZMAN

From the [urlCouncil on Foreign Relations,]http://www.cfr.org/[/url] February 8, 2006

Bernard Gwertzman is consulting editor for the Council on Foreign Relations website, cfr.org.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says that he does not believe Iran has passed the point of no return on developing nuclearweapons.

"I think they`re really determined, at least to get a nuclear-weapons capability," says Albright. "Whether they`ve made the decision to get the bomb or not, I personally think that there isn`t a firm decision; I also think they`ve made a decision that they want this enrichment capability, and it`s going to take the international community quite a bit of effort to get Iran to reconsider."

Albright says that just as the United States has offered North Korea a security guarantee if it stops its nuclear-weapons program, the United States would be well-served doing the same with Iran. "Iran needs to believe that if it gives up its nuclear programs, it`s not going to be vulnerable to an attack by the United States," he says. "And in the case of Iran, the United States has not wanted to make a security guarantee. I think it makes the whole situation more difficult to manage."

Over the weekend a decision was taken by the IAEA to send Iran to the UNSecurity Council in March because of serious questions involving Iran`s nuclear policies. What`s likely to happen?

Well, the first thing is: What is Iran going to do? There`s a one-month delay in the Security Council taking up the issue actively, to see if Iran will accept the conditions laid out in the Board of Governors resolution, which are mainly to stop enrichment, or enrichment-related activities, and to give up building a heavy water reactor. The IAEA would then either do inspections based on the so-called additional protocol or go beyond the additional protocol to resolve the outstanding questions.

So it`s really a time to see what Iran does. And I think part of the whole approach has been to give Iran an opportunity to back down. And I think if Iran doesn`t back down -- for example if it really goes forward and says no longer will the "additional protocol" be in play in Iran -- then I think what you will have is the Security Council fairly quickly issuing a statement from the chairman that would basically reiterate what the IAEA Board of Governors said, and that it would signify a broadening of the efforts to get Iran to change its mind.

Talk about the "additional protocol" for those who are not acquainted with that.

Well, the "additional protocol" came about because of the failure of the international inspectors to detect Iraq`s secret nuclear-weapons program back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The reason that failure happened was largely due to too-limited access to nuclear and related sites. And so the "additional protocol" was aimed to fix this specific problem, that the IAEA was not very good at finding undeclared nuclear activities or facilities.

This was custom-made to deal with Iran. Iran was operating undeclared facilities and with the "additional protocol," signed by Iran with the IAEA in 2003, the IAEA had authority to conduct more rigorous, short-notice inspections at undeclared nuclear facilities to ferret out secret nuclear activities. The IAEA was quickly able to uncover a series of secret facilities, to catch Iran in lie after lie, and see through deception campaigns and reach a point where it forced Iran to really reveal most of its nuclear program. Unfortunately, there were some parts of the Iranian program that are suspected to exist that the "additional protocol" isn`t enough to deal with, and that`s why this resolution actually calls for the IAEA to have expanded authority beyond the "additional protocol."

What the IAEA`s facing is military procurement of equipment that looks like it could be for centrifuges. And the Iranians say "no, it`s not anything to do with nuclear activities but you can`t see it." The IAEA feels it needs to see it because it does look like it`s equipment imported for a centrifuge program by a military-related organization. They don`t have the authority under the "additional protocol" to probe as deeply into nuclear weapons efforts that could involve the missile program. Documents were brought out of Iran and given to intelligence agencies that have information that seem to be modifying the reentry vehicle of a missile so that it looks like it could hold a nuclear weapon. Again, under the "additional protocol" there isn`t much the IAEA can do. So it needs more authority to ask for interviews with certain people who the Iranians say are not in the nuclear program. And [the IAEA] needs broader declarations from Iran.

Since the decision by the Board of Governors on Saturday, the Iranians have said they`re resuming full-scale uranium enrichment. What does that really mean?

It doesn`t mean much of anything. They`re just continuing what they`ve been doing. They play games with words. Originally, when they ended the suspension they said, "oh, it`s only research, it`s what a university would do." They tried to downplay it, but what they did is they started their program to learn how to use centrifuges to enrich uranium, largely a developmental program now, and they need to run centrifuges alone and they need to run what`s called a "cascade" [a series of centrifuges]. They have a pilot cascade that is built but has not been operated with uranium. This is at the pilot plant in Natanz. And so they`ve been doing all the preparatory work to start up the activities that they stopped in the fall of 2003. And so now they call it full-scale enrichment but it`s really no different.

Talk to me again about centrifuges. Are these big things? How many centrifuges do you need to make nuclear weapons?

Well, there are many types of centrifuges. And the ones that Iran (have) been building and deploying (have) been at Natanz and [are] what have come to be called the P-1. The P-1 is actually a Dutch design originally, I don`t know, two meters high, 100 millimeters in diameter; aluminum is the rotor material, it doesn`t spin that fast, it has some problems in it, it`s actually kind of hard to learn how to operate.

Each centrifuge doesn`t really do that much. It just doesn`t enrich that much and it can`t process that much uranium in a year. So you start connecting them together, both to increase the amount of enrichment, and to increase the amount of uranium that you can push through and to come out as enriched uranium. So if Iran right now wants to run a 164-machine cascade, they won`t really make much material.

In the end centrifuges are rather precious to the Iranians. And so you don`t want to break too many of them. If they wanted to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb program, they could get by with 1,500 centrifuges operated in cascades, and that would give them enough highly enriched uranium for about one bomb a year. If they wanted to make enough to fuel the Bushehr reactor [being built for Iran by the Russians], they would need about 50,000 operating centrifuges, of enriched uranium.

Is that a heavy-water reactor?

No, it`s a light-water reactor. It`s a Russian design. One of the difficulties in the situation is Iran says, "oh, we just want it for civil purposes, it`s for the power reactors." Well, once they see if they went ahead and did that, and they had 50,000 centrifuges operating, then they would be able to change the purpose of that facility overnight, and actually within a few days make enough highly enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon. It would give Iran a rapid capability to produce material for a bomb, way faster than the IAEA could ever detect.

And so I take it from what you`re saying, you think Iran`s purpose right now is to make nuclear weapons.

Frankly, I don`t know. I don`t think the Iranian leadership has really decided. I mean what you`d expect if there was a bomb program -- and we`ve seen this in South Africa, we saw it in Iraq in the 1980s -- that you have a decision made by a leader or leadership, and then the scientific infrastructure, the engineering infrastructure in the nuclear and the military fields goes about making the material for bombs, making a weaponized device militarily sound, fitting into a delivery system, or at least trying.

So you get this whole range of activities, you get budgets, you get major resources committed. No one can find evidence of that in Iran that`s compelling. And so there`s a good argument for the side that`s says Iran hasn`t made the decision to build and deploy their weapons. But there`s another view that says in 1985, when Iran says they started this program, it was started by the military, and was started for the reason to get nuclear weapons. And it was done right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Iran learned that Iraq wanted to get nuclear weapons, and I think it was responding.

It wasn`t started by some civil part of the nuclear establishment. And then there was some kind of transition where the Iranian Atomic Organization got much more involved in it, but that it was military in nature. But again, 1985 is a long time ago. Iraq did invade Kuwait and was crushed and its nuclear program was eliminated; Iran was well aware of that. I remember doing an assessment in 1995 on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and it was hard to see what they had, but again they were working on centrifuges in secret, and they were at least seven years or so from building a centrifuge plant.

Now that Iraq is knocked out of the nuclear business, why doesn`t Iran just say, `OK, great, we don`t need nuclear weapons`?

Well, I think, another thing that`s come to play is that (Iran has) invested a lot in the infrastructure, and they`re gaining prestige from doing what they`re doing. And some of the Iranian leadership`s statements reflect that. I think that they`re so invested in the nuclear infrastructure, they think they`re going to get benefits from it. They also think that it could deter an American attack, and I think that they`re really determined, at least to get a nuclear-weapons capability. Whether they`ve made the decision to get the bomb or not, I personally think that there isn`t a firm decision, I also think they`ve made a decision that they want this enrichment capability, and it`s going to take the international community quite a bit of effort to get Iran to reconsider.

Do you think the Russian proposal to have enrichment done on Russian soil for the Iranians has any real possibility?

Yes, I think it does. It`s a way for Iran to back down gracefully. And so I think that it`s very important that these offers continue and they be developed, and Iran needs to negotiate with Russia so that if Iran does make the decision to change its course of action, that it can grab onto a proposal. In the end I think a lot of people support Iran`s desire to build a nuclear power plant. Even the U.S. government has changed a lot in the last two years. It now realizes that it`s just going to have to accept that Iran`s going to have nuclear power and it is all right so long as it doesn`t have a weapons capability. And if you`re going to have nuclear power you`re probably going to build more than one plant and you`re going to have to have a source of fuel; and so it makes sense that Russia provide a source of fuel in some kind of guaranteed way where Iran is part of the deal, and also that the Western nations make commitments to guarantee a fuel supply for nuclear power reactors.

Is the United States overacting to all this?

No, I don`t think the United States is overacting. I think the United States stumbled badly a couple of years ago, because it said the goal is to go to the Security Council no matter what. And most people didn`t agree. And then the argument against [it] was simple: What are you going to do then? There won`t be sanctions, so let`s do a different process. And I think the Europeans had the right approach, an offer of carrots; and I think the United States joined that effort and now Russia and China joined it. But it`s tough, a tough road to hoe. It`s very hard to get Iran to change course. But also because of that difficulty it`s important to build up support slowly, and countries react in different ways to Iran, so you have to have a strategy that offers carrots to Iran and at the same time, if Iran just refuses those carrots, and acts provocatively, which it`s done recently, you can set up a track to get to the UN Security Council. That can lead to isolating Iran and threatening to put on sanctions.

Do you think Iran has sort of watched the North Koreans closely to see what they do?

I think so. Both North Korea and Iran face the problem that the Bush administration has been very aggressive about challenging both regimes. And once [the United States] invaded Iraq, both regimes concluded you could deter the United States with nuclear weapons. Both countries feel that nuclear weapons are important for their security. And Iran is pretty far from having nuclear weapons -- several years at least. So it`s struggling to get nuclear-weapons capability while at the same time trying to deter the United States, or trying to prevent the United States from keeping it from having nuclear-weapons capability.

So there are still differences. But in the end it does reflect on what the United States needs to do. In the case of North Korea, it finally said to North Korea, "Look, if you give up your nuclear weapons, we`re not going to attack you and we`ll give you security guarantees." And the United States is not going to stop trying to transform the regime and it shouldn`t, but it`s not going to have an active program to overthrow the regime. It needs to do the same thing with Iran. Iran needs to believe that if it gives up its nuclear programs, it`s not going to be vulnerable to an attack by the United States. And in the case of Iran, the United States has not wanted to make a security guarantee. I think it makes the whole situation more difficult to manage.

Because the United States keeps indicating it thinks it can influence the internal situation in Iran?

I think the Iranian people are very proud. The regime is very good at manipulating the media to distort what`s going on and gain more support from the Iranian population. I think that if the confrontation heightens, the regime is perfectly capable of suppressing dissent more. I`m not optimistic that a transformation like the United States wants is going to take place soon, and yet I think we can get rid of the Iranian nuclear-weapons capability. It may require the United States to give a security guarantee to Iran.

* Copyright 2006

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February 10, 2006
U.S. Trade Deficit Hit All-Time High in 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/business/10cnd-econ.html?e…

By VIKAS BAJAJ

The United States trade deficit jumped nearly 18 percent in 2005, the government reported today, hitting its fourth consecutive record as consumer demand for imports increased and energy prices soared.

The $725.8 billion gap, which is almost exactly twice the deficit in 2001, was driven by a 12 percent jump in imports and a more muted 10 percent increase in exports, the Commerce Department reported. The nation last had a trade surplus, of $12.4 billion, in 1975.

As a percent of the gross domestic product, the trade gap increased to 5.8 percent from 5.3 percent in 2004 and 4.5 percent in 2003.

With the American economy continuing to grow faster than many of its export markets and energy prices staying at elevated levels, economists expect little improvement, and perhaps even a slight worsening, in the national trade balance this year.

"The pace of that widening will be moderating to some extent," Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital, said noting that exports to Europe, Japan and other countries are growing. But "you need a dramatic slowdown in domestic U.S. demand to bring down the U.S. trade deficit and we think that is unlikely."

In addition to being improbable, such a deceleration would be extremely painful to workers and businesses. To an extent, the nation finds itself in an arithmetic hole that it will not be able to simply export its way out of. Imports are now one and a half times bigger than exports and it would take a substantial and sustained growth in sales of American goods and services overseas to make up that difference.

That means the country will have to rely on the flow of billions of dollars in foreign money, particularly from central banks in Asia, into American financial markets for some time to come. China and Japan are the biggest holders of United States Treasury bonds. Their purchases help finance the federal budget deficit and allow Americans to buy homes with cheap mortgages and to consume large quantities of imports, many of them from Asia.

Many economists believe that situation is unsustainable in the long run and the United States will eventually face a harsh correction that would depress consumer spending, increase the cost of borrowing and result in a weaker currency.

"There is certainly going to be inflows, the question is at what price?" said James O`Sullivan, an economist at UBS. "As time goes on, it will become a little more difficult to attract foreign funds. That`s another way of saying the dollar will fall."

The dollar strengthened against the euro, Japanese yen and British pound in 2005, making American exports more expensive and imports from those countries cheaper.

Bond prices fell today, pushing the yield on the 10-year United States Treasury to 4.59 percent, from 4.54 Thursday evening. The stock market was little changed in afternoon trading.

Perhaps one of the most important factors in the rising deficit is the import of oil and other energy sources. Trade in petroleum products accounted for 29 percent of the total deficit, up from 25 percent in 2004. Imports for petroleum goods climbed 39 percent, to $251.6 billion, after rising by 39 percent in 2004. Excluding oil and other petroleum products, the trade deficit would have grown 10 percent.

Though oil and other energy prices fell late last year, which helped lower petroleum imports in December, they have risen sharply early this year because of concerns about Iran`s nuclear program.

In December, the nation saw a 1.5 percent increase in the deficit, to $65.7 billion, as imports of computers, cars and airplanes rose and exports of planes, which had risen sharply in November, dropped. The trade deficit in petroleum products narrowed by about $1.2 billion, but nonpetroleum imports increased by $2.3 billion, to $47.3 billion.

"We can expect to see worse numbers to come," said Ashraf Laidi, chief currency analyst for MG Financial Group in New York. "The simple reason is when there is a rise in oil prices that increase in oil price for a particular month does not tend to spill over into the trade deficit until the next month."

The nation set another record last year, this one in its politically sensitive trade deficit with China. That nation had the largest trade deficit with the United States of any country, at $201.6 billion for the year, up 24.5 percent from 2004. In December, the country`s deficit with China narrowed 11.9 percent, to $16.3 billion.

Lawmakers in Washington have seized on the growing trade imbalance in China to call on the Bush administration to take a harder line with the country on its currency and other trade practices.

In July, the Chinese government adjusted the value of the yuan up by about 2 percent and allowed its currency to float in a narrow band. Since then it has risen by an additional 0.7 percent. One dollar buys about 8.0505 yuan today.

The United States` second biggest deficit was with Japan, at $82.7 billion, up 9.4 percent, followed by Canada, a big supplier of oil and natural gas, at $76.5 billion, up 15.1 percent. The deficit with members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries increased by 29 percent, to $92.7 billion.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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FEMA`s website for Kids is illustrating fear into our children.

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Published on Friday, February 10, 2006 by the International Herald Tribune

A `Long War` Designed to Perpetuate Itself
http://www.iht.com/

by William Pfaff


Paris -- The U.S. Defense Department and the White House have decided that the United States is now conducting "the Long War" rather than what previously was known as the War against Terror, then as the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, and briefly - as one revealing Pentagon study described it - a war against "the Universal Adversary."

President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last month that the aim of his administration is to defeat radical Islam. This was a preposterous statement. Shortly afterward, radical Islam began burning embassies from Afghanistan and Indonesia to Damascus and Beirut. The United States is not going to defeat that.

There are a great many dismaying aspects of Bush`s Washington, but nothing more so than this combination of the unachievable with the hortatory in giving a name and purpose to the military campaigns that already have the U.S. Army and Marine Corps near exhaustion, and a major part of the world in turmoil.

It is customary, politically desirable and morally indispensable to say seriously what a war is about, if only so that the public will know when it is over; when the declared and undeclared measures of exception that have accompanied it, justifying suspension of civil liberties, illegal practices and defiance of international law and convention, will be lifted; and when the killing may be expected to stop.

What was originally to be a matter of quick and exemplary revenge, with lightning attacks and acclaimed victories, has now become, we are told, the long war whose end cannot be foreseen. The citizen is implicitly told to expect the current suspension of constitutional norms, disregard for justice, and defiance of limits on presidential power as traditionally construed, to continue indefinitely. We are in a new age, America`s leaders say. The Democratic opposition seems to agree.

What started as the war against terror, proclaimed by the president to Congress in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, has undergone a metamorphosis. The initial interpretation was that the people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks and other terrorist outrages against Americans and their interests would be discovered, defeated and killed or brought to justice.

Surely that is what most Americans thought when the search began for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and members of Al Qaeda. Today bin Laden and Mullah Omar are somewhere in Waziristan, in Pakistan`s tribal areas, tracked by the CIA and Pakistani soldiers (with different degrees of enthusiasm). There is an insurrection in Iraq, which had nothing to do with Al Qaeda when it started, but from which Al Qaeda and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi now draw global publicity.

Elsewhere, violent and alienated members of the Muslim diaspora in Europe claim the brand-identification of Al Qaeda to dramatize their own exploits, as do discontented sons of the Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern elites.

Yet even if you include the 9/11 casualties, the number of Americans killed by international terrorists since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting them) is about the same as that killed by lightning - or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts.

"In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States" wrote John Mueller of Ohio State University in last autumn`s issue of the authoritative American journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

As Mueller concedes, there is a definitional issue: Few insurgents in Iraq are internationals; most are homegrown. And if aspirant terrorists in London or Paris had nuclear bombs, the numbers would become rather different.

Nonetheless, a phenomenon that is scattered, limited and under control, and inevitably transient, has been conflated by Washington with something that is huge and very serious: the desperation among the Muslim masses that is directed indiscriminately against Western nations, which are held responsible for Islamic society`s backwardness, poverty and exploitation.

Al Qaeda and individual international terrorists are the object of worldwide intelligence and police operations. They are a marginal phenomenon. The Bush administration`s conflation of them with the social upheaval in their world is exploited to perpetuate changes in American society that provide a much more sinister threat to democracy than anything ever dreamed by Osama bin Laden.

The radical threat to the United States is at home.

© 2006 International Herald Tribune

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February 11, 2006
Editorial
Another Cave-In on the Patriot Act
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/opinion/11sat1.html

The Patriot Act has been one of the few issues on which Congress has shown backbone lately. Last year, it refused to renew expiring parts of the act until greater civil liberties protections were added. But key members of the Senate have now caved, agreeing to renew these provisions in exchange for only minimal improvements. At a time when the public is growing increasingly concerned about the lawlessness of the Bush administration`s domestic spying, the Senate should insist that any reauthorization agreement do more to protect Americans against improper secret searches.

When the Patriot Act was passed after Sept. 11, 2001, Congress made some of its most far-reaching provisions temporary so it would be able to reconsider them later on. Those provisions were set to expire last December, but Congress agreed to a very short extension so greater civil liberties protections could be added. This week, four key Republican senators — later backed by two Democrats — said that they had agreed to a deal with the White House. It is one that does little to protect Americans from government invasions of their privacy.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Patriot Act is the "gag order" imposed by Section 215, which prohibits anyone holding financial, medical and other private records of ordinary Americans from saying anything when the government issues a subpoena for those records. That means that a person whose records are being taken, and whose privacy is being invaded, has no way to know about the subpoena and no way to challenge it.

Rather than removing this gag order, the deal keeps it in place for a full year — too long for Americans to wait to learn that the government is spying on them. Even after a year, someone holding such records would have to meet an exceedingly high standard to get the gag order lifted. It is not clear that this change has much value at all.

The compromise also fails to address another problem with Section 215: it lets the government go on fishing expeditions, spying on Americans with no connection to terrorism or foreign powers. The act should require the government, in order to get a subpoena, to show that there is a connection between the information it is seeking and a terrorist or a spy.

But the deal would allow subpoenas in instances when there are reasonable grounds for simply believing that information is relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is an extremely low bar.

One of the most well-publicized objections to the Patriot Act is the fact that it allows the government to issue national security letters, an extremely broad investigative tool, to libraries, forcing them to turn over their patrons` Internet records. The wording of the compromise is unclear. If it actually says that national security letters cannot be used to get Internet records from libraries, that would be an improvement, but it is not clear that it does.

In late December, it looked as if there was bipartisan interest in the Senate for changing the worst Patriot Act provisions and standing up for Americans` privacy rights. Now the hope of making the needed improvements has faded considerably.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Smoking [urlDutch Cleanser]http://www.mine-engineer.com/mining/dutch.htm
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By MAUREEN DOWD

Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he`s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic.

President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage.

The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn`t. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned.

The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, "he`s smoking Dutch Cleanser."

The president doesn`t know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids.

The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn`t, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme.

At the Bush White House, the mere evocation of the word "terror" justifies breaking any law, contravening any convention, despoiling any ideal, electing any Republican and brushing off any failure to govern.

Asked yesterday by Senator Susan Collins why the administration had reacted in slo-mo on Katrina, with "people dying, people waiting to be rescued," Michael Brown replied that if FEMA had declared that a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, "then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could."

Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations.

It used to take an Israeli incursion to inflame the Arab world. Now all it takes is a cartoon in Denmark.

W. and Vice have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground, leaving the 9/11 villains at large, and letting cronies and losers botch the job of homeland security.

Brownie, one of the biggest boneheads in U.S. history, considered the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, so useless that he deliberately didn`t call him right away about the suffering in New Orleans.

"The culture was such that I didn`t think that would have been effective and would have exacerbated the problem, quite frankly," Brownie told the Republican senator Bob Bennett, who called the statement "staggering." A telephone call to his boss, Brownie said, "would have wasted my time."

The doofus who frittered away lives e-mailing colleagues about being a "fashion god" and wondering how he looked on television may have just been engaged in self-protective spin. Or has the Homeland Security Department simply created another set of paralyzing turf battles?

The most dysfunctional man in government is calling the government dysfunctional.

W.`s sophomoric "Brownie, you`re doing a heck of a job" line makes even Brownie cringe. "Unfortunately," the former FEMA chief complained, "he called me `Brownie` at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir."

In the new Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, who was a senior C.I.A. official overseeing Middle East intelligence assessments until October, says the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the intelligence on Iraq was that war was unnecessary. He says the White House "went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

He calls the relationship between the intelligence community and the policy makers — you guessed it — politicized, damaged by bureaucratic rivalries and dysfunctional.

A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay.

Perfect.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Saturday, February 11, 2006

The Raid...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_riverbendblog_a…

We were collected at my aunts house for my cousins birthday party a few days ago. J. just turned 16 and my aunt invited us for a late lunch and some cake. It was a very small gathering- three cousins- including myself- my parents, and J.’s best friend, who also happened to be a neighbor.

The lunch was quite good- my aunt is possibly one of the best cooks in Baghdad. She makes traditional Iraqi food and for J.’s birthday she had prepared all our favorites- dolma (rice and meat wrapped in grape leaves, onions, peppers, etc.), beryani rice, stuffed chicken, and some salads. The cake was ready-made and it was in the shape of a friendly-looking fish, J.’s father having forgotten she was an Aquarius and not a Pisces when he selected it, “I thought everyone born in February was a Pisces…” He explained when we pointed out his mistake.

When it was time to blow out the candles, the electricity was out and we stood around her in the dark and sang “Happy Birthday” in two different languages. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly to make a wish and then, with a single breath, she blew out the candles. She proceeded to open gifts- bear pajamas, boy band CDs, a sweater with some sparkly things on it, a red and beige book bag… Your typical gifts for a teenager.

The gift that made her happiest, however, was given by her father. After she’d opened up everything, he handed her a small, rather heavy, silvery package. She unwrapped it hastily and gasped with delight, “Baba- it’s lovely!” She smiled as she held it up to the light of the gas lamp to show it off. It was a Swiss Army knife- complete with corkscrew, nail clippers, and a bottle opener.

“You can carry it around in your bag for protection when you go places!” He explained. She smiled and gingerly pulled out the blade, “And look- when the blade is clean, it works as a mirror!” We all oohed and aahed our admiration and T., another cousin, commented she’d get one when the Swiss Army began making them in pink.

I tried to remember what I got on my 16th birthday and I was sure it wasn’t a knife of any sort.

By 8 pm, my parents and J.’s neighbor were gone. They had left me and T., our 24-year-old female cousin, to spend a night. It was 2 am and we had just gotten J.’s little brother into bed. He had eaten more than his share of cake and the sugar had made him wild for a couple of hours.

We were gathered in the living room and my aunt and her husband, Ammoo S. [Ammoo = uncle] were asleep. T., J. and I were speaking softly and looking for songs on the radio, having sworn not to sleep before the cake was all gone. T. was playing idly with her mobile phone, trying to send a message to a friend. “Hey- there’s no coverage here… is it just my phone?” She asked. J. and I both took out our phones and checked, “Mine isn’t working either…” J. answered, shaking her head. They both turned to me and I told them that I couldn’t get a signal either. J. suddenly looked alert and made a sort of “Uh-oh” sound as she remembered something. “R.- will you check the telephone next to you?” I picked up the ordinary telephone next to me and held my breath, waiting for a dial tone. Nothing.

“There’s no dial tone… but there was one earlier today- I was online…”

J. frowned and turned down the radio. “The last time this happened,” she said, “the area was raided.” The room was suddenly silent and we strained our ears. Nothing. I could hear a generator a couple of streets away, and I also heard the distant barking of a dog- but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

T. suddenly sat up straight, “Do you hear that?” She asked, wide-eyed. At first I couldn’t hear anything and then I caught it- it was the sound of cars or vehicles- moving slowly. “I can hear it!” I called back to T., standing up and moving towards the window. I looked out into the darkness and couldn’t see anything beyond the dim glow of lamps behind windows here and there.

“You won’t see anything from here- it’s probably on the main road!” J. jumped up and went to shake her father awake, “Baba, baba- get up- I think the area is being raided.” I heard J. call out as she approached her parents room. Ammoo S. was awake in moments and we heard him wandering around for his slippers and robe asking what time it was.

Meanwhile, the sound of cars had gotten louder and I remembered that one could see some of the neighborhood from a window on the second floor. T. and I crept upstairs quietly. We heard Ammoo S. unlocking 5 different locks on the kitchen door. “What’s he doing?” T. asked, “Shouldn’t he keep the doors locked?” We were looking out the window and there was the glow of lights a few streets away. I couldn’t see exactly where they came from, as several houses were blocking our view, but we could tell something extraordinary was going on in the neighborhood. The sound of vehicles was getting louder, and it was accompanied by the sound of clanging doors and lights that would flash every once in a while.

We clattered downstairs and found J. and the aunt bustling around in the dark. “What should we do?” T. asked, wringing her hands nervously. The only time I’d ever experienced a raid was back in 2003 at an uncle’s house- and it was Americans. This was the first time I was to witness what we assumed would be an Iraqi raid.

My aunt was seething quietly, “This is the third time the bastards raid the area in 2 months… We’ll never get any peace or quiet…” I stood at their bedroom door and watched as she made the bed. They lived in a mixed neighborhood- Sunnis, Shia and Christians. It was a relatively new neighborhood that began growing in the late eighties. Most of the neighbors have known each other for years. “We don’t know what they’re looking for… La Ilaha Ila Allah…”

I stood awkwardly, watching them make preparations. J. was already in her room changing- she called out for us to do the same, “They’ll come in the house- you don’t want to be wearing pajamas…”

“Why, will they have camera crews with them?” T. smiled wanly, attempting some humor. No, J. replied, her voice muffled as she put on a sweater, “Last time they made us wait outside in the cold.” I listened for Ammoo S. and heard him outside, taking the big padlock off of the gate in the driveway. “Why are you unlocking everything J.?” I called out in the dark.

“The animals will break down the doors if they aren’t open in three seconds and then they’ll be all over the garden and house… last time they pushed the door open on poor Abu H. three houses down and broke his shoulder…” J. was fully changed, and over her jeans and sweater she was wearing her robe. It was cold.

My aunt had dressed too and she was making her way upstairs to carry down my three-year-old cousin B. “I don’t want him waking up with all the noise and finding those bastards around him in the dark.”

Twenty minutes later, we were all assembled in the living room. The house was dark except for the warm glow of the kerosene heater and a small lamp in the corner. We were all dressed and waiting nervously, wrapped in blankets. T. and I sat on the ground while my aunt and her husband sat on the couch, B. wrapped in a blanket between them. J. was sitting in an armchair across from them. It was nearly 4 am.

Meanwhile, the noises outside had gotten louder as the raid got closer. Every once in a while, you could hear voices calling out for people to open a door or the sharp banging of a rifle against a door.

Last time they had raided my aunts area, they took away four men on their street alone. Two of them were students in their early twenties- one a law student, and the other an engineering student, and the third man was a grandfather in his early sixties. There was no accusation, no problem- they were simply ordered outside, loaded up into a white pickup truck and driven away with a group of other men from the area. Their families haven’t heard from them since and they visit the morgue almost daily in anticipation of finding them dead.

“There will be no problem,” My aunt said sternly, looking at each of us, thin-lipped. “You will not say anything improper and they will come in, look around and go.” Her eyes lingered on Ammoo S. He was silent. He had lit a cigarette and was inhaling deeply. J. said he’d begun smoking again a couple of months ago after having quit for ten years. “Are your papers ready?” She asked him, referring to his identification papers which would be requested. He didn’t answer, but nodded his head silently.

We waited. And waited… I began nodding off and my dreams were interspersed with troops and cars and hooded men. I woke to the sound of T. saying, “They’re almost here…” And lifted my head, groggy with what I thought was at least three hours of sleep. I squinted down at my watch and noted it was not yet 5 am. “Haven’t they gotten to us yet?” I asked.

Ammoo S. was pacing in the kitchen. I could hear him coming and going in his slippers, pausing every now and then in front of the window. My aunt was still on the couch- she sat with B. in her arms, rocking him gently and murmuring prayers. J. was doing a last-minute check, hiding valuables and gathering our handbags into the living room, “They took baba’s mobile phone during the last raid- make sure your mobile phones are with you.”

I could feel my heart pounding in my ears and I got closer to the kerosene heater in an attempt to dispel the cold that seemed to have permanently taken over my fingers and toes. T. was trembling, wrapped in her blanket. I waved her over to the heater but she shook her head and answered, “I.... mmmm… n-n-not… c-c-cold…”

It came ten minutes later. A big clanging sound on the garden gate and voices yelling “Ifta7u [OPEN UP]”. I heard my uncle outside, calling out, “We’re opening the gate, we’re opening…” It was moments and they were inside the house. Suddenly, the house was filled with strange men, yelling out orders and stomping into rooms. It was chaotic. We could see flashing lights in the garden and lights coming from the hallways. I could hear Ammoo S. talking loudly outside, telling them his wife and the ‘children’ were the only ones in the house. What were they looking for? Was there something wrong? He asked.

Suddenly, two of them were in the living room. We were all sitting on the sofa, near my aunt. My cousin B. was by then awake, eyes wide with fear. They were holding large lights or ‘torches’ and one of them pointed a Klashnikov at us. “Is there anyone here but you and them?” One of them barked at my aunt. “No- it’s only us and my husband outside with you- you can check the house.” T.’s hands went up to block the glaring light of the torch and one of the men yelled at her to put her hands down, they fell limply in her lap. I squinted in the strong light and as my sight adjusted, I noticed they were wearing masks, only their eyes and mouths showing. I glanced at my cousins and noted that T. was barely breathing. J. was sitting perfectly still, eyes focused on nothing in particular, I vaguely noted that her sweater was on backwards.

One of them stood with the Klashnikov pointed at us, and the other one began opening cabinets and checking behind doors. We were silent. The only sounds came from my aunt, who was praying in a tremulous whisper and little B., who was sucking away at his thumb, eyes wide with fear. I could hear the rest of the troops walking around the house, opening closets, doors and cabinets.

I listened for Ammoo S., hoping to hear him outside but I could only distinguish the harsh voices of the troops. The minutes we sat in the living room seemed to last forever. I didn’t know where to look exactly. My eyes kept wandering to the man with the weapon and yet I knew staring at him wasn’t a good idea. I stared down at a newspaper at my feet and tried to read the upside-down headlines. I glanced at J. again- her heart was beating so hard, the small silver pendant that my mother had given her just that day was throbbing on her chest in time to her heartbeat.

Suddenly, someone called out something from outside and it was over. They began rushing to leave the house, almost as fast as they’d invaded it. Doors slamming, lights dimming. We were left in the dark once more, not daring to move from the sofa we were sitting on, listening as the men disappeared, leaving only a couple to stand at our gate.

“Where’s baba?” J. asked, panicking for a moment before we heard his slippered feet in the driveway. “Did they take him?” Her voice was getting higher. Ammoo S. finally walked into the house, looking weary and drained. I could tell his face was pale even in the relative dark of the house. My aunt sat sobbing quietly in the living room, T. comforting her. “Houses are no longer sacred… We can’t sleep… We can’t live… If you can’t be safe in your own house, where can you be safe? The animals… the bastards…”

We found out a few hours later that one of our neighbors, two houses down, had died. Abu Salih was a man in his seventies and as the Iraqi mercenaries raided his house, he had a heart-attack. His grandson couldn’t get him to the hospital on time because the troops wouldn’t let him leave the house until they’d finished with it. His grandson told us later that day that the Iraqis were checking the houses, but the American troops had the area surrounded and secured. It was a coordinated raid.

They took at least a dozen men from my aunts area alone- their ages between 19 and 40. The street behind us doesn’t have a single house with a male under the age of 50- lawyers, engineers, students, ordinary laborers- all hauled away by the ‘security forces’ of the New Iraq. The only thing they share in common is the fact that they come from Sunni families (with the exception of two who I`m not sure about).

We spent the day putting clothes back into closets, taking stock of anything missing (a watch, a brass letter opener, and a walkman), and cleaning dirt and mud off of carpets. My aunt was fanatic about cleansing and disinfecting everything saying it was all “Dirty, dirty, dirty…” J. has sworn never to celebrate her birthday again.

It’s almost funny- only a month ago, we were watching a commercial on some Arabic satellite channel- Arabiya perhaps. They were showing a commercial for Iraqi security forces and giving a list of numbers Iraqis were supposed to dial in the case of a terrorist attack… You call THIS number if you need the police to protect you from burglars or abductors… You call THAT number if you need the National Guard or special forces to protect you from terrorists… But…

Who do you call to protect you from the New Iraq’s security forces?


- [urlposted by river @ 12:43 AM]http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113960899464455450[/url]

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[urlSenator Chuck Hagel]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Hagel[/url]

February 12, 2006
The Heartland Dissident
http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2006/02/12/magazine/112499…

By JOSEPH LELYVELD

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[/TABLE]With a bluntness that seems habitual — and more than occasionally strikes fellow Republicans as disloyal — Senator Chuck Hagel started voicing skepticism about the Bush administration`s fixation on Iraq as a place to fight the Global War on Terror more than half a year before the president gave the go-ahead for the assault. What the senator said in public was milder than what he said in private conversations with foreign-policy gurus like Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser in another Bush administration, or his friend Colin Powell, the secretary of state, who thought he still had a chance to steer the administration on a diplomatic course. The Nebraskan wanted to believe Powell but, deep down, felt the White House wasn`t going to be diverted from its drive to topple Saddam Hussein. When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force — he`d persuaded himself that his vote might strengthen Powell`s hand — he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it. What sounded then to the venture`s true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later, which is to say that Hagel`s words can reasonably be read as prescient: "How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." The president had said "precious little" about post-Saddam Iraq, which could prove costly, Hagel warned, "in both American blood and treasure."

As the months and years wore on, Senator Hagel`s public musings on Iraq became less measured, as if his gorge rose a little higher with each day`s casualty report. He would say that the White House was out of touch with reality, that the reconstruction effort in Iraq was "beyond pitiful," that he had lost confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that we were losing the war and had destabilized the Middle East, that the United States was getting "bogged down" in Iraq the way it had been in Vietnam. Some of these observations flew into print during the 2004 presidential race, and one of them, the "beyond pitiful" line, was seized upon by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, in his second debate with President Bush. At the Republican grass roots in Nebraska and in the upper reaches of his party in Washington, the senator`s candor was not universally viewed as refreshing. His timing was held against him even more than his dissent. ("Maybe his criticisms are valid," a letter to The Omaha World-Herald said, "but why showcase them and lend credence to the liberal opposition?") Obviously, this was not a team player. Some of his closest friends and supporters fretted that he was killing whatever small chance he might have had to be the national candidate he plainly aspired to be. Now — 33 months before a presidential election, two years before the first primaries — his chances aren`t merely discounted; he`s seldom even mentioned in Republican circles, as if he has been sidelined by his independence on Iraq.

The fact that Hagel himself emerged with two Purple Hearts from Vietnam, where he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, has often been mentioned in news reports quoting him on Iraq as if memories, or maybe nightmares, dating back to the war from which he still carried bits of shrapnel in his chest were primary and extenuating factors shaping his seemingly irrepressible utterances on the latest intervention, his regular brushes with apostasy. Compelling as it is, Chuck Hagel`s history as an ordinary soldier, a grunt from small-town Middle America who grew up to be a senator, is more layered, less simple. Unlike Senator Kerry, he had never been a Vietnam veteran against the war. Unlike his own younger brother Tom — with whom, against standard Army practice on exposing brothers to risk, he walked point in the same infantry unit — he supported that war to the bitter end. The brothers continued to argue about it for another 25 years until the older one`s experience of the world as a globetrotting businessman and his autodidact forays into history and foreign-policy discourse brought him to more or less the same place that Tom (now a law professor in Dayton, Ohio, and a Democrat) had reached in instant, visceral reaction to the experience of jungle war.

Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that`s nearly as rare in the Republican aviary. He became an internationalist, someone who`s capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs. A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don`t begin and end with agricultural exports. Tellingly, when he was elected to the Senate in 1996, he was the one new Republican whose first choice for a committee assignment was the Foreign Relations Committee, which had declined steadily in prestige since the Vietnam-era days of a Democratic chairman he sometimes mentions as a role model, J. William Fulbright. An instinctive and unwavering conservative on most issues — in particular, big government and deficits — he was the antithesis of a neocon, a profile to which The Weekly Standard paid backhanded tribute in 2002 when it included him (along with Powell, Scowcroft and The New York Times) in what it called "the axis of appeasement." In the cruelest cut, in that brief period of easy, triumphalist anticipation before the invasion and its turbulent aftermath, National Review put Nebraska`s senior senator down as Senator Hagel (R., France).

If his tendency to fall out of step with the administration and to ignore talking points sent around by the Republican National Committee has been most conspicuous on foreign affairs, he has been just as much his own man on domestic issues. ("Nothing in my oath of office," he recently told reporters, "says, `I pledge allegiance to the Republican Party and President Bush.` ") The senator from Nebraska broke with his party leadership to vote against the new prescription-drug program under Medicare, the No Child Left Behind bill and a big farm bill stuffed with incentives for corporate agriculture. Each, he felt, was ill conceived in practical terms and unwarranted as an expansion of federal mandates and spending. Only on the Bush tax cuts — all of which he has supported — has he been deaf to warnings about the consequences for the federal deficit. (Though, he says, he`d never take "the pledge" to oppose any and all tax hikes.)

It can be argued, as David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, pointed out, that Hagel has taken a more conservative position than the Bush administration every time he has broken with it on a major issue. Keene`s outfit gave the senator a 100 percent rating for his votes in 2003. His lifetime rating for his first eight years in the Senate stood at 85 on the union`s scorecard, which translates into baseball talk as better than a .300 batting average. Here`s a certified conservative, then, who has regularly decried partisanship — even during the do-or-die Florida showdown in 2000, when he suggested a statewide recount — and doesn`t go on about "values." (He has them; most people have them, he says, so seeking to impose one`s own values on others isn`t right.) A regular churchgoer, an Episcopalian who sends his two children to Catholic school, he thinks religion is a private matter. In today`s partisan climate, what are so-called movement conservatives to make of such a man? Facing conservative audiences, he struggles to overcome the suspicion that he`s unpredictable, a throwback to old-school G.O.P. moderation, a dissident.

That suspicion isn`t altogether baseless. Hagel is typically more interested in facts on the ground than doctrine. For instance, while he`s reliably anti-abortion — earning a legislative rating of 100 from the Christian Coalition in 2004 — he`s ready to think through an issue that`s a litmus test for some religious groups without bothering to figure out what it might cost him. I asked whether he, like the Bush administration, resisted assistance to groups that distribute condoms in the fight against AIDS in Africa. The senator didn`t have a potted answer, so I got to watch him think. He said he thought the United States should be careful about the conditions it lays down; he also had no problem with contraception, he said. As far as I could tell, the answer had come through unfiltered, without political calculation.

None of this easily adds up to a mandate to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, even if you`re the senator and happen to believe strongly that the party has lost its way at home and abroad. Hagel leaves no doubt that this is how he feels, even when he`s trying to hold in check the reflexive, often surprising directness that makes him a favorite on Sunday-morning TV gab shows. ("I sometimes question whether I`m in the same party I started off in," he will say. Or, "This party that sometimes I don`t recognize anymore has presided over the largest growth of government in the history of this country and maybe even the history of man.") Though he can be scathing about the Bush administration`s policies, he almost always avoids direct criticism of the president (except to express astonishment that a Republican could go five years without vetoing a single spending bill). He also doesn`t praise him.

The problem with making a revival of old-time values of fiscal restraint at home and restraint in the use of American power abroad the starting point for a race is that it presumes a level of disillusion that latter-day Republicans — the people who`ll vote in primaries in 2008 — show little sign of feeling. Even when George W. Bush was bottoming out in national polls, Republicans gave him a favorability rating of about 80 percent. Nevertheless, Chuck Hagel is still thinking hard about running, even though party professionals place him at the back of the pack; even though running would more than likely entail standing against John McCain, whom he supported in 2000, one of only four senators to do so, and his closest neighbor in the Russell Senate Office Building. McCain, a former naval officer who calls Hagel "Sergeant," is not only another Vietnam vet and therefore a soul mate, he`s also the member of the Republican caucus, Hagel will say even now, who has the best shot at giving the party a new direction and balance. But, among other things, they`ve differed on Iraq.

Before he can worry about potential rivals, Hagel says, he has to look into himself to see if he has the mettle and ideas needed to offset the disadvantages that make also-rans of senators who discover their Washington experience and voting records only handicap them when they go up against fresh-faced governors able to boast that they`re not part of the problem. A veteran of previous administrations who`s in fairly regular touch with the senator said he admired him for his seriousness and "brain power," his fresh and independent approach to the toughest issues in foreign affairs especially, but hadn`t yet detected the "single-minded zeal" that marks successful candidates for the highest office. Judged as a possible president, the former official said, Hagel could be considered impressive, but judged as a possible candidate, he seemed "basically a dilettante."

Michael McCarthy, an Omaha merchant banker who once made Chuck Hagel president of his investment bank and is now among his most stalwart backers, said he doubted that Hagel could get very far in presidential politics. But he didn`t rule out a race. "Chuck`s a complicated guy," he said. "He thinks with the clarity of an actuary but decides with the heart of an Irishman, so I don`t know where at the end of the day he`ll land. He sure as hell can overcome doubt and decide to go where his heart tells him to."

The issue that could propel him into the campaign is not one on which candidacies normally rise or fall. Call it the issue of competence. Hagel is a small-government man who believes government can be made to work, that it should be managed well. And while he doesn`t exactly say that the current administration has been careless and incompetent, that theme cries out between the lines of much of what he does say. After the botched reconstruction of Iraq and the nonchalant response to the hurricane on the Gulf Coast, it`s not a stretch to hear an implied critique when he says, as he did talking to local reporters in Ames, Iowa, last fall, that the president should "stay focused on governing the country" and "reach out to Congress." It was a polite way of saying the president had done neither. Later, in an interview in his Senate office, I asked how he thought history would judge George W. Bush. He said it would be "rather harsh" if things continued for the next three years the way they`ve gone for the last five. The verdict would depend on Iraq, "on what happens to the deficit and the debt and some of these issues we`ve not paid attention to over the last five years." His list of "these things" is familiar and long, in both foreign and domestic affairs. It includes global warming, an issue Hagel has fastened on ever since sponsoring a Congressional resolution with Senator Robert Byrd, the Democratic elder from West Virginia, that opposed the Kyoto Protocol because it placed no caps on emissions by rising industrial powers like China and India; on climate change, he feels strongly, the Bush White House has muffed a chance to demonstrate that conservatives can say something more useful than no, that they can actually advance ideas and programs.

An earnest legislator who seeks to legislate across a broad range of big, looming issues, Hagel managed to pass a couple of bills that offered corporations loan guarantees and tax breaks to come up with processes and devices that limit greenhouse gases. Unlike the administration, he actually got to the point of drafting a Social Security reform bill. And finding allies across party lines — Tom Daschle of South Dakota in the last session, Barack Obama of Illinois as well as a fellow Republican, Mel Martinez, in this one — he shaped a package of immigration-reform bills that aim to create a system that`s not dysfunctional: tough on illegals coming into the country, not impossible for illegals who are already here and manageable for employers who want to obey the law. (To understand why a Nebraska senator might interest himself in immigration issues, it`s enough to visit an Omaha meatpacking plant. On the cutting floor, the universal language is Spanish.)

"Competent Governance" may not be a slogan to set Republican pulses racing; and pledging to be "a uniter rather than a divider" and to be "humble" in dealings with the rest of the world are, in any case, themes that have already been tried. Recently, instead of the pallid term "competence," Hagel has been talking about "competitiveness" as he tries to find language that will give some urgency to his sense that the party in power, his party, has failed to address issues that are just as urgent as terrorism.

It may say something about the politics of "tending to the base" that Chuck Hagel appears today to be the longest of long shots, for he`s a politician with attributes that are supposedly sought by the people who package candidates and by the casual, least opinionated voters for whom they package them — those who drift back and forth between parties, actually deciding elections. The packagers like candidates with what in the trade is called "a good story." Hagel`s story wouldn`t have to be reshaped by an editor in a cutting room. Voters claim they look for someone who comes across as genuine, talks straight, means what he (or, for argument`s sake in the coming campaign, she) says, even if they`re not in perfect sync with the candidate on issues. Hagel has that quality of going beyond plausibility to believability, possibly to a fault (in that it sometimes comes with a senatorial tendency to tell you more than you wanted to know; a related liability is that he likes to write his own speeches, which he weighs down with lessons of history and high-minded quotations from his reading, as if he feels a need to show how studious he is).

A Republican campaign pro, after an astute analysis of Hagel`s virtues and drawbacks, zeroed in on a factor no one else had mentioned, one that he seemed to feel said a lot about the reason Hagel`s party hasn`t warmed to him, and therefore about his limited prospects.

"He doesn`t have a happy face," the pro said.

That`s something a good story — real life, in other words — can do to a person.

It`s not that Chuck Hagel can`t flash a smile. I watched him in Iowa patiently pose with members of his audience who lined up to have their pictures snapped. The strain started to show only after seven or eight little flashes. He also laughs easily, at his own jokes and others`. A tireless networker and campaigner who revels in small-town parades, he never seems to need prompting to attach a name to a face. But his gregariousness, the habit of a lifetime, takes concentration. When he`s small-talking his way around a room, he seems to lean into conversations; and his fingers are usually working, if not grabbing elbows or patting shoulders, then knitting themselves together or kneading the palms of his hands, as if typing out signals to his brain to remind him he`s on stage. If you had to choose a word to describe him at such moments, it might be "focused," even "conscientious"; it wouldn`t be "happy." Later, while he`s waiting to be introduced, his roughly chiseled features may look a little tired or pensive but never less than alert. This is a politician who works at his job.

That usually animated, hardly woebegone face has taken more than its share of battering. His nose was broken twice in high school and college football games and at least once more in a fistfight. (There was the fight on a dance floor in Schuyler, Neb., when some players from another school started picking on a pal, and another at a party in Lincoln when he advised some crashers to leave a friend`s home.) And there was Vietnam, where the left side of his face was scorched after a mine went off under the armored personnel carrier in which he was riding. Harder to read are the tracings of a difficult childhood, over which Hagel usually drops a kind of scrim to obscure the roughest parts.

If he tells the story of his hard-luck dad, who came down with malaria in the Pacific theater, he`s apt to leave out the drinking. And if he mentions the binges, it takes some prompting for him to acknowledge the effect on himself, the eldest of four sons. More often he dwells on the conversion of his German-French father — Charles Dean Hagel, known as Charlie — to the Roman Catholicism of his Polish-Irish mother and the lead role he then took in building a small church in the town of Ainsworth, where Chuck and Tom became altar boys. Or he humorously turns the fact that the family had homes in seven different small towns that describe a loop around Nebraska into a bountiful political legacy, one that makes it possible for him to say it`s good to be home again practically anywhere he campaigns in his state.

Hagel, who will turn 60 this year, was born in North Platte, in western Nebraska, less than a year after his parents were wed, and christened Charles Timothy. They then moved north to Ainsworth, where his dad worked for his own father in a lumberyard, loading and unloading trains. When they couldn`t get along, he got himself reassigned to a lumberyard in Rushville, farther west. By then the senator`s dad had already been hospitalized twice, for polio and for severe injuries sustained in a fall at the Ainsworth yard. When the family caught up to him in Rushville, he was again in the hospital, this time with a broken back, the result of a car crash when he`d been drinking.

"We lived," Hagel told me, speaking haltingly, not relishing the details, "in the basement of this old hotel called the Travelers Hotel in downtown Rushville — downtown Rushville is like two streets — and when Dad got out of the hospital, we couldn`t find a house. It was like a furnace room. I mean it literally was a furnace room. I mean we had cots down there. It was all dirty. Mice and everything." After Rushville came Scotts Bluff, farther west, near the Wyoming border; then Terrytown, just across the Platte River, where his dad would be fired for drinking; then, moving east again, York and the basement of another hotel, the St. Cloud, where young Chuck, by now a freshman in high school, bused tables. "It was a little better than Rushville," he said, "but not much."

By then, he was winning notice for his athletic promise and precocious interest in politics. It was 1960, and he was in a Catholic school called St. Joseph`s. "I was the only kid in the school who was for Nixon," he said. "The nuns and priests were wild, just completely wild, for Kennedy, and everyone was very upset with me because I had a picture of Nixon on one of my books." It was also about then that he started getting into occasional confrontations with his dad. As he guardedly puts it now, "Some of it was physical." Feeling that he had a responsibility as the eldest, he`d step between his parents when his father, livid with drink, started badgering his mother. I asked whether his dad ever took a swing at him. He paused for a moment, then said, "Yeh, uh-huh." Again he paused. "Well, you wouldn`t swing back at him," he went on. "I`d just push him back."

In his steadier moments, the father was hugely proud of his eldest son, attending all his games, forecasting a great future for him and seeming not to notice that he was slighting his next in line, Tom, who was not an athlete. At the end of a year in York, the family moved north to Columbus, the easternmost point in its circuit of the state, about 80 miles from Omaha. There his dad had one more drunken smash-up. Then on Christmas morning in 1962, the Hagel boys were startled by the sobbing of their mom, who`d come home from early Mass to find her husband dead in bed at 39 of a heart attack. Chuck, just 16, imagined he had to fill the void.

In the five years between his dad`s death and his departure for Vietnam, the new man of the family was sturdy, attentive to his brothers and rudderless in his own life. His first goal, set by a football scholarship to Wayne State College, was thwarted early on when an injury left him with a pinched nerve in his neck that surgery couldn`t correct. He then drifted to the University of Nebraska at Kearney (pronounced Carney) and from there, dropping out on a sudden impulse, to a school of broadcasting in Minneapolis, where he tried to support himself by going door to door near the airport, in an attempt to sign up United Airlines stewardesses for the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would be a smart investment, he`d tell them, for the children they didn`t yet have. "Well, I did make some sales," the senator said.

When his number came up at the draft board in January 1967, he went willingly. And when, after training, he received orders to go to Germany, he requested a transfer to Vietnam. He hadn`t been touched by anti-war protests. Where he came from, the feeling was that if there was a war on, that`s where a young American soldier belonged. In that reflex, which many would still call patriotic, he briefly found a purpose.

It`s unclear to the two brothers today how they wound up in the same infantry squad. Tom, drafted as soon as he finished high school, went initially to a reconnaissance unit up north, where he saw heavy fighting. He put in for a transfer, hoping to get closer to his brother, who was serving in the south. Soon they were on patrol together in canopied jungle near the Cambodian border. Over a period of about four weeks, each got a chance to save the other`s life. When the first incident occurred, on March 28, 1968, their squad leader had just taken them off point and moved them to the middle of the column. One of the soldiers who replaced them hit a trip wire, setting off a mine that had been placed in a tree so that it would detonate at face level. Bodies, body parts and shrapnel were blasted back into the ranks as the squad was crossing a stream. Tom picked himself up and looked for his brother. What he saw, he says, was a "geyser" of blood gushing from Chuck`s chest. Tom, then only 19, stanched the bleeding and bandaged the wound, only then noticing that he`d been hit himself in the arm. By the time the medevac choppers had taken off the dead and critically wounded, the Hagel boys were deemed well enough to continue on, which meant going off the booby-trapped trail and hacking through thick undergrowth.

Twenty-five days later, it was Chuck`s turn to rescue Tom, when their troop carrier hit a hand-detonated mine as it emerged from a village in the delta. Tom had been in the turret behind a .50-caliber machine gun. He was unconscious, not obviously alive, when his brother got to him. The blast had blown out Chuck`s eardrums and severely burned his left side, but knowing the carrier might soon explode, he worked feverishly to pull Tom from the wreckage, then threw his body on top of Tom`s as Vietcong fighters in ambush sprayed the area with gunfire.

Chuck left Vietnam in December 1968, Tom the following February. Back in Omaha, they roomed together for a time, then followed separate paths to readjustment to civilian life. Beset by nightmares and feelings of guilt that sent him off on binges, Tom had the most to get over, what seemed to be the harder time. He also had the clearest idea about the war, which seemed to him futile and cruel. Before they could get used to their new lives, their youngest brother, Jimmy, was killed in a car crash at 16, yet another piece of Hagel hard luck.

In his reaction to all he`d been through, Hagel mixed repression and a fierce focus on the future. He would do his best to put the war out of his mind, get through his studies finally — he was in his third college — and move on. "I was probably going through something that I didn`t quite understand," he acknowledges. "I don`t think I`m a person who doesn`t reflect, because I do — I reflect on a lot of things — but in this case I wanted to get it behind me. . .I wanted a life." It happened relatively fast. Working part time as a radio reporter in Omaha, he interviewed the only Republican on the county board, John Y. McCollister, who then was elected to the House of Representatives when Hagel was about to graduate, finally, from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The young veteran asked the new congressman for help finding a Washington job. A month later, McCollister and his wife invited their protégé to stay in their home. Soon his boss was bringing him coffee in bed in the mornings and driving him to work. A year and a half after that, Hagel was his chief of staff, at 26.

"It wasn`t very long before he knew everyone on Capitol Hill," McCollister told me. "That`s the history of Chuck Hagel. He meets people easily." The subsequent lines on Hagel`s dense résumé had everything to do with this talent for getting to know people.

Within 10 years, as Ronald Reagan swept into the White House, he was well-enough connected in Republican circles to be made the second-ranking official of the Veterans Administration. In that capacity, he turned up as one of the main speakers at the groundbreaking for the Vietnam War Memorial. Five months later, in what might be seen as his first declaration of independence, he quit in open protest against cuts in benefits for Vietnam vets, which he`d resisted unsuccessfully.

The resignation opened a new chapter in his life. He would now turn his hand to making money. Cashing in his life-insurance policies and selling his car to his mother and stepfather, he managed to raise $5,000, enough to make him a partner in a batch of new companies that would compete in a lottery for licenses to set up systems for a new kind of telephone that worked without wires. The company he helped found, after stock swaps and the arrival of new partners, grew up into Vanguard Cellular Systems. By the time it went public in 1988, it had become one of the country`s biggest cellphone companies, and Chuck Hagel`s stake made him a wealthy man. By then he`d traveled to some 15 countries, negotiating with governments, usually unsuccessfully, for contracts to set up wireless systems.

He`d also married and remarried. The first marriage lasted less than two years. The Nebraska Catholic then got to know a Mississippi Baptist, Lilibet Ziller, who handled press for the House Veterans` Affairs Committee. Their search for a church where they could both be comfortable led them to St. John`s Episcopal Church across from the White House, where they now worship and where their two children were baptized and confirmed. (Hagel realizes that if he were to try a national run, he might be called on to explain his choices in religion to Christian groups that are part of the conservative coalition his party has fused together. He doesn`t especially like the idea. "I don`t question or critique any other politician`s style, but I know who Chuck Hagel is," he said. "I know what fits me, and I know what fits my wife. Religion is important to us, spirituality is important, but it`s also private.")

His financial independence eased his return to the political sphere and made it only a question of time as to when he`d run for office. He toyed briefly with the idea of running for governor of Virginia, then returned to Nebraska in 1992, going to work for Michael McCarthy as an investment banker. One of the companies he looked after, American Information Systems — later rechristened Election Systems and Software — manufactured voting machines in partnership with The Omaha World-Herald, the state`s biggest daily.

It`s sometimes said that Nebraska has two Republican parties, one of which calls itself Democrat. That party had won every Senate race for two decades when Hagel started driving from town to town in 1995 to make himself known. In a state with fewer than a million voters, personal contact matters. Dick Robinson, who runs a steel company in the town of Norfolk, said he`d never heard of his visitor when Hagel dropped by to ask for his support. Ten years later, in his skybox at the always-sold-out stadium in Lincoln where the University of Nebraska plays football, Robinson seemed glad to have a distraction from a game the once-indomitable Huskers were giving away to Oklahoma. "It was great to meet a politician who could look you in the eye and say, `I disagree,` " he said. "We`ve been fast friends ever since."

Although their state is one of the two or three most lopsidedly Republican in presidential voting, Nebraskans cling to the notion that their wide open spaces — populated by nearly four times as many cattle as people — nurture a spirit of political independence, an indifference to partisanship. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who couldn`t help calling President Clinton "an unusually good liar," is the most recent example. George Norris, a Senate titan for three decades, supported Al Smith in 1928 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 against Herbert Hoover while still a Republican, writing an article for Liberty magazine entitled, "Why I Am a Better Republican Than President Hoover."

Chuck Hagel isn`t likely to go that far. Having resided full time in Nebraska for only 7 of the last 34 years, he`s not apt, in any event, to present himself as a Prairie independent. Viewing himself as a self-made man who started out with nothing besides his own inner resources, he has neither broken with his party nor allowed it to define him. Nor did he wait for his party to decide when it was his turn.

In 1996, in his first race, he took on a Republican attorney general in the Senate primary and won by nearly two to one. In the general election, he upset a popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, by a margin of 14 percentage points. Realizing too late that he was trailing, Nelson ran attack ads portraying Hagel as a Washington insider who`d used his connections to enrich himself in the cellphone business. Hagel had earlier resisted demands by Alfonse D`Amato of New York, then chairman of the Republican campaign committee in the Senate, that he order up a series of attack ads by a favorite D`Amato demolition specialist.

Stung by Nelson`s barrage, Hagel countered with an ad in The Omaha World-Herald calling them "the most scurrilous and false attacks ever made in Nebraska politics." Not the forgiving sort, he has never quite forgotten his grudge against Nelson, who, for the last five years, has been the state`s junior senator. Senator Nelson has since been heard to ask how it could be that he managed to get over a big loss while his colleague has yet to get over a big win.

In the blogosphere, where conspiracy theories enjoy a certain immortality, the scale of Hagel`s upset victories in 1996 made him an object of suspicion after the Florida voting fiasco of 2000. Here was a virtual unknown who`d once been an officer of a company that made the voting machines on which most ballots were cast in Nebraska. But these were scanners, not digital counters; paper ballots survived, available for a recount that neither of his rivals sought. (When he ran for re-election in 2002, he won even bigger, capturing 83 percent of the vote, a Nebraska record. Out on the Web, suspicion lived on.)

What Hagel thought he`d showed in his face-offs with Nelson and D`Amato — who`d called him a "prima donna" (and then some) — was that heavy reliance on attack ads wasn`t a winning strategy. After not quite two years in the Senate, he put himself up for the campaign committee`s chairmanship, sending around a manifesto to his colleagues that promised to thin the ranks of consultants as a step toward cleansing "the political culture in America by `defining up` the standards of debate, political discourse and campaigns." It was a direct challenge to the leadership, which he accused of running "issueless campaigns." And it flopped. His colleagues weren`t responsive to his musings on the state of the political culture. They decided that winning was still "the only thing," voting 39-13 in favor of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Not for the last time, Hagel`s position was shown to be lonelier than he`d realized.

He may not have become a leader of his caucus, but, to the likely dismay of the White House, he`s also not an outcast. On a personal level, he`s still a man who forges connections. In addition to John McCain, he gets along well with the chairmen of his key committees — Pat Roberts of Kansas on Intelligence and Richard Lugar of Indiana on Foreign Relations — and counts Democrats Joe Biden of Delaware and Jack Reed of Rhode Island as among his best friends on the Hill. "I`ve been in the Senate a long time, and there`s nobody I`ve liked more than Chuck Hagel," Biden told me.

By the time of his loss to McConnell, Hagel had nearly persuaded himself that he felt a fresh breeze blowing in the party from Austin, Tex., which he`d visited in April 1998 for a laid-back overnight at the governor`s mansion that included a meandering walk through the gardens with his host, a quiet dinner with just George and Laura Bush, then more talk on an upstairs porch. It was the first real encounter between the two and the most time they`d ever spend together.

He found Bush "a very charming, gregarious person," and when, several months later, on a swing through Nebraska, he was asked whom he liked as the next Republican nominee, he all but endorsed the Texan, citing his name recognition, success in a big state, age and conservative profile.

It proved to be the first time that Bush learned he could not take Chuck Hagel for granted. Before long, John McCain knocked on the Nebraskan`s door, divulged his own ambitions and asked his friend to be co-chairman of his campaign. Hagel had to know there were differences in temperament and outlook between himself and McCain, who was more moralistic about international issues, less fascinated by the intricacies of diplomacy, more inclined, perhaps, to brandish military power. But in the Clinton years, these did not loom large. He knew the senator far better than he knew Bush — who was pretty much a blank on national-security issues anyway — and admired him, above all, for his readiness to take lonely stands.

He was sitting with McCain when the South Carolina primary returns came in following a campaign in which McCain`s mental stability was questioned and calls were made to likely Republican voters telling them the former P.O.W. and his wife had a black baby, without mentioning that the little girl had been adopted at an orphanage in Bangladesh. Reached by Don Walton, the respected political reporter of The Lincoln Star Journal, Hagel said Bush had "sold his soul to the right wing." He called it "the filthiest campaign I`ve ever seen."

"I`d say the same thing today," he said when I asked about South Carolina, nearly six years later.

Considering how he`d disappointed Bush after the attention lavished on him in Austin and what he`d said about South Carolina, it`s remarkable that Senator Hagel then found himself on the short list for running mate in 2000. To this day, he doesn`t know whether he was seriously in contention. Possibly there was some thought that the former member of the Texas Air National Guard could benefit by picking, or at least appearing to consider, a twice-wounded Vietnam vet. Hagel says he spent $15,000 on accountant fees assembling the information the campaign demanded. Dick Cheney, the chief talent scout, interviewed him twice and sent his son-in-law around to pick up a box of documents before it was discovered that the talent scout was actually the talent.

"I still have the box," Hagel said. Nothing could be more unanswerable than the question of what might have happened in Iraq had he been picked. It`s a testament to the vice president`s influence that it even occurs.

Hagel had been to Iraq four times by the time Cheney paid his first visit as vice president in December 2005. Today the war is so much in the front of the senator`s mind that it pops into just about any answer he gives to a political question, sometimes more than once. When I asked whether he saw himself as a maverick, his reply boiled down to saying he was a consistent conservative. But here`s how it began: "When I think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it — no planning, no preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we were going to get out, went in without enough men, no exit strategy, those kind of things — I`ll speak out, I`ll go against my party."

A minute later, still chewing on the same question, Hagel was relating the retort of a Nebraska friend to a Republican who`d complained that the senator was still out of step with the president. Pretty much the same litany then tumbled out as, speaking in what was supposed to be the friend`s voice, Hagel went on: "Who`s the conservative here? Who votes against the Medicare reform bill, who votes against No Child Left Behind, who votes against the farm bill, who`s opposed to invading another country, occupying another country, with no plans, no exit strategy and not enough troops? Now you tell me who the conservative is."

The trouble with Iraq as an identifying issue for a potential candidate today is that practically everyone except Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, who have flirted with the idea of a deadline for withdrawal, purports to be in essentially the same position with regard to what needs to be happen: hoping that the insurgency will wane, that the Sunnis will somehow be mollified, that the number of U.S. troops can be drawn down this year, that Iraqis will be able to finish the war, more or less on their own. Everyone, for the moment, includes George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Hagel. Some are more hopeful (Bush), and some decidedly less (Hagel). No one now can really know how Iraq will play out in our politics.

It`s not, in any case, an issue on which Hagel can easily "position" himself the way most senators who are not satisfied with being senators would. As this least partisan Republican stews on his decision on whether to go national with his sense of frustration, he has to know that his independence and forthrightness, the qualities that so far have defined him, are also his most obvious limitations in the roughhouse game of presidential politics as we know it. A candidate who worries about the price he may have to pay for anything he says would not have called for active engagement with Iran and Cuba as Hagel has regularly done in foreign-policy speeches over the last several years. And he would probably not be displaying, as Hagel has recently done, a newfound sensitivity on civil liberties matters. Through the end of 2004, Hagel`s rating on the legislative scorecard of the American Civil Liberties Union was an anemic 22 percent. But at the end of December, as Congress rushed to adjourn, he was one of only four Republican senators whose votes held up an extension of the Patriot Act, arguing for checks on federal powers to invade homes and private records that had passed the Senate unanimously but then had been dropped in conference.

"When government continues to erode individual rights, that`s the most dangerous, dangerous threat to freedom there is," he said, calling it "far more dangerous than terrorism." His reaction was similarly sharp when he first heard of the report in this newspaper that the president had claimed authority to order domestic wiretapping without court approval. "If, in fact, this is true," he said, "then it needs to stop." When the White House acknowledged it was true, Hagel pressed for Congressional hearings and a national debate. "I think Congress has failed the country in many ways," he said at a forum in California last month. One way was to allow the administration "to completely overpower the debate based on, `I`m the commander in chief, and I know what`s best.` "

As he road-tests themes for a possible campaign, he argues that his party is running low on ideas for the country`s future, so fixated has it been on the threat of terrorism and maintaining itself in power. The importance of terrorism can`t be minimized, he hastens to say, but through neglect of research and infrastructure, through failures in education, the country is losing its edge in a competitive world economy. Sure, globalization causes dislocations, this devout free trader and new-economy entrepreneur says, and, sure, the rise of China presents problems, but these are facts of life "that we are not going to unwind." Forty-six years after a senator last made it directly to the White House, he gropes for words in which to talk about national purpose, about a Manhattan Project for alternate energy sources, about getting the country moving again. These themes are in the air; President Bush latched onto them in his State of the Union address in January.

Earlier in the month, Hagel had already tried them out at a breakfast talk to a conservative group in Orange County, Calif. The breakfast had opened with an invocation in which "the vision of a former lifeguard called Dutch" and the American engagement in Iraq had been gratefully cited as part of "God`s plan" to spread freedom around the globe. That left Hagel sounding a little impious when he gave his cool assessment of the venture on the Euphrates. Iraq may yet work out, he said. "I don`t think it will, but it may." But as for the conservative revolution in America, "Where," he asked, "is Phase 2?"

The audience — youngish businessfolk who had formed a new political action committee called Atlas, after Ayn Rand`s paean to competitiveness, "Atlas Shrugged" — seemed mildly appreciative rather than shocked.

"This administration has kept America on such a narrow ledge," he remarked after the talk. "Everything is terrorism."

In Washington, I asked Senator McCain whether he saw his pal next door as a serious candidate in 2008. The senator, who rode a campaign bus he called the Straight Talk Express in 2000, knows something about the advantages and disadvantages of candor in a national campaign. In this instance he either misconstrued or sidestepped my question. He replied that Hagel was definitely serious, one of the two, three or four leading voices on national security and foreign policy in the Senate. "Chuck really works at it," he said.

McCain was an early enthusiast for the war in Iraq, Hagel an early skeptic. Could he imagine the co-chairman of his first national race having a place on a McCain ticket or in a McCain administration? I asked. "I`d be honored to have Chuck with me in any capacity," McCain replied. "He`d make a great secretary of state."

Propriety and common sense argue that it`s too early to place such bets. Hagel isn`t ready to have the conversation with McCain that he knows he`ll have to have. He`s still at the stage of testing audience responses, of looking into faces to see if they give back any hint of encouragement, even recognition. "Hello," he`ll say, sticking out his hand to a receptionist or a registration clerk, "I`m Senator Chuck Hagel." He has done it often enough to know that the likely response is a blank stare, but still he persists as he travels beyond Washington and Nebraska, to Los Angeles, New York, Iowa, New Hampshire, even McCain territory — he had a fund-raiser in Phoenix last month — trying to identify potential donors and supporters.

Whatever he concludes, he promises he`ll go on saying what he thinks a senator should say about issues as they arise. "I don`t have to be president; I don`t have to be a senator," he said over dinner in an Omaha steakhouse. "I have to live with myself." More striking than the words was the urgency with which he spoke them. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than his companions, as if repeating a vow. Of course, we know, or think we know, that people who don`t have to be president are unlikely to get the chance.

Joseph Lelyveld is the author most recently of "Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop" and a former correspondent and executive editor at The Times.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 12, 2006
Violent Crime Rising Sharply in Some Cities
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/national/12homicide.html?_…

By KATE ZERNIKE

MILWAUKEE — Even as crime is at historic lows nationwide and in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles, it is rising sharply here and in many other places across the country. And the police say the increase is not driven by battles over gangs and drugs, which characterized violent crime in the early 1990`s, but by something more bewildering: petty disputes and arguments that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.
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Law enforcement officers trying to serve a warrant in South Philadelphia. With 380 homicides, 2005 was the deadliest year in that city since 1997.
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Here in Milwaukee, one woman killed a friend after they argued over a brown silk dress. A man killed a neighbor whose 10-year-old son had mistakenly used his dish soap. Two men argued over a cellphone, and pulling out their guns, the police say, killed a 13-year-old girl in the crossfire.

Suspects tell the police they killed someone who "disrespected" them or a family member, or someone who was "mean mugging" them, which the police loosely translate as giving a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giving people a way to act on their anger.

Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it "the rage thing."

"We`re seeing a very angry population, and they don`t go to fists anymore, they go right to guns," she said. "A police department can have an effect on drugs or gangs. But two people arguing in a home, how does the police department go in and stop that?"

In Milwaukee, where homicides jumped from 88 in 2004 to 122 last year, the number classified as arguments rose to 45 from 17, making up by far the largest category of killings, as gang and drug murders declined.

In Houston, where homicides rose 24 percent last year, disputes were by far the largest category, 113 out of 336 killings. Officials were alarmed by the increase in murders well before Hurricane Katrina swelled the city`s population by 150,000 people in September; police say 18 homicides were related to evacuees.

In Philadelphia, where 380 homicides made 2005 the deadliest year since 1997, 208 were disputes; drug-related killings, which accounted for about 40 percent of homicides during the high-crime period of the early 1990`s, accounted for just 13 percent.

"When we ask, `Why did you shoot this guy?` it`s, `He bumped into me,` `He looked at my girl the wrong way,` " said Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson of Philadelphia. "It`s not like they`re riding around doing drive-by shootings. It`s arguments — stupid arguments over stupid things."

Police say the suspects and the victims tend to be black, young — midteens to mid-20`s — and have previous criminal records. They tend to know each other. Several cities said that domestic violence had also risen. And the murders tend to be limited to particular neighborhoods. Downtown Milwaukee has not had a homicide in about five years, but in largely black neighborhoods on the north side, murders rose from 57 in 2004 to 94 last year.

"We`re not talking about a city, we`re talking about this subpopulation, that`s what drives everything," said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "When they calm down, all the numbers go down. When they heat up, all the numbers go up. They hurt each other over personal stuff. It`s respect and disrespect, and it`s girls."

While arguments have always made up a large number of homicides, the police say the trigger point now comes faster.

"Traditionally, you could see the beef growing and maybe hitting the volatile point," said Daniel Coleman, the commander of the homicide unit in Boston. "Now we see these things, they`re flashes, they`re very unpredictable. Even five years ago, in what started as a fight or dispute, maybe you`d have a knife shown. Now it`s an automatic default to a firearm."

In robberies, Chief Hegerty of Milwaukee said, "even after the person gives up, the guy with the gun shoots him anyway. We didn`t have as much of that before."

Homicide rates are driven by different factors in each city, but even cities whose rates have fallen have seen problems with disputes, though those disputes are often about drugs or gangs.

"As the murder universe continues to shrink in New York, the common denominators remain consistent," said Police Department Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne. "In most instances, killers and victims knew each other, each had criminal records, and they were engaged in disputes, usually over narcotics."

Nationally, the homicide rate peaked in 1991, declined steadily after 1993 and has remained essentially flat since 1999. But in the first six months of 2005, according to preliminary statistics from the F.B.I., the number of homicides nationwide rose 2.1 percent, with the greatest increase, 4.9 percent, in the Midwest.

Yet many cities have seen far steeper increases. In Boston and San Francisco the number of homicides last year was at its highest in a decade, and in Prince George`s County, Md., outside Washington, it was the highest ever.

In St. Louis, the number of homicides rose to 131 last year from 113 in 2004. Tulsa had 64 murders, 2 more than in 1993. Charlotte jumped from a record low of 60 homicides in 2004 to 85 in 2005. And the murder rate for 2005 was above the 15-year average in Kansas City, Mo., and Nashville.

A large part of the problem, the police say, is simply more guns on the streets as gun laws have loosened around the country. In Philadelphia, Commissioner Johnson said, since the state made it easier to get a gun permit in 1985, the number of people authorized to carry a gun in the city has risen to 32,000 from 700.

But the police also blame lax sentences and judges who they say let suspects out on bail too easily. Here, Deputy Chief Brian O`Keefe recalled a man who was released from prison on an armed robbery conviction after two years, with five years` probation, and killed someone within three months. In Nashville, Chief Ronal W. Serpas recalled an 18-year-old who had been arrested 41 times but was out on bail when he killed a bystander in a fight over a dice game.

"We have people who`ve done two, three, four, five shootings who are back on the streets," said Kathleen M. O`Toole, Boston`s police commissioner. "Unless we have bail reform, unless these impact players with multiple gun arrests are kept off the streets, we won`t reverse this problem."

Still, some of the problems are hard to address with tougher laws.

The neighborhoods with the most murders tend to be the poorest. In Milwaukee, Mallory O`Brien, an epidemiologist brought in to direct the new homicide review commission, said suspects and victims tended to have been born to teenage mothers. The city has one of the nation`s highest teenage pregnancy rates for blacks, and among black men, one of the lowest high school graduation rates. An industrial base that used to provide jobs for those without a high school diploma has shrunk.

Police Chief Jim Corwin of Kansas City said that in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, people had explained it as a "lack of hope." "If I don`t have skills, I don`t have training, my socioeconomic situation looks desperate, do I really have hope?" he said. "I think that ties into the anger. If the only thing I have is my respect, that`s what I carry on the street. If someone disrespects me, they`ve done the ultimate to me."

Those who study crime debate whether the cities where homicide is rising represent a trend.

"It`s a couple of cities with bad luck and with local problems which are very real, but not necessarily part of a national pattern," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley who is writing a book on the crime drop of the late 1990`s.

But Mr. Kennedy, at John Jay, said the decrease in homicides in big cities had obscured the problem in many other places.

"In many places — both cities and increasingly suburban and rural settings — things never got as good as they did nationally," he said. "Even if things got better, they didn`t get as better as they did in Los Angeles or New York. In many places, they`re getting worse."

Certainly, the number of homicides is lower than its peak in the early 90`s — Milwaukee had 168 killings, not including Jeffrey Dahmer`s serial murders, in 1991. But the number is far higher than in recent years, and alarming to a public that has gotten used to good news. Boston, which peaked with 151 murders in 1990, had declined to 31 in 1999. Nashville in 2004 had its lowest homicide rate in the history of city government, with 58 murders, before jumping to 99 last year.

"Because for this decade the sense is that crime is down, it`s very hard to speak out about it and not look as though you`re doing something wrong," said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research and public policy group in Washington. "People`s expectation of crime has significantly changed."

In some of the cities, overall crime has declined, thanks to a significant drop in property crimes. But the rise in homicides and robberies causes alarm.

"It`s hard for people to look at it in depth and understand that they`re not likely to be a victim if they get along with their family members and neighbors and don`t live a high-risk lifestyle," said Darrel Stephens, the police chief in Charlotte.

Cities say they are going after illegal guns and are trying to stop disputes from becoming homicides. Kansas City used to investigate only some aggravated assaults; now it follows up on all cases, on the theory that next time, the assault might be a homicide. Boston and Philadelphia are sweeping neighborhoods for people who have violated warrants. In St. Louis, police have put cameras in high-crime neighborhoods and have sent gang units to talk to parents of chronically truant students.

But recognizing that the problems have deep roots, cities are also going beyond traditional law enforcement, trying to involve churches, schools and social service agencies. In Boston, the neighborhood sweeps are followed by work crews that repair potholes, trim trees and remove graffiti.

Here in Milwaukee, police are tagging "M.V.P.`s," or major violent players — people with several arrests, who are more likely to be involved in arguments and homicides, according to Ms. O`Brien`s analysis. Those names are announced at daily police briefings.

The city has also put prosecutors and probation and parole officers on patrol with police officers because they have more immediate power to rein in chronic offenders by enforcing curfew, nuisance laws, and restrictions against alcohol or drug use and association with gang members.

The homicide review commission has frequent, formal meetings with corrections officers, prosecutors and social service agencies to identify problem families, and is meeting with schools to assess what they are teaching about conflict resolution and how to reduce truancy.

Next month, police officials say, they will have the first of several town hall meetings with the neighborhoods with the highest homicide rates to get residents` ideas on how to stop the killings.

"We didn`t get here in a day," said Ms. O`Brien, the epidemiologist. "There`s no simple solution."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 12, 2006
Inquiry Into Wiretapping Article Widens
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/politics/12inquire.html

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — Federal agents have interviewed officials at several of the country`s law enforcement and national security agencies in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program, according to government officials.

The investigation, which appears to cover the case from 2004, when the newspaper began reporting the story, is being closely coordinated with criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, the officials said. People who have been interviewed and others in the government who have been briefed on the interviews said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry that could lead to criminal charges.

The inquiry is progressing as a debate about the eavesdropping rages in Congress and elsewhere. President Bush has condemned the leak as a "shameful act." Others, like Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, have expressed the hope that reporters will be summoned before a grand jury and asked to reveal the identities of those who provided them classified information.

Mr. Goss, speaking at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Feb. 2, said: "It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information. I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserve nothing less."

The case is viewed as potentially far reaching because it places on a collision course constitutional principles that each side regards as paramount. For the government, the investigation represents an effort to punish those responsible for a serious security breach and enforce legal sanctions against leaks of classified information at a time of heightened terrorist threats. For news organizations, the inquiry threatens the confidentiality of sources and the ability to report on controversial national security issues free of government interference.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation, and he defended the paper`s reporting.

"Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration`s contention that disclosing the program would damage the country`s counterterrorism efforts," Mr. Keller said. "We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security.

"What our reporting has done is set off an intense national debate about the proper balance between security and liberty — a debate that many government officials of both parties, and in all three branches of government, seem to regard as in the national interest."

Civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers as well as some Republicans have called for an inquiry into the eavesdropping program as an improper and possibly illegal intrusion on the privacy rights of innocent Americans. These critics have noted that the program appears to have circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval for eavesdropping on American citizens.

Former Vice President Al Gore has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the government`s use of the program, and at least one Democrat, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, has said the eavesdropping effort may amount to an impeachable offense.

At the same time, conservatives have attacked the disclosure of classified information as an illegal act, demanding a vigorous investigative effort to find and prosecute whoever disclosed classified information. An upcoming article in Commentary magazine suggests that the newspaper may be prosecuted for violations of the Espionage Act and says, "What The New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism."

The Justice Department took the unusual step of announcing the opening of the investigation on Dec. 30, and since then, government officials said, investigators and prosecutors have worked quickly to assemble an investigative team and obtain a preliminary grasp of whether the leaking of the information violated the law. Among the statutes being reviewed by the investigators are espionage laws that prohibit the disclosure, dissemination or publication of national security information.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation team under the direction of the bureau`s counterintelligence division at agency headquarters has questioned employees at the F.B.I., the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the officials said. Prosecutors have also taken steps to activate a grand jury.

The interviews have focused initially on identifying government officials who have had contact with Times reporters, particularly those in the newspaper`s Washington bureau. The interviews appeared to be initially intended to determine who in the government spoke with Times reporters about intelligence and counterterrorism matters.

In addition, investigators are trying to determine who in the government was authorized to know about the eavesdropping program. Several officials described the investigation as aggressive and fast-moving. The officials who described the interviews did so on condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of an ongoing criminal inquiry.

The administration`s chief legal defender of the program is Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who is also the senior official responsible for the leak investigation. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 6, Mr. Gonzales said: "I`m not going to get into specific laws that are being looked at. But, obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they`re going to prosecute those violations."

Mr. Bush and other senior officials have said that the electronic surveillance operation was authorized by what they call the president`s wartime powers and a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda passed in the days after the September 2001 terror attacks.

The government`s increasing unwillingness to honor confidentiality pledges between journalists and their sources in national security cases has been evident in another case, involving the disclosure in 2003 of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, demanded that several journalists disclose their conversations with their sources.

Judith Miller, at the time a reporter for The Times, went to jail for 85 days before agreeing to comply with a subpoena to testify about her conversations with I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby has been indicted on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice and has pleaded not guilty.

"An outgrowth of the Fitzgerald investigation is that the gloves are off in leak cases," said George J. Terwilliger III, former deputy attorney general in the administration of the first President Bush. "New rules apply."

How aggressively prosecutors pursue the new case involving the N.S.A. may depend on their assessment of the damage caused by the disclosure, Mr. Terwilliger said. "If the program is as sensitive and critical as it has been described, and leaking its existence could put the lives of innocent American people in jeopardy," he said, "that surely would have an effect on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion."

Recently, federal authorities have used espionage statutes to move beyond prosecutions of government officials who disclose classified information to indict private citizens who receive it. In the case of a former Pentagon analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, who pleaded guilty to disclosing defense secrets, federal authorities have charged Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.

The two men have been indicted on charges of turning over information obtained from Mr. Franklin to a foreign government, which has been identified as Israel, and to journalists. At Mr. Franklin`s sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Va., Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court said he believed that private citizens and government employees must obey laws against illegally disseminating classified information.

"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law," Judge Ellis said. "That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."

Some media lawyers believe that The Times has powerful legal arguments in defense of its reporting and in protecting its sources.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who has represented publications like The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, said: "There is a very strong argument that a federal common-law reporters` privilege exists and that privilege would protect confidential sources in this case. There is an extremely strong public interest in this information, and the public has the right to understand this controversial and possibly unconstitutional public policy."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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February 12, 2006
Editorial
The Trust Gap
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12sun1.html?_r=1&o…

We can`t think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can`t think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush`s presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn`t the slightest intention of changing it.

According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn`t work that way. It`s not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales`s own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.

THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.

On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.

According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings.

And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president`s whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.

THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush`s biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
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Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

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For Possible `08 Run, McCain Is Courting Bush Loyalists
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02…

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006; A01

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a man in perpetual motion, flew to South Carolina on Jan. 16. His stops included a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and speeches to local Republican groups. But one of his most important events was not on the public schedule -- a 5 p.m. meeting at a Spartanburg hotel with loyalists to President Bush.

A dozen or so people were in attendance. At least two were among Bush`s major national fundraisers. Virtually all had been on Bush`s side in the bitter 2000 South Carolina primary that badly damaged McCain`s chances of winning the presidential nomination and scarred the relationship between the two men and their rival political camps. McCain was there to woo them.

"For people who were really strong for Bush, I feel like this was a dating meeting," said Barry Wynn, Bush`s state finance co-chairman in 2000 and 2004 and a Pioneer for Bush both times, meaning he raised $100,000 for each campaign. "He`s not quite ready to ask us to go steady. But I was a little surprised at the reaction, including my own reaction. I was much more positive than I thought I`d be going to the meeting."

With a 2008 campaign in the offing, McCain has begun an intensive courtship of Bush`s financial and political networks. His recent travels included a December swing through the heart of Bush country in Texas that put him in front of many of the president`s leading supporters there.

In 2000, McCain proved better at attracting independent voters than Republicans, and his success in overcoming doubts about him within his own party holds the key to his prospective candidacy. As Republicans look toward 2008 and worry about maintaining the White House, a streak of pragmatism has drawn them to look again at a man who often has been an antagonist of the president and party leaders.

McCain, who was not interviewed, will not make a final decision about running until after November, aides said. In anticipation of a likely campaign, he appears eager to reach accommodation with longtime GOP adversaries. He has undertaken the kind of practical steps necessary to enhance his chances of winning the nomination, focusing on organizations in states critical to winning the GOP nomination and building relationships with Republicans who rejected him in 2000.

There are many obstacles. Many conservatives, particularly social conservatives, still distrust him. His outreach to party insiders could threaten his appeal as a maverick. His mercurial personality could still cause problems with some of those with whom he has sought to mend relations. His age, now 69, could deter some voters; if elected he would be the oldest president-elect in history.

But recent events and McCain`s record have coincided to make the Arizona senator newly attractive to many Republicans. After the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Republicans are scrambling to associate themselves with McCain`s image as a reformer. They also praise McCain for his role in smoothing the confirmation of Bush`s judicial nominations.

McCain`s upcoming schedule, which includes trips to New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio, California, Florida, Minnesota, Arkansas and New Jersey, reflects the convergence between his political ambitions and his growing demand among Republicans. "The McCain brand in this environment is something people want, and they`re breaking down the door of McCain`s operation to get an appearance or an endorsement," said GOP strategist David Carney.

Fiscal conservatives, alarmed by the ballooning federal deficit on the president`s watch, have been drawn to McCain as someone who says he can rein in spending -- though they remain suspicious of his commitment to tax cuts. "He`s reaching out to all of us," said Mallory Factor, chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund. "He may not be winning converts, but he`s making gains."

Most important may be the admiration McCain earned for his steadfast support of Bush in the 2004 campaign and his unyielding defense of the president`s decision to go to war in Iraq. Despite a public quarrel with Bush over torture policy late last year, a number of Republicans loyal to Bush now see McCain as perhaps best positioned to continue the president`s national security policies.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a McCain supporter who helped arrange the Arizona senator`s South Carolina itinerary, called the confluence of events "gifts of the political gods," adding, "Nobody`s going to get to the right of John on the war or spending."

As the torture policy battle showed, McCain is not reluctant to challenge the White House, even as he reaches out to Bush supporters. Relations between the Bush and McCain camps have improved, but there is no assumption on the part of McCain advisers that Bush will lend him any direct support if he runs for president.
Two-Pronged Approach

McCain`s activities, which have been shaped under the guidance of his chief political adviser, John Weaver, reflect overlapping political priorities. The first appears to be expanding his fundraising network, starting with Bush`s Rangers (those who raised $200,000) and Pioneers (those who raised $100,000). He also has signed up John Moran, who was finance chairman for Robert J. Dole`s 1996 presidential campaign.

The second underscores McCain`s commitment to build or bolster political organizations in key states on the nomination calendar. He skipped Iowa in 2000 but cannot afford to do so again, and an April trip there on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Rep. Jim Nussle (R) will help establish a beachhead in that state. His New Hampshire team remains solid, and he has begun to attract supporters of the president.

No state is getting more attention from McCain than South Carolina, given the senator`s loss there in 2000. With Graham`s help, McCain has been systematically meeting with prospective supporters who were with Bush in the past. In November, he had lunch in Columbia with John Rainey and C. Edward Floyd, state co-chairmen of Bush`s finance team in 2004. His team has reached out to Warren Tompkins, the state`s leading Republican strategist who ran Bush`s operations there. Tompkins said he is "genuinely up in the air" about 2008. Floyd, too, said he is far from committed.

Michigan is another prime target. McCain won the state in 2000, but Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) could be a threat there because of his family roots. Romney`s father, the late George Romney, was governor in the 1960s.

"I`ll be sitting having a cup of coffee and the phone will ring and it will be McCain," said Charles "Chuck" Yob, Michigan`s GOP national committeeman. He described the senator as "a lot more conservative than a lot of conservatives give him credit for."

McCain has helped raise money for the Michigan GOP, and Yob returned the favor at last month`s Republican National Committee meeting in Washington by helping to organize a private lunch for McCain with about 20 state party officials from around the country.
Strengthening Contacts

McCain`s early strategy includes an effort to build links to party conservatives, or at least minimize their antagonism to him. He made an early endorsement of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who is running for governor; held a 90-minute meeting last fall with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whom he had attacked during the 2000 campaign; and attended a private dinner with conservatives, hosted by the American Spectator magazine.

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said that McCain`s "chances are enhanced if there`s not a crusade against him" among conservatives but that many conservatives still believe McCain is personally antagonistic toward them. "They think that, if he had his way, it would be a party without them," Keene said.

With Bush heading toward private life after 2008, McCain is building alliances in Texas. His four-day trip in December included receptions in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Houston attended by many of the president`s leading allies.

A principal organizer and hosts at a dinner for McCain at the San Antonio Country Club on Dec. 9 were former House member and lobbyist Tom Loeffler and his wife, Nancy. Both are longtime members of the Bush political family, but Loeffler also enjoys a close relationship with McCain, dating to their days together in the House in the early 1980s.

That relationship was interrupted by the 2000 campaign, when the Loefflers stayed loyal to Bush. Now they are enthusiastic members of the prospective McCain 2008 operation, and a few weeks after the Texas trip, each contributed $5,000 to McCain`s Straight Talk America political action committee. "If needed, I`d wash bottles and change the tires on the Straight Talk America van," Tom Loeffler said.

McCain`s host at a luncheon in Dallas was Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers baseball team from the president and his partners in 1998 and was a Bush Ranger in 2004. In Austin, former representative Kent Hance, a Bush Pioneer in 2004, gathered 38 people at his home on a Sunday night to meet McCain. Among them was Hance`s next-door neighbor Joe Allbaugh, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Bush`s 2000 campaign manager.

Without endorsing McCain, he said the GOP will need a strong candidate if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) is the 2008 Democratic nominee. "She`s very political and a talent to be reckoned with," he said. "The Republican Party has to be as smart, as aggressive and political about the `08 nominee."

While in Austin, McCain, mindful that Bush and the current governor have not always been on the closest of terms and that sitting governors can be helpful in nomination battles, took time for breakfast with Gov. Rick Perry (R), the second private meeting between the two in a matter of months. McCain also met with former governor William P. Clements in Dallas.

From Texas, McCain flew to Florida for a scheduled book-signing in Jacksonville Beach. En route, however, he found time for a strategic stop in Tallahassee, where he had lunch with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R). Traveling with McCain that day was Mark McKinnon, Bush`s chief media consultant, who already is signed up to help McCain in 2008 -- unless the president`s brother or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unexpectedly enters the race.

McKinnon is the only senior member of Bush`s team to commit publicly to McCain, but others are interested. One strategist, who played an instrumental role in the 2004 campaign but did not want to be identified because he is still looking at 2008 options, said, "I thought he would be a contender and a good general election nominee, but a year ago I would not have thought I would be seriously considering being with him. Now I am."

Staff writer Charles Babington, special correspondent Chris Cillizza and political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post 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/

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Bombings, Assassinations Continue
As Political Process Stalls

A bomb rigged to a motorcycle exploded outside a restaurant in Baghdad on Sunday morning, wounding at least 9 persons.

Political assassinations and bombings were carried out by guerrillas on Saturday in Basra, Baghdad, Baquba, Balad and Fallujah, among other places. Army and police figures were the main victims, though guerrillas kidnapped 5 civilians near Balad north of the capital.

[urlVideo footage of British soldiers kicking and beating Iraqi teenagers has surfaced.]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4705482.stm[/url] I saw it on Aljazeerah. It was taken by a British corporal who appears to have thought the whole thing a hoot. The teenagers had been demonstrating outside the British barracks, apparently. The soldiers landed 41 blows in a minute of tape, and also beat up on a corpse. Although the British government maintains that the incident is unrepresentative, one can only imagine that tens of thousands of Iraqis have been beaten by foreign troops (US, UK and others) during the past nearly 3 years. There are 15,000 in custody at any one time, and there have been lots of home invasions and repressions of demonstrations and of militia activity. Since the clannish Iraqis almost all have 24 first cousins who would die to defend their honor, the number of persons deeply affected by the beatings is in the millions. Imperialism requires brutality, but brutality weakens imperialism over the long run.

Riverbend describes a raid by Iraq`s mostly Shiite special police commandos in her aunt`s Sunni Muslim area of Baghdad. For more on the aftermath of such raids, see the items from the Iraqi press at the end of this posting.

Reuters reports that Sunni Arab guerrillas kidnapped 12 Iranian pilgrims at Samarra north of Baghdad on Saturday night. It says that Iraqi security forces found and freed 3 of them, but the other nine are still missing. The Iranian newspaper Baztab tells a different story. Baztab says that the pilgrims had been kidnapped some time ago, and that the last 4 were just released as a result of successful Iranian negotiations with the Sunni guerrllas. The newspaper maintains that this incident shows that Iran not only has enormous influence with Iraq`s Shiites, but that it can reach out to the Sunni Arabs, as well. (If this argument had any merit, the guerrillas would not have taken Iranians hostage to begin with; the "influence" of Tehran here. if there was any, almost certainly consisted of petrodollars laid on a guerrilla`s palm). I am sorry to say that I do not know if Reuters and Baztab are contradicting one another or reporting two different incidents, or what. We`re fair and balanced here at IC--we report, you decide.

Whenever they did it, these Iranian pilgrims had traveled north toward Samarra as part of their pilgrimage itinerary. Although it is now a largely Sunni city of 200,000, Samarra has a significant Shiite quarter clustered around shrines. They are the burial places of the tenth and 11th Imams, Ali al-Hadi and Hasan al-Askari. There is also a shrine at the place where the 12th Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is said to have gone into supernatural realm from which he will one day return (rather as Christians believe in the ascent and return of Christ). The capture of the Iranian pilgrims wouldn`t make much sense if Iran was, as Mr. Rumsfeld keeps charging, backing the Sunni guerrillas, now would it?

The political news out of Baghdad on Saturday was the [urlfailure of the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance,]http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5611554,00.html[/url] to choose a prime minister.

[urlNancy Youssef of Knight Ridder does a good job]http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/13848340.htm[/url] of explaining what is at stake. One candidate, Ibrahim Jaafari, is from a conservative background in the holy city of Karbala. When he fled Iraq in 1980, he spent some time studying in seminary at Qom in Iran. As prime minister, he raised eyebrows when he declined to shake hands with women. Jaafari is from the Dawa Party, some branches of which stayed in Iraq under Saddam. It is the oldest Shiite fundamentalist party, and dreams of a sort of lay Islamic state (i.e. with Islamic law but not run by clerics). Jaafari`s record as prime minister is mixed. The Kurdish president Jalal Talabani accused him of being high-handed. Others have accused him of being indecisive. (Can both charges be true?) On his watch, the security situation has continued to deteriorate. But it is his rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that has the effective paramilitary force, the Badr Corps. As Badr has been recruited into the Ministry of the Interior special police commandos, Sunnis charged that they kidnapped suspected guerrillas and killed them, and they developed secret prisons where they tortured the mostly Sunni inmates. Again, Jaafari is accused both of laxness and severity at once.

His main rival, the cosmopolitan French-speaking Adil Abdul Mahdi, has been a Marxist, a Baathist, a Shiite fundamentalist, and more recently a free marketeer, and is reputedly favored (for the latter reason) by Washington.

Interestingly, the two branches of the hard line Sadr movement are split on this issue. Muqtada al-Sadr favors Jaafari. The Virtue Party led by Mustafa Yaqubi, a disciple of Muqtada`s revered father, seems to like Abdul Mahdi better. The Sadrists together have some 45 seats, but they do not form a united bloc because Muqtada and Yaqubi don`t get along. It is their disagreement that postponed a decision on Saturday. The coalition is attempting to reach a decision by consensus, since that would help keep them strong within the coalition and also in dealing with the Kurds and Sunni Arabs.

Also interesting is that the relatively hard line Iranian newspaper Baztab is backing Abdul Mahdi, and all but unilaterally awarded him the post in its Sunday edition. It said that Abdul Mahdi is close to the Islamic Republic, and that relations between Tehran and Baghdad would be even closer under his prime ministership than under that of Ibrahim Jaafari.

Now that the election results have been certified, parliament must meet within 15 days. But it needn`t immediately form a government or actually do anything while in early session. Once the UIA decides on its prime minister, they will attempt to cobble together a cabinet from the various parties in parliament in such a way as to give themselves a majority with their coalition partners. Four MPs have said they will vote with the Shiite UIA, so they only need 6 to have a slim 51 percent. Once the promises are made about the cabinet, they can settle with the Kurds the appointment of Jalal Talabani as president again, and he will appoint the prime minister. All this could stretch on for weeks or even months.

The final distribution of seats within the United Iraqi Alliance, as certified by the electoral commission, is analyzed by Reidar Vissar. He finds that a disproportionate number of the unapportioned seats went to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, bringing its representation up to levels similar to those of the Sadr Bloc and the two Dawa Parties. These proportions were decided before the election, when each of the three was promised roughly 30 seats each, and the party leadership knew that it was likely to have the unapportioned seats to play with.

Vissar finds, though, that the leadership sometimes reached down in the lists to promote candidates into parliament that had not received many votes. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq appears to have wanted a representative in parliament on its list from the mostly Sunni Arab province of Anbar, a major center of the anti-US guerrilla movement. I presume this move is an attempt to outflank Muqtada al-Sadr, who had been attempting to make a pan-Islamic anti-American alliance with Anbar Sunnis.

[urlThat $8.8 billion that is unaccounted for from the Coalition Provisional Authority]http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C02%5C12%5Cstory_12-2-2006_pg7_7[/url] is still and probably forever will be unaccounted for, according to an auditor who spoke to CBS news. Abramoffocracy was too good to confine it only to the US--it had to be exported to Iraq.

[urlSurprise! War is good for . . . defense contractors!"]http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12count.html[/url]

[urlPaul Pillar`s indictment of the Bush administration]http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html?mode=print[/url] for its politicization of intelligence before the Iraq war is well worth reading. But the most important thing about the piece is the suggestion for how to improve things in the future. The problem is that all the major intelligence units are essentially part of the Executive. When the executive decides to use intelligence to go to war, the agencies have no independence and no way of effectively demurring. Pillar suggests an oversight board like the Federal Reserve with appointed members who cannot just be dismissed at will. If our economy is important enough to warrant a firewall between key decisions and the president, isn`t the intelligence base for taking the country to war? Pillar writes:


"The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms."



Hear, hear!

[urlYuval Diskin, head of Israel`s Shin Bet domestic intelligence branch was caught]http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1567635.htm[/url] on tape saying that the chaos in Iraq is likely a greater threat to Israel than was the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. He also admitted that Israeli courts and police discriminate against Arabs. He called West Bank colonists who threaten violence "terrorists" and "worse than Arab attackers." Gee, Diskin and Cole agree 3 for 3 here. No doubt David Horowitz and the other American Likudniks will now consider him "dangerous."

Tidbits from BBC World Monitoring of the Arabic Press for Feb. 7:


`Al-Zaman runs on the front page a 120-word report on the statement issued by Electricity Ministry yesterday, 6 February, confirming that the high voltage power line linking Al-Nasiriyah and Khur al-Zubayr was sabotaged. An official source at the ministry attributed the current decline in electricity production to lack of fuel.

Al-Zaman carries on page 4 a 400-word report citing an official source at Mosul University confirming unrest in the university for the second consecutive day due to sexual harassment . . .

Dar al-Salam carries on the front page a 150-word report citing secretary general of Iraqi Islamic Party saying that Dr Ibrahim al-Ja`fari has rejected the call by Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front to stop random arrests and raids by Interior Ministry.

Dar al-Salam carries on the front page a 250-word report citing in-charge of Iraqi Islamic Party`s Human Rights Committee saying that 300 persons were assassinated and 1659 others are missing from Interior Ministry`s and US prisons.

Dar al-Salam carries on the front page a 50-word report citing in-charge of British Seventh Brigade`s media in Basra saying that three mortar shells were fired at Shat al-Arab Hotel.

Dar al-Salam carries on the front page a 200-word report citing eyewitnesses saying that US forces have started withdrawing from Al-Anbar Governorate and will hand over the responsibility of security to local forces . . .

Dar al-Salam carries on page 2 a 200-word report citing eyewitnesses saying that commando forces broke into Al-Aqsa Sunni Mosque in Sab` al-Bur and arrested nine persons who were found killed in different areas of Baghdad.

Dar al-Salam carries on page 2 a 120-word report saying that the National Guards checkpoint arrested a citizen whose body was found later.

Dar al-Salam carries on page 2 a 75-word report that US and commando forces arrested an Iraqi Islamic Party member and his son in Al-Jihad.

Dar al-Salam carries on page 2 a 60-word report that Interior Ministry forces arrested an Association of Muslim Scholars member in Karbala. . .

Al-Zaman runs on page 3 a 500-word report on the sharp increase in the consumption and prices of red meat and fish due to avian flu.

Al-Zaman carries on page 3 a 300-word report on the statement issued by Health Workers Federal Union yesterday, 6 February, announcing a new sit-in in Baghdad and other governorates on 18 February, demanding improvement in their living standards. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 550-word report that UAE Red Crescent office in Iraq has started a big campaign to help poor Iraqi families all over Iraq. . .

Al-Sabah al-Jadid publishes on page 11 a 1,000-word report on the deterioration of public services in Al-Husayniyah district in Baghdad.

Tariq al-Sha`b carries on page 4 a 2,000-word report surveying the comments of Diyala`s inhabitants on internet services in the governorate.

Tariq al-Sha`b runs on page 4 a 1,600-word report on the need to organize the work of peddlers in Basra. . .

Al-Zaman runs on page 8 a 1,000-word column by Muthanna al-Tabaqchali on Iraq journalists` sufferings and fear to express their true opinions and views.

Al-Zaman publishes on page 8 a 1,000-word article by Jasim Murad entitled "Stop killing children", on Iraqi children`s human rights and sufferings. . . .

Al-Adalah carries on page 6 an 800-word article by Muhsin Jawamir criticizing the insulting cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, and calling on Westerners to analyze Islam without confusing it with terrorism. The writer also calls on Muslims to "forgive" those who insulted Prophet Muhammad. . .

Tariq al-Sha`b carries on page 3 a 300-word article by Abu-Ali al-Saffar criticizing the attacks against Iraqi university professors by students.

Tariq al-Sha`b runs on page 3 a 400-word article by Raysan Husayn commenting on the deterioration of electricity supply in Kirkuk.

Tariq al-Sha`b publishes on page 9 a 1,200-word article by Rida al-Zahir commenting on President Bush`s recent speech, saying that it was "confused" and did not present clear solutions for the US "failure" in Iraq. The writer also criticizes the "monopolistic discourse" of Iraqi politicians, calling on Iraqis to "tame" themselves according to democratic principles . . .

Al-Dustur publishes on the front page a 900-word editorial that many writers have abandoned their daily columns in protest of the daily threats against journalists and media. `

posted by Juan @ [url2/12/2006 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/bombings-assassinations-continue-as.html[/url] 0 comments

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Der Chef des israelischen Geheimdienstes bedauert, dass Saddam verjagt wurde. Lieber mit Saddam leben als mir dem permanenten Chaos im Irak.
Das ist die endgültige Bankrotterklärung für die US-Nah-Ost-Politik.

[urlAudio: Real Player]http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200602/r72084_200844.ram[/url]

Israeli spy chief`s speech caught on camera
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1567635.htm


AM - Saturday, 11 February , 2006 08:16:00
Reporter: Mark Willacy
ELIZABETH JACKSON: It`s not often the head of a country`s secret service is caught out, but this week an Israeli TV channel broadcast a secret recording of a speech made by the chief of Israel`s domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet.

Speaking to teenage Jewish settlers preparing for their military service, Yuval Diskin offered his thoughts on everything from the war in Iraq to those he calls Jewish terrorists.

The Shin Bet chief says Israel may come to regret the ousting of Saddam Hussein, warning that strong dictatorship is preferable to the chaos now gripping Iraq.

Our Middle East correspondent Mark Willacy reports from Jerusalem.

MARK WILLACY: A burly man with a shaved head, Yuval Diskin is the spy charged with running Israel`s internal security and counter-intelligence. Appointed as chief of the Shin Bet last year, Diskin leads a service of 5,000 agents and employees - and an agency whose motto is "the defender who shall not be seen".

But this week the usually shy Yuval Diskin was seen - on TV no less - voicing his opinion on everything from the invasion of Iraq, to the election of Hamas and to those he calls Jewish terrorists.

(Yuval Diskin speaking)

The Shin Bet chief was secretly recorded while speaking to young Jewish settlers preparing for military service. The tape was then passed on and broadcast by Israeli television.

(Yuval Diskin speaking)

Asked about the chaos in Iraq, Yuval Diskin said Israel may come to regret the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Strong dictatorship is preferable to chaos, he said, adding that he wasn`t sure whether Israel would not miss Saddam.

A veteran Shin Bet field agent and mastermind of Israel`s policy of targeted killings of Palestinian militant leaders, Yuval Diskin was also asked about matters closer to home.

(Yuval Diskin speaking)

The Shin Bet chief told his audience that both Israel`s judicial system and security establishment treated Arabs and Jews differently. When Arabs and Jews are guilty of the same offence he said, they don`t always receive similar treatment during interrogation or in court.

Yuval Diskin then spoke about those he called "Jewish terrorists", men or women who use violence to oppose the pull out of settlers from occupied Palestinian territory.

(Yuval Diskin speaking)

A Jew who carries out terror attacks is a cancer to the nation, they are worse than Arab attackers, he said. With the same determination that I pursue the terrorists of Hamas, I will pursue a Jew who wants to kill another Jew, the Shin Bet chief vowed.

While it`s unlikely Yuval Diskin would`ve been pleased to hear his comments on Israeli TV, the head of the internal security agency has received widespread public support for his views. But the next time he speaks at a seemingly innocuous event, Israel`s chief domestic spy might consider that someone out there in the crowd is doing a bit of spy work themselves.

This is Mark Willacy in Jerusalem for AM.

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Was schreibt Cole in seinem Hinweis auf diese Artikel. Die USA exportieren keine Demokratie in den Nahen Osten, sondern Abramoffocracy.

Und eine besonderen Fachmann auf diesem Gebiet haben sie schon vor Ort: Ahmet den Dieb Chalabi.

Aber auch einige Neocons wie z.B. Perle stehen ihm in ihrer Mitnahmementalität nicht nach.

Daily Times - Site Edition Sunday, February 12, 2006

Billions of dollars ‘missing’ in Iraq
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C02%5C12…

WASHINGTON: About $8.8 billion disbursed for Iraq’s reconstruction is unaccounted for, the CBS News on Friday quoted the US official in charge of tracing the funds as saying.

Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, says $8.8 billion is unaccounted for because oversight on the part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the entity governing Iraq after the war, “was relatively nonexistent,” the CBS report said. The ex-number two official at the coalition’s transportation ministry, Frank Willis, agreed, according to the report.

“I would describe (the accounting system) as nonexistent,” he was quoted as saying. With no financial infrastructure, checks and money transfers were not possible, so the coalition kept billions in cash to pay for its multitude of projects. “Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed 100-dollar bills. It was the Wild West,” Willis was quoted by the CBS as saying.

In fresh violence in Iraq, drive-by gunmen killed two Iraqi policemen as well as a spokesman for the Iraqi army in three separate shootings across the country, while Shia leaders met on Saturday in Baghdad to discuss who should be Iraq’s next prime minister.

Gunmen in a red sedan shot dead a policeman in central Fallujah, 65 kilometres west of Baghdad, at about 9am on Saturday as he was heading to work, said Lt Sami Mohammed.

A spokesman for the Iraqi army was shot dead in British-controlled Basra, a southern city that had been also been noted for its relative stability, but has seen renewed violence, in part fueled by rival Shia militias and local opposition to the coalition troop presence. Army spokesman Capt. Makram Al-Abbasi was killed in a hail of gunfire from a civilian car also accompanied by a police vehicle early Saturday in central Basra’s Jubaila area, said police Capt Firas Al-Tamimi.

In Baghdad, unidentified gunmen killed police Sgt Bassem Al-Rikabi while he patrolled in the southeastern Jisr Diyala area at about 11.30 pm, police said.

Meanwhile, kidnappers of American journalist Jill Carroll have given until February 26 until their demands are met or they will kill their 28-year-old captive, according to a TV channel. agencies

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Diese dänischen Cartoons

Lassen sie sich nicht täuschen – dies ist keine Frage von Islam versus Säkularismus

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&It…

von Robert Fisk
ZNet 09.02.2006

Jetzt sind’s also Cartoons des Propheten Mohammed mit einem bombenförmigen Turban. Botschafter sind aus Dänemark zurückbeordert worden, in Golfstaaten entfernt man dänische Produkte aus den Regalen, Bewaffnete in Gaza drohen der Europäischen Union. In Dänemark erklärt Fleming Rose, der „Kultur“-Redakteur eines Zeitung-Winzlings, die diese einfältigen Cartoons veröffentlicht hat – und das schon im letzten September, – dass wir Zeuge eines „Kampfes der Kulturen“ zwischen säkularen westlichen Demokratien und der islamischen Gesellschaften sind. Das stellt unter Beweis, so mutmaße ich, dänische Journalisten verstehen sich in der Tradition von Hans Christian Anderson. Was wir miterleben, ist die `Infantilität der Kulturen`.

Beginnen wir also mit dem Wahrheitsministerium. Dies ist keine Frage von Säkularismus versus Islam. Für Moslems ist der Prophet ein Mann, der das göttliche Wort direkt von Gott erhielt. Wir sehen unsere Propheten als schwache historische Figuren, in Widerspruch zu unseren hochentwickelten Menschenrechten, fast Karikaturen ihrer selbst. Tatsache ist, dass Moslems ihre Religion leben. Wir leben sie nicht. Sie haben ihren Glauben durch unzählige Schicksalslaunen hindurch bewahrt. Wir sind unseres Glaubens verlustig, seitdem Matthew Arnold über „nur dumpfes Dröhnen, das im traur`gen Schwund
zurück sich zieht“ der See schrieb [1]. Das ist der Grund dafür, dass wir über „der Westen gegenüber dem Islam“ und nicht über „die Christenheit gegenüber dem Islam“ sprechen: weil in Europa nicht mehr furchtbar viele Christen zu finden sind. An dieser Wahrheit ist auch nicht vorbeizukommen, indem wir mit dem Finger auf andere Weltreligionen zeigen und fragen, warum wir denn nicht Mohammed lächerlich machen dürften.

Davon abgesehen können wir uns auch selbst in heuchlerischen Gedanken über unsere religiösen Gefühle ergehen. Dabei erinnere ich mich , wie vor mehr als einem Jahrzehnt ein Film mit dem Titel „Die letzte Versuchung Christi“ Jesus dabei zeigte, wie er mit einer Frau schlief. In Paris wurde ein Kino angesteckt, das diesen Film zeigte, und dabei wurde ein junger Mann getötet. Ebenfalls entsinne ich mich an eine US-Universität, die mich vor drei Jahren zu einem Vortrag einlud. Das Thema war „Der 11. September 2001: frag, wer es getan hat, aber, um Gottes Willen, frag nicht warum“. Als ich ankam, sah ich, dass die Universität die Phrase „um Gottes Willen“ gestrichen hatte, weil „wir auf bestimmte Empfindlichkeiten Rücksicht nehmen wollten“. Ah-ha, wir haben also auch „Empfindlichkeiten“.

Anders gesagt, während wir fordern, dass Moslems gute säkulare Bürger sein müssen, wenn es um freie Rede (oder billige Cartoons) geht, dürfen wir uns über Anhänger unserer eigenen wertvollen Religion keine größeren Sorgen machen. Ich amüsierte mich auch über die pompösen Behauptungen europäischer Politiker, dass sie Redefreiheit oder Zeitungen nicht einschränken könnten. Auch das ist Unsinn. Hätte das Cartoon des Propheten stattdessen einen hohen Rabbi mit einem bombenförmigen Hut gezeigt, wäre sofort „Antisemitismus“ geschrieen worden – und mit Recht! Genauso hören wir ja auch häufig israelische Beschwerden über antisemitische Cartoons in ägyptischen Zeitungen.

Weiterhin ist es in einigen europäischen Staaten – Frankreich ist einer davon, Deutschland und Österreich sind unter den anderen – gesetzlich verboten, Völkermorde zu leugnen. In Frankreich ist es zum Beispiel illegal zu sagen, dass der jüdische Holocaust oder der armenische Holocaust nicht stattgefunden haben. Also ist es in der Tat unzulässig, gewisse Aussagen in europäischen Staaten zu treffen. Ich bin dennoch unsicher, ob diese Gesetze ihr Ziel erreichen; wie sehr man auch versuchen mag, Holocaustleugnung in Vorschriften zu fassen, werden Antisemiten doch immer versuchen, einen weg darum herum zu finden. Wir können aber schwerlich unsere politischen Einschränkungen dazu einsetzen, um Holocaustleugnungen zu verhüten, und dann ein lautes Geschrei über Säkularismus zu beginnen, wenn wir merken, dass Moslems an unserer provokativen und beleidigenden Darstellung des Propheten Anstoß nehmen.

Für viele Moslems ist die „islamische“ Reaktion auf diese Angelegenheit beschämend. Es besteht guter Grund zu der Annahme, dass Moslems es gutheißen würden, wenn einige Reformansätze in ihrer Religion Einzug hielten. Wenn dieser Cartoon die Sache derjenigen vorangebracht hätte, die hierüber eine Debatte in Gang setzen wollen, hätte das keinen gestört. Aber er war klar darauf angelegt, provokativ zu sein. Er war so empörend, dass es nur eine Gegenreaktion hervorrief.

Und jetzt ist keine gute Zeit, um den alten Müll von Samuel Huntington über den „Kampf der Kulturen“ wieder aufzuwärmen. Iran hat jetzt wieder eine geistliche Regierung. Und der Irak praktisch auch (obwohl es eigentlich nicht vorgesehen war, dass der Irak unter eine demokratisch gewählten geistlichen Führung gerät, aber das kommt davon, wenn man Diktatoren stürzt). In Ägypten gewann die Moslemische Bruderschaft in den jüngsten Parlamentswahlen 20% der Sitze. Und nun hat Hamas die Kontrolle über „Palästina“. Da steckt eine Botschaft drin, oder nicht? Die amerikanische Politik – Regierungswechsel im Nahen Osten – hat nicht ihre Ziele erreicht. Millionen von Wählern zogen den Islam den korrupten Regimes vor, die wir ihnen aufgezwungen haben.

Wenn der dänische Cartoon nun zusätzlich auf dieses Feuer geworfen wird, ist das in der Tat gefährlich.

Auf alle Fälle geht es nicht darum, ob der Prophet dargestellt werden sollte. Der Koran verbietet keine Bildnisse des Propheten, obwohl das Millionen von Moslems tun. Das Problem ist, dass diese Cartoons Mohammed als einen Gewalttäter im Stil eines Bin Ladens darstellt. Sie zeichnen den Islam als eine gewalttätige Religion. Er ist es nicht. Oder wollen wir ihn dahingehend verändern?

Anmerkungen des Übersetzers:

[1] Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), englischer Dichter und Kulturkritiker. Angespielt wird auf das Gedicht „Dover Beach“, in dem das Lyrische Ich angesichts einer Welt von Unsicherheit und Krieg eine Leere im Glauben bei sich feststellt. Die See dient hier als Metapher des Glaubens: „The sea of faith“.

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth`s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl`d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Die See des Glaubens war einst voll, und war dem Erdenrund ein lichter Gürtel, der die Falten schwellt. Doch hör ich jetzt, zu meiner Zeit, nur dumpfes Dröhnen, das im traur`gen Schwund zurück sich zieht - dort, wo der Nachtwind fällt hinab die Schneiden, trostlos breit, hinab die nackten Strände dieser Welt.

http://myweb.dal.ca/waue/Trans/Arnold-Dover.html

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Eine Frage stellt sich mir, wenn die neuen EU-Mitglieder mitgerechnet sind, ergibt sich automatisch eine Absenkung des Durchschnittseinkommens, vergleichbar als wenn Mexico zu dem Einkommen der USA gerechnet wird.
Ein Vergleich der alten EU mit den USA würde Sinn machen. Jedenfalls in dem Newsweek-Artikel.

http://www.oecd.org/document/7/0,2340,en_2649_34325_35995079…

The Decline and Fall of Europe
Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research and they will rarely even mention Europe.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11298986/site/newsweek/

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Feb. 20, 2006 issue - Cartoons and riots made the headlines in Europe last week, but a far less fiery event, the publication of an academic study, might shed greater light on the future of the Continent. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, headquartered in Paris, released a report, Going for Growth, that details economic prospects in the industrial world. It is 160 pages long and written in bland, cautious, scholarly prose. But the conclusion is clear—Europe is in deep trouble. These days we all talk about the rise of Asia and the challenge to America, but it might well turn out that the most consequential trend of the next decade will be the economic decline of Europe.

It`s often noted that the European Union has a combined gross domestic product that is approximately the same as that of the United States. But the EU has 170 million more people. Its per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that of the U.S. and, most important, that gap has been widening for 15 years. If present trends continue, the chief economist at the OECD argues, in 20 years the average U.S. citizen will be twice as rich as the average Frenchman or German. (Britain is an exception on most of these measures, lying somewhere between Continental Europe and the U.S.)

People have argued that Europeans simply value leisure more and, as a result, are poorer but have a better quality of life. That`s fine if you`re taking a 10 percent pay cut and choosing to have longer lunches and vacations. But if you`re only half as well off as the U.S., that will translate into poorer health care and education, diminished access to all kinds of goods and services, and a lower quality of life. Two Swedish researchers, Frederik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag, note in a monograph published last year that "40 percent of Swedish households would rank as low-income households in the U.S." In many European countries, the percentage would be even greater.

In March 2000, the EU`s heads of state agreed to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010." Today this looks like a joke. The OECD report goes through the status of reforms country by country, and all the major continental economies get a B-minus. Whenever some politician makes tiny, halting efforts at reform, strikes and protests paralyze the country. In recent months, reformers like Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Jose Manuel Barroso in Brussels and Angela Merkel in Germany have been backtracking on their proposals and instead mouthing pious rhetoric about the need to "manage" globalization. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson`s efforts to liberalize trade have been consistently undercut. As a result of the EU`s unwillingness to reduce its massive farm subsidies, the Doha trade-expansion round is dead.

Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research, and they will rarely even mention Europe. There are areas in which it is world-class, but they are fewer than they once were. In the biomedical sciences, for example, Europe is not on the map, and it might well be surpassed by much poorer Asian countries. The CEO of a large pharmaceutical company told me that in 10 years, the three most important countries for his industry would be the United States, China and India.

And I haven`t even gotten to the demographics. In 25 years, the number of working-age Europeans will decline by 7 percent, while those over 65 will increase by 50 percent. One solution: let older people work. But Europe`s employment rate for people over 60 is low: 7 percent in France and 12 percent in Germany (compared with 27 percent in the U.S.). Modest efforts to allow people to retire later have been met with the usual avalanche of protests. And while economists and the European Commission keep proposing that Europe take in more immigrants to expand its labor force, it won`t. The cartoon controversy has powerfully highlighted the difficulties Europe is having with its existing immigrants.

What does all this add up to? Less European influence in the world. Europe`s position in institutions like the World Bank and the IMF relates to its share of world GDP. Its dwindling defense spending weakens its ability to be a military partner of the U.S., or to project military power abroad even for peacekeeping purposes. Its cramped, increasingly protectionist outlook will further sap its vitality.

The decline of Europe means a world with a greater diffusion of power and a lessened ability to create international norms and rules of the road. It also means that America`s superpower status will linger. Think of the dollar. For years people have argued that it is due for a massive drop as countries around the world diversify their savings. But as people looked at the alternatives, they decided that the chief rivals, the euro and the yen, represented economies that were structurally weak. So they have reluctantly stuck with the dollar. It`s a similar dynamic in other arenas. You can`t beat something with nothing.

Write the author at [e-mail].

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11298986/site/newsweek/

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U.S. OFFERS TO RELOCATE INSURGENTS TO IRAN
‘Keep Doing What You’re Doing’ Next Door, Rumsfeld Says
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In what Pentagon planners are characterizing as their boldest tactic to date, the United States today offered to relocate Iraqi insurgents to Iran and urged them to continue their insurgent activities next door.

With U.S. troops stretched thin in Iraq, the idea of encouraging Iraqi insurgents to travel across the border and topple the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a cost-efficient solution to a nettlesome problem, Pentagon sources said.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the formal appeal to the insurgents, telling them, “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing, just do it next door.”

Calling them “world-class insurgents,” Rumsfeld said, “Go across the border and keep on insurging the way only you know how to insurge.”

Answering reporters’ questions, Secretary Rumsfeld said that the insurgents were being offered a special relocation package that included a bus ticket and change-of-address cards so that their mail service would be uninterrupted.

He added that if the relocation program proved successful, the Pentagon would consider offering to relocate additional insurgents to North Korea.

“This is ‘thinking outside the box’ at its very best,” a beaming Rumsfeld said.

But in Iraq, the relocation program seemed to hit a snag, with many of the insurgents turning up their noses at the Pentagon’s offer.

“Why would I want to go to Iran?” asked one insurgent who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That’s where I came from in the first place.”

Elsewhere, Los Angeles police were led on a high-speed chase by a car driven by Britney Spears’ baby.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1318&srch=

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3 Jahre sind genug!
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[/TABLE]Heute vor 3 Jahren habe ich diesen Thread eröffnet, ohne zu wissen, was ich ich damit für mich angerichtet habe.
Ich habe immer gemeint Toons gibt es nur im Kino, aber ich ich hätte vorsichtig sein sollen, denn seitdem ich Anfang der 90er das erste Mal den Film [urlFalsches Spiel mit Roger Rabbit]http://www.kino.de/kinofilm.php4?nr=9285[/url] gesehen habe, hätte ich es wissen müßen, die Grenze zwischen realer Welt und der virtuellen Welt ist fließend.

So kam es dazu, wie bei anderen Mit-Toons hier im Forum, dass sich neben der realen Welt eine zweite Welt aufgebaut hat, die scheinbar leicht die reale Welt in den Schatten stellen konnte.

Die dort vorhandenen Toons verhielten sich auch oftmals so, wie die Figuren in den Filmen, auf jeden Hammer wurde mit einem noch größeren Hammer draufgehauen, ohne sich darum zu kümmern, was diese Hammerschläge in der Realität bewirken würden.

So hat sich eine Gegenwelt aufgebaut, die bei vielen schon zu einer Verleugnung der Realität führt, und aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach auch im realen Leben zu Konflikten führt.

Für jeden, der sich länger in dieser Welt bewegt, besteht die Gefahr, dass vieles andere unerledigt bleibt, weil es so einfach ist, diese virtuelle Welt zu bedienen ohne dafür Verantwortung zu tragen.

Nun haben sich bei mir eine Menge Dinge angesammelt, die auch noch zu erledigen sind, Bücher, die zu lesen sind, Briefe, die zu schreiben sind und auch Kontakte, die zu pflegen sind.

Deshalb werde ich aufhören diesen Thread zu pflegen, da er mir einfach zu viel Zeit nimmt, die ich hoffe wieder besser anzulegen, besonders da nun das Frühjahr kommt.

Da augenblicklich die Diskussionskultur durch den immer übermächtiger werdenden Rassismus auf einen Tiefpunkt ist, ist es es guter Zeitpunkt auszusteigen.

Ich habe die Mods gebeten diesen Thread zu schließen, denn es gibt genügend Threads über die USA und auch über den Krieg im Nahen Osten. Anderseits halte ich es für unwahrscheinlich, dass jemand in meinem Sinne die Zeit und die Lust aufbringt den Thread in vollem Umfang fortzuführen.

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Eine Anmerkung noch, ich empfehle das Forum ´Wirtschaft und Politik´ zu schließen, da es in den letzten Wochen immer mehr zu einem Tummelplatz für Rassismus und Faschismus geworden ist. Und da Rumsfeld einen permanenten Krieg angekündigt hat, werden sich diese Tendenzen immer noch verstärken. Es ist jetzt schon schwierig die Protagonisten in den Griff zu bekommen, und um noch einmal Rumsfeld zu zitieren, es sind nur einige faule Äpfel, aber die entwickeln eine Sogwirkung und können die gesamte Umgebung verderben.
Und wie ich in den letzten Monaten feststellen mußte, immer mehr von den vernunftbegabten Usern sind verschwunden und sind von Schreihälse und Pöbler ersetzt worden.

[Sep]

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