Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 23)

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How three threats interlock
A mission for moderates
By Amin Saikal (IHT)
Monday, December 29, 2003


CANBERRA: Three minority extremist groups - the militant fundamentalist Islamists exemplified at the far edge by Al Qaeda, certain activist elements among America`s reborn Christians and neoconservatives, and the most inflexible hard-line Zionists from Israel - have emerged as dangerously destabilizing actors in world politics. Working perversely to reinforce each other`s ideological excesses, they have managed to drown out mainstream voices from all sides. Each has the aim of changing the world according to its own individual vision.

If these extremists are not marginalized, they could succeed in creating a world order with devastating consequences for generations to come. Al Qaeda and its radical Islamist supporters, believing in Islam as an assertive ideology of political and social transformation, want a re-Islamization of the Muslim world according to their vision and their social and political preferences. The alternative that they offer is widely regarded as regressive and repressive even by most Muslims, let alone the West. Violence against innocent civilians can neither be justified in Islam nor find approval among a majority of Muslims. Yet many Muslims have come to identify with the anti-American and anti-Israeli stance of the radicals because they have grown intolerant of America`s globalist policies.

Muslims have been angered by U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in Muslim countries, including at one point Saddam Hussein`s, and by its backing of Israel as a force occupying Palestinian lands and Islam`s third holiest place, East Jerusalem. The U.S.-$ led occupation of Iraq, seen by many in the Middle East as imperial behavior harmful to the Iraqi people, has certainly not eased these feelings. On another side are groups of internationalist activists among American fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives who have found it opportune since Sept. 11, 2001, to pursue their agendas more aggressively. They wish to reshape the Middle East and defiant political Islam according to their ideological and geopolitical preferences.

The extremists of these groups seek to "civilize" or "democratize" the Arab world in particular, and the Muslim world in general, in their own images, and they have particular influence through key appointees in the Bush administration. The fact that democracy can neither be imposed nor be expected to mushroom overnight does not appear to resonate with them. (The agenda of some fundamentalist Christians, who promote Jewish dominance of the Palestinian lands as leading the world closer to the prophesied Judgment Day, is a variant that might be dismissed as a hysterical fringe element if it were not connected to a powerful voting bloc supporting President George W. Bush.)

The efforts of the neoconservatives dovetail all too effectively with the aims of the radical Zionists who push for more and more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. Because of Israel`s proportional voting system, these radicals exercise disproportionate power within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s government. Although a majority of the Israelis still support the creation of an independent Palestinian state based on the principle of land for peace, the electoral system leaves them hostage to the minority of extremists in their midst. The activities of these three extremist minorities feed on one another: actions by each are seized on by others to justify their own extremism. With considerable help, intended or not, from one another, these three groups have now positioned themselves to determine the future of world order and, for that matter, humanity. Prime Minister Tony Blair recently declared that Iraq would define the future of relations between the West and the Muslim world. This is also precisely what Osama Bin Laden and his leadership associates have said from the Islamic side. It is important that these minorities not be allowed to have such an influence. It is necessary for the mainstream from all sides to return to the center stage to chart the direction of world politics before it is too late.

It takes a few to make war but many to make peace. In pursuit of peace, not only should Al Qaeda and its associates be marginalized, but the radical international agendas of some reborn Christians, neoconservatives and hard-line Zionists should be completely discredited. Doing away with one and not the others is not an option for our future.

Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.

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Für alle, die bei knapp 1,26$ für den € noch schnell für morgen einen Trip planen, hier einige Tips.
Aber bei Gewinn die Dollars schnell umtauschen.

Gawkers in Paradise
By GLENN COLLINS and SARAH COLLINS

FOR the hordes of casino-mad tourists disgorged under the 12-foot stainless-steel palm trees of McCarran International Airport, the primordial Las Vegas welcome is that clowny sound, the chiming of the dollar slots in the supercarrier-sized terminal.

But we had our own desert epiphany directly outside the windows of our Boeing 757 as it taxied across the runway late on a Saturday night in October. We saw a stirring exhibition in the darkness. What seemed to be a museum of holographic miniatures, a rainbow row of megaresorts way in the distance, glowing with fun and frolic and promise.

The scene: this was exactly what had drawn us to Las Vegas. Go ahead and roll your eyes, casino managers, but we happen to be clueless, incompetent gamblers. You might call it a character flaw. We invariably watch, slack-jawed, as our money rapidly, and senselessly, disappears from the gaming tables. No, what we wanted to sample at Disneyland in the Desert was a smorgasbord of spectacle itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/travel/28vegas.html?pagewa…


Hikers at Calico Tanks in Red Rock Canyon.A performer in Cirque du Soleil`s "O."

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Bush Campaign Pledge: A McJob For Every McPerson!


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CRAWFORD, TX (IWR News Parody) - George Bush and Marc Racicot this morning unveiled a new Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign poster on jobs.
"Unlike those lying Democrats, I hereby make this full employment pledge to American workers: A McJob for every McPerson!

Sure your high paying factory job may have went south to Mexico, or your hi-tech career may have been outsourced to India, but I guarantee you there will always be exciting low wage McJobs available in this country!

And just to make sure there are enough Mcjobs for y`all, I am going to send my `Full Employment` bill to Congress.

This first thing this legislation will do is lower the current minimum wage to half its current value.

Shazam!!!! More jobs!

The next jobs friendly thing this bill will do is make business exempt from providing health and unemployment benefits!

Shazam!!!! More jobs!

Marc tells me, for example, that his rich oleogarch [sic] friends can`t find decent English speaking dishwashers or caddies these days.

Marc says his friends would be more than happy to give an unemployed engineer a job, especially if they don`t have to worry about wages, benefits and whatnot.

That`s what`s compassionate conservatism is all about.

So there you have it.

While the Democrats just play lip service to creating new jobs, I have a real plan for full employment for all Americans.

Thank you and may God bless crony capitalism," said Mr. Bush.

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Rummy beliebt zu scherzen!

Rumsfeld rejects Iraq WMD doubts
By Nick Childs
BBC Pentagon correspondent

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he believes weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq and he rejected the charge that the war against Baghdad was waged under a false pretext.
Earlier this week Mr Rumsfeld suggested that the Iraqis may have destroyed the weapons before the Iraq conflict.

His remarks seemed to echo hints by US officials behind the scenes suggesting US-led forces may not find a clear-cut "smoking gun" of Iraqi weapons.

Now though, in a US radio phone-in, he says he personally believes they will be found.

In his latest remarks he says the reason they have not been found up until now is because the government of Saddam Hussein had worked so hard to hide them.

It is not because they are not there he says - the US believed they were there.

More confusion

He also rejected the idea that the war was waged under any false pretext.

In his words, the US and British case against Iraq was based on what he called good intelligence.

Still, Mr Rumsfeld`s words are likely only to sow more confusion about the issue.

And while he says US-led forces have been searching for only seven weeks, the questions about Iraq`s weapons programmes are unlikely to subside until the coalition comes up with more clear-cut evidence than it has up until now.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/2948806.st…

Published: 2003/05/30 00:17:50 GMT

© BBC MMIII

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Their Photos Tell the Story
Jimmy Breslin

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres303605595dec…



December 30, 2003

The Army Times, a civilian newspaper that is sold mainly on military bases and thus reaches the prime wartime audience, uses eight pages of its year-end review, out now, to run photos of all those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, except 35.

I usually don`t refer to other publications, for I have enough trouble with my own. But this issue of the Army Times is so extraordinary and gives hope that it will provide some leadership in the news industry.

There were 506 killed by the time the newspaper closed last Friday. Since then, another seven have died. The newspaper has said this is the deadliest year for the U.S. military since 1972, when 640 were killed in Vietnam.

In introducing the pictures, under the headline "Faces of the Fallen," the Army Times said: "More than 500 service members died in operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom in 2003, a group that represents the full, rich face of American diversity.

"They grew up in big cities like Chicago and New York and small towns like Layton, Utah, and Cross Lanes, West Virginia. Ten were women, the youngest six 18-year-olds barely out of high school. The oldest, Army Sgt. Floyd G. Nightman Jr., was 55.

"They died at the hands of the enemy, from illnesses contracted in the war zones and the accidents that inevitably push human beings and their equipment to their limit.

"They came from all walks of life, from every race and creed. But all shared a common bond - commitment to, and pride in, serving their country in the cause of freedom.

"As the New Year dawns, we pause once to honor those who fell in 2003."

The pictures are small and run in neat columns. The names, ranks and date and place of death are in small type underneath the small pictures. The understatement is devastating.

The paper`s senior managing editor, Robert Hodierne, was saying yesterday, "When I looked at the pages, I felt the same as I did when I walked along the Wall."

He met Maya Lin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall architect who was 23 when she designed it.

"I am in love with her," Hodierne says.

The chilling photos run at a time when the government tries to describe the war as a civic venture, and nearly all of the news industry doesn`t know how to object. This probably is the worst failure to inform the public that we have seen. The Pekingese of the Press run clip-clop along the hall to the next government press conference.

"We started on the issue three or four weeks ago," Hodierne said. The paper has been running pictures of the dead every week.

"We had 75 percent of the photos. We had to make the best effort we could to go after the others. We went to families and hometown papers. The military doesn`t give out so many photos of the dead. People here were upset by the gaps in the rows of photos."

One who was bothered was Anna Pozzie, who scanned the photos into a computer. It was slow, painful work. She became saddened by the pictures. The ages of the dead young men were wrenching.

Steve Zelfers, the photo editor, said, "You stare at the photos and see the cost of the war."

The complaint about the military holding back pictures is one part of the attempt to make you as unaware as possible that soldiers are dying in Iraq. They have this Bremer who stands in his jacket, shirt and tie and talks about the new Iraqi government that we have set up.

He doesn`t seem to know about death.

He doesn`t know that every time we try to put our democracy into one of these totalitarian countries, the scum comes to the top. They have been living elsewhere and rush back to lick American boots and get positions in the great new government.

The government folds and the imams take over.

And the dead are brought back here almost furtively. There are no ceremonies or pictures of caskets at Dover, Del., air base, where the dead are brought. "You don`t want to upset the families," George Bush said. That the people might be slightly disturbed already by the death doesn`t seem to register.

The wounded are flown into Washington at night. There are 5,000 of them and for a long time you never heard of soldiers who have no arms and legs. Then the singer Cher went into Walter Reed Hospital and came out and gave a report that was so compelling she should walk away with a Pulitzer Prize.

Finally, a couple of television stations and a newspaper here and there began to cover these things. There are miles to go.

For now, Cher, on one day, and the Army Times for the whole year, have served the nation as it should be served.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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Sharon`s resignation, and other reckless predictions
Blair and Bush have little to fear in 2004. But what of the rest?

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday December 31, 2003
The Guardian

In a neat bit of symmetry, why not end the year as we began it? On January 1 this column made six reckless predictions for 2003. The first was that the US and Britain would take military action in Iraq. Next came forecasts that Ariel Sharon would be re-elected in Israel, going on to rule with a narrow, rightwing coalition rather than a government of national unity; that Gordon Brown would say the five economic tests on the euro had not been passed; that the new constitution for Europe would end up as a dish of classic Brussels fudge; that the Tories would dump IDS; and that Northern Irish elections would see Sinn Féin and anti-agreement Unionists emerge as the two biggest forces in the province.

OK, maybe it didn`t exactly take Mystic Meg to predict war in Iraq or, indeed, any of the above. And the European guess turned out to be far too optimistic; instead of a fudge, the union did not agree a constitution at all. But there is the beginning of a tradition to maintain here, so why not give it another whirl?

1 The Hutton Report. His lordship is due to publish his findings on January 12. Officially, all he is required to do is offer a full account of the "circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly", but the conventional wisdom has already endowed the Hutton report with much more significance than that. It is, they say, the document that could destroy Tony Blair and transform the BBC.

Reckless prediction: Hutton steers clear of the ground that could be most perilous for Blair - the honesty or otherwise of the September 2002 dossier on Iraq`s military capacity. There is no killer sentence accusing him of leading the country falsely to war. (As an unelected judge, Hutton would tremble at the thought of toppling an elected head of government.) Instead, Hutton spreads the pain evenly. The BBC is faulted both for the sloppy editorial procedures that allowed Andrew Gilligan to overshoot on his original story and for the dual role of the board of governors, acting as both regulator of the BBC and protector of its independence. Hutton suggests the latter be reformed. As for the government, he criticises the "naming strategy" that exposed Kelly, perhaps even laying some personal blame for that on the prime minister. Blair bites his lower lip and takes full responsibility - but survives. Likeliest heads to roll are at the Ministry of Defence: Geoff Hoon is vulnerable, but so are his mandarins.

2 The US election. This month sees the first tests of Democratic opinion, in Iowa and New Hampshire. The winner there will then hurtle into a sharply accelerated contest whose outcome should be clear by March. With no primary challenge on the Republican side, the Democratic winner will go head-to-head with George Bush in November in a contest that will profoundly affect the world for the rest of the decade.

Reckless prediction: Former Vermont governor Howard Dean dominates the early contests. On February 3, in South Carolina, the field winnows, with a single Stop Dean candidate emerging from the pack; there is a southern surge for former general Wesley Clark. But it is not enough: Dean is the nominee. Meanwhile, Bush enjoys the huge advantage handed him by the absence of a primary battle. Unopposed, he strives towards November, distracted only by a flurry of speculation as to whether he will dump the cardiacally challenged Dick Cheney from the ticket. With the economy improving, Saddam Hussein in captivity and Dean easily lampooned as a 21st-century McGovernite liberal, Bush walks it.

3 Iraq. The American dilemmas persist. Should we stay or should we go? Should we carry this burden alone or allow others, including those in the coalition of the unwilling who refused to back the war, a piece of the reconstruction action too? And what should we do with Saddam?

Reckless prediction: Day to day anti-occupation violence continues, taking the shine off the Saddam capture - it proves he was not directing the resistance from his spider hole after all. The Americans, mindful of their electoral timetable, start looking for exits. Bush family retainer and presidential special envoy James Baker negotiates a deal with France and the other refuseniks: they give international legitimacy to Iraqi elections in return for lucrative reconstruction contracts. The elections - run as local caucuses rather than under the traditional, but less controllable, one-person, one-vote system - take place in August and are hailed as proof that America`s mission of liberation is accomplished. The troops start coming home: these pictures, unlike those of returning coffins, are televised. To be on the safe side, "legal process" ensures Saddam gets nowhere near a dock - where he might shoot his mouth off about past US support for his regime - at least not before November.

4 Israel and Palestine. According to the US-backed road map for Middle East peace, a viable, independent Palestinian state should be just 12 months away. Yet there was next to no progress in 2003 - just fine speeches and a signing ceremony in June, followed by the departure of moderate Palestinian PM Abu Mazen in September. Will 2004 be any better?

Reckless prediction: Washington, in an election year, refuses to pressure Israel. Violence continues. But the cracks in the domestic Israeli ice that appeared in 2003 get wider in 2004. The host of rival peace plans dominate public discourse; a consensus emerges, from the military elites down, that Sharon`s way is futile. In a shock development, the corruption allegations that have long swirled over the PM engulf him and he is forced to resign. He is replaced by Binyamin Netanyahu.

5 The home front. In what is likely to be the last full year before a general election and the start of Labour`s eighth in office, how will the domestic landscape look?

Reckless prediction: Michael Howard continues to get good ink from the rightwing press, especially when bolstered by a solid result in June`s elections for the European parliament. Back in the Labour fold, Ken Livingstone cruises to a second term as mayor of London and hints that his election-winning formula is the clear alternative to Blairism. Gordon Brown stays on as chancellor - and waits.

6 And finally. Finding Nemo is nominated as best picture at the Oscars and England do well in the European Championships. How well? Now here is where the crystal ball begins to get a little cloudy...

Happy New Year.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Der Bürgerkrieg hat schon längst begonnen.

Gunfire Erupts in Kirkuk; Two Said Killed

Wednesday December 31, 2003 10:16 AM


KIRKUK, Baghdad (AP) - Gunfire erupted Wednesday as hundreds of protesters marched in Kirkuk and at least two people were reported killed in the oil-rich northern city where plans for a new democratic Iraq are dividing Kurd, Arab and Turkmen residents.

Police Col. Salem Taha said two protesters were killed and 16 were wounded in the shooting. A reporter saw six people hit by gunshots, and heard sirens as ambulances rushed to the rescue.

Witnesses fleeing the scene said police opened fire on the crowd, but police said the shots came from members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, as demonstrators tried to converge on that party`s office.

U.S. soldiers moved in with tanks to barricade the area and set up checkpoints at major intersections.

Hundreds of Arabs and Turkmen began protesting Wednesday morning to demand that Kirkuk remain under a central Iraqi government and not be incorporated into any proposed Kurdish federation.

``Kirkuk is an Iraqi city!`` protesters shouted. ``Down with federalism.``

The exact division of the population of Kirkuk is not known. It is believed that residents are divided equally between three ethnic groups - Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds.

Some Kurds in Kirkuk have been calling for the city to become part of an autonomous Kurdistan, joining a Switzerland-sized area of northern Iraq where Kurds have ruled themselves since the end of the Gulf War, more than a decade ago, under U.S.-led aerial protection.

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Killer was hired as Air France guard
Paul Webster in Paris
Wednesday December 31, 2003
The Guardian

The company put in charge of security for Air France flights employed a convicted murderer and a number of others with serious criminal records, it emerged yesterday.

The background of the guards was disclosed in a Paris court during a hearing to wind up the company, Pretory, which had been operating security on the French airline for more than two years but went into bankruptcy after tax fraud allegations.

The revelation of its lax recruiting methods coincided with the disclosure that armed French police have been flying with Air France to the US since December 23.

The government ordered the use of the gendarmerie after the US said that flights without armed escorts would be banned from overflying or landing, because of the fear of terrorism.

Last week Air France cancelled six transatlantic crossings at short notice after Washington said terrorists might be on board.

The airline refused to make any comment on a possible link with the use of a dodgy private company.

Four days after the terror attacks in the US on September 11 2001 Air France was one of the first networks to announce that passengers would be accompanied by "specially trained agents".

But the tribunal which ordered the company`s liquidation heard that, in a rush to recruit guards, it had taken on disco bouncers, dog handlers, nightwatchmen, and other staff with little or no experience of arms or safety procedures.

At one time 200 guards were employed on flights.

An investigation was eventually started last April, when the police looked into the background of 140 agents, the most qualified of whom were former soldiers.

As a result of a search of criminal records more than 30 agents were grounded as a potential security risk.

The police also looked into the record of Pretory`s sub-contractors.

This led to unconfirmed reports that some guards had been sent for arms training courses in Middle Eastern countries suspected of harbouring terrorists.

A few weeks before yesterday`s liquidation hearing Air France announced that it was ending the contract with Pretory from today.

But by then the company had run into legal trouble because of its non-payment of social security charges and alleged tax frauds amounting to about €4.5m (£3m).

American anxiety about the quality of Air France`s protection service was at the centre of discussions in Washington this week.

French diplomats gave assurances that the Pretory recruits had been replaced by police from the SAS-style intervention group, GIGN.

According to police sources two to six gendarmes accompany every flight to and from the US, depending on the number of passengers.

One guard is assigned to the cockpit. The men`s main weapons are electric stun guns and other non-lethal arms.

"These men have received special training," a member of the force said.

"In fact, we have been testing this sort of airline security for years."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Ausführlichen Bericht siehe LATimes von gestern #10978/79

Syria was conduit for Saddam arms
Brian Whitaker, and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Wednesday December 31, 2003
The Guardian

A host of companies around the world provided military equipment to Iraq in the run-up to war, sending it mainly through Syria, according to documents discovered in Baghdad.

The files, which include signed contracts, shipping manifests and minutes of meetings, appear to show that a Damascus company run by a relative of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was at the centre of the trade.

The documents were found in the abandoned office of al-Bashair Trading Company by a reporter for the German magazine Stern, shortly after US troops entered the capital.

Although al-Bashair was ostensibly an import-export business, it had been identified by the UN as the biggest of 13 companies used by Saddam Hussein`s regime to evade international sanctions.

Details of Iraq`s weapons purchases emerged yesterday when the Los Angeles Times published the results of a three-month investigation sparked by the discovery of the papers.

The report comes at a particularly sensitive time in relations between Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this month President George Bush approved sanctions against Syria for its alleged support of Islamist groups. Washington has also been pressing Syria to seal its border with Iraq to stop the infiltration of militants.

The LA Times said that between last year and early this year Syria became the main conduit for illicit weapons deals after a crackdown in Jordan, which had previously been Iraq`s chief source of smuggled arms.

It said the Syrian company SES International Corporation had played a pivotal role.

"Iraqi records show that SES signed more than 50 contracts to supply tens of millions of dollars` worth of arms and equipment to Iraq`s military shortly before the US-led invasion in March," it said.

The deals are reported to include supplying 1,000 heavy machine guns and up to 20m rounds for assault rifles.

"Syria`s government assisted SES in importing at least one shipment destined for Iraq`s military, the Iraqi documents indicate, and Western intelligence reports allege that senior Syrian officials were involved in other illicit transfers," the paper said.

The investigation is likely to embarrass two American allies, Poland and South Korea.

Before the war a Polish company, Evax, signed four contracts with Iraq and delivered up to 380 engines for surface-to-air missiles to Baghdad through Syria, the paper said.

A South Korean company, Armitel, sent telecommunications equipment worth $8m (£4.5m) for what the documents said was air defence, the paper reported.

Among other deals identified by the investigation:

· A Russian company signed an $8.8m contract in September last year to supply mostly American-made communications and surveillance equipment to Iraq;

· A Slovenian company sent 20 tank barrels identified as "steel tubes" to SES in February 2002, though further supplies were blocked by the Slovenian government;

· Two North Korean officials went to Damascus to discuss an Iraqi payment of $10m for ballistic missiles components;

· A US-based company, Cambridge Technology, sold four optical scanners, which can be adapted to help divert laser-guided missiles, to a student in Canada who sent them to Jordan, "without the US company`s knowledge".

It is unclear whether SES was acting with the knowledge or approval of the president, but analysts said it was unlikely that the deals could have gone ahead without the government`s involvement.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Immer noch die Geschichte der Rache an Botschafter Wilson, weil er die Nigeria-Irak-Uran-Geschichte als Ente entlarvt hat.
Dafür hat dann eine Person aus dem Umfelds von Bush Wilsons Frau als CIA-Agentin enttarnt.
Da das Enttarnen eines Agenten in den USA ein Verbrechen
ist, müßte derjenige in den Knast.
Und Karl Rove im Gefängnis, das wäre schon etwas, wovon die Bush-Gegner träumen.

December 31, 2003
Special Counsel Is Named to Head Inquiry on C.I.A. Leak
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 — Attorney General John Ashcroft disqualified himself on Tuesday from any involvement in the investigation into whether Bush administration officials illegally disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer. At the same time, the Justice Department brought in a special counsel to lead the politically charged case.

The two steps suggested that the three-month-old investigation had reached a crucial juncture at which Mr. Ashcroft`s continued involvement was considered politically untenable, officials said. Leading Democrats had pushed for months for Mr. Ashcroft to remove himself from the case because of his close ties to the White House, but he had consistently resisted those demands until Tuesday.

Federal investigators have been examining whether officials at the White House or in other federal offices leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist. Mr. Novak included the information in a column published last July.

The White House has denied that top officials there, including the president`s top political adviser, Karl Rove, had any role in leaking the information to Mr. Novak. The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed Mr. Rove in October, officials said, and his relationship to the attorney general has been a source of concern for some Justice Department officials because he was a paid adviser to Mr. Ashcroft on several of Mr. Ashcroft`s political campaigns in Missouri.

James B. Comey Jr., a former Manhattan prosecutor who was installed just three weeks ago as deputy attorney general, will oversee the investigation following Mr. Ashcroft`s withdrawal. His first decision in that role was to name Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is the United States attorney in Chicago and is a friend and former colleague of Mr. Comey`s, as a special counsel who will direct the investigation.

"The attorney general, in an abundance of caution, believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of the circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the investigation," Mr. Comey said in announcing the decision at a news conference, which Mr. Ashcroft did not attend. "I agree with that judgment. And I also agree that he made it at the appropriate time, the appropriate point in this investigation."

Mr. Comey added that the attorney general did not believe that he had a conflict of interest that would have prevented him from fairly overseeing the case. "The issue that he was concerned about was one of appearance, Mr. Comey said.

White House officials said that President Bush was informed of the decision several hours before Mr. Comey formally announced it but that the White House played no role in it. Indeed, the decision appeared to surprise both political figures in the White House and law enforcement officials at the Justice Department, leaving many to speculate about what led Mr. Ashcroft to disqualify himself from the case now after months of political pressure.

Some officials suggested that the move was driven largely by political factors and that the Democrats` near-constant criticism over the pace of the investigation and Mr. Ashcroft`s role in it could hurt Mr. Bush as he campaigns for re-election next year. By this theory, Mr. Comey`s confirmation as deputy attorney general three weeks ago may have allowed Mr. Ashcroft a relatively smooth way by which to extricate himself from the case.

"The Justice Department and Ashcroft in particular have been in an impossible situation," said one White House adviser. "Unless he finds everybody at the White House guilty, his critics will charge that he was soft."

But some Democrats said they believed that Mr. Ashcroft`s decision was evidence that the F.B.I.`s investigation into the leak could be moving closer to key White House personnel with whom the attorney general is closely aligned.

The Justice Department`s investigation centers on accusations that unnamed Bush administration officials disclosed the identity of Ms. Plame to Mr. Novak last summer in order to punish the C.I.A. officer`s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his criticism of Mr. Bush`s policies in Iraq.

Days before his wife`s role with the Central Intelligence Agency was disclosed, Mr. Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times saying that a government fact-finding trip he took to Niger in 2002 found nothing to substantiate the accusation that Iraq had imported uranium ore from Niger. In his State of the Union address in January, Mr. Bush said Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium in Africa, although he did not specifically mention Niger.

Disclosing the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer is a felony under federal law.

Republicans were largely silent on Mr. Ashcroft`s decision, but Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail were quick to praise it, although some saw it as belated.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who led the push for Mr. Ashcroft`s withdrawal and the appointment of an outside counsel, said, "This isn`t everything that I asked for, but it`s close."

On the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald to lead the investigation, Mr. Schumer said: "I would have preferred to have someone outside the government altogether, but given Fitzgerald`s reputation for integrity and ability — similar to Comey`s — the glass is three-quarters full."

Howard Dean, who leads in polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that while he was encouraged by Mr. Ashcroft`s decision, "it is too little, too late."

Dr. Dean suggested that because Mr. Comey and Mr. Fitzgerald are political appointees named to their jobs by Mr. Bush, the Justice Department should still appoint an outside counsel to handle the case.

In the last three months, the leak investigation has been run out of the Justice Department by John Dion, a career lawyer who leads the department`s counterespionage unit. While Mr. Ashcroft has been briefed occasionally on the progress of the investigation, Justice Department officials have stressed that the unfettered authority of Mr. Dion and his staff were critical to ensuring the fairness and independence of the investigation.

Mr. Comey, however, left open the question of whether Mr. Dion and other career prosecutors in his unit would remain on the case. He said that decision will be left entirely to Mr. Fitzgerald, but he added, "I wouldn`t be surprised if he thought maybe he ought to keep some or all of the career folks involved."

Mr. Comey, who earned a reputation in Manhattan as an independent prosecutor on corporate crime and other high-profile criminal matters, said that he was giving Mr. Fitzgerald broad authority to pursue the investigation and that he would be allowed to issue subpoenas and grant immunity on his own authority.

"I told him that my mandate to him was very simple," Mr. Comey related. "Follow the facts wherever they lead, and do the right thing at all times. And that`s something, if you know this guy, is not something I even needed to tell him."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Ein wenig Wahlkampfhilfe, ab nächsten Monat werden es weniger.

[Joerver]

Im März 84 war Rumsfeld das 2.Mal im Irak und hat der irakischen Regierung ihre Unterstützung zugesagt, nachdem der es wegen der Gasangriffe von Hussein zu einigen Mißverständnissen gekommen war.

December 31, 2003
How Disappearance in `84 Blighted Family in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 — A month after American troops occupied Baghdad, the family of Dr. Taki al-Moosawi was gathered at his Baghdad home, watching one of the Arab satellite channels that have become popular since the toppling of Saddam Hussein made it possible for any Iraqi, not just the ruling clique, to have satellite receivers.

And suddenly there it was: Old film clips of executions looted from the archives of the General Security Directorate, the most powerful of Mr. Hussein`s secret police agencies. There, too, in the last terrifying moments before he was blown apart by a grenade his executioners had taped onto his chest, was the nephew who had disappeared without trace more than 18 years before, Mehdi Salih al-Moosawi.

When the secret police came for him and other males in the family in December 1984, Mehdi was a quiet 22-year-old student at a Baghdad technical college, a karate champion just back from service as an infantryman in the Iran-Iraq war, the father of two infant children.

He was accused, along with Dr. Moosawi, of planting bombs in Karamanah Square in Baghdad, though Dr. Moosawi says that the charge was false and that the real offense was speaking, among friends, in ways that were critical of Mr. Hussein.

In all the years since Mehdi`s arrest, there had been no rest in the search for his nephew by Dr. Moosawi, a British-trained physiologist. The doctor himself was released after several months, on the intervention of an acquaintance who was a cousin of Mr. Hussein, but he was haunted, he says now, by the anguish of having left Mehdi in the dungeons of the secret police headquarters in central Baghdad.

When he saw the tape on Al Jazeera, an Arab station that has frequently been criticized for whitewashing Mr. Hussein`s rule, Dr. Moosawi said, he was overcome with anger and disgust, as well as shame that it had been Mehdi who died, not him. He also felt at that moment, he said, that any price Iraqis paid for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, including the ravages of the American invasion, had been worth it.

"In my own mind, I was already dead from the moment that Mehdi disappeared," he said. "I wished only that it could have been me, sitting there in the desert. Only later on, when I remembered that the Americans had come here to end this terror, did I begin to think, well, we were all dead, but we have been resurrected, we have been born again."

What happened to Mehdi, and what became of his family as they balanced their quest for him with a relentless theater of fealty to Mr. Hussein, is a grim — and grimly familiar — parable of the terror inflicted on 25 million Iraqis during the 24 years of Mr. Hussein`s rule.

The critical view the family now takes of the American-led occupation may also hold clues for the United States as it confronts a brutal insurgency and grapples for some formula that will bring American troops home.

"They did a very good job for America and for Iraq in getting rid of Saddam, and we thank them," Dr. Moosawi said. "Now, they are young boys lost in a foreign country, and every day there is a bomb in the road. They live a terrible time. So please tell them, we would like that they would leave our country as soon as possible, as soon as they have arranged a stable government to replace Saddam."

Dr. Moosawi embodies much of what America has brought to Iraq. On the instruction of American officials, all 63 of Iraq`s universities and technical colleges held elections this summer for presidents, vice presidents and deans; Dr. Moosawi, once a pariah among his colleagues because of the taint he bore from his brush with the secret police, is now vice president of Mustansiriya University, a proud if dilapidated institution in Baghdad that was founded by one of the ruling caliphs of the Islamic world in the 13th century.

Through all the years of the search for Mehdi, the family`s hopes had been sustained by contacts with a senior officer in the mukhabarat, one of the prime agencies in Mr. Hussein`s constellation of secret police agencies, which exacted money from the family, saying it would buy food, clothes and medicine for Mehdi in an undisclosed prison. It was a deceit of a kind that became common as Mr. Hussein`s government came ever more to resemble an entrenched mafia whose brutality and greed metamorphosed into unrelenting terror.

The Moosawis suffered as grievously as any other from that murderous terror, Dr. Moosawi said, listing 9 members of the extended family who were executed under Mr. Hussein, and 30 others who are still missing, presumed dead, after being taken away by the dictator`s enforcers.

Yet nothing had prepared the family for seeing the horror of Mehdi`s end in the secret police film, which is available on a compact disk that sells on handcarts in bazaars all over Iraq. Dr. Moosawi, 50, hands copies of the CD to visitors to his university office, although he says he and most other members of the family, including Mehdi`s father, Salih, and his mother, Zeineb, have never been able to watch through to the film`s dismal end.

The CD shows Mehdi, sometime in 1985, emerging with two other young men from a white van, at what is said by the narrator to be an execution site in the flat, hot desert outside Baghdad. Their hands are bound behind their backs, and they have rags, in Mehdi`s case a green bandanna, for blindfolds.

A group of men led by Ali Hasan al-Majid — Mr. Hussein`s cousin, known as Chemical Ali for his role as commander of Iraqi forces that used chemical weapons to attack a Kurdish town, Halabja, in 1988 — stand at ease, cheering and clapping as the death sentences are read.

But these, it quickly becomes clear, are to be no routine deaths. The revolutionary court has condemned the three young men to hanging, the narrator says, because of their complicity in bombings that killed many people, including "women and children," in Baghdad. But President Hussein has ordered an exemplary punishment: that the condemned will be "blown to pieces," the narrator says, quoting from the document being read to the men in the desert.

One by one, the men are led forward to a mound of earth bulldozed as a sort of blast shield, and forced to sit down, cross-legged, on the ground. A man wearing a watch with Mr. Hussein`s face on the dial then approaches, slips a grenade into the breast pocket of each of the victims, then closes the pocket by securing it with white medical tape. A wire runs back toward the execution party, linked to a battery and a detonator.

Each of the first two men is blown apart within seconds, their dismembered bodies lying in the fold of the earthen mound as Mehdi, in a brown track suit top, is led forward to his end. As the grenade is fixed and the tape secured, his bandanna, around the lower part of his face, slips further. Moments before the end, he looks up to his left, a slight, lightly moustached young man with a look of terror in his eyes, and says four or five words to the man leaning over him. On the tape, the words are indecipherable.

Then the detonator is pressed, and Mehdi disappears in a cloud of smoke and dust. The execution party walks away, led by Mr. Majid, laughing and congratulating each other. Mr. Majid, who later commanded troops who occupied Kuwait in August 1990, is now a prisoner himself, captured by American troops in Mosul in August. He was No. 5 on the list of 55 "most wanted" members of Mr. Hussein`s leadership, and is likely to be among those, along with Mr. Hussein, who was captured himself on Dec. 13, who will face war crimes trials before Iraqi courts.

In the Dungeon

After 19 Years, Memory Still Stuns

Dr. Moosawi is a busy man these days. In his outer office at Mustansiriya University sits an American-trained Iraqi bodyguard with a pistol in his waistband, surrounded by dozens of petitioners seeking dormitory rooms, jobs as teachers and guards, scholarships and other favors that Dr. Moosawi can grant as the university`s chief administrator. He also supervises postgraduate students in physiology at the medical school.

By his own account he is a quiet man, scion of a prominent Iraqi Shiite family respected for lineal ties that reach back to the Prophet Muhammad, and to a school of Islam that emphasizes tolerance, humanity and progress.

But when he sat down to tell Mehdi`s story, and his own, he appeared to move into another world, speaking in a monotone that continued for two hours and more at a time, without interruptions from others in the room, without inflection or overt sign of emotion beside a gaze fixed on the carpet and the occasional wringing of his hands.

His descent into the gulag began at the University of Dundee, in Scotland, where he completed his doctorate between 1977 and 1984. They were years that bracketed Mr. Hussein`s ascent to the presidency in 1979, and the Iraqi attack that began the war with Iran in 1980, leading by 1988 to a million dead on the two sides. As Dr. Moosawi told it, he left an Iraq at peace, in the middle of an oil boom that financed great progress in education, medicine and other fields, and returned on holiday in 1981 to a nightmare.

"I had a problem with Saddam right from the start," he said, speaking in a sometimes rusty, slightly Scottish-inflected English. "There were all those wounded people from the war, with no medical attention at all. There was no care for the families of the soldiers killed. On the radio, there were these songs with words that talked of the war as your lover. I was confused. War means killing, war means death. How can it be your lover?

"Everything had changed. The attitude was, `Either you are fighting, or you are not an Iraqi citizen.` Everything was military, and everywhere the color was khaki. All your friends were in the army, or the people`s militia. A lot of bad habits had been initiated among the ordinary people, like cheating, telling lies and spying. Schoolchildren were encouraged to spy on their parents, and wives on their husbands, and of course this led to the destruction of the family."

Back in Scotland, Dr. Moosawi spoke to fellow Iraqi students of his contempt for Mr. Hussein. Then, in June 1984, he returned to Iraq.

The first sign of trouble came when the Health Ministry refused to certify his Ph.D., barring him from working. Then, in December 1984, he said, 50 armed men from the secret police burst into the home of his older brother, Salih al-Moosawi, Mehdi`s father, and arrested the two brothers, a cousin and two of Dr. Moosawi`s nephews, one of them Mehdi.

His vision blinded by blackened, wraparound glasses, Dr. Moosawi said, he was driven to the General Security Directorate, which was then scattered around a score of old buildings in one of Baghdad`s most historic sections and known as the White Palace, after a porticoed mansion once owned by a queen of Iraq. Long ago the houses had been owned by Jewish merchants; by the 1980`s, the Jews were all gone, and the mansions had been converted to interrogation centers.

"They said, `All of you have to be executed; all of you have to be destroyed,` " Dr. Moosawi said. " `None of your family has to stay alive.`

"Before we got in the car, a very bad man pointed his gun at me and said, `You are to be killed now.` An officer came out and said, `What are you doing?` and he said, `He swore against Saddam Hussein.`

"It was not true, of course. The officer told the man to put his gun away."

At the interrogation center, the men were taken down stairs into a pitch-black basement, then separated. Dr. Moosawi`s cell was just large enough for one man to sit, and two to stand, with an earthhole in the corner for a toilet. Mehdi was taken to another cell, and never seen again. It was bitterly cold and damp, Dr. Moosawi said, and women could be heard weeping somewhere in the dark.

Weeks passed, then months. Between interrogation sessions, the only contact with guards was when bread crusts were thrown into the cell.

"We didn`t know if it was night or day," Dr. Moosawi said. "I told my nephew and my cousin, `This is the time of our death, and we have to be patient, and strong.` "

Guards taunted them. "They said, `Well, you are a doctor,` " he recalled. "I said, `Yes,` and they laughed and said: `Forget about it. It`s all over for you. You will be buried here.` "

Finally, he was taken from the cell, up the stairs and into the presence of an officer, who told Dr. Moosawi he was to be released.

"Up the stairs I saw something I had forgotten, the sunlight," he said. "I thought, they will drive me to another place of execution. I said to the officer: `Would you do me a favor, please: execute me here. I don`t want to wait.` And he said: `Dr. Taki, you are my friend. Honestly, you will not be executed. You are free.` "

Later, Dr. Moosawi learned that an Iraqi he had met in Britain — a cousin of Mr. Hussein`s, though Dr. Moosawi says he did not know that — had visited his Baghdad home by chance, learned of his arrest, and intervened to have him released. Also freed were Mehdi`s father and the two other men, but not Mehdi. Dr. Moosawi`s name was placed on the secret police`s special watch list of potential traitors.

After the Dungeon

A Time of Searching, a Time of Hate

At home Dr. Moosawi found the women in black, mourning men they had presumed lost forever. Remembering that, he paused, and wept silently into a handkerchief. After a full minute, he resumed.

Eventually, Dr. Moosawi got a job teaching at Mustransiriya, but colleagues avoided him. Friends stopped contacting his family, except for a few who came late at night or telephoned using false names.

Payments were made to the secret police officer who promised to look after Mehdi. But asking about his whereabouts, at secret police headquarters and prisons, was dangerous. "We`d say, `Give him to us, and let us have a gun, and we will kill him,` " Dr. Moosawi said. "Of course, it was a lie."

Another war came in 1991, after the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and Mr. Hussein`s grip tightened still further. Economic conditions worsened under the United Nations sanctions imposed after the Kuwait invasion. Virtually the whole economy turned into a black market, controlled by Mr. Hussein and two of his sons. By the mid-1990`s, with the Iraqi currency thoroughly devalued, Dr. Moosawi`s salary as a full professor came to be worth barely $2 a month.

But he had something most Iraqis did not: a certain immunity to fear.

"I had learned, No. 1, that I wasn`t afraid of death; No. 2, that I wasn`t afraid of a hard life," he said. "I`d seen the worst, and I believed I should give as much as I can. I worked day and night at the medical school, and tried not to think about anything else."

A marked feature of Dr. Moosawi`s account was that for long periods he barely mentioned the name of the fallen dictator, as though unwilling to invoke it.

Now, nine months after the American occupation began, mass graves are being exhumed all across the country, and charges of war crimes and genocide weighed against Mr. Hussein, whose secret police, by estimates of Iraqi human rights groups, may have killed 300,000 to one million Iraqis.

Though American troops captured Mr. Hussein in a bunker near Tikrit, many Iraqis say privately that he still casts a long shadow, and that his loyalists, insurgents now, can still strike with ambushes, assassinations and roadside bombs. Dr. Moosawi said any killer could enter his office in the throng of petitioners, and that, for his family`s sake, he should be careful when saying anything about Mr. Hussein.

Still, the picture he painted of Iraq`s last years under the dictator suggested that Mr. Hussein`s psychological hold on Iraqis, through the terror, had eroded fast after the 1991 war over Kuwait.

"If you had come to me and asked me about Saddam Hussein a year ago, I would have told you that he was a hero, that the Iraqi people love him," Dr. Moosawi said, "because if I tell you the truth I`ll be finished. They will kill me."

But secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, Iraqis had decided, after Kuwait, that the dictator had to go. "After the war with Iran ended, with nothing gained and everything lost, people thought Saddam would become like a priest, that he would pay for what he had done by becoming a very good man. Then, in two years, he attacked Kuwait, and even people who had doubted it understood that the government of Saddam was against the people."

Secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, he began meeting with others at the university, forming the nucleus of a group of intellectuals who have since formed a society to work for a re-birth of Iraq. At home, a year ago, he and his family watched the drumbeat of yet another approaching war, this time with the Americans coming to overthrow Mr. Hussein.

Their fear, he said, was that President Bush would compromise with Mr. Hussein at the last moment, giving him a reprieve of the kind he gained when American troops stopped at the Iraqi border in 1991.

"We wished that Saddam would leave without a war, but unfortunately this didn`t happen," Dr. Moosawi said. "So we Iraqis came to a place where we said, `We will have to sacrifice something to have our freedom,` and the war fought by the Americans was the price."

When American advance columns arrived in Baghdad on April 9, he said, and appeared on television assisting in the toppling of Mr. Hussein`s statue in Firdos Square, there was joy among the Moosawis that there had not been since Mehdi disappeared.

"I went to my brother to congratulate him", he said, speaking of Salih, Mehdi`s father. "It was like we were dreaming. There were tears and smiles. Everybody was laughing and crying."

But in the months since, the mood among the Moosawis has soured, and not only because of the bitterness of learning, after weeks of visiting virtually every secret police station in Iraq, and scanning lists of political prisoners posted on lampposts and trees, that Mehdi would not be coming back. The Americans, Dr. Moosawi said, have failed the high expectations of Iraqis and have sunk so low in popularity that most cannot wait to see them go home.

"It is freedom the Americans have given us, but it is not good freedom," he said. "Yes, we wanted freedom against dictatorship, truth against lies, education and progress instead of pushing the intelligentsia down. But what have we got? There is no law, we live in the dark without electricity, there are no police to stop the thieves, nobody to control the traffic, no gasoline.

"In those respects, we say, `Things were better under Saddam.` "



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Siehe auch #11008

December 31, 2003
The Right Thing, at Last

fter an egregiously long delay, Attorney General John Ashcroft finally did the right thing yesterday when he recused himself from the investigation into who gave the name of a C.I.A. operative to the columnist Robert Novak. Mr. Ashcroft turned the inquiry over to his deputy, who quickly appointed a special counsel. There was little chance of a credible outcome for the investigation as Mr. Ashcroft had originally chosen to run it: under his personal supervision, using Justice Department lawyers whose futures are dependent on his good graces. Even the normal investigative units of the F.B.I. would have been cut out of the loop.

The change was announced by the newly appointed Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who turned the case over to a respected career prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago. Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column.

The operative in this case is the wife of Joseph Wilson IV, a retired career diplomat who wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times, published on July 6, that said the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence by asserting that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Africa in order to foster a nuclear weapons program.

There are still serious questions about the investigation, the most immediate of which is whether Mr. Comey will give Mr. Fitzgerald true operational independence. Mr. Comey must also allow Mr. Fitzgerald to use the full powers of a special counsel, including the ability to seek Congressional intervention if he finds his investigation blocked by a government official or agency.

We may never know what damage was caused by Mr. Ashcroft`s delay of nearly two months in taking the proper action. Further time will now be lost as Mr. Fitzgerald gets up to speed on the investigation. In his announcement, Mr. Comey said that Mr. Ashcroft was displaying "an abundance of caution" in recusing himself from the case. But that sort of care would have mandated the appointment of a special counsel from the start. Yesterday`s developments left open the possibility of what we feared all along: that Mr. Ashcroft`s extremely tight political bonds with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the chief White House strategist, inevitably conflicted with an investigation into whether someone at the White House, perhaps acting with institutional sanction, had revealed the name of a C.I.A. operative for political reasons.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

December 31, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Office Pool
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON

In last year`s office pool, for the second year running, I accurately predicted the best-picture Oscar winner. Forget all of the other predictions, which were varying degrees of mistaken; I shoulda been a film critic.

The multiple choices include one, all or none. My picks are down below. Do not save this page.

1. Next tyranny to feel the force of U.S. liberation: (a) North Korea; (b) Iran; (c) Syria; (d) Venezuela.

2. Iraq will (a) split up, like all Gaul, into three parts; (b) defeat the insurgents and emerge a rudimentary democracy; (c) succumb to a Sunni coup.

3. First to fall from power will be (a) Little China`s Chen Shui-bian, whose two-China campaign oratory on Taiwan is asking for trouble with Big China; (b) Pakistan`s Musharraf, double-crossed by his Islamist military; (c) the U.S.`s Bush, after abandoning fiscal restraint; (d) Russia`s Putin as his electorate miraculously awakens; (e) Cuba`s Castro.

4. Long-overdue exoneration will come to embattled media megastar (a) Martha Stewart; (b) Michael Jackson; (c) Kenneth Lay; (d) Pete Rose.

5. The economy will (a) see a booming 13,000 Dow and 3,000 Nasdaq; (b) grow more slowly as a weakening dollar drives up interest rates; (c) be rocked by the abuse of manipulative derivatives in hedge funds.

6. The fiction best seller will be (a) "Retribution" by Jilliane Hoffman; (b) "Confessions of a Bigamist" by Kate Lehrer; (c) "Flying Crows" by Jim Lehrer (presumably one of Kate`s husbands).

7. The nonfiction sleeper will be (a) "Inside — A Public and Private Life" by Joseph Califano Jr.; (b) Carl Zimmer`s brainy "Soul Made Flesh"; (c) Michael Korda`s biography of U. S. Grant; (d) Gertrude Himmelfarb`s "The Roads to Modernity."

8. The scientific advance of the year will be (a) age retardation enhanced by memory protection; (b) a single pill combining erectile dysfunction treatment with a fast-acting aphrodisiac; (c) neuroscientists` creation of a unified field theory of the brain; (d) the awakening of geneticists to the liberating study of bioethics.

9. Best-Picture Oscar: (a) Anthony Minghella`s "Cold Mountain"; (b) Edward Zwick`s "The Last Samurai"; (c) Clint Eastwood`s "Mystic River"; (d) Sofia Coppola`s "Lost in Translation"; (e) Gary Ross`s "Seabiscuit." (This is the category I`m good at.)

10. Bush`s domestic initiative will be (a) Social Security personal accounts; (b) community college scholarships; (c) a moon colony; (d) snowmobile restrictions in Florida parks.

11. The U.S. Supreme Court (a) will decide that the rights of alien detainees in Guantánamo have not been violated; (b) will deadlock, 4-4 (Scalia recused), in the Pledge of Allegiance case, thereby temporarily affirming the Ninth Circuit decision declaring "under God" in the pledge unconstitutional; (c) in Tennessee v. Lane will uphold a state`s immunity to lawsuits, limiting federal power in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

12. Howard Dean will (a) sweep Iowa and New Hampshire and breeze to a boring nomination; (b) lose to Gephardt in Iowa and do worse than expected in N.H., leading to a long race; (c) transform himself into the centrist, affable "new Dean"; (d) angrily bolt and form a third party if the nomination is denied him.

13. The "October surprise" affecting our election will be (a) the capture of bin Laden in Yemen; (b) the daring escape of Saddam; (c) a major terror attack in the U.S.; (d) finding a buried bag of anthrax in Tikrit.

14. Debating Cheney on TV will be the Democratic running mate (a) Wes Clark; (b) Bob Graham; (c) Bill Richardson; (d) Dianne Feinstein; (e) John Edwards; (f) Carl Levin.

15. The next secretary of state will be (a) Richard Holbrooke; (b) Paul Bremer; (c) Donald Rumsfeld; (d) John Kerry.

16. Israel, staunchly supported during the U.S. election year, will (a) build its security barrier including the Ariel salient and the Jordan Valley; (b) undermine Arafat by negotiating territory with Syria after Assad quiets Hezbollah in occupied Lebanon; (c) close down illegal outposts before "redeploying" settlers out of Gaza.

My picks: 1. (none), 2. (b), 3. (e) (I`ve made this yearly prediction for three decades and now is not the time to stop), 4. (a), 5. (all), 6. (b), 7. (a), 8. (d), 9. (c) (Make my day, Clint!), 10. (b), 11. (all), 12. (b), 13. (c), 14. (b), 15. (b) 16. (all). This last one is pure, unsourced thumb-sucking; Sharon didn`t return my call.


E-mail: [e-mail]



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

[DOLCETTO]

many thankxx for your support, checker

ich wünsche dir einen guten und phetten rutsch, sowie
ein gesundes, erfolgreiches jahr 2004

Rüspektgruß aus dem tiefen süden, ciao!

[Joerver]

Hi Dolcetto
freue mich von Dir zu hören.

Grüße zurück in die Hauptstadt der Bewegung und Dir einen Guten Rutsch, aber nicht wörtlich nehmen, außer Du kennst die Herkunft des Glückwunsches!

[DOLCETTO]

Joerver,

ein grosser schwarzer vogel hat mir von nördlichen
gefilden gezwitschert
und nun was aus einer anderen hauptstadt der bewegung:

The Streets of Your Town


As I walked around the streets of your town
Tryin` not to bring myself down
The jeers of the insane
Bounce like bullets off my brain,
The subway is not the underground.
Oh, New York City, goodbye!
Oh, New York City, goodbye,
Goodbye, New York City!
Number-People rush through the dawn
With their Number-People faces on.
Times Square is not the word
For the sucking, squeezing herd,
The subway is not the underground.
Oh, New York City, goodbye!
Oh, New York City, goodbye,
Goodbye, New York City.

As I walked around the streets of your town
Tryin` not to bring myself down
Stoned here I find
I almost lost my mind,
The subway is not the underground.
Yeah, now New York — New York City goodbye,
Oh New York City, goodbye,
Goodbye, New York City, I`m goin` home,
Oh, I don`t want to be in New York anymore, oh no.

[Joerver]

Howard Dean ist John Wayne

washingtonpost.com
Dean and the Duke


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, December 31, 2003; Page A19


I`ve got this Howard Dean problem, and it`s not that I think he`s George McGovern. Actually, I think he`s John Wayne.

And not just any John Wayne, but the Duke in his greatest performances, in some of John Ford`s later movies. I know -- it`s bad enough to tell my fellow liberals that I still have reservations about Dean, but to say that John Wayne was capable of great performances immediately subjects all my judgment and, perhaps, eyesight, to pitiless scrutiny. Nevertheless.

I have in mind the Wayne characters in "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." In these movies, Wayne plays historically transitional figures -- the ultimate tough guy who defeats the forces of darkness and disorder, in no small part by becoming, or just being, very like them himself, but for whom the forces of light then have no further use. In "The Searchers," he spends five years hunting down a Comanche tribe, and when he finds it, he scalps the chief. The conclusion of "The Searchers" sees Wayne heading off to wander in the desert as the door to his family`s home closes behind him. In "Liberty Valance," he guns down bad guy Lee Marvin -- and renders himself obsolete as soon as the smoke clears. With their safety secured, the townsfolk don`t need the Wayne character anymore; they go off and anoint the distinctly less rambunctious Jimmy Stewart as their hero.

At first glance the parallels between these Wayne incarnations and George W. Bush may seem more striking. Bush has Wayne`s swagger, his contempt for certain civilized norms. He`s a president for battle, but when it comes to thinking through how to build a community or a police force after the war is over, he`s as clueless as the Duke once the bad guys are dispatched. At this point, as John Ford clearly understood, you send for Jimmy Stewart.

But in Howard Dean, you don`t get Jimmy Stewart -- at least, not yet.

You get the Democrats` John Wayne, on a mission to hunt down George W. Bush in no small measure by becoming, or being, the Democratic candidate most like Bush. Dean has the Duke`s contempt for all those citified fellers -- the Washington Democrats -- who took forever to realize that Bush was gunning for them and never quite figured out how to fight back.

Alone among the Democratic candidates, Dean understood that the law hadn`t come yet to Dodge, that the party needed a tough guy who could unleash its long-suppressed animal instincts. And so Dean has pursued the same strategy that Bush has followed, but that his fellow Democrats have shunned: Cultivate the base. He gave the core Democrats, and the unaffiliated young, a meaningful vehicle to oppose the war and Bush`s shredding of the social contract at home and international alliances abroad.

While the Republicans under Bush have consistently catered to the right, Dean is the first Democratic presidential candidate in years to have reached out so clearly to his party`s liberal base.

And to that base, Dean`s appeal is as much personal as programmatic.

The Deaniacs love him for the enemies he`s made and his seeming determination to keep making them. He`s as pugnacious as Bush, and just as inclined to shoot from the lip -- less from misspeaking, I surmise, than from a sense that at times he needs to assure the zealots in his ranks. Like Bush, he can alienate millions of people at such moments -- for instance, his refusal to immediately swat down the cockeyed notion that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance -- but, like Bush, by so doing he displays a solicitude even to the most feebleminded of his backers.

All this has made for an absolutely brilliant 2003, with Dean soaring into what is likely an insurmountable lead in the fight to become the party`s nominee. The Democrats have needed a Wayne of their own, and there are signs -- Nancy Pelosi`s increasingly assured leadership of the House Democrats, for one -- that this toughness is beginning to take hold beyond the confines of Deanland. The question, though, is whether Dean can transcend his inner Duke. In 2004 the Democrats need a Jimmy Stewart, too, who can persuade the townsfolk that he`s not just good for battle but for building a better social order.

That doesn`t mean Howard Dean needs to move to what many in Washington consider the center. Dean`s well-grounded misgivings about free trade will certainly stand him in better stead in such key swing states as Ohio than will a New Democrat infatuation with a globalization that raises profits and depresses wages. But it does mean that Dean needs to find some Stewart-like magic that enables him to talk to Ohioans about family and security as though he were more of an old friend -- someone who champions their interests and feels at home in their culture. He doesn`t need to cultivate a drawl, but he needs to broaden his repertoire beyond the bark.

Even those of us who defend John Wayne`s acting, after all, never say that the Duke had any range.

[e-mail]



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

San Francisco, Monterey`s nearst big city, was exploding with new ideas about how to live.

The fragance of liberation(sic) hung in the air, like an ether haze waiting to be ignited by the spark that flew when radical student politics met the uncomplicated hedonism of rock`n`roll.

The Beatles` Sergeant Pepper album had been released a few weeks before the festival into a world pregnant with possibilites......

The streets were alive with the look, smell, sound, taste and feel of `mind-expanding` drugs, new music, experimental arts and sexual adventures and, trough 1966 and early 1967, the astronauts of inner space had danced to the music of pied piper band like Jefferson Airplan, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish at festivals and `be-ins all round the Bay.

Rock`n`Roll Babylon über das erste Festival in Monterey(CA)`It was a warm and wet June weekend in 1967.`

WOODSTOCK `69
Country Joe McDonald
and The Fish

Ich finde den Text aus dem Buch herrlich, zum weinen!
Bitte übersieh die Schreibfehler, ich mußte es abtippen.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

*************

Für den großen, schwarzen Vogel, der gezwitschert hat. Links geht es zum Terminator ~200m.

[Joerver]

SADDAM’S BROTHER JERMAINE SPEAKS OUT

Appears on ‘Larry King Live’

Saddam Hussein’s little-known brother, Jermaine Hussein, took to the airways last night to offer a spirited defense of his embattled brother on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

Jermaine Hussein, who had not been seen with his brother Saddam since the Husseins’ so-called “Victory Tour” at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, told Mr. King that Saddam was currently undergoing a “trial by media” and warned against a “rush to judgment” in his brother’s case.

“Larry, when I hear people talking on TV about my brother, I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Jermaine Hussein told Mr. King. “This is not the Saddam I know.”

Jermaine Hussein called accusations that the former Iraqi dictator persecuted thousands of Kurds “very hurtful,” adding, “Saddam Hussein would rather slit his wrists than do that.”

“Larry, Saddam would never do anything to hurt Kurds,” Jermaine Hussein said. “He loves Kurds.”

Jermaine added that, now that the U.S. has searched Saddam’s Presidential Palace for weapons of mass destruction, Saddam would never want to live there again.

“He might visit, but it’s not a home anymore,” Jermaine said. “It’s just a house now.”

In a related story, there was a shake-up in Saddam’s inner circle as the Iraqi madman fired his official spokesman and replaced him with Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaaf, the former Iraqi Information Minister.

Mr. al-Sahaaf will come on board with the imprisoned dictator after months of working as a media advisor to Hollywood actor Ben Affleck.

In a prepared statement, Mr. al-Sahaaf said, “Ben Affleck is a shoo-in for an Oscar for his amazing performance in ‘Paycheck!’”

**** NEW BOROWITZ BOOK AVAILABLE NOW! ****

Amazon.com is now shipping “Governor Arnold,” the new book by Andy Borowitz, for only $9.95. Buy your copy today!

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

=====================

THE OFFICIAL 2003 WHITE HOUSE CHRISTMAS CARD: FESTIVELY PATRIOTIC HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND FIRST LADY LAURA WELCH BUSH
For 2003, President and Mrs. Bush`s personal Christmas card list grew to include the most recipients ever – over 175,000 highly deserving Ranger and Patriot-Level campaign fund-raisers and corporate PAC donors representing all fifty states and every imaginable hue in the Caucasian color spectrum.
Printed on exquisite handmade paper pressed from genuine clear-cut redwood and sequoia pulp, each 2003 White House Christmas card is personally faux-signed by a perky, ink stamp-wielding intern who is 100% guaranteed to have never savored even a driblet of Presidential DNA jelly.

In the grand Christmas tradition of briefly pretending to dispense with classism, President and Mrs. Bush reluctantly permit all lesser Americans to gaze upon inferior digital reproductions of this priceless, limited edition

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[Joerver]

==============

====================

America`s need has never been so desperate.
Locked in the iron grip of the Bush administration, the United States is crying out for liberation. And who better to fulfill the promise of freedom than the wholesome and resilient lasses our men have fought for? It`s mere months until election day - that marvelous occasion when we finally get to send Dubya packing back to his stinking ranch, and return our nation to the greatness that is its rightful destiny. But first, we have to kick the bum out.

Now, you too can strike a blow for freedom...

========================
............................................................Thirteen beautiful women versus one hideous president.
It`s time to put the pleasure back into liberal politics!

What could be more un-American than that election-hijacking, economy-wrecking, war-mongering chimp George W. Bush? What could be more All-American than thirteen beautiful young women, exercising their first amendment right to thumb their nose at our bozo president? Clearly, these two opposing forces were bound to collide, and they do so beautifully in the lustrous, glossy color pages of this thirteen-month REGIME CHANGE COUNTDOWN CALENDAR! Each day counts off the number of days remaining until the moving vans pull up to the White House. And each month`s pages are liberally lavished with facts `n` figures about the failures of the Shrub administration.

For only $11.00 (plus $1.95 shipping), you too can experience the thrill of thirteen socially-conscious, stunningly-attractive young women escorting you through the weeks and months until inauguration day in January, 2005 - when America finally gets a real president again. Educational, entertaining, and socially responsible without being politically correct...all for less than a dollar per month!


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But wait - unfortunately for Shrub, there`s more!
A portion of the money we take in will be donated to worthy causes of the sort that give Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and company fits - pro-environment, pro-civil rights, pro-peace, pro-woman, anti-AIDS, and most especially ANTI-Bush.

http://www.babesagainstbush.com/main.html

[Joerver]

Revellers celebrate at midnight the New year of 2004 in Hong Kong, January 1, 2004. Revellers in the territory celebrated the New year with news of a better than expected unemployment rate and the fall of personal bankruptcies to their lowest level in two years, reflecting further evidence that Hong Kong`s economy is recovering more strongly than expected


Fire works light up over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to welcome in the New Year, January 1, 2004.Fireworks explode over the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge as part of new years celebrations, January 1, 2004. An estimated one million people lined the harbor foreshore to watch the fireworks display from the bridge to welcome the new year

[Joerver]

New Zealand First To See New Year In

Images By Selwyn Manning
Happy New Year From Auckland, New Zealand - Explosions sounded forth at midnight from Sky Tower in Auckland City, New Zealand, to herald in the New Year 2004. Up to 30,000 people had gathered around SkyCity anticipating a pyrotechnics showcase to wave goodbye to 2003 with a bang.

[hawkhead]

Guten Rutsch und guten Flug


Country Joe McDonald • An Untitled Protest

Red and swollen tears tumble from her eyes
While cold silver birds who came to cruise the skies
Send death down to bend and twist her tiny hands
And then proceed to target "B" in keeping with their plans
Khaki priests of Christendom interpreters of love
Ride a stone Leviathan across a sea of blood
And pound their feet into the sand of shores they`ve never seen
Delegates from the western land to join the death machine
And we send cards and letters.

The oxen lie beside the road their bodies baked in mud
And fat flies chew out their eyes then bathe themselves in blood
And super heroes fill the skies, tally sheets in hand
Yes, keeping score in times of war takes a superman
The junk crawls past hidden death its cargo shakes inside
And soldier children hold their breath and kill them as they hide
And those who took so long to learn the subtle ways of death
Lie and bleed in paddy mud with questions on their breath
And we send prayers and praises.

=======
Recorded at Sierra Sound Laboratories, Berkeley, November 1967
and Vanguard Studios, 71 West 23rd Street, New York City, 1968
Producer: Samuel Charters
Engineer & Sound Effects: Ed Friedner
Processed at Vanguard Studios, 71 West 23rd Street, New York City

Quelle:
http://www.well.com/~cjfish/index.html

[Joerver]

hallo großer schwarzer Vogel auch für Dich und Anhang einen guten Ab-und Anflug.
Ich habe mir die Doors mal wieder rausgesucht.
das nächste ist`light my fire`
und dann mein Lieblingsstück `the end`
THE END
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I`ll never look into your eyes...again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger`s hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There`s danger on the edge of town
Ride the King`s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he`s old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we`ll do the rest

The blue bus is callin` us
The blue bus is callin` us
Driver, where you taken` us

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...fuck you

C`mon baby, take a chance with us
C`mon baby, take a chance with us
C`mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin` a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin` a blue rock
C`mon, yeah

Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free
But you`ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end

http://www.davemcnally.com/Lyrics/TheDoors/Doors/

Für Dolcetto mußte ich meinen Telefonjoker einsetzen

[Joerver]

Fireworks explode over Malaysia`s Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, at midnight on January 1, 2004. Thousands of Malaysians gathered at the foot of the country`s landmark to celebrate the coming of the new year.

[hawkhead]

Auch dem grossen weissen Vogel einen guten Abflug!

[DOLCETTO]

die doors - oh man da tun sich abgründe auf

the end of this year >> passt hervorglänzend, Joerver!

und dann noch "riders in the storm" hinterher.......

ich wünsche dem weißen und dem schwarzen vogel einen
guten flug ins neue jahr

[Joerver]

Dolcetto
das sind keine Abgründe, das sind 30-40 Jahre Leben.
Früher James Brown und nun ans Ende denken.

[DOLCETTO]

it`s all right, checker

mista brown hat auch bei unsereiner eine stabile
aussagekraft >> ich geh jetz off mit

positive vibrations

[Joerver]

James Brown Sex Machine


Get up, get on up
Get up, get on up
Stay on the scene, like a sex machine

Wait a minute!
Shake your arm, then use your form
Stay on the scene like a sex machine
You got to have the feeling sure as you`re born
Get it together right on, right on

Get up. get on up

I said the feeling you got to get
Give me the fever in a cold sweat
The way I like it is the way it is
I got mine and don`t worry `bout his

Get on up and then shake your money maker
Shake your money maker.....

[Joerver]

Parthenon in Athens Fireworks explode over Guangzhou as revellers ring in the New Year in the capital of China`s Guangdong province January 1, 2004.


Fireworks explode above Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro Fireworks explode over the London Eye in central London


A storm of confetti fell just after the ball dropped to signal the start of the New Year January 1, 2004 as celebrants crowded the barricades in Times Square. Security at Times Square included thousands of uniformed and undercover police, canine units, radiation detection units and metal detectorsU.S. soldiers dance during the New Year`s Eve party at the recreation center of the main U.S. army barracks in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, some 250 km north of Baghdad, December 31, 2003.

New Year`s Eve in Times Square.

[Joerver]

Kill a rat
And 100 other things to do this year

Tim Dowling
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian

1 Divest yourself of everything that, as it turned out, really was just for Christmas: tree, gym membership voucher, fondness for mulled wine, new party shirt, large sack of hazelnuts, carols CD, goodwill towards men, paper hat. Remember that pets are not just for Christmas, unless they are sea monkeys.

2 Revise enemies list. Consider making up with any foes you have failed to vanquish thus far.

3 Repent. Every year has its own end-of-the-world predictions. A group called the Watcher Ministries has pegged 2004 as the year of the second coming, using complex calculations based on measurements of the Pyramid at Giza. Another apocalyptic number-cruncher named Clay Cantrell is more specific, setting October 17 as the start date for the Rapture. Australian doomsday prophet William Kamm, whose followers call him the Little Pebble, predicts the end of the world as we know it for Easter Sunday. In The Bible Code II: The Countdown, Michael Drosnin plumps for a June nuclear attack on New York City, touching off the third world war and hastening the end-time. One to keep your eye on.

4 Think about everything you failed to do in 2003. At the very least it will stop you focusing on all things you are failing to do in 2004.

5 Make new year`s resolutions for 2005. Experience the profound satisfaction of delayed self-restraint.

6 Keep your head down. In August a large comet will brush northern France, raining debris on the Earth before exploding over the Aegean. At least that`s what Nostradamus is predicting for 2004. Of course his lunatic quatrains have always been open to a certain amount of interpretation, but this is the central thesis of Comet of Nostradamus: August 2004: Impact!, a book which, it is widely predicted, will disappear off the face of the earth on September 1.

7 Scan the skies. We are expecting our closest encounter with an asteroid in the next 50 years on September 29, when the mysterious, turd-shaped Toutatis, or Asteroid 4179, swings by. Before you start wondering whether this is what Nostradamus had in mind, you should know that "close" in this context means four times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

8 Chuck out all your old opinions. It doesn`t hurt to start afresh every once in a while. For the first few weeks of the year, your only contribution to any conversation should be the word "huh". Eventually you will form brand new opinions based on the abject stupidity of other people`s opinions.

9 Get a PhD. The internet is full of diploma mills offering degrees in just about anything. Before the advent of top-up fees, £500 for a fake doctorate from the University of Royston Vasey might have seemed expensive, but suddenly it sounds jolly reasonable. One day we will all have them.

10 Erase your entire hard drive. Chances are this will happen at some point in the year anyway; this way you can make it feel like a liberating exercise instead of a terrifying crisis.

11 Age.

12 Celebrate the centenary of the New York subway system.

13 And Bloomsday (June 16 1904).

14 And Fifa.

15 And the banana split, Graham Greene, Salvador Dali and West Berkshire council.

16 Remain alert, but not alarmed.

17 Go and see the locusts. 2004 is the year that the 17-year locust emerges across the United States. Millions of them - they`re actually a type of cicada - will make a loud, creepy buzzing sound all summer, breed, and then disappear for another 17 years.

18 Monitor the US elections. The American presidential election is scheduled for November 2. Why not spend the week in Florida, soaking up the sun, seeing the sights and ensuring that no large boxes of uncounted votes go missing?

19 Attend the Athens Olympics, August 13-29 2004. Where else can you watch Iraq play Afghanistan at beach volleyball?

20 Compete in the Athens Olympics. Have an unusual talent? Born anywhere interesting? There could be a team and a sport with a vacancy to suit your skills.

21 Take an extra day. February 29, to be precise. 2004 is a leap year, the first since 2000.

22 Wake up every morning and say to yourself, "Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California." This will serve to remind you that you are living in a surreal dream world where your actions have no consequences.

23 Watch Euro 2004 in Portugal. England`s first match, against France, kicks off at 7.45pm on June 13.

24 Read the Hutton Inquiry Report, expected to be published on January 12

25 Kill a rat. 2003 was the year that the UK`s rat population outpaced the human population, but if we all killed one each they would be practically endangered. This is no time to be squeamish. If you already kill rats for a living, keep up the good work.

26 Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster, the Moog synthesiser and, according to some, the birth of rock `n` roll itself: both Bill Hailey`s Rock Around the Clock and Elvis Presley`s That`s All Right Mama were recorded in 1954.

27 Tell everyone you know that rock `n` roll actually dates from the 1951 recording of Rocket 88, written by Ike Turner, but often wrongly ascribed to Jackie Brenston, who did the vocals. Don`t forget to mention that the pioneering fuzzy guitar sound was caused by a damaged amplifier which fell off the back of a truck on Highway 61.

28 Indulge in the new rock `n` roll. No one can be sure what will officially become the new rock `n` roll of 2004, but current contenders include gout, pipe-smoking, nudity, Latin, hockey, wind power and fixed-interest mortgages. Competition to be the new black is also stiff, with blue, very dark grey, fat stripes, shiny and moss-covered all still in with a chance.

29 Ignore the 50th anniversary of Playboy magazine and the Guinness Book of Records.

30 Be a man. The term "metrosexual" is, at press time, very last year. The latest incarnation of modern masculinity is still being hammered out by trendspotters, but it appears men will have a choice between HyperBloke, post-Beckhamist and Cheddarosexual, a growing demographic of lactose-tolerant urban males.

31 Abandon all use of any of the following phrases, or any variations or puns based on them: cheese-eating surrender monkey, weapons of mass destruction, shock and awe.

32 Increase your debt load. If you happen to have some debt already, don`t do a thing; it will get bigger all by itself.

33 Load your entire CD collection on to your new iPod, then lose it.

34 Place a bet on Gordon Brown replacing Tony Blair as prime minister before 2005.

35 Go to the cinema to see Kill Bill Volume 2, Star Wars Episode III, Indiana Jones 4 and Superman 5. Be repeatedly disappointed.

36 Think about appropriate and engaging ways to commemorate 2004 in its guise as the UN International Year of ... wait for it ... rice.

37 Go off-calendar. 2004 is only 2004 if you accept the establishment`s Gregorian paradigm. The laid-back Julian model is a good 22 days behind; on the Chinese calendar you can wait until January 22 to ring in the year Monkey. Don`t let datist relatives and employers hold you back.

38 Suddenly lose all interest in the Darkness.

39 Memorise the names of the 10 nations that will join the EU on May 1: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Now with your eyes closed.

40 Turn 40, have a huge party and suddenly become keenly aware of your impending death (39-year-olds only).

41 Turn 50, say a lot of things about how 50 is the new 40, have a huge party and suddenly become keenly aware of your impending death (49-year-olds only).

42 Turn 100, and marry yet another blonde model a fraction of your age (Rod Stewart only).

43 Avoid the paintball world cup in Toulouse (July 4-6), where 120 teams from 30 countries are expected to participate.

44 See the El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery (February 11), the Jasper Johns show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (July 10) and the Bruce Nauman installation in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (October 12).

45 Celebrate the official downgrading of cannabis to a class C drug on January 29 in a manner that is unlikely to warrant prosecution.

46 Celebrate National Masturbation Month in May in a manner that is unlikely to warrant prosecution.

47 Enjoy the Six Nations Rugby Union Tournament (February 14-March 27), an experience sure to be enhanced by your new-found grasp of the rules.

48 Participate in National Be Nice To Nettles Week (19-28 May). Do not expect nettles to respond to this overture in any way.

49 Breathe a sigh of relief as the Ireland takes over the EU presidency from Italy today.

50 See His Dark Materials, a two-play adaptation of the novels of Philip Pullman, opening at the National on January 3.

51 Watch Nip/Tuck, the controversial American TV series about plastic surgery starring Joely Richardson, coming to British satellite television this winter.

52 Refuse all honours before you are offered them.

53 Introduce a tabloid version of yourself in the Greater London area. Remain broadsheet elsewhere for the time being.

54 Slowly reintroduce carbohydrates into your diet. You may have lost weight, but you look ill and you smell funny.

55 Read a book written for grown-ups.

56 Keep to yourself the belief that you are Britain`s answer to J-Lo.

57 See Newsnight: The Opera. This successor to Jerry Springer: The Opera, from the innovative Battersea Arts Centre, is tipped for the West End next year.

58 Become unattractively engrossed in the trial of Michael Jackson.

59 Get down on your knees and ask God just what the hell He thinks He is playing at.

60 Give up smoking. It`s bad for you.

61 Give up cod. There isn`t any.

62 Give up playing the guitar. You`re annoying everyone.

63 Having read the copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves you found in your stocking, feel free to punctuate with amusing imprecision!

64 Stop telling people that, where you come from, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the punchline of a much dirtier joke.

65 Donate your 15 minutes of fame to someone who wants it more.

66 Instead of complaining, listen to what spammers are trying to tell you: you need cheaper insurance, prescription drugs, lower heating bills and a bigger penis.

67 Accept that giving 16-year-olds the vote will probably not stop them setting fire to the swings.

68 Do the one thing that separates us from the animals: write thank-you notes.

69 Sue Catherine Zeta-Jones.

70 Change your mobile phone ring tone to a ringing noise.

71 Stop thinking of Libya`s Muammar Gadafy as an unstable and dangerous lunatic; he`s a principled and courageous statesman now.

72 Accept that buying loads of stuff that you cannot afford will never make you happy, and that it`s just something you have to do to keep the economy afloat.

73 Say, "Hey! Whatever happened to Tatu?"

74 Send Saddam Hussein a card on his 67th birthday, on April 28. Don`t put a stamp on it just yet.

75 Forswear reality television.

76 Accept that echinacea doesn`t do anything except taste bad.

77 Have your property valued frequently, even if you have no intention of selling it, and even if you don`t own it. Wasting estate agents` time isn`t just amusing; it`s a civic duty.

78 Hang up as soon as the phrase "double glazing" is mentioned.

79 Make yourself a T-shirt that says: "No, I do not have a fucking Nectar card."

80 Find Osama bin Laden.

81 Put in a bid for the Daily Telegraph.

82 Stop watching property programmes in the vain hope that the people who buy the houses, do them up very badly and then sell them on will have their greed and stupidity punished by disastrous financial losses. It never happens.

83 Shop at Morrisons instead of Safeway.

84 Go to Code Orange.

85 Go back to Code Yellow.

86 Go briefly to the one that is right below Yellow, but then decide that Yellow is probably a more accurate reflection of your ongoing threat level after all. Stand by.

87 Buy Metallica`s soon-to-be-released DVD box set, Live Shit, Binge & Purge, for the title alone.

88 Buy all your Christmas presents for next year in the January sales. Eventually decide to keep them all.

89 Make up the scandals for next year: Williamgate, Honourgate, Top-upgate, Saddamgate, Nigellagate. Award yourself a point for each one you get right.

90 Give up reading newspaper lists of 101 things to do. Even the best ones run out of steam at about 75.

91 Stop watching Saturday morning children`s television. If it was really meant for you, you would have heard of the bands they have on.

92 Look fondly back on 2003, and wonder why you can`t remember anything that happened before August.

93 Get gay-married. Outrage conservatives and grammarians alike.

94 Clean out the car.

95 Let go of the whole Lord of the Rings thing. It`s over.

96 Accept the profound implications of life being discovered on Mars. Or of lots of rubbish spaceships crashing on Mars.

97 Drink the night away under the proposed new licensing laws, but not in a bingey way.

98 Celebrate the 25th anniversary of Idi Amin`s downfall, the winter of discontent, and St Lucian independence.

99 Go back to work.

100 Be wise but not too worldly, tolerant but not naive, generous but not gullible, careful but not cautious.

101 Send me a pound.

102 und mir nen Euro.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

This man can survive shark attacks
Howard Dean`s party rivals scent blood, but he`s still unscathed

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian

The presidential party of the party that doesn`t hold the White House is like a ghost party that miraculously springs to life in the January of election year. It exists apart from the congressional party and often against it, and it does not proceed through the tortuous path of legislation but a swift and unforgiving campaign. Though the curtain is just rising on 2004, the action is near the end of the first act.

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, arrives at his position as frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination by outpacing three successive alternative frontrunners. Paradoxically, the fire concentrated on him has only bolstered him.

Dean`s frankness has been accompanied by apparent gaffes - for example, his remark that the country is not safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein, a stunning event that reversed President Bush`s poll slide. In a double whiplash effect, the other candidates, who had been trying to persuade Democratic voters that, while they had initially supported the Iraq war, they were against it all along, repositioned. "Dean will melt in a minute once Republicans start going after him," charged Senator Joseph Lieberman. Dean "makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact that he is not well-equipped to challenge Bush," said Congressman Dick Gephardt. "I don`t think (Dean) can win either," added Senator John Kerry. Every time Dean makes an artless comment, his opponents see blood in the water. There may be blood, they may be sharks, but he emerges unscathed.

Since 1968, when Eugene McCarthy shocked President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the establishment candidate has been vulnerable to an insurgent. The case for strategic voting has without exception never worked. In 1992, Bill Clinton, under attack for evading the draft during the Vietnam war, was excoriated by his rival, Senator Bob Kerrey: "I`m not questioning (Clinton`s) patriotism, but I guarantee Bush will in November," Kerrey warned. "The Republicans will exploit every weakness" and Clinton "will get opened like a soft peanut."

By calling attention to Dean`s boldness (or rashness) without any effectual action of their own, Dean`s rivals are underscoring his fusion of acceptable political credentials as the only governor in the race who is also the insurgent. They appeal to a mythical establishment to stop him, setting themselves up as the establishment. But the unions are split, with some of the most powerful backing Dean; African Americans have no obvious candidate, with many leaders backing Dean; elected officials are widely diffused, with many behind Dean; Al Gore has endorsed Dean; Jimmy Carter is quietly helpful; and the Democratic national committee is peripheral.

Yet Dean`s opponents continue to promote him as the anti-establishment candidate, an image fitting Democratic voters` notion of the primaries: a referendum on their view of political reality. Why trust Bush and the Republicans, the conservative establishment ruling a one-party state?

The intensity among Democrats may appear to result from the debate over Iraq, but its roots go back to impeachment and Florida. Then, after 9/11, Bush betrayed the bipartisan consensus that had supported the Afghanistan war by smearing the congressional Democrats as unpatriotic. With that, in the 2002 midterm elections, he took back the Senate, rendering them impotent. The Democrats` illusion of good faith had disarmed them. They had behaved as though they were dealing with the elder Bush. Iraq, even for most rank and file Democrats who favoured the war to depose Saddam, is understood as an extension of the anti-constitutional strategy of the Republicans` ruthless exercise of power.

The sin of the "Washington Democrats" in the eyes of Democrats isn`t simply their fecklessness; it`s that they have appeared as appeasers. Whether Dean or another Democrat can win the war is another war. But the first requirement for becoming the wartime leader is to understand that there is a war.

Lieberman has declared that Dean is not in the mould of Clinton in 1992, as though attempting to repeat the past makes a New Democrat born again. But Dean`s pragmatic strategy may be another version of that which Clinton adopted after he suffered the loss of the Democratic Congress in 1994. By defining his position apart from the rightwing Republicans and the "Washington Democrats", as he calls them, Dean has reinvented triangulation.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US has got wrong men, Iraqi families claim
Americans accused of letting many real culprits of Saddam`s regime go free, while `most wanted` were tortured

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian

The families of senior Iraqis captured by the US since the fall of Saddam complained last night that their relatives had been wrongly identified as important members of the regime and that some had been tortured while in custody.

In interviews with the Guardian, the families said that their relatives had been held without charge for as long as eight months, and that their only contact with loved ones was through Red Cross letters.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, for them to get a fair trial because the US had refused to allow them to see lawyers, they added.

American troops have so far captured or killed 42 of the original "55 most wanted" members of the ousted Iraqi regime - including Saddam Hussein - who were emblazoned by the US on a pack of playing cards.

Last night, however, relatives claimed that many of the 55 had not committed atrocities during the Saddam years, while others who were, in fact, to blame had escaped American attention.

The prisoners have been classified as "security internees" and are now believed to be in a high-security US military prison at Baghdad international airport.

And the relatives claimed that, although conditions have now improved, US troops tortured several prisoners during the first days of interrogation.

Yesterday Mohammed al-Faysal, whose father Sa`ad al-Faysal was formerly Iraq`s ambassador to Moscow, said he was baffled by his detention.

His father - number 55 on the list, and the three of spades - was recalled by Saddam days before the war broke out and made a Ba`ath party commander, following 30 years abroad as a diplomat. US troops arrested him seven months ago, together with his nephew.

"The person who interrogated them was from Lebanon. He asked my cousin what his relationship with my father was. They kept him in detention for two weeks. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and keep in a dark room with no light. It was very hot. They tortured them by making them raise their arms in the air for several hours until they fainted."

He added: "My cousin heard screaming sounds coming from the next room. He didn`t know whether this was real or the sound from a tape."

The Pentagon denies using torture on the 5,000 Iraqi prisoners who have been rounded up since the US-led invasion of Iraq, though it does admit using sleep deprivation.

Last night Badie Arief Izzat, a senior Baghdad lawyer who represents 20 of the most wanted 55, claimed that at least one detainee who was subsequently released had been beaten up while in US custody.

"They kept him in a small dark room with his arms in the air. When they were sleeping a US soldier came in and started to kick the prisoners," he said.

Mr Izzat, who has been contacted by Saddam`s daughters to discuss their father`s defence, said none of the "most wanted" had been allowed access to a lawyer.

He had raised the issue with Paul Bremer, the Bush administration`s top official in Iraq, but failed to get a reply.

"This kind of justice isn`t very different from Iraqi justice under Saddam," the lawyer complained.

Several letters sent by prisoners had gone missing following a bomb attack on the Red Cross`s Baghdad office in October, which forced the organisation to pull out of Iraq, he added.

· At least two people were killed and 16 wounded yesterday when Kurdish gunmen opened fire on a demonstration in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

The demonstrators had been protesting against Kurdish plans to include the ethnically divided city in a new Kurdish federation.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Heath feared US plan to invade Gulf
Owen Bowcott
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian

Ted Heath`s government feared - at the height of the 1973 oil crisis - that the White House was planning to invade Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to secure fuel supplies, according to Downing Street files released today.

Suspicions about Richard Nixon`s administration, the documents show, were reinforced when the prime minister was only belatedly informed of a worldwide nuclear alert declared by the US.

The files released under the 30-year rule, expose a disturbing and acrimonious episode in "the special relationship" between London and Washington.

In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war, America blamed Britain for failing to open its military bases. The defeated Arab nations then imposed an oil embargo on the west.

The US defence secretary, James Schlesinger, told Britain`s ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, "it was no longer obvious to him that the US could not use force".

Schlesinger had already clashed with Lord Carrington, the defence secretary. The ambassador`s interview was no more amicable. "Couthness is not Schlesinger`s strong point," he said in a cable to London. "One or two of his remarks bordered on the offensive."

In mid-November, Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, warned that if the Arab oil embargo continued unreasonably and indefinitely, America would have to decide what counter-measures were necessary.

In the grip of an international security crisis, Heath commissioned a report from Percy Cradock of the joint intelligence committee.

The 22-page survey, delivered to the prime minister in December, warned that the most likely US military action was the seizure of oil-producing areas. Such a move might be triggered by a resumption of the Arab/Israeli war and protracted oil sanctions.

"The United States might consider it could not tolerate a situation in which the US and its allies were at the mercy of a group of unreasonable countries. We believe the American preference would be for a rapid operation conducted by themselves to seize oilfields.

But it was the full-scale nuclear alert - declared on October 25 that year, supposedly in response to Soviet fleet movements - which most infuriated Ted Heath.

The prime minister, the documents reveal, only learned about it from news agency reports while in the Commons.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Das Duo infernal bis 09/10. This is the end my friend, the end!


Blair says his job is only half done, hinting at third
term as PM until 2010
By Paul Waugh Deputy Political Editor
01 January 2004


Tony Blair suggested yesterday that he will remain Prime Minister until 2010 as he vowed in a New Year message not to "falter with the job only half done".

Having already spent six years in office, Mr Blair`s remarks werre his strongest signal yet that he intends to carry on at Downing Street for a full third term. If Labour wins the general election expected in 2005, a further six years would mean seeing out a whole parliament, surpassing Margaret Thatcher`s record of 11 years in the job.

The Prime Minister`s allies are wary of Mr Blair`s promise to "go on and on", but stress that controversies such as Iraq and public sector reform have not dimmed his appetite for the job. In his message, Mr Blair underlined his determination to ensure that reforms were seen through to their conclusion, however great the opposition.

Labour MPs are threatening a rebellion over university top-up fees next month, but Mr Blair said he was "confident" that they will make it through Parliament. "Britain is poised to become one of the most successful 21st-century nations," he said. "And I am as committed, as optimistic, as determined today as I was in 1997 to see through the reforms that will make it happen.

"This is no time to turn the clock back, no time to coast, no time to falter with the job only half done. I relish the challenge ahead and I am confident that in partnership - Government and people - we can take the next important steps forward in 2004." On variable tuition fees, Mr Blair said the more people addressed the real choices in delivering a fair system of student finance, "the stronger the support for our proposals". He added: "I am confident in our plans - free at the point of study, fair at the point of repayment - and believe we will get them through.

The theme of Mr Blair`s message was that difficult decisions taken by the Government were "beginning to pay off". Mr Blair said the work being done by British service personnel in post-Saddam Iraq held the prospect of a brighter future for the country and the region. But again, the job had to be seen through to the end.

"The capture of Saddam Hussein was a vital milestone on the road to a stable Iraq," he said. "Constant progress on essential services like electricity and water are sure signs that life in Iraq is slowly going in the right direction. In 2004 we must stick to the task. There will be no better signal for the Middle East or the world than a democratic, prosperous Iraq replacing a tyrannical, brutal dictatorship."

In his New Year message, Michael Howard, the Tory leader, accused Labour of being addicted to over-centralised government. "The Conservative Party enters the new year in good heart, united in its purpose to offer the British people an alternative government," he said. "In 2004, our task will be to speak up for millions of our fellow citizens who, though living in a first-class country, often have to put up with second-class services."
1 January 2004 12:34



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Absolut lesenswerter Artikel!

Said Ghazali: Arab problems require an Arab solution
We blame only others: at times we seem almost to revel in the role of persecuted victims
01 January 2004


The inability of Arab leaders to draw the right lessons from Saddam`s rise and collapse - after all, he was one of the Arab dictators himself - leads me to contemplate the sterility of their regimes.

Although Saddam`s intolerance and brutality was well known in the West, it came as news to millions in the Muslim world who had been deluded by the regime`s pan-Arab slogans, which described him as the knight of the Arabs. But Iraqis, as well as the citizens of the other 21 Arab countries, have long yearned for freedom, democracy, progress, and modernisation.

The American soldiers, even with their sophisticated weapons, cannot achieve this goal by force. Democracy is the product of social, economic and political change. But the American occupation could help to shed light on the Arab world`s own weaknesses.

After more than five decades of living under the Arab regime system, we have reaped only wars, occupations, poverty, corruption and oppression. The 300 million Arabs, from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, have no rights, no freedom, and no hope. Their regimes are too often corrupt and defensive. And the ordinary Arab is too often over-sensitive, paranoid and irrational.

In the third millennium, this vast land has become fertile ground for fundamentalism. The unholy coalition of the Arab dictatorships and the growing fundamentalism of the peoples they rule hamper modernisation and progress, while the Arab League, dogged with endless divisions, is an empty shell incapable of solving the deep problems of the region.

Two Arab countries Iraq and Palestine are occupied. Two others, Sudan and Algeria, live in chronic civil war. Somalia is not a country any more. Egypt is hungry. Syria is a big slogan. Lebanon is fragmented by sectarian conflicts. Jordan is a beggar. Saudi Arabia is sterile and reactionary.

The oil of the Arab countries has become a curse. For 35 years, Muammar Gaddafi squandered the oil-derived affluence of Libya on developing weapons of mass destruction, sending armies to neighbouring countries and stupidly getting involved in terrorist activities. His sudden capitulation has had the same damaging effects as the humiliating capture of Saddam Hussein in a spider`s hole.

But the correct conclusions should be drawn by rational thinkers in the Arab world: there is no middle class to introduce positive changes; our best educated citizens are serving in the world`s best universities and institutions; the Arab world has no independent media and no workable judicial system to enforce the rule of law; our parliaments are rubber stamps.

Since the American soldiers set foot in Iraq, not a day passes without strong condemnation of the occupation. We have been assaulted by tides of analysis from Arab commentators exposing the negative goals of the US. Any talk by Americans about freedom and democracy, as in George Bush`s speech in Britain, has been strongly dismissed. But few of the commentators, who are university academics, ex-generals and top former officials, have pointed to our own ailments. We only blame others: it is the fault of the West; it is the fault of the US neo-conservatives; it is the fault of the Jewish lobby. At times we seem almost to revel in the role of persecuted and occupied victims.

There is no serious discussion about the clash between modernisation and fundamentalism. But these are the real problems that perpetuate the Israeli occupation and which paved the way for the new American occupation. Our reaction to the US invasion was tribal, because the Arab regimes have little idea how to react beyond a series of vague sound-bites.

It is true the governing council in Iraq is a puppet in the hand of Americans; but Iraq is not ruled now by a dictator, like the rest of the Arab countries. There is debate among Iraqis. They are discussing a constitution, and the outcome might not be completely negative. Iraqis should work for having a real democracy under the sovereignty of law. They should not let America take their oil, or deprive them of their sovereignty. They should have their own army, to defend the country and not invade its neighbours.

But Arabs must stop dwelling in the past. They should reinvigorate their societies by shaking the rule of dictators, by modernising Islam, by revitalising the forces of enlightenment. America, despite its flaws, has helped the Iraqi people to get rid of a most brutal regime. On the other hand, as the most recent UN development report on the Arab world pointed out, the oppressive internal security laws enacted by the US since 11 September 2001 against resident Muslims - not to mention some of the military operations carried out against Iraqi civilians - give an excuse to Arab regimes to be even more repressive towards their own citizens.

The Arab nations should conclude that, as long as Arab dictators rule unchallenged by the masses, there will be more occupations, more oppression, more poverty, and more slavery - which is worse than occupation. The anti-occupation struggle must not divert us from diagnosing our own chronic weaknesses We have yet to challenge the forces of darkness pushing us backwards when we desperately need to go forwards.

The writer is a Palestinian journalist resident in East Jerusalem
1 January 2004 12:40



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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The Occupiers, As Ever, Are Damned Either Way - Especially When The Innocent Die

Robert Fisk in Baghdad

31 December 2003: (The Independent) Cigarette sellers don`t have names. They said he was called Fouad but even the shopkeeper whose nephew drove the wounded, screaming man to hospital didn`t know his family name.

There was just a pile of crushed Marlboro boxes and a lot of blood that had poured from his half-severed arm when the bomb went off in the middle of Karradah. It was aimed at the Americans of course, and, as so often happens, the Iraqis paid the price. None more so than the man in black trousers and white shirt who was torn apart by the explosion and whose crushed body was dragged off on a wooden cart. Another day in the life and death of Baghdad. As always, there were the odd little ironies of violence. The dead man - and nobody in Karradah knew him because he had arrived in a taxi - was on his way to the local bank to change currencies, from the old dinar notes with Saddam`s face on them to the new dinars with the ancient Iraqi mathematician Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haitham in place of the captured dictator.

In one sense, therefore, the dead man had been making his way from "old Iraq" to "new Iraq" when he died. A café owner called Anwar al-Shaaban - the living always have names - thought the man might have been called Ahmed.

Then there was Yassir Adel. He was a 12-year-old schoolboy and he was taking his two brothers to school when the bomb exploded in the centre of the crowded highway. "The American patrol had just gone past and one of their vehicles was blasted over the road," he told me with a maturity beyond his years. "It`s like that here these days - every day."

I recognised the grocery store on the corner. In the last days of the Anglo-American invasion in April, I had bought my eggs and water here and I remember hiding with the owner behind his counter when an American jet flew low down the street and bombed a building at the far end.

Yesterday - eight months later - his eggs were a grey-yellow sludge, the plastic water bottles flooding the shop, the owner muttering to himself as he knocked the splinters from his window frame.

A group of US troops and members of the new, hooded "Iraqi Civil Defence Force" - a militia in all but name - turned up afterwards in those all-too-vulnerable Humvees. Their comrades had been the target and within an hour they were handing out coloured pamphlets - produced for just such an occasion by the occupation authorities - which some of the shopkeepers, sweeping their shattered glass into the street, threw into the gutters in anger.

One showed a group of children, with the legend: "The terrorists and troublemakers are putting bombs on both sides of the roads and highways and they don`t care about who gets hurt ... You, the citizens of Iraq, hold the key to stopping this violence against your people." But to people blasted by just such a bomb, this was a heavy sell. "The terrorists wish to make anyone a victim - women, children, mothers, fathers," the leaflet said. "These terrorists care about nothing except fear and darkness. Their aim is to destroy your new freedom and your self-government [sic] ... Tell the police and coalition forces about any information you have."

It was a bad time to ask the people of Karradah to be collaborators. The insurgents who are cutting down young American lives every daydo not care if Iraqis die in the attacks, but everyone knows that the Americans are the targets - which the leaflets failed to mention. And indeed, the explosives were hidden in the centre of the highway. There had been a gap in the concrete central reservation for cars to turn left onto the street from a side road. Someone had re-sealed the gap with stones and placed the bomb beneath them. When the first American patrol passed, that same someone had set off the bomb - and missed the soldiers. Did he see the man with the dinars crossing the highway in his black trousers and white shirt? Did he see Fouad the cigarette salesman with his Marlboros? No doubt he did.

But one young man walked up to me and blamed the Americans. "At least under Saddam there was security - now we are afraid to go to work," he shouted. "At least under Saddam, the innocent didn`t suffer."

I disputed this. He knew this was a lie. But another, older, educated man arrived. "We were better off under Saddam," he said. "No, we were not free, but you have brought us anarchy." Even the old Shia lady in black, buying lemons from the stall on the other side of the street cursed the Americans.

It was the same old story of every foreign occupier: damned if you do and damned if you don`t - especially when the innocent die.

Copyright: The Independent.

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UK Charity Seeks Compensation Over "Lost" Cancer Drugs For Iraqi Children

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

30 December 2003: (The Independent) A British charity for Iraqi children is demanding that the Government repay almost £100,000 to its donors after nearly half its shipment of medicines ­ including vital cancer drugs ­ was lost by the British Army after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
Despite assurances by the British military commander in Basra that the medical supplies, valued at £201,410.98, would be safely delivered to five paediatric hospitals, Medical Aid for Iraqi Children (MAIC), a registered charity, says doctors at Iraqi hospitals found almost 50 per cent of the value of its supplies had gone "missing". In a statement the charity said it was "seeking compensation of £98,784.49 ­ the value of the medical supplies lost".

"Many children, especially cancer patients, went without treatment," the charity said. "It is very probable that many other children who could have been saved lost their lives due to the lengthy delay and significant loss of medical supplies."

British military authorities have been unable to account for the disappearance of the supplies and their correspondence with the charity, which begins with assurances that the medicines would be safely delivered, slowly retreats from these promises and then complains about the "disappointing" tone of MAIC`s complaints about their failure to account for the missing medicine. A subsequent letter from Baroness Amos, when she was Secretary of State for International Development, states ­ wrongly ­ that there was "some uncertainty" about the Baghdad hospitals which were to receive the medicines, adding that British troops had "a lot of competing priorities" to manage.

May Daftari, of MAIC, has expressed her outrage to both the Army and the Government. "We are most concerned about this significant loss of medical supplies, especially at a time when war injuries were rife and need for medicines were paramount," she said.

"Cancer patients who are dependent on our regular supplies of anti-cancer drugs were deprived of vital treatment."

The consignment of supplies, including cancer drugs for children, surgical items, baby milk, crutches and wheelchairs, were sent to Iraq on 1 May, less than three weeks after American troops entered Baghdad, on board Sir Richard Branson`s much-publicised Virgin humanitarian flight to the southern city of Basra.

Correspondence shows that Ms Daftari sent details of the hospitals in Baghdad ­ the Mansur Teaching Hospital, the Central Paediatric Teaching Hospital and the Qadisiyah Hospital, as well as the Children`s Hospital in Karbala and the Paediatric Hospital in Basra ­ to Virgin on 30 April, when Sir Richard Branson praised MAIC`s "generosity and quick response" to the emergency in Iraq.

Two days later, Colonel John Graham, of the medical branch of the 1st Armoured Division, thanked MAIC for its "generous donation of medical aid" which was received at Basra airport on the Branson flight. "You will be pleased to hear that we were able to arrange immediate safe storage of the medicines and equipment," he wrote. "They will be moved very shortly to the intended recipients." By 19 May, Ms Daftari had become worried. One of the doctors in Baghdad waiting for the medicine had learnt that at least two of the deliveries had not arrived. "As a British charity," she wrote to Colonel Graham, "we also need hospital receipts to assure our donors in the UK". That same day, Colonel Graham e-mailed MAIC to say the "kit" for Baghdad was still in Basra but it would be moved to the capital on the next C-130 transport aircraft.

Ms Daftari replied on 28 May that the MAIC board felt "great concern" that cancer drugs valued at £95,123 could be damaged by heat. She repeated the names of the five hospitals expecting the supplies.

Colonel Graham replied more than two weeks later that the heat-sensitive drugs had been stored at the medical warehouse in Basra but that the medicines for Baghdad had been flown to the capital "between 24 and 31 May", to be distributed by "Korean Food for the Hungry".

By 23 June, Ms Daftari was faxing Colonel Graham to say that, despite his assurances, the medical supplies had still not been supplied to the Baghdad hospitals. On 10 July, she wrote again to Colonel Graham to say 30 per cent of the supplies in the list of medicines were missing when delivered to one Baghdad hospital. "You kindly assured us ... that our supplies ... would be delivered to the pre-assigned hospitals," she wrote. "We had full trust in the British Forces that they would arrange the safe distribution of all our supplies. Unfortunately ... we have not received ... hospital receipts for the delivery of our supplies which I have requested several times in my faxes to you."

A reply came three days later from a Colonel E B Carmichael ­ his address was "Headquarters Multinational Division (South East), Operation TELIC II" ­ saying Colonel Graham had left Iraq, but claiming that "at the very outset no undertaking was given that medical supplies could readily be moved to Baghdad at that moment in time ... My predecessors did not receive any receipts that I am aware of and I am not optimistic that I will ... to expect these medical supplies could be delivered with a clear audit trail [sic] in an insecure and challenging environment where looting was occurring is simply unrealistic."

This is the first reference in British documents to the looting that British troops permitted in Basra after their occupation of the city. Ms Daftari had made no mention of this. But Colonel Carmichael had not finished. "Could I point out," he wrote, "that I find the tone of your recent fax and the implied criticism disappointing to say the least ..."

A letter from the Department for International Development on 9 July claimed there was "some uncertainty about which four [sic] hospitals" the supplies were intended for, adding that British forces in Basra had "a lot of competing priorities to manage". It also stated "all the drugs and supplies have now arrived at their intended recipients in Baghdad". The charity says this is untrue.

Copyright: The Independent

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The stroke of midnight on New Year`s Eve in Times Square in New York.


Belagerungszustand in New York.

January 1, 2004
The City Can Tighten the Reins, but There`s No Stopping the Party
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Helicopters swept the sky, and clusters of police officers stood guard on street corners. But for revelers in Times Square, the New Year`s Eve countdown was about party, not panic.

With the nation on a heightened terror alert, security was tight throughout the city. In Times Square, where people began gathering in large numbers early yesterday afternoon, police officers looked through backpacks and checked celebrants with metal detectors.

Even so, revelers streamed into Times Square for the time-worn tradition. Though there was no official crowd count, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the numbers were high.

"We`re going to have a record crowd tonight, they are backed up to Central Park," he said as he left dinner at a Times Square restaurant.

Even so, some vendors and regulars to the celebration said the crowd — which city authorities expected to reach 750,000 — looked thin.

"This year it`s much smaller," said Tony Greiss, manager of the Roxy Delicatessen on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets. .

Most celebrants interviewed last night said they did not associate the countdown with a fear of terrorism.

Still, the increased national terror alert — which was raised to the second-highest level 10 days ago by the federal government — did cast a shadow. It was a reminder, revelers said, of the attack on New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Now there`s a fundamental concern that wasn`t there before," said David Scott, who lives in Midtown. "Something happens at the end of a countdown. If there`s no boom after a `tick, tick, tick,` you`re left still waiting for it to happen."

Later last night, throngs of people slowly filled holding pens along Seventh Avenue and Broadway in the 50`s.

Some of those pens appeared empty, but a police officer controlling the flows said some pens were being kept empty on purpose.

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said crowds reached as far north as Central Park.

"It`s part art, part science," he said of the crowd estimates.

Though the celebration was more guarded than it has been in past years, the celebrants were no less merry.

"Festive, very festive," said Srini Masanem, 37, a financial consultant who was taking photographs of passing revelers with his cellular phone. "I came here to feel the mood."

But there had been naysayers. Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who is chairman of a terrorism subcommittee, in said an interview on Tuesday that he wouldn`t go to Times Square "for anything."

Mr. Tompkins responded with a sharply worded jab yesterday.

"I think the likelihood that three-quarters of a million people are going to take the suggestion and just stay home for New Year`s Eve is about as likely as Paris Hilton deciding that her New Year`s resolution is to become a nun," he said.

Indeed, thousands came from other cities and countries to celebrate in the city. Matt Allard, 19, from St. Paul, Minn., said he briefly considered not coming to New York to celebrate, but then changed his mind.

He found a dark humor in the terror alert and the tall orange hats of the celebrants.

"Maybe the hats are orange because of the orange alert," he said. He had been standing for hours, and added that "at least if something happens, I`ll get to sit down."

Rohith Ramamurthy, 25, a computer science graduate student at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, took the security in stride, as he was searched and checked with a portable metal detector.

`If we are not searched, or don`t react to a strange person, a strange sound, then it would be forgetting about 9/11," he said.

"Thousands of lives were lost, and we need to be careful. If this is necessary, so be it."

Some dismissed the terror alert as political maneuvering that had no base in fact.

"The danger from people being drunk was a lot worse than any terrorist threat," said Mike Hermanski, who lives in Midtown and said he was on his way to a house party.

But others, like Mr. Masanem, did not make light of the threat. He witnessed the attack on the World Trade Center from his downtown office building, andhe said he would never forget it.

"What happened there was real," he said. "It`s not silly at all. It`s a very serious thing."


Reporting for this article was contributed by Janon Fisher, Jason George, Colin Moynihan and Howard O. Stier.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Bevor Las Vegas bombadiert wird, will ich mein Geld wiederhaben.
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas

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[Joerver]

January 1, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What We Will Do in 2004
By COLIN L. POWELL

WASHINGTON — As we Americans turn the last page of our calendars, many of us are moved to review the achievements of the year gone by and to make resolutions for the year ahead. This can be a frustrating business if one dwells on subjects like exercise and dieting, but the twin task of stock-taking and resolution-making is a worthy discipline — and not just for individuals.

We in the Bush administration have also taken stock and made resolutions. We do so with confidence because President Bush`s vision is clear and right: America`s formidable power must continue to be deployed on behalf of principles that are simultaneously American, but that are also beyond and greater than ourselves.

We resolve, of course, to expand freedom, and we are focused in particular on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Afghan people now have a constitution, a rapidly advancing market economy, and new hope as they look toward national elections. The aspirations of a free and talented Iraqi nation are also taking wing, now that Saddam Hussein`s murderous and dangerous regime is no more. We are working to return sovereignty to the Iraqi people through a fair and open process and to ensure that the country receives the maximum feasible debt relief. As the Coalition Provisional Authority closes its doors on June 30, in accord with the Nov. 15 transition plan, we will open an embassy in Baghdad.

While our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq will continue in 2004, we are resolved as well to turn the president`s goal of a free and democratic Middle East into a reality. We will expand the Middle East Partnership Initiative to encourage political, economic and educational reform throughout the region. We will also stand by the Iranian people, and others living under oppressive regimes, as they strive for freedom.

This struggle will not be confined to the Middle East. We are working for the advent of a free Cuba, and toward democratic reform in other countries whose people are denied liberty. And we are resolved to support the young democracies that have risen in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The consolidation of freedom in many new but often fragile democracies will shape the aspirations of people everywhere, assuring that the 21st century will be a century of liberty worldwide.

Our efforts will apply to individuals as well as nations. In 2003 we freed thousands from oppression through President Bush`s program to combat human trafficking — whether for prostitution or forced labor or to turn children into soldiers. We have saved lives and redeemed the enslaved, and we will do more in 2004. Also in 2004, the president`s plan for H.I.V. and AIDS relief will help free millions worldwide from the devastation of this horrible disease.

We resolve to promote prosperity, too. A new international consensus is helping poorer countries develop themselves through good governance, sound economic, trade and environmental policies and wise investments in their people. The centerpiece of our program for development, to be started in 2004, is the Millennium Challenge Account — an incentive system that makes assistance contingent on political and economic reform.

We also made important strides in 2003 toward a more open international trade and investment climate, signing free trade pacts with Chile, Singapore and the countries of Central America. In 2004 the president will lead the effort to reinvigorate our global free trade strategy, and to advance regional and bilateral free trade as opportunities arise. His proposal to develop a Middle East free trade agreement is high on the agenda.

We are resolved, as well, for peace. Freedom cannot flourish and prosperity cannot advance without security, and this we are determined to achieve. Americans are safer as 2004 begins than they were a year ago. Afghanistan is no longer a devil`s playground for terrorists, nor is Iraq an incubator for weapons of mass murder that could have fallen into terrorists` hands.

Al Qaeda remains a great danger — the main reason for our current heightened security posture. But its members are increasingly on the run, in hiding, in jail or dead. Its finances and communications are being disrupted, and closer intelligence and law enforcement cooperation among peace-loving countries is making headway against terrorist plots.

Iran has felt our sustained pressure and that of our allies to come clean on its nuclear weapons program, and has begun to do so. And Libya has renounced terrorism and weapons of mass destruction thanks to the president`s robust counterproliferation strategy and bold British and American diplomacy. In our own hemisphere, narco-traffickers and terrorists are on the defensive thanks to strong United States support for a resolute Colombian government.

The war on terrorism remains our first priority, but success in that war depends on constructive ties among the world`s major powers. These we pursue without respite; America`s relations with Russia, China and India all improved in 2003. Ties with allies old and new have been strengthened as well, despite the growing pains of adjustment to a new era. Indeed, both NATO and the European Union will expand this year, which is good news for international security.

Our partnerships remain strong as do the institutions of international cooperation. We will rely on both to advance freedom, prosperity and peace in 2004. As we work to restore a liberated Iraq to its people, we invite the United Nations and the international community to help Iraqis establish a new citadel of free minds and free markets in the Middle East. With our NATO allies we will support the Afghan people as they heal their wounds and chart their future.

With China, Japan, Russia and South Korea we will continue to tackle the problem of North Korea`s dangerous nuclear weapons programs. We seek peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula, but we will not reward threats from Pyongyang or provide incentive for blackmail. With our quartet partners — the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — we will help Israelis and Palestinians achieve peace, so that a free Palestine will exist alongside a secure and democratic Jewish state in Israel.

We are resolved, too, to share the burden to bring longstanding conflicts in Sudan, Liberia, Northern Ireland and elsewhere to an end. Such achievements will build momentum for the success of American diplomacy worldwide.

Freedom, prosperity and peace are not separate principles, or separable policy goals. Each reinforces the other, so serving any one requires an integrated policy that serves all three. The challenges are many, for the world is full of trouble. But it is also full of opportunities, and we are resolved to seize every one of them. If some of us drop a few pounds in the process, that`s O.K., too.


Colin L. Powell is secretary of state.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Ein wenig Lebenshilfe, aber ob die WaPo zählt. Ne Liste der Times ist wohl wichtiger!
Einige Grausamkeiten, die in sind: Cointreau, Der Gröpenfuhrer(Schwarzenegger),Barry Manilow.
washingtonpost.com
THE LIST
What`s Out and In for 2004?

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 1, 2004; Page C01


Here`s your List for 2004, and it`s been 100 percent metrosexualized by yet another bossy sissy. We`d stick around and explain it to you, but everything on our List has already (already?!) been griped about and refuted on somebody`s smarter-than-thou blog. (Drat!)

So we`ll be down in the spider hole if you need us, with our neat new friend Scarlett Johansson (in!) or maybe Elijah Wood (out?), hiding from Fox News, orange alerts, the next 50 Cent album and that creeeeepy-looking Mel Gibson Jesus movie. We`re also dodging any more essays about Paris Hilton and/or the effect of the celebutante on modern culture. It`s safe down here -- no Blaster worms, flu superstrains or Karl Rove. Plus we have time to write children`s books, practice our frog march, unstitch the cholo monograms from our cigarette pants, and work on our robot. (Our girl robot.)

You can handle it from here, and if you can`t, there`s always Google.

Like the banner on the big boat says, Mission Accomplished! Cheers, queers.

OUT

SKANKY

UNDERCOVER

REMIXES

SNOWBOARDING

LETTING YOUR BOYFRIEND VIDEOTAPE IT

THE NBA

MARTHA STEWART LIVING

BELVEDERE

ROCAWEAR

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

MTV2

HILTONS

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE

GOURMET COTTON CANDY

JESSICA LYNCH

FLAT HAIR

SPIKE JONZE

GLACEAU VITAMIN WATER

THE STROKES

MUTUAL FUNDS

"ELIMIDATE"

CLAY AIKEN

"JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY" T-SHIRTS

BOBBI BROWN BEACH BODY OIL

MINI COOPER

CELEBRITY CRIME

OVERSCHEDULED KIDS

BLEACHED DENIM WRINKLES

GRADY LITTLE

"28 DAYS LATER"

POWERPOINT

PAPARAZZI

TRUCKER HATS

AVOIDING ALBACORE

HOMELAND SECURITY

FRIENDSTER CLIQUES

JIMMY FALLON

ZIPZAP CARS

WIRE-FU FIGHT SCENES

BACHELORS

JACKASSES

SIEGFRIED & ROY

JOHN MAYER

LETTUCE-WRAPPED HAMBURGERS

JIMMY CHOO

PAUL SMITH THROW RUGS

THE WHITE STRIPES

JOSH HARTNETT

JENNIFER GARNER

DAVID BECKHAM

SUSHI

SEGWAY

"SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE"

"THE MATRIX"

"SUH-WEET!"

LISTENING TO COLDPLAY

"K STREET"

VON DUTCH

TINY DOGS

"NIP/TUCK"

SHARPIES IN THE END ZONE

JAMES CARVILLE

MARTHA BURK

TEN PENH

INFANT GREENS

YELLOWCAKE

VIAGRA

BOTOX INJECTIONS

DONATELLA VERSACE

KIDS WHO READ "ERAGON" BOOKS

SAYING SOMETHING IS "NE PLUS ULTRA"

COMBING THROUGH ITUNES

FLASH MOBS

ADIDAS

ENORMOUS SCARVES

JACK NICHOLSON

BACHELORETTES

BANDS WHO LOOK LIKE BLONDIE

"RICH GIRLS"

SONDHEIM

US WEEKLY

"WHILE YOU WERE OUT"

Ab hier ist IN

LOVELY

NON-OFFICIAL COVER

GUITAR SOLOS

KITEBOARDING

LETTING A MAJOR NETWORK VIDEOTAPE IT

AND-1

SANDRA LEE SEMI-HOMEMADE COOKING

COINTREAU

THROWBACK JERSEYS

DER GROPENFUHRER

FUSE

OLSENS

BRITISH TELEVISION

HOMEMADE MARSHMALLOWS

SHOSHANA JOHNSON

WAVY HAIR

SOFIA COPPOLA

POM WONDERFUL

THE SHINS

GOOGLE`S IPO

"LINGO"

BARRY MANILOW

TANK TOPS WITH YIDDISH SAYINGS

LUSH BACK FOR BREAKFAST SHOWER GEL

SCION XB

"CELEBRITY POKER"

UNRESTRICTED PLAYTIME

BAKED DENIM WRINKLES

STEVE BARTMAN

"30 DAYS OF NIGHT"

HANDOUTS

HELICOPTERAZZI

INTELLECTUALIZING THE TRUCKER HAT DILEMMA

FINDING NEMO

SOCIAL SECURITY

STEPFORD WIVES

JACK BLACK

BEYBLADES

CATFIGHTS

AVERAGE JOES

BADASSES

SUDDENLY SIEGFRIED

JACK JOHNSON

CHEESEBURGER-FLAVORED FRIES MADE OF MEAT

HOLLY DUNLAP

TODD OLDHAM LA-Z-BOYS

WHITENING STRIPS

GAEL GARCIA BERNAL

MISCHA BARTON

FREDDY ADU

CRUDO

HONDA RUCKUS

"MY MILKSHAKE BRINGS ALL THE BOYS TO THE YARD"

METRICS

"CRISP!"

MARRYING COLDPLAY

"AVENUE Q"

ORIGINAL PENGUIN BY MUNSINGWEAR

HAIRLESS CATS

"THE O.C."

CELL PHONES IN THE END ZONE

GOLLUM

CODE PINK

BUCK`S FISHING & CAMPING

ICEBERG LETTUCE

HAFNIUM

LEVITRA

TOE REDUCTIONS

VIKTOR & ROLF

KIDS WHO READ "HIS DARK MATERIALS" BOOKS

SAYING IT`S "SUI GENERIS"

SUBSCRIBING TO ACTIVAIRE

HOWARD DEAN MOBS

Y-3 BY ADIDAS

UGG BOOTS (WARNING: EXPIRES FEB. 7)

BILL MURRAY

QUIRKYALONES

BANDS WHO LOOK LIKE THE ALLMAN BROTHERS

"NEWLYWEDS: NICK AND JESSICA"

KUSHNER

THE STAR

"CLEAN SWEEP"



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Die Silvester-Berichterstattung läuft bei der WaPo unter `Homeland security `

Celebrations and Precautions
At New Year`s Eve Events, Terrorism Fears Mean Extra Security
By Dan Eggen and Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 1, 2004; Page A01


Revelers in Washington and New York rang in the New Year peacefully amid some of the tightest security restrictions in U.S. history, as authorities in major cities throughout the nation dispatched fighter planes, sharpshooters and thousands of police officers to guard against a feared al Qaeda terrorist attack
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46396-2003Dec…
Mehr Meldungen zur Sicherheit auf der Seite.

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

Wie wird Schwarzenegger entscheiden.

COMMENTARY



The Death Penalty: A 1% Nonsolution to Crime
By Jeff Gillenkirk

January 1, 2004

We are a people of ritual. We string up Christmas lights against the darkness, trim the wicks on menorahs, break the fasts of Ramadan, gather our clans for sumptuous feasts. In the midst of this season of ritual, another evocative pageantry has been added — the execution of a prisoner. One week before Christmas, San Diego Superior Court Judge William Kennedy set a date for the killing of Kevin Cooper by the state of California, in what would be the 11th execution since 1978 and the first since January 2002.

Now another familiar ritual begins — the ritual of society gearing up to execute a man. First, a menacing mug shot of the convicted murderer appears. Then comes the litany of gory details of the crime: the defendant`s frustrated claims of innocence; the anger of the victim`s family; the hopes of the defense lawyers; the certainty of the prosecutors.

As we get closer to the actual killing, we`ll see profiles of the condemned man as an abused child; the anguish of the victims` families awaiting final justice; dramatic, last-minute legal appeals to the Supreme Court; the clemency petition to the governor and his anguish over his power to administer death — and his solemn acquiescence to justice. We will read descriptions of the condemned man`s last meal; the strap-down on the gurney and insertion of the needles; the phone on the wall that may ring at midnight; the final expiration of breath; the pronouncement of death; and the sad retreat of hundreds keeping vigil outside the gates of San Quentin.

This is how it will be. It always is.

Kevin Cooper was convicted of killing four people in Chino Hills in 1983. It was a gruesome crime. Four people were hacked to death with an ice pick, a hatchet and an ax. They included a 10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy; an 8-year-old boy was left to die. In that same year in California, just 24 people received the death penalty — about 1% of perpetrators — all of whom still sit on death row.

Those who adamantly support the death penalty argue that all murderers — not just 1% — should be executed. But justice, while ostensibly blind, must also be discriminating.

Death penalty proponents claim that the ultimate punishment is reserved for the "worst of the worst." Those selected for death, however, are usually not the worst of the worst. Like Cooper, who was adopted, abused as a youth and caught in a downward spiral of menial sales jobs and botched burglaries, they`re usually poor and unable to afford a decent attorney. A distressing number are mentally retarded. A study compared California`s death penalty system with the Illinois findings that led that state`s governor to commute the sentences of 167 death row inmates to life without parole and it found California`s system surprisingly similar — lacking basic safeguards such as videotaped interrogations or standardized DNA testing. "California`s system is seriously flawed and dangerously unjust," the author concluded.

But the date for Cooper`s execution has been set: 12:01 a.m., Feb. 10. Death penalty supporters argue that Cooper`s killing will deter others from committing murder, though this is a matter of faith rather than fact. No study has ever quantified a link between motivation and murder statistics.



People like John DuPont, Erik and Lyle Menendez and others with resources are never the ones strapped to the gurney and offered as victims to soothe our primitive fears.

But Cooper will be. The execution of the 1% is designed to assure us that our criminal justice system is dealing effectively with crime. Except it`s not, as the recent rise in the FBI`s crime statistics shows.

A far more effective punishment for murder is life without the possibility of parole, which has been doled out to more than 2,700 convicted killers in California since 1977. Only two have been released — after being found innocent. But something much more primitive in us reacts to the cues each time an execution rolls around. The crime scene is described again, our blood pressure rises, someone must pay. So get ready. After the tree is down and the menorah packed away, we`ll begin the new year with another ritual — the killing of the 1%.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Gillenkirk is on the board of directors of Death Penalty Focus, which advocates abolition of the death penalty.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Keine Bilder aus L.A. und San Francisco.



A couple embraces in front of the International Fountain at the Seattle Center as fireworks erupt from the Space Needle to signal the start of the New Year. (January 01, 2004)Filipinos look at a fireworks as they welcome the New Year in front of a lantern-made palace in downtown Manila



About 450,000 people celebrate the New Year near the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris early Thursday.Russian girls toast with champagne and light sparklers as they celebrate New Year at the Red Square in Moscow.

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Wednesday, December 31st, 2003
A Review of 2003 With Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Katha Pollitt, Martin Espada, Michael Parenti and Aarti Shahani

Watch 256k stream http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2003/dec/256/d…

Modem, ISDN:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/31/1539246
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As 2003 comes to a close, a small number of stories dominate the headlines and newscasts of major media outlets. The Michael Jackson and Koby Bryant cases, the Mad Cow Scare, the nine democratic candidates for president verbally assaulting one another. But there is one word that characterizes 2003 more than any other—war. The war abroad and the war here at home.
On the international front, as the Bush administration expanded its occupation and war in Afghanistan, it intensified its battle to sell a war against Iraq. The American public was bombarded with stories of the grave danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Administration officials spoke of mushroom clouds and smoking guns. In his January State of the Union address, televised across the world, President Bush accused Iraq of attempting to procure uranium for a nuclear weapons program, an accusation that was the lynchpin of the administration’s justification for war. Though the administration was eventually forced to retract the charge after former US ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson blew the whistle , the damage was done.

On March 20 at approximately 5:35am Baghdad time, the Bush Administration unleashed what it bragged was a shock and awe campaign, raining bombs and missiles down on Iraq. US forces poured across Iraq’s borders, bombing and shooting their way toward Baghdad and other cities, accompanied by cheerleading journalists, who were embedded with the forces. At the onset of the invasion, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said “One of the things that we don`t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we`re going to own that country." Dan Rather of CBS said, “Good morning Baghdad.”

The 24-hour news coverage on the networks was dominated by an endless string of current and retired generals and other military figures. Many news outlets broke away from the commentaries of the generals only to go live to official briefings at the Pentagon, State Department, White House or Central Command in Doha Qatar. It gave new meaning to the term “general news.” But most of the rest of the world saw a very different picture. International news agencies, most prominently Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language networks, showed the real face of war—the civilians trapped under the bombs, the hospitals, the women, children and men killed by US missiles. The overwhelming majority of people and nations in the world were against the war before it began, and the civilian consequences increased the outrage.

Though US forces encountered unexpected resistance from Iraqis in the south and north, Washington’s massive military power could not be stopped.

On April 8, in one of the most televised moments in history, US forces pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad. The American public was inundated with images of jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets as they dragged the statue’s head around the square. What was not reported was that there were only a handful of Iraqis at the event, who had been brought in by the US forces. In reality, most of the 150 or so people in the square that day were journalists and soldiers. Some of the Iraqis in the square that day were later identified as agents of the Iraqi opposition figure Ahmed Chalabi, who has a long history of working with the CIA. But none of this mattered to the generals and pundits on the networks, as they praised the operation for its swiftness and success.

On, May 1, in a highly orchestrated event that many viewed as a film shoot for a Bush election campaign ad, the president landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Behind him hung a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” Since then, 340 soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq, the vast majority of the more than 475 killed since the invasion began.

Bush has banned the media from filming the return of caskets to the United States and has yet to attend a single funeral for a soldier killed in action during his time in power. US soldiers are being killed on a daily basis in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as resistance to the occupations increase. But the heaviest price has been paid by the civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq alone, some estimates put the number of civilians killed at more than 9,000.

2003 was also a deadly year for journalists. In Iraq, more than a dozen journalists were killed, some of them clearly targeted by US forces. Tariq Ayoub, Al Jazeera’s correspondent was killed outside of Jazeera’s office. The Pentagon knew it was the agencies Baghdad headquarters. In the same attack, the Baghdad offices of Abu Dhabi TV were also hit, though no journalists were killed.

The office of the Reuters News Agency at the Palestine hotel in Baghdad was hit by a rocket launched by US troops. The attack killed 2 journalists and wounded several others. It was a well known fact that the Palestine was home to scores of journalists—in fact almost all of the unembedded journalists in Baghdad. Later in the year, a veteran Reuters cameraman, Mazen Dana, was killed as he filmed US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Pentagon spokespeople later said they mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Today on Democracy Now!, we are going to look back at 2003, a year defined by war, invasion, occupation and resistance. Later in the program, we will be speaking with Noam Chomsky, with Katha Pollit of The Nation magazine , author Michael Parenti, Aarti Shahani of Families for Freedom and poet Martin Espada. But first we go all the way across the world to Australia, where it is already 2004. We are joined by veteran filmmaker, author and journalist John Pilger.


John Pilger, journalist and filmmaker. His latest documentary is titled "Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror." He is speaking to us from Australia where the New Year has just arrived.

Katha Pollitt, she writes a bi-weekly column “Subject to Debate” for The Nation magazine. Her essays and poems have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Glamour and The New York Times, among other places. She is the author of the book Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture and Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism. Her latest column in the Nation is titled "Good News for Women."

Martin Espada, poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he teaches creative writing, Latino poetry, and the work of Pablo Neruda. Sandra Cisneros calls Espada the “Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Others have called him “The Latino Poet of his Generation.” He is the winner of the American Book Award, among other honors. He is the Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Aarti Shahani, organizer with immigrant advocacy group Families for Freedom.

Michael Parenti, author of several books including The Terrorism Trap, To Kill A Nation and Democracy For the Few. His most recent book “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People`s History of Ancient Rome” has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and the author of over 100 political books including the recent book "Hegemony or Survival: America`s Quest for Global Dominance." [Archived Democracy Now! shows featuring Noam Chomsky]
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 [phone].

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Web lets Palestinian children find world beyond refugee camp
By Robert Fisk - 31 December 2003

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?st… (Full Story)

There are 32 children in the class, all Palestinian, all new experts on the internet. Qassem Sa`ad, a small man with a neat brown moustache, is proud of them and not without reason. Noisy they may be, but enthusiastic they obviously are. And bright.

Where do they all come from, I ask? And the answer, of course, is not Lebanon - even though they were born there. "Safad," says one. "Hitin." "Tabaria." "Shafa`am." "Nimerin." "Sminya," says a little girl wearing a scarf. All are towns that are - or were - in what is present-day Israel.

These children - and dozens of others - are beneficiaries of a project by Save the Children UK, one of the three charities this newspaper is supporting in this year`s Christmas Appeal for Forgotten Peoples. Though they live in Ein al-Helweh, Sidon, the biggest and arguably the poorest refugee camp in Lebanon, these children now have their own website, called Eye-to-Eye. When The Independent correspondent admits that he does not use the internet, there are roars of laughter. Palestinians 1, Fisk 0.

Through the website, the children of Ein al-Helweh can talk to children elsewhere in the world. They talk to schoolchildren in Wales, to child workers in India - in a glass-bangle factory near Agra, which sounds, to be frank, an awful lot like being a Palestinian refugee child. They talk to their friends in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. One has found relatives amid the vastness of Ukraine. The introduction to the website is carefully phrased, and Save the Children has gone out of its way to avoid the usual claims of bias. "Save the Children UK recognises the political issues and sensitivities surrounding the current crisis in the Middle East," it says. "Our sole concern is to safeguard the rights and lives of all children, wherever they live." It condemns "explicitly and strongly ... any act of violence against children on both sides".

But through the site children are learning that there are 7.5 million Palestinians, of whom 4.5 million are refugees, that more than 50 per cent are under 15 and that "it is more than 50 years since the first exodus of Palestinian refugees".

According to Save the Children`s website the UN decided in 1947 to divide up Palestine into two states: a Jewish state and an Arab state and "the Arab states were not happy with this plan". They could say that again. About 800,000 of the Arab population fled their homes "to avoid the fighting". But Save the Children are honourably trying to tell the Palestinian story.

The website has a quotation from the UN General Assembly`s unbinding resolution 194, which demands that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbours" should be permitted to do so; this, of course - rather than the right to a homeland of indeterminate size - is the new focus of dispute in any Middle East talks, the reason why both Israeli and Palestinian extremists condemned the recent Geneva Accord signed by unelected representatives of both sides.

And Save the Children is bold enough to point out some hard facts. The Israelis, they say, have closed off "islands" of Palestinian territory, and Palestinians "can`t leave their own area to go to school or hospital in another area ... Many Palestinians do not have safe, clean water to use ... because the Israeli settlers who live in the settlements can take the water from the Palestinians".

Yet such adult perspectives are merely the framework for the project. Its point is to allow the children to speak themselves, directly, without any interlocutor. On their website the children post photographs of their daily lives in Ein al-Helweh. They take part in photographic competitions. A girl called Nisreen has written of how her parents have the old British mandate documents proving their home is in Palestine, not in Lebanon.

I ask them to tell me who they blame for their lives as refugees. A boy puts his hand up. "The Israelis," he says. Did they all agree? A girl`s hand goes up. "Palestinians," she says, setting many heads nodding. An older boy interrupts. "I blame the Arabs," he says. Bright children, these. Could there be better pupils for Save the Children to help?

go to top



http://www.robert-fisk.com

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Bush was told the second tower was hit (9-11-01)




One minute 15 seconds after Bush was told the second tower was hit




Four minutes 45 seconds after Bush was told the second tower was hit





Why did Bush just sit there?

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NO FUTURE

Predictions for a Crucial Year
NEW YORK--People say it every December but for once it`s true: the year ahead will be a crucial one for America. The 2004 elections will offer voters a discrete choice between two possible futures, each offering benefits and pitfalls. Should the Republicans and Bush prevail, the radical reforms enacted under his first term--a shift of power away from Congress toward an increasingly imperious presidency, the transition from European-influenced secular democracy to Third World-style theocratic police state, perpetual war--will take on an air of institutional permanence. The neoconservatives` vision of the United States (aggressive, unilateral, despised and feared) will slowly but surely replace the 20th century ideal of the American nation (strong yet slow to anger, generous, democratic and freedom-loving).

On its face a Howard Dean victory would be even less appealing in the short run. Fiscal austerity in the wake of Bush`s tax giveaways would require difficult spending cuts and tax increases. Engineering a withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, two pointless and unaffordable wars, would suck up time and money. Terrorists might mistake reasonableness for weakness and strike more aggressively at American targets. The real benefits of a Dean victory--a stronger economy, improved international relations, maybe a solution to the healthcare crisis--might not become feasible until after the post-Bush clean-up, during a second term.

So who`s going to win? Will the U.S. become the new Evil Empire? Are things going to improve in Iraq? Predictions are for saps, but what the hell. Here`s what, failing the inevitable, unforeseeable events that can and will change everything, I see happening during the coming year. Clip this column and bury it in a time capsule under a begonia, then dig it out next year to see how well I played the role of Cassandra.

The Democratic Nominee: Howard Dean, hands down. He`s leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, and 32 percent of Democratic National Committee members say they support the former Vermont governor. (Gephardt and Kerry get 15 and 14 percent respectively.) Not even a gaffe can stop him now. He got where he is by speaking off the cuff; no one will hold anything he says against him. Unfortunately, defending himself from primary opponents with no chance to win and nothing to lose will leave him bloodied and tens of millions of dollars poorer than Bush in the general election.

Riots in New York: It won`t disintegrate into Chicago `68-style anarchy but the Republican convention, scheduled for early September at Madison Square Garden in order to coincide with 9/11 anniversary ceremonies at Ground Zero, will be a singularly ugly affair. More than 200,000 protesters are expected to converge on the capital of American liberalism to scream at delegates wearing those silly elephant hats. The NYPD will deploy shock-and-awe tactics to stop them, bloodying nightsticks and claiming a few lives.

Continuing Jobless Recovery: Though overpriced and fiscally reckless, the $1.8 trillion in tax cuts will continue to prime the pump of corporate recovery. The Dow will keep rising, perhaps as high as 12,000 by November. But a recovery isn`t worthy of the name unless it creates good, high-pay, high-benefit jobs--and that won`t happen. Due to three years of recession and the export of jobs overseas, there just isn`t enough disposable income in the pockets of the average American to fuel the two-thirds of the economy directly dependent on consumer spending. No matter what, the unemployment rate won`t drop below 5.2 percent.

Karzai`s Last Year: Regardless of whether Dean or Bush wins in the fall, Hamid Karzai`s tenure as puppet president of Afghanistan will end in 2004 or 2005 (I`m betting the latter). Ironically, his last year will be characterized by unprecedented optimism for the future. Scheduled elections will be held on time, and Karzai will win. Modest rebuilding projects, the beneficiaries of a (U.S.) election-year funding boost, will finally begin. But Karzai`s pet Trans-Afghanistan oil and gas pipeline project, as Asia Times says, remains on hold "basically because Afghanistan remains a country at war." Since the rump Afghan government doesn`t control areas outside Kabul, Karzai`s "election" won`t enjoy international recognition. Worst of all, from Karzai`s standpoint, is the fact that the U.S. put Afghanistan on the back burner last year. Opium production is going like gangbusters. The U.S. has already begun acknowledging Taliban control of various provinces. Karzai will be forced to choose between exile and assassination.

More of the Same in Iraq: The guerilla war against U.S. occupation forces will continue. Foreign and local resistance fighters, funded and armed through neighboring Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, will continue to launch hourly attacks that claim a life and a dozen limbs per day. The U.S., meanwhile, will eschew carrot in favor of stick, radicalizing fence-sitting Iraqi moderates with Israeli-style round-ups, house demolitions and indiscriminate retaliatory airstrikes. Things won`t get worse, but they won`t get better.

Supremes Come Through: The U.S. Supreme Court, asked to judge the Bush Administration`s policy of indefinite detention of "enemy combatants," will cite the Constitutional guarantee of due process to rule "release or file charges" re "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, Yaser Edam Hamdi and/or the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp inmates.

Whoever Wins Wins Big: I have no idea who will win the presidency, so I won`t venture a prediction here. Most analysts, however, expecting a replay of 2000, think the presidential race will be tight. Not me. The advantages of Bush`s ill-gotten incumbency and outsized attack ad budget could let him to trounce Dean in a landslide of Reaganesque proportions. On the other hand, several wild cards may lead to a Dean sweep: pent-up resentment over Florida 2000, a smart pick for vice president that overcomes concerns about Dean`s lack of foreign policy experience (Bob Graham or Wesley Clark), more terrorist attacks, mismatched presidential debates. Thanks to redistricting and a flurry of Democratic retirements, the House and Senate will remain Republican regardless.

Another Year, No 9/11: George W. Bush is the best thing that ever happened to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups. The anti-Americanism fueled by his policies has brought them unprecedented levels of cash and new recruits. Terrorists won`t risk losing their benefactor by attacking us on U.S. soil before the election.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America`s best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

RALL 12/30/03

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First Hand News Vs. CNN
Posted by Dahr Jamail | on Wednesday, December 31, 2003 - 02:42 PM
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News…
Today on Palestine Street near Mustanceria University in Baghdad, a car packed with explosives was exploded as a US patrol passed. I saw at least one Humvee flipped upside down and another sitting nearby, completely incinerated; as soldiers, tanks, Bradleys, and Hummers had the area completely sealed. Razor wire was strung across the street, keeping the area clear.


Soldiers sealing off Palestine Street near recent attack on US Patrol

Meanwhile soldiers went building to building pulling out all the men, and inside of their sealed perimeter stood a group of at least 25-35 men, all most likely to be detained. I stood by the razor wire watching them taking men with their hands tied with plastic ties out of buildings. The young soldier near me saw an Iraqi man staring at him, and yelled at him,

“What the fuck are you looking at mother fucker!?”

He points his gun at him.

“Get the fuck out of here. You like what you see? I said Fuck Off!”

My translator asked the Iraqi to please just walk away, as he stood glaring at the soldier.

We are told soldiers went through the dorms of the nearby university and pulled many young men out in order to detain them.

Each scene I’ve visited like this has revealed a policy that seems to be that the military will seal off the area for several blocks around where a patrol has been hit, then go house to house, building to building, and just pull men out for either questioning, or more likely, detaining them.

We were hoping to take pictures, and find out what happened. But the usual policy of the military here of preventing photos of US military hardware wreckage was in force. The first soldier we’d come upon said to us,

“Sure you can take pictures. Then I’ll take your camera.”

Our translator said that some Iraqis nearby said they’d watched soldiers take the camera from a man and smash it on the ground.

We move to the other side of the street and another young soldier is watching the crowds, very tense. He only speaks to us with one sentence responses, but even more with one or two word responses. His eyes constantly scan for threats.

I speak with several soldiers, all of them very down. An Iraqi man asks one of the troops if people were hurt, a rather silly question. The response was,

“Yes. What do you think? Many people are dead.”

As mentioned above, one Hummvee has been flipped completely upside down by the blast. At least three soldiers are dead, maybe more. Certainly civilians are killed, as the entire front of a nearby building is ripped off by the blast, pieces of plaster and ceiling dangling limply in the air from the second floor of this usually crowded shopping area near the college campus.

We move to another area near the border of razor wire to try to get a better view of the wreckage. We stand talking with the soldiers. They are very down, not talking much, other than asking one of us,

“You bang an Iraqi chick yet? Can you get good hash here? Go to Europe, they got the really good shit there man.”

Another soldier pointed out the group of soldiers who were sent to the scene first to clear the area and take detainees, and said of his fellow troops,

“Those are the war criminals.”

The mood is extremely tense, and needless to say, morose.

One of the soldiers tells us they won’t be letting any journalists inside the perimeter until they clear the wreckage…so we decide to head back home.

Back at the hotel I check the news and see that CNN has reported on the strike on the patrol.

According to Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the US Army’s 1st Armored Division speaking of this attack, “…an explosion near a U.S. military convoy in a crowded area of Baghdad wounded five U.S. soldiers and three Iraqi civil defense personnel.”

The soldiers on the scene had gloomily told me, firsthand, quite a different story while we gazed at the two incinerated Humvees in front of a nearby building with the side of it blasted into tatters.

Dahr Jamail is a freelance journalist and political activist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has come to Iraq to bear witness and write about how the US occupation is affecting the people of Iraq, since the media in the US has in large part, he believes, failed to do so.

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War Takes An Inhuman Twist With Cats, Dogs and Donkeys Turned Into Bombs

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

01 January 2004: (The Independent) "Watch out for the donkey!" we cried yesterday near the town hall. I like donkeys. The Arabs despise the hamar but I have always loved the grey-haired wisdom of the beast, those big, affectionate eyes, its soft fur and slavish love. Poor old "donks", we said sadly when the insurgents used donkey carts to fire rockets at the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad. One of the animals - badly singed on its rear by a missile - upset the rest of the armoury on to the road and may have saved lives. But when a donkey came clopping up to an American checkpoint on Tuesday, all animal love was set aside.

A roadside bomb had just exploded. The US troops in Karradah were ready to fire at anything and anyone. Then came the donkey. It shuffled up the street, pulling a blue cart of rusting gas canisters and its owner, who was sitting on the cart. Turn the donkey round, we muttered under our breath. "Turn that donkey round," shouted an American. "Turn the fucking donkey round," announced an Iraqi militiaman.

The donkey clopped to a standstill and turned its head toward us. I looked at its eyes. It looked at me. Please turn round, I mouthed. And the bearded man yanked the reins and the beast backed up and turned left and wearily retraced its path.

Even cats have the same effect these days. American soldiers returning home to the US are giving ambush lessons to incoming members of the 82nd Airborne and the Marines. The "terrorists" or "rebels" or "insurgents" are using the hollowed out carcasses of cats and dogs to hide explosives. On the left, the explosives are hidden inside the concrete median. On the right - well, take your local moggie, slit him or her in half, insert three mortar shells and leave it by the side of the road. So off we go each day from Baghdad, The Independent and its trusty driver Mohamed, ever watchful for run-over, well-fed quadrupeds.

"Watch out for that cat," I shouted yesterday at a traffic roundabout in Mansur, and Mohamed veered to avoid a large and very dead black and white puss. On the motorway to al-Doura an old dog was spread-eagled by the verge. "First lane," I yelled, and Mohamed wrenched the steering wheel left. Mohamed thinks I am a soft Westerner, uneasy at running over long-dead animals. It has taken days to educate him. Why does he think the American convoys are now driving in the centre lane of motorways? "Mr Robert, I know the answer," he said. "The left side explodes in concrete and the dogs and cats explode on the right of the road."

It is strange how quickly we become accustomed here to the rules of life and death and discomfort. Never eat, for example, at the restaurant of my hotel, a great white building where The Independent maintains its dodgy offices. Just one shrimp cocktail will have you driving the big white bus all night. The menu boasts "Shredded chicken w/ Bamboo Shoot" and "Tornedo w/ Mushrooms" and I dare any bon vivant to sample the "Deluxe Beef Burger w/ egg and cheese" and try sleeping soundly for eight hours.

Even the laundry has its excitements. Every evening, Hassan will call on the house phone and scream, "Laundry!" - to make sure I am at home and ready to tip him for my cleaned clothes. A few minutes later Hassan is at the door. "Laundry!" he bawls, as if the mere production of my tired old shirts and socks is a political victory to rival the invasion of his country. I know the routine well. I smile like a newly freed prisoner. I express the thanks of the doomed that my clothes have been returned on their dirty red hangers. I hand over 3,000 Iraqi dinars. Then I smell the petrol. My shirts and pants and socks smell of benzene. Only yesterday did I dare to ask why. I padded down to the receptionist, who explained the problem to me very gently. "Mr Robert, if there is some spot on your shirt, something they can`t clean with soap and water, they use the benzene." Understood! No problem then. My shirts smell of petrol because they are so clean.

You get used to it, of course. The fish, the laundry, the cats and dogs in New Iraq. Don`t overtake American convoys. And above all, stay away from donkeys.

* At least five Iraqis were killed and more than 20 wounded yesterday when shots were firedduring a demonstration in Kirkuk, where Kurds are vying for more control of the oil-rich city.

Thousands of Arab and Turkoman protesters marched on the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two main Kurdish factions, and chanted: "No to federalism, Kirkuk is Iraqi". Kirkuk`s chief of police said two people were killed in the gunfire. Doctors said three more people died later at a nearby hospital.

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December 30, 2003
Q&A: Foreign Policy Issues of 2004

From the Council on Foreign Relations, December 30, 2003


What will be the major foreign policy challenges of 2004?

The fallout from the war in Iraq and the ongoing U.S.-led occupation of that country will remain the No. 1 international issue, according to many U.S. foreign policy experts. "The capture of Saddam Hussein doesn`t mean an end to the violence in Iraq. There`s still the open question of whether we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again," says James M. Lindsay, vice president, Maurice R. Greenberg chair, and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. There are also a host of other challenges for U.S. policymakers in 2004, including the nuclear weapons threat from North Korea, the possibility of another major terrorist attack, and continuing violence in the Middle East.

What are the Bush administration`s goals for Iraq in 2004?

It has set an ambitious deadline of June 30 to shift political authority from the occupation government to an interim Iraqi government. The change will occur four months before U.S. presidential elections in November. The result of the transition will have a significant impact not only on President Bush`s re-election prospects but also on how the world views the United States. There is little hope that Iraq will be transformed into a peaceful, secure country by November, and U.S. forces will likely remain stationed there for years to come, most experts say. But "the important thing is that Iraq appears to be making progress toward a stable transition," says Winston Lord, co-chairman of the International Rescue Committee and a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Bush wants to lower the U.S. profile in Iraq if he can."

How will Iraq affect other U.S. foreign policy interests?

"A lot turns on Iraq," says Michael P. Peters, the Council`s executive vice president. "If we are successful there, it will validate the incredibly aggressive policy that we used to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein." The outcome of the U.S.-led intervention will reverberate throughout the Middle East, which could be further destabilized if upheaval in Iraq continues. It could also shape U.S.-European relations and the foreign policy strategy of the next American administration. If Iraq appears to be a success, "there will be a re-evaluation of what kind of world we live in and how we should align ourselves," says Walter Russell Mead, the Council`s Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy.

What are the risks of a North Korea conflict?

The Bush administration has assembled a group of nations to grapple with the threat of nuclear weapons in North Korea. A five-member negotiating coalition--the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and China--is scheduled to meet with a North Korean delegation in 2004, and U.S. policymakers anticipate that China will continue to play an important role as host and intermediary. But there is no clear prospect of a negotiated settlement to stop North Korea`s nuclear weapons program, and confrontation with its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il, remains a possibility. "The North Korea situation could break in any direction," says Eric Heginbotham, the Council`s senior fellow for Asia studies. Peters agrees: "If through deliberate steps, miscalculation, or misunderstanding, people start shooting at each other [on the Korean Peninsula], we would have a big war on our hands with huge casualties and a devastating effect on the world economy," he says.

What are the chances of another major terror attack in 2004?

It`s unclear. The United States remains at risk of another attack, despite unprecedented strides in improving homeland security since September 11, 2001. Among the targets experts cite as still relatively unprotected: commercial airliners--which are now better protected against hijackers but are defenseless against shoulder-fired missiles--soft targets like hotels, and such critical facilities as chemical plants and the electric-power grid. "The terrorist threat to the homeland is the issue that needs to be constantly on everyone`s mind," Peters says. On a global level, radical Islamic movements threaten stability in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and numerous other countries in the Arab world and beyond. From the perspective of the American voter, terrorism will be a key issue "if we catch Osama bin Laden or if there`s a big terror attack," says Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs. "If not, it will stay in the background, as it has more or less, for the past six months."

What are the prospects for peace in the Middle East?

Many analysts expect the tense stalemate between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to largely continue. President Bush is unlikely to make a major push for peace, based on the so-called road map plan, unless the situation on the ground shifts unexpectedly. "The focus will be: `No War in 04.` What they want to do is keep things calm in November," says Joseph S. Nye, dean of the Harvard University`s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Lord concurs. "They`ll try to contain the problem," he says. There is the possibility, Lord adds, that "if [Israeli President Ariel] Sharon is suddenly more flexible, and/or the new Palestinian prime minister [Ahmed Qurei] turns out to be a capable negotiator, then maybe there will be some movement." Says Mead: "It looks like we are headed for another damage-control year rather than a year of progress."

What are some other brewing crises that could flare in 2004?

Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf has dodged repeated assassination attempts, most recently in Rawalpindi on December 14 and again on December 25. A successful attack on Musharraf-which experts acknowledge is a possibility in this volatile region-could cause deep instability. Despite some positive signs in 2003, Kashmir, the disputed territory claimed by the nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, remains on the verge of armed conflict. And growing Islamic radicalism near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is fueling a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and likely providing a haven for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
China-Taiwan. Conflict has existed between communist China and the breakaway government in Taiwan since the island passed its own constitution in 1947, but the situation has not become any less dangerous. Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian`s decision to press for a referendum in March that could bring Taiwan a step closer to declaring independence has raised ire on the mainland. It has also been criticized by the White House, which supports a longstanding and ambiguous "one-China" policy and wants to avoid a crisis. Because of its defense pact with Taiwan, the United States could be drawn in militarily to any clash provoked by Taiwanese stirrings for independence. "If the Taiwanese president continues to act this way and the Chinese feel they are backed into a corner, it could get very ugly," Peters says. "This remains probably the most dangerous geopolitical situation in the world," he adds.
Venezuela. Opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are seeking to depose him in an as-yet unscheduled referendum. "This could become an almost civil war in Venezuela," says Peter Schwartz, the chairman of Global Business Network, a private consulting company that analyzes global risks. "If Chavez refuses to have the referendum, it could lead to national paralysis, with a popular movement in the streets. If he loses and doesn`t step down, there could also be turmoil," he says. A Venezuelan crisis would have a significant effect both inside and outside South America because Venezuela is a major source of oil on the world market.

What are some issues to watch in 2004?

There are a number of critical issues on the global agenda in 2004, experts say. Among them:

Nuclear proliferation. A key issue of 2004 may well be President Bush`s oft-stated pledge to attempt to keep the "worst weapons out of the hands of terrorists." Regime change in Iraq was largely the result of a desire to disarm Saddam Hussein of his alleged arsenal of unconventional weapons. Considerable diplomatic efforts are under way to attempt to slow North Korea`s nuclear escalation and Iran`s apparent efforts to build a bomb. Many nonproliferation experts hope that efforts to crack down on the spread of weapons of mass destruction will broaden next year. "We`ve done one thing, taken out Iraq. But we must do a lot more," says Ashton Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at the Kennedy School. Among possible steps are closing loopholes in the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and stepping-up efforts to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet states. "We need a complete overhaul of our whole policy toward nonproliferation," Carter says.
Democratization in Russia. The outcome of the Russian presidential election, scheduled in March, is nearly assured: current president Vladimir Putin will almost certainly win. The question is what Putin will do with his mandate. "There are serious questions about the direction of democratization in Russia," Peters says. "If it continues to move toward a more authoritarian state, the long-term implications are not good. It will lead to increasing instability in the neighborhood, make it more difficult for us to deal with Russia on global issues, and could drive a wedge between us and European allies."
The European Union`s effort to adopt a constitution. The December negotiations over the proposed document were stalled by a dispute about voting power between large and medium-sized European nations and a related quarrel about how to distribute limited E.U. resources. Ten new nations are scheduled to join the 15-member union in May 2004. "The expansion of the European Union has triggered a fundamental debate about how to govern it, and the future of the E.U. will hinge on how this turns out. It`s the most important issue in Europe," says Council senior fellow Michael Mandelbaum. Other key European issues to watch: tensions caused by a flood of immigration into Europe from North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and the continuing debate over the potential conflicts between the U.S.-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization and an E.U. defense arm.

How will the U.S. elections affect the foreign policy agenda?

"The U.S. presidential election will be the most important driver of foreign events next year," says Mead, who places Bush`s chances of re-election at 60 percent. No matter which Democrat wins the nomination, "it`s going to be someone who will want to undo the `Bush Revolution` in foreign policy and be much less assertive," Peters says. A second term for Bush would represent "a big endorsement of the incredibly aggressive foreign policy of his presidency--and an endorsement of an approach to work with others but without much compromise," he adds. Bush`s re-election will have a particularly powerful effect on U.S.-European relations, Mead says. Leaders in France and Germany were vocal opponents of the war in Iraq, and European voters were widely opposed to the war and the Bush administration`s unilateralist foreign policy. "So far, Europe has been in denial, hoping the Bush nightmare is going to go away," Mead says. "But if it`s clear that he will be re-elected, they will think more seriously about how to deal with this new situation."

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



Copyright 2004

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Who`s afraid of elections in Iraq?
Current US plans to hand power to a `selected` assembly won`t wash

Laith Kubba
Friday January 2, 2004
The Guardian

Since the end of the war on May 1, Iraq has taken many strides towards normalcy and self-governance. Iraqis now enjoy freedom of expression and association, more representation at local level, better health services and higher incomes.

The country has also passed three crucial milestones. After months of wrangling, the US-run Coalition Provincial Authority committed itself to ending the occupation and handing Iraq`s sovereignty to an interim national assembly by the end of June; second, international donors pledged over $30bn to help rebuild Iraq; and third, Saddam has been arrested and his two sons killed.

Yet, such progress is overshadowed by rising political violence and lack of security. Only an inclusive political process can get the Sunni tribes plugged into the future of Iraq and out of the growing insurgency. Meanwhile, Iraq must rebuildits institutions - in particular, its police, intelligence and army. This can only be achieved by a national government and a legitimate political process.

The CPA is in a vicious race to restore services and win the confidence of Iraqis before the insurgents succeed in undermining the new order. Last November, the CPA agreed to end the occupation by June 30 and authorised the US-appointed Iraqi governing council to work out details for the transition.

The CPA wants to constitute an interim national assembly by selecting delegates from Iraq`s 18 provinces, and it has empowered the governing council to form committees to select members to local electoral caucuses. The November agreement calls for these members to elect delegates to the interim Iraqi national assembly. The assembly would be the recipient of Iraq`s sovereign power before electing an interim government by June 30. Phase two of the transition will then begin: for 18 months the interim government will undertake all day-to-day responsibilities as well as forming a constitutional assembly and holding national elections by the end of 2005.

But the November agreement will only work if it engages the country`s main communities - the Shias, Kurds and Sunnis - in a shared interest in a successful transition. Second, for the plan to succeed, it must not allow the governing council to predetermine the outcome. Council members, appointed by Paul Bremer as advisors, quickly became partners in post-Saddam Iraq with authority over Iraq`s ministries, laws, intelligence and security. It is most unlikely that the governing council would vote itself out of power now. The agreement has empowered it to design the transition and veto delegates to provincial caucuses. But council members, who would lose out in a free election, are likely to manipulate the process in pursuit of their own political survival.

Popular acceptance of the handover of power hinges on perceptions of its independence from foreign control. So far, Iraqis perceive it as a plan with an outcome predetermined by the US. The gate keepers - council members - were appointed by the CPA. This objection has been articulated by the grand Ayatollah, Syed Ali Sistani, spiritual leader of the majority Shias. His call for direct elections has become a rallying point for the majority of Iraqis. The Ayatollah argues that only elected delegates have the right of sovereignty over Iraq and that the US should not intervene, directly or indirectly, in the political transition.

An alternative would be to seek direct elections of delegates to the interim national assembly under UN supervision. The Ayatollah has called for the UN to become the arbiter and propose alternatives. This is the right moment for the international community - and the UN in particular - to step in and lead the transition.

Elections by June 30 are rejected on three grounds: that there is insufficient time to register voters; that there are threats of violence; and that a rushed election would risk bringing in former regime leaders, militants and religious extremists. However, direct elections, even if rushed and imperfect, would offer Iraq a more legitimate and representative transitional assembly than that which would result from the November agreement. A combination of measures - including the use of inerasable ink and ration cards - could provide control over the voting process. In 1992, Iraq`s three Kurdish provinces succeeded in organising elections in conditions much worse than those in Iraq today. Through elections, Iraqi would change the mindset of their leaders from seeking guns and foreign support to seeking constituent support at the ballot box.

· Dr Laith Kubba is president of the Iraqi National Group and former spokesman of the Iraqi National Congress

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Darauf sollte man auch keine Hoffnung setzen.

Bush says he is still eating beef
Reuters, Falfurrias
Friday January 2, 2004
The Guardian

President Bush said last night that Americans should feel comfortable eating beef, despite the country`s mad cow scare.

Mr Bush told reporters after a Texas hunting trip that he ate beef yesterday and said he would continue to do so, despite the discovery last month of the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) on a US farm.

He said US agriculture officials, who have banned the use of meat from sick "downer" cattle in foodstuffs, had taken the right steps to ensure the safety of beef. Officials sought to recover meat from eight states that may have received produce from the affected animal.

Asked whether Americans should continue eating beef, Mr Bush said "They should." He added: "I ate beef today and I will continue to eat beef."

The sick animal was discovered almost two weeks ago on a farm in Washington state. More than 20 countries quickly responded by banning the import of US beef.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Mr. Bush Has One Priority for 2004: Get America Out of Iraq – Fast
Iraq is breaking up into rebels and collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent bodies turning up each day at the morgues
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
2 January 2004
Ever since Daniel Pipes - he of the failed American neo-cons - piped up last summer with his plan to install a "democratic-minded autocrat" (sic) in Iraq, I have been eyeing the Washington crystal ball for further signs of what the designers of this wretched war have in store for the Iraqis whom they "liberated" for "democracy" last year. And bingo, not long before Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for "New Iraq" popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose wretched plans for "liberated" Iraq call for something close to ethnic cleansing.

In no less an organ than The New York Times - the same paper which carried a plea last year that Americans should accept that US troops will commit "atrocities" in Iraq - appeared Mr Gelb`s "Three State Solution", an astonishing combination of simplicity and ruthlessness. It goes like this. America should create three mini-states in Iraq - Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the centre and Shias in the south - the frontiers of these three entities drawn along ethnic, sectarian lines. The "general idea," says Mr Gelb, "is to strengthen the Kurds and Shias and weaken the Sunnis." Thus US forces can extricate themselves from the quagmire of the "Sunni triangle" while the "troublesome and domineering" Sunnis themselves - with no control over Iraq`s northern or southern oil fields - will be in a more moderate frame of mind.

True, the chopping up of Iraq might be "a messy and dangerous enterprise" - tens of thousands of Iraqis, after all, would be thrown out of their homes and pushed across new frontiers - but Washington should, if necessary, impose partition by force. This is the essence of the Gelb plan.

Bosnia comes to mind. Or Kosovo. But if it gets us out of Iraq, who`s going to complain when we - the famous "coalition of the willing" - push those recalcitrant, ungrateful Iraqis into the same kind of "divide and rule" colonial world for which the Americans always used to excoriate the British.

It`s important not to regard all this as the meandering of Washington think-tanks. Pipes and Gelb and their friends helped to build the foundations of this war, and their ideas are intended to further weaken Iraq as a nation - and thus the Arab world as a whole - while maintaining American military power. Already, the sectarian nature of "New Iraq" has been established by Washington`s proconsul in Baghad, Paul Bremer.

His "Governing Council" is made up of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds in direct proportion to their share of the population. The Shias, who form 60 per cent of the country, expect to take effective power in the Iraqi national elections this year - this, after all, is the only reason why the Shia clergy have not urged their people to join the anti-American insurgency - and the Americans and British understand this all too well. Like so many of those Arab nations created by the French and British amid the wreckage of the Ottoman empire after the First World War, Iraq is to be governed along sectarian lines.

So the coming months are not difficult to comprehend. As the insurgency continues - and as President Bush`s re-election drama grows nearer - the US administration will be ever more anxious to do two things: to insist that America will "stay the course" - and to get out as quickly as possible. There will be ever more policemen hired, ever more militias, ever more ex-members of Saddam`s old secret service, to act as sandbags between Iraqi guerillas and the Americans. Already - with Iraqi cops taking the most casualties - this is coming about. The Iraqi world is now breaking up into rebels and collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent Iraqi bodies - of children playing beside roadside bombs, children cut down by American gunfire during house raids or protests, busloads of passengers caught in guerilla ambushes, diners blown apart in restaurants - turning up each morning at the Baghdad morgue.

Mr Bush, of course, will be looking forward to the Show Trial of the Year to help his election prospects. What, after all, could be more calculated to justify the whole miserable occupation of Iraq than the concrete evidence of Saddam`s atrocities? Already, however, this highlight is beginning to look distinctly worrying for the Bush administration, because any fair trial of the old dictator must take into account the massive evidence, much of it still secret in Washington, of the United States` involvement in creating - and supporting - Saddam`s regime for the cruellest years of his rule. The shark-like lawyers already vying to defend Saddam are well aware that it was Washington which enabled Saddam to obtain the chemicals for his revolting use of gas against both Kurds and Iranian soldiers.

Gwynne Dyer, the courageous journalist who did more than anyone to publicise Saddam`s use of gas against the Kurds - at a time when the CIA was putting out the lie that the Halabja dead were killed by Iranian gas bombs - believes Saddam will never get a public trial because if he did, "all this would come out in gory detail." So maybe we won`t see Saddam in the dock this year after all.

As for that other, cancerous war - between the Israelis and the Palestinians - we can be sure than America`s cowardly bias towards Israel at the expense of occupied Palestinians will only be exacerbated by November`s US presidential election. Between Arafat`s corrupt rule and the suicide executioners of Hamas, and the expansionist and brutal Ariel Sharon, there will be no peace. Already - how often that word "already" now crops up in any Middle East analysis - Washington has given its blessing to the shocking "new" message delivered by Sharon last month.

This was the speech in which the Israeli Prime Minister appeared to support President Bush`s "road-map" - which calls, among other things, for an end to Jewish settlement building - by stating that he was faithful to the agreement "based on President Bush`s speech of June 2002".

Countless newspaper editorials went along with this piece of chicanery - without checking the date. For Bush outlined his "road-map" in a speech in 2003, not 2002. The 2002 presidential speech to which Sharon was referring stated only that Palestinians must forgo terrorism "before the peace process can begin". Which suits Sharon fine. Hence this week`s revelation that during his three-year premiership, the population of illegal Jewish settlements - built for Jews and Jews only on occupied Arab land - has increased by 16 per cent.

So there you have it. More Israeli settlement building on Arab land and, I`ve no doubt, more Palestinian suicide bombings. More desperate attempts by the Americans to escape from Iraq and more talk of turning "New Iraq" into ethnic statelets. More Arab humiliation. More anger. More "war on terror". Flak jackets on for 2004.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. Reprinted for Fair Use educational purposes only.

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A Cruel Sense of Humor is All That is Left for Iraqis to Cling to After a Suicide Bombing
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
2 January 2004
Mystification. why would a bomber blow himself up to destroy a restaurant? There`s no doubt that the man who killed eight diners in Nabil`s on Wednesday was a suicide attacker.

One of the waiters, a balding, angry man, showed me what was left of him yesterday. Flesh in the forecourt, a set of four blackened fingers below a wall. "You want a chicken tikka?" he asked cruelly. But these are cruel times.

Next door, every member of the family in the now broken villa was taken to hospital. I knew them all. A few months ago, when the hotel across the road was bombed, I`d lent them my phone to call their relatives in America.

"Al-hamdulila - praise be to God - we are all OK," the mother had shouted down the line to Detroit. Not any more. Her husband was hurt in the chest by the blast. All her daughters were cut, too. Why them?

In any other land, there would be a forensic science laboratory and someone would have taken those fingers away for identification. But the Americans were only looking for the detonator. Some hope. The bomber`s Oldsmobile was almost atomised. Did he think someone from the occupation authorities was among the diners at the New Year`s Eve belly-dancing party?

Mystification. I am talking to a young American soldier from the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. He`s just down from the Syrian border. "We had a problem there," he says. "A guy got hostile with our men last night. Pulled a knife. He was shot dead." A knife? The guy pulled a knife on a soldier? No information in the papers, of course. No mention of the dead Iraqi in the occupation power`s usual press conference.

Mystification. Just two days before Christmas, I am driving the desert road at night west of Ramadi. This is bandit country, a death trap for Americans and insurgents alike. Then to the south, there is a great fire, flickering with explosions, shell bursts, flares, streaks of tracer. The light burns brightly on the horizon, pulsates orange and red for almost 20 minutes, the time it takes my car to reach Fallujah. But next day, no one reports a fire. Nothing in the papers. Someone must know. Can`t the Americans, watching all this from their satellites, account for this blazing fire in the night?

Mystification. I am in a traffic jam in the Muthhana area of Baghdad, a thieves` paradise, next to a beat-up Toyota with a bearded man at the wheel. The driver`s window is broken, the door doesn`t close properly, the registration plates have fallen off.

"Well, you`re safe," I shout at him. "No one`s going to steal your car." The man grins back at me. "No, they can`t steal my car," he roars, then reaches to the floor of his vehicle. He comes up with his false left leg and dangles it out of the window towards me. "And they can`t steal me either." Chicken tikka? False legs? Where do the Iraqis find their sense of humour?


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. Reprinted for Fair Use educational purposes

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January 2, 2004
A Wounded United Nations

These are difficult times for the United Nations. The Bush administration`s taste for unilateral action and its doctrine of preventive war pose a profound challenge to the U.N.`s founding principle of collective security and threaten the organization`s continued relevance. Since the day the administration took office, it has been chipping away at the multinational diplomatic system that America did so much to build in the past two generations. It has walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, waged war against the International Criminal Court and disparaged international arms control agencies and weapons inspectors.

The war in Iraq brought these conflicts to a new height. Washington`s rush to invade split the Security Council in ways that have still not healed. Yet the months since the Iraq invasion have shown how much the United States still needs the U.N.`s unparalleled ability to confer international legitimacy and its growing experience in nation-building.

Even after the U.N. was shoved aside over Iraq, it tried to play a constructive role in rebuilding that shattered country. The price it paid was the terrorist bombing of its Baghdad headquarters last August, perhaps the most costly blow the U.N. has ever endured. Its top diplomat in Iraq was killed, along with 21 others. Despite standing aside from the invasion and being excluded from the subsequent administration, the U.N. found itself a prime target of Iraqi guerrillas, and a particularly vulnerable one because relief and reconstruction work cannot be carried out from behind impregnable barriers. Since August, the U.N. has all but withdrawn from Iraq.

The U.N.`s global concerns reach far beyond Iraq. In Afghanistan, a senior U.N. diplomat is responsible for assisting the transition to a fully elected government. The U.N. is part of the quartet group, which is trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to carry out their responsibilities under the agreed road map for peace. Its nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is charged with detecting nuclear weapons programs. Just as important is the U.N.`s role as a crucial catalyst for education, health and poverty-reduction programs, which can help prevent future armed conflicts. This work has suffered from the fallout over Iraq and the resulting tensions between the United Nations and Washington. Unless the U.N. finds a way to reclaim a leadership role on Iraq, it could have an increasingly hard time mobilizing the political and financial resources it needs.

That seems to suit the Bush administration. The White House continues to disparage the effectiveness of U.N. weapons inspectors, most recently in Libya. It complains about the U.N.`s reluctance to return to Iraq without acknowledging its legitimate concerns about the lack of a clear political mandate. But the U.N. cannot afford to wait until Iraqi sovereignty is restored next July. It must take on increased responsibilities in the coming weeks.

Instead of complaining about the U.N., Washington should smooth the path for its return. It should take up Secretary General Kofi Annan`s suggestion of a three-way meeting of U.N. officials, the American occupation administration and the Iraqi Governing Council later this month to clarify the role the U.N. can play in shaping the transition to a self-governing Iraq. One meeting would not resolve all the differences between Washington and the U.N. But it would be a useful start.

America needs the United Nations as an effective partner in Iraq, not as a whipping boy for the administration`s continuing problems there. The U.N. needs to be involved, most immediately so it does not default on its responsibilities to the Iraqi people. By taking a strong role in shaping Iraq`s return to the community of sovereign nations, the U.N. can also demonstrate that it is determined not to let its global influence be marginalized.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who`s Nader Now?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In the 2000 election, in a campaign that seemed driven more by vanity than by any realistic political vision, Ralph Nader did all he could to undermine Al Gore — even though Mr. Gore, however unsatisfying to the Naderites, was clearly a better choice than the current occupant of the White House.

Now the Democratic Party has its own internal spoilers: candidates lagging far behind in the race for the nomination who seem more interested in tearing down Howard Dean than in defeating George Bush.

The truth — which one hopes voters will remember, whoever gets the nomination — is that the leading Democratic contenders share a lot of common ground. Their domestic policy proposals are similar, and very different from those of Mr. Bush.

Even on foreign policy, the differences are less stark than they may appear. Wesley Clark`s critiques of the Iraq war are every bit as stinging as Mr. Dean`s. And looking forward, I don`t believe that even the pro-war candidates would pursue the neocon vision of two, three, many Iraq-style wars. Mr. Bush, who has made preemptive war the core of his foreign policy doctrine, might do just that.

Yet some of Mr. Dean`s rivals have launched vitriolic attacks that might as well have been scripted by Karl Rove. And I don`t buy the excuse that it`s all about ensuring that the party chooses an electable candidate.

It`s true that if Mr. Dean gets the nomination, the Republicans will attack him as a wild-eyed liberal who is weak on national security. But they would do the same to any Democrat — even Joseph Lieberman. Facts, or the lack thereof, will prove no obstacle: remember the successful attacks on the patriotism of Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, or the Saddam-Daschle ads.

Mr. Dean`s character will also come under attack. But this, too, will happen to any Democrat. If we`ve learned anything in this past decade, it`s that the right-wing scandal machine will find a way to smear anyone, and that a lot of the media will play along. A year ago, when John Kerry was the presumptive front-runner, he came under assault — I am not making this up — over the supposed price of his haircuts. Sure enough, a CNN host solemnly declared him in "denial mode."

That`s not to say that a candidate`s qualifications don`t matter: it would be nice if Mr. Dean were a decorated war hero. But there`s nothing in the polling data suggesting that Mr. Dean is less electable than his Democratic rivals, with the possible exception of General Clark. Mr. Dean`s rivals may well believe that he will lose the election if he is nominated. But it`s inexcusable when they try to turn that belief into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Let me suggest a couple of ground rules. First, while it`s O.K. for a candidate to say he`s more electable than his rival, someone who really cares about ousting Mr. Bush shouldn`t pre-emptively surrender the cause by claiming that his rival has no chance. Yet Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Kerry have done just that. To be fair, Mr. Dean`s warning that his ardent supporters might not vote for a "conventional Washington politician" was a bit close to the line, but it appeared to be a careless rather than a vindictive remark.

More important, a Democrat shouldn`t say anything that could be construed as a statement that Mr. Bush is preferable to his rival. Yet after Mr. Dean declared that Saddam`s capture hadn`t made us safer — a statement that seems more justified with each passing day — Mr. Lieberman and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Kerry launched attacks that could, and quite possibly will, be used verbatim in Bush campaign ads. (Mr. Lieberman`s remark about Mr. Dean`s "spider hole" was completely beyond the pale.)

The irony is that by seeking to undermine the election prospects of a man who may well be their party`s nominee, Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Kerry have reminded us of why their once-promising campaigns imploded. Most Democrats feel, with justification, that we`re facing a national crisis — that the right, ruthlessly exploiting 9/11, is making a grab for total political dominance. The party`s rank and file want a candidate who is running, as the Dean slogan puts it, to take our country back. This is no time for a candidate who is running just because he thinks he deserves to be president.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Sgt. Randy Davis, 25, left, and Specialist Chris Wilson, 24, are a sniper team at a forward operating base near Samarra, Iraq. The Army is increasingly relying on snipers to protect patrols and head off guerrilla attacks.
January 2, 2004
In Iraq`s Murky Battle, Snipers Offer U.S. a Precision Weapon
By ERIC SCHMITT

SAMARRA, Iraq, Dec. 28 — The intimate horror of the guerrilla war here in Iraq seems most vivid when seen through the sights of a sniper`s rifle.

In an age of satellite-guided bombs dropped at featureless targets from 30,000 feet, Army snipers can see the expression on a man`s face when the bullet hits.

"I shot one guy in the head, and his head exploded," said Sgt. Randy Davis, one of about 40 snipers in the Army`s new 3,600-soldier Stryker Brigade, from Fort Lewis, Wash. "Usually, though, you just see a dust cloud pop up off their clothes, and see a little blood splatter come out the front."

Working in teams of two or three, Army snipers here in Iraq cloak themselves in the shadows of empty city buildings or burrow into desert sands with camouflage suits, waiting to fell guerrilla gunmen and their leaders with a single shot from as far as half a mile away.

As the counterinsurgency grinds into its ninth month, the Army is increasingly relying on snipers to protect infantry patrols sweeping through urban streets and alleyways, and to kill guerrilla leaders and disrupt their attacks.

"Properly employed, we can break the enemy`s back," said Sergeant Davis, 25, who is from Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Our main targets are their main command and control elements and other high-value targets."

Soldiering is a violent business, and emotions in combat run high. But commanders say snipers are a different breed of warrior — quiet, unflappable marksmen who bring a dispassionate intensity to their deadly task.

"The good ones have to be calm, methodical and disciplined," said Lt. Col. Karl Reed, who commands the Stryker Brigade`s Fifth Battalion, 20th Infantry, Sergeant Davis`s parent unit.

In the month since he arrived here on his first combat tour, Sergeant Davis already has eight confirmed kills — including seven in a single day — and two "probables."

He and his partner, Specialist Chris Wilson, who has one confirmed kill, do not brag about their feats. Their words reflect a certain icy professionalism instilled in men who say they take no pleasure in killing, and try not to see their Iraqi foes as men with families and children.

"You don`t think about it," said Specialist Wilson, 24, of Muncie, Ind., speaking at an austere base camp near here after a late-afternoon mission. "You just think about the lives of the guys to your left and right."

Sergeant Davis nodded in agreement: "As soon as they picked up a weapon and tried to engage U.S. soldiers, they forfeited all their rights to life, is how I look at it."

All soldiers are trained to destroy an opponent, but snipers have honed the art of killing to a fine edge. At a five-week training course at Fort Benning, Ga., they learn to stalk their prey, conceal their own movements, spot telltale signs of an enemy shooter and take down a target with a lone shot.

To qualify for the school, a soldier must already be an expert marksman, pass a physical examination and undergo a psychological screening ("To make sure they`re not training a nut," Sergeant Davis said.) The rigorous course fails more than half of its students.

The demand for snipers is great enough that the Army has sent a team of trainers to Iraq to keep churning out new ones for the war effort here and in other hot spots.

As the Army faces more conflicts in which terrorists use the tight confines of city blocks and rooftops to stage hit-and-run strikes, the sniper school has placed increasing emphasis on urban tactics. That makes sense in places like this city of 250,000 people, a hotbed of Saddam Hussein supporters 65 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The training paid off on Dec. 18. Dusk was setting in here, and Sergeant Davis was wrapping up a counter-sniper mission when he spotted an armed Iraqi on a rooftop about 300 yards away. He said he knew the gunman was a sniper by the way he sneaked along the roofline to track a squad below from Sergeant Davis`s Company B.

"The guy made a mistake when he silhouetted himself against the rooftop," said Sergeant Davis, who has 20/10 vision. "He was trying to look over to see where the guys were in the courtyard."

As the gunman rose from the shadows to fire, Sergeant Davis said he saw his head and then the distinctive shape of a Dragonov SVD Russian-made sniper rifle. The sergeant drew a bead on the shooter with his weapon of choice, an M-14 rifle equipped with a special optic sight that has crosshairs and a red aiming dot.

"I went ahead and engaged him and shot him one time to the chest," he said, matter of factly. "I watched him kick back, his rifle flew back, and I saw a little blood come out of his chest. It was a good hit."

Three days earlier, Company B walked into an ambush in downtown Samarra in which gunmen on motorcycles used children leaving school as cover to attack the patrol. Sergeant Davis, armed this time with an M-4 rifle, shot 7 of the 11 attackers that American commanders say died in the 45-minute skirmish.

"We don`t have civilian casualties," the sergeant said of how he avoided the schoolchildren. "Everything you hit, you know exactly what it is. You know where every round is going."

In city or desert, Army snipers spend hours planning and setting up their positions, often under cover of darkness. "We don`t have the capability to survive a sustained firefight," the sergeant said. "We use surprise and stealth to accomplish missions."

Army snipers generally choose from four different weapons, depending on the mission. The standard M-24 sniper rifle is simple in design. It has an adjustable Kevlar stock, a thick stainless steel barrel, a mounted telescopic, day/night scope and is bolt action, rather than semiautomatic, like other sniper rifles. It sets up on a bipod and fires 7.62-millimeter ammunition, hitting targets up to 1,000 yards away.

In the desert, snipers wrap plastic bags or condoms over the gun muzzle to keep the sand out. They carry their weapons in padded green canvas bags. "We baby the hell out of them," Sergeant Davis said.

Most snipers are familiar with firearms even before joining the armed forces. Sergeant Davis and Specialist Wilson grew up on farms, and both owned their first rifles before they were 10. They fondly remember hunting deer as youngsters.

Both men are married and have children, and say they do not talk much about their work outside their tight-knit clan. "We try to get away from stereotypes that you`re a psychotic gun nut running around, like the guy in D.C., or like in the movies, a cool-guy assassin," Sergeant Davis said.

There are not many targets these men dread, but in the shifting battlefield of Iraq, where seemingly everyone is armed, one candidate emerges. Would they ever shoot a child who aimed at them?

"I couldn`t imagine that," said Specialist Wilson, a father of five.

But Sergeant Davis had a different view: "I`d shoot him, otherwise he`d shoot me. But I wouldn`t feel good about it."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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Planen sie eine Botschaft oder ein Regierungsgebäude?

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Has Big Plans for Embassy in Iraq


By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A14


In preparation for ending its occupation of Iraq, the United States is making plans to create the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world in Baghdad, complete with a staff of over 3,000 personnel, according to U.S. officials.

The transition will mark the hand-over of responsibility for dealing with Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department, which will then help oversee the two definitive steps in creating Iraq`s first freely elected democratic government.

"The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week. "That`s going to be a major effort on our part."

One of the first steps will be resuming diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad. Although the United States is the occupying power in Iraq, the two nations have not formally resumed relations, which were severed after Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait.

"Saddam broke off relations in 1991, and it requires a fairly complicated agreement to reestablish ties," a senior administration official said.

The other major challenge will be sorting out the terms of the U.S. military presence, which is expected to exceed 100,000 troops even after the occupation ends, U.S. officials say.

"We have to determine what command American troops will be under: Will it be part of some kind of multinational force, under the United Nations, under NATO? Or will they be relatively independent in an agreement with the Iraqi government? These are huge questions to be answered in a very short amount of time," the official added.

In the interview, Powell said he will spend the next six months pressing for larger international participation: "As I build up that large embassy, I`ve got to also generate more international support, U.N. presence -- get the U.N. back in there in force. . . . I think NATO is more and more willing to play a role in Iraq."

Over the next six months, the State Department will increasingly assume responsibility for jobs now carried out by the U.S.-led coalition authority, senior U.S. officials said. Several teams of lawyers are immersed in the complicated legal issues of handing back sovereignty to Iraq and making arrangements for a formal diplomatic relationship.

The bulk of the U.S. staff will continue to be headquartered in Saddam Hussein`s former Republican Palace. But to avert the potential psychological fallout from staying in the headquarters of the previous dictatorship, the new embassy will officially be in a building not far from the "Green Zone" of Baghdad, where the Coalition Provisional Authority operates. The embassy, however, will have nominal use.

The United States is tentatively planning to build a new embassy, although construction could take three to five years, U.S. officials say. Over the next two months, the State Department will be intensively recruiting to staff the U.S. Embassy.

Staffing has been an issue in recent months. Many on the staff of L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, are young, comparatively inexperienced in the Middle East, non-Arabic speakers and political appointees rather than career Foreign Service officers. Some have already left or plan to do so before the occupation ends to work on the president`s reelection campaign, according to U.S. officials.

"There will be a fairly dramatic shift of personnel over the next six months," the U.S. official said. "It can`t be precipitous and happen all at once."

The U.S. Embassy in Egypt has a larger presence, with more than 7,000 personnel. But they include many non-diplomats from various U.S. agencies, including, for example, two members of the Library of Congress who collect foreign books. The Baghdad embassy will have the largest diplomatic staff anywhere in the world, the State Department said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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After a mass grave site was discovered last year in Hilla, south of Baghdad, an Iraqi woman and her two sons searched for evidence of a third son, who had disappeared in 1991.

Welche Beweise wollen die USA den auswählen, da kann man viel reindeuten.

washingtonpost.com
The Trial of Hussein: Choosing the Evidence
Prosecution Likely to Focus on Few Incidents

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A01


In Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, killing was politics by other means.

As many as 300,000 Iraqis died on the orders of Hussein and his lieutenants, human rights groups believe. The years of violence included the gassing of Kurdish villages and the slaughter of Shiites in open fields. Countless other Iraqis disappeared one by one, to be executed as enemies no matter the quality of the evidence against them.

Now that Hussein is in custody, Iraqi and U.S. leaders are debating how to prove their belief that he was personally responsible -- and should perhaps pay with his own life -- for the carnage committed in his name. A trial is seen not only as a chance to bring Hussein to justice but also as an opportunity for Iraqis to confront their past.

Critical decisions have yet to be made on what could become the highest-profile war- crimes prosecution since Nuremberg. But officials and specialists familiar with Hussein`s record foresee a trial that will focus on a relatively small number of crimes chosen for the strength of the evidence and their power to represent the types of suffering inflicted during 35 years of rule by terror.

Prominent on everyone`s list is the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, in which tens of thousands of Kurds died and hundreds of villages were destroyed. A chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja killed 5,000 people, one of many places where the Hussein government allegedly used airborne poisons.

Legal experts believe the most likely path to a conviction of Hussein for committing genocide or crimes against humanity is to establish his command responsibility for the institutions of Iraqi government, including the military that tormented the Kurds and the security services that killed thousands of ordinary Iraqis between 1968 and 2003. The well-documented Halabja attack may serve as a case in point.

Documents gathered in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War include an order from Hussein granting supreme powers in Kurdish northern Iraq to his cousin Ali Hassan Majeed. A June 1987 order from Majeed instructed Iraqi military commanders to carry out "special bombardments . . . to kill the largest number of persons present," according to Human Rights Watch.

The next year, an audiotape captures Majeed telling colleagues that he will use chemical weapons against the Kurds, whose political aspirations Hussein saw as a threat. Majeed, now a U.S. prisoner in Iraq, soon deployed the gas and became known as "Chemical Ali."

"I will kill them all with chemical weapons," Majeed is quoted as saying in a transcript provided by Human Rights Watch. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? [Expletive] them -- the international community, and those who listen to them. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for 15 days."

In addition to the Halabja assault, a trial of Hussein would almost certainly address the fearsome force used to quell an insurrection by Shiite Muslims at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the subsequent draining of the southern marshes.

Led again by Majeed, who had moved south to take command, Iraqi troops terrorized communities with indiscriminate public shootings and air attacks, witnesses said. They killed an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Shiites, most of them civilians, according to human rights organizations.

Back in control, Hussein and his security forces -- in a country labeled the "Republic of Fear" by Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya -- squeezed the Shiites in innumerable ways through the 1990s. One of the most infamous was the rerouting of the Euphrates River to dry up the southern marshes and disrupt traditions thousands of years old. An estimated 250,000 Marsh Arabs were forced to flee to Iran or move elsewhere inside Iraq.

Also likely to be included in the prosecution of Hussein, according to current thinking in Baghdad, is the 1983 roundup and massacre of as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani clan. Hussein became angered when the Kurdish Barzanis helped Iranian forces seize two slices of Iraq and is believed to have sent his forces to exact revenge.

Hussein`s smaller-scale persecution of real and perceived political opponents will be an almost certain target, with prosecutors taking examples from the innumerable individual executions and episodes of violent harassment. Human rights workers identified scores of mass graves last year, suggesting that long-term repression claimed more lives than estimated.

Two prominent cases under discussion are the killings of Shiite ayatollahs Mohammed Bakr Sadr, executed with his sister in 1980, and his cousin Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, assassinated in 1999.

File After File


Although critics have repeated their accusations against Hussein as dictator, tyrant and war criminal for years, prosecutors must confront major complexities in a case that is still not nearly ready for trial, according to Iraqi and U.S. sources.

Miles of files have yet to be examined, and uncounted witnesses must be interviewed.

Valuable to any prosecution will be new evidence gathered by U.S. forces, which seized tons of documents after the war in Iraq and arrested dozens of Hussein`s former aides. U.S. authorities continue to hold closely any dramatic gleanings and have not decided how witnesses and sensitive information will be handled.

U.S. intelligence officials have said they would like to have at least a year to interrogate Hussein before he is delivered to court. They say long periods in captivity have typically made high-ranking terrorists markedly more cooperative. That could conflict with Iraqi ambitions to try Hussein faster, although it may take that long to organize an effective prosecution.

State Department war crimes ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper is expected to visit Iraq next month to discuss the Hussein trial with the Iraqi Governing Council and the U.S.-led occupation authorities. The White House has offered to help Iraq develop a special tribunal and build the case against Hussein and others, but it does not want to be seen as dictating terms.

Iraqi authorities must decide the extent of the charges against Hussein and, indeed, the scope of a trial that many Iraqis hope will stretch beyond his personal role to expose a vast system of terror. Some members of the Governing Council are pushing for an early trial that convicts Hussein quickly and closes a door on the nation`s inglorious past.

"Any investigation into this case will take some time. You have an entire country that is literally a crime scene, plus what occurred in the neighborhood," cautioned a senior State Department official, referring to Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and its use of chemical weapons against Iran. "We have decades of abuses. One should not expect this to be a quick and rapid process."

The evidence against Hussein is mostly circumstantial, said Hassan Mneimneh, who reviews Iraqi files at Harvard University and in Baghdad for the Iraq Memory Foundation, which aims to build a definitive record for future generations. "He kept himself removed by one or two degrees from actual executive decisions when it came to any act of repression."

Makiya, a creator of the foundation and an expert on known Iraqi documents, said: "We don`t have a smoking gun. There would be some ambiguity, I suspect, from a legal point of view."

International legal standards do not require a commander to be proved to have delivered explicit orders to underlings, said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. Rather, the evidence must prove that the leader knew or should have known about the alleged crimes and did nothing to prevent them or punish the perpetrators.

"It`s open-and-shut on a command theory," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat. Hussein "was in charge of Iraq for 35 years," he said. "It`s impossible to imagine that the Kurds were gassed without his knowledge."

A second approach would be to demonstrate that Hussein participated in a joint criminal enterprise, Dicker said. Akin to conspiracy statutes in U.S. courts, the approach holds members of a criminal group accountable for their colleagues` actions.

"He clearly ran the regime. If they can attribute crimes committed by his generals, security officials and confidants to him, they can throw away the key," said Michael Amitay, head of the Washington Kurdish Institute, which received a share of the $10 million spent by the U.S. government to gather evidence against Hussein and his lieutenants.

Problems and Potential


The Hussein government`s repeated assaults on Kurds illustrate the problems and the potential of a case against Hussein for genocide or crimes against humanity. Human rights workers who have studied the documents say they have found no direct command from Hussein to target the Kurds.

Details of the Anfal campaign are well known, thanks to the seizure of documents after the Persian Gulf War, when northern Iraq came under the protection of the United States and Britain. Working with Human Rights Watch, the U.S. military hauled 18 tons of documents to Washington, where staff members spent years building a genocide case.

"There`s going to be pretty clear documentary evidence that this was not a rogue operation," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "This was a very well-planned and orchestrated operation to smoke Kurds out of the highlands using chemical weapons, to round them up on the plains, and to truck the men and boys to remote locations for execution."

A delegation of Iraq`s current leaders, dispatched Dec. 14 to confirm the identity of the newly captured Hussein, asked him about the attack on Halabja. He told the delegation Iran was responsible. He insisted that he ran a just society. He has long dismissed allegations of brutality against the Shiites by declaring that Iraqi troops acted within their rights to crush an insurgency.

Investigators expect last year`s capture of central and southern Iraq to yield incriminating files from a government that documented its operations in often extraordinary detail. Documents that could fill seven miles of shelves were in the custody of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group by July. Many more are scattered among Iraqi political parties and other groups.

Countless Iraqis have told stories of brutality and oppression since Hussein`s government fell on April 9, a trend that his arrest appears likely to intensify. U.S. forces are holding at least three dozen men who served in top jobs in the Hussein government.

"Everyone is out to save himself or herself at this stage," said David Scheffer, former U.S. ambassador for war crimes, who perceives "a lot of potential for witness testimony from the highest levels."

Human rights workers and international legal advocates fear that pressure for vengeance inside Iraq will force a trial that fails to measure up to international legal standards -- and does not reach deeply enough into Iraq`s past horrors.

"This has to be done methodically and systematically. It`s largely a question of a rush to closure," said Mneimneh, whose research is part of a broader effort to document Iraq`s recent past. "Iraqi society at large is willing to let it happen because, at the end, Saddam is going to be executed, which is what they want to happen."

Some of Hussein`s accusers said a murder conviction could be a simple -- if potentially unsatisfying -- way forward. During a 1982 Cabinet meeting, according to author Said K. Aburish, Hussein took issue with his health minister, Riyadh Ibrahim. The Iraqi leader invited Ibrahim to step into the next room. Ministers heard a shot, and Hussein returned alone.

No one heard from Ibrahim again.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Working Hard -- And Forgotten


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A21


Here`s a hope for 2004: that this is the year when we remember the forgotten.

The forgotten are not rich, powerful or famous. They are not the people who show up at President Bush`s fundraisers or get big tax breaks. They are not Michael Jackson or his lawyers. They are forgotten by definition: Nobody pays any attention to them.

We pay lip service to the forgotten. We praise our men and women in uniform. But how much do we think about the reservists whose lives have been so disrupted by tours of duty extended far beyond anything they signed up for? How much attention do we pay to those who have lost limbs in Iraq or Afghanistan? Politicians who have never served in battle give lovely speeches about patriotism. How often do they think about the sacrifices being asked of those who carry out their policies?

We praise hard work all the time. But as a society, we do very little for those who work hard every day and receive little reward for what they do. Beth Shulman, a former vice president of the United Food & Commercial Workers union, has written a powerful book on the subject, "The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans." Attention should be paid to her indictment.

She points out that one in four U.S. workers earns $8.70 an hour or less. That works out, at the high end, to $18,100 a year, roughly the current official poverty level in the United States for a family of four. Contrary to a lot of propaganda, Shulman notes that "low-wage job mobility is minimal" and that "low-wage workers have few career ladders."

We pay no attention to the people on whom we depend every day. As Shulman has written: "They are nursing home and home health care workers who care for our parents; they are poultry processors who bone and package our chicken; they are retail clerks in department stores, grocery stores and convenience stores; they are housekeepers and janitors who keep our hotel rooms and offices clean; they are billing and telephone call center workers who take our complaints and answer our questions; and they are teaching assistants in our schools and child care workers who free us so that we can work ourselves."

And where public policy is concerned, they are nothing. We don`t worry that they lack health insurance coverage. We`re not concerned that their children lack child care or that they get little or no vacation time. You have to admire the gall of free-market economists who, in articles so often written during summer breaks in places like Martha`s Vineyard or the Rockies, tell those who earn so little to work harder.

We don`t raise the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997. The aforementioned economists claim that the minimum wage is counterproductive. They clearly didn`t grow up with anyone whose only pay increases came when Congress kindly raised the minimum wage.

The forgotten come in many colors. They are whites of modest income who work hard, are devoted to their kids and spouses -- and whose votes conservative politicians assume they will get without delivering any tangible benefits to their families. They are African Americans who are among the most religious people in our country but have to listen to racists who question their "values." They are Latino immigrants who find themselves trashed even though our society depends upon their labor.

The forgotten are forgotten because the media pay little attention to them. Much notice is given to the wealthy and the well-educated, to the CEOs, to those who are seen as fashionable, beautiful and articulate. The rest are sent away empty. The devoutly religious in white evangelical or African American churches don`t get much press. Union activists rarely get good press. Business pages and business broadcasts talk far more about stock prices and takeovers than wages and benefits. The cops who patrol dangerous neighborhoods get into the papers only when something goes terribly wrong. Good teachers get the occasional friendly feature story but usually see their profession discussed in relation to failure.

This is an election year. It`s the moment to challenge politicians as to whether what they say bears any relationship to what they do for those whose votes they so devoutly seek. In an election year, the forgotten have the majority of the votes. They should use them to demand that they not be forgotten.

[e-mail]



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

FBI und CIA die Lachnummern des Jahres.
Bei diesen Sicherheitsorganen ist schon durch die Anwesenheit dieser beiden Vereine die höchste Alarmstufe erforderlich!


SPIEGEL ONLINE - 02. Januar 2004, 13:25
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,280237,00.html
Falscher Terroralarm

FBI-Panne verhinderte Weihnachts-Flüge

Kampfjets über Los Angeles, gestrichene Flüge in Paris, Terroralarm in Hamburg: Die Angst vor Anschlägen sorgt weltweit für Einschränkungen. Nun stellt sich heraus, dass für den Stopp mehrerer Air-France-Maschinen eine FBI-Panne verantwortlich war. An Bord war ein Kind, das den Namen eines mutmaßlichen Terroristenführers trug.

Paris - Aus Kreisen der US-Regierung wurden Meldungen bestätigt, dass Kampfjets vom Typ F-16 am Dienstagabend und am Mittwoch mindestens zwei Air-France-Maschinen zum Flughafen Los Angeles eskortiert hätten. Die Maßnahme habe sicherstellen sollen, dass die Maschinen auf Kurs blieben, hieß es. Zudem wurden mehreren Verbindungen aus Frankreich, Großbritannien und Mexiko gestrichen. Der Geheimdienst, hieß es weiter, sei noch immer besorgt wegen glaubwürdiger Informationen über Terrorgefahren auf Flügen von Paris und Mexiko-Stadt nach Los Angeles.
Als Grund für den Stopp mehrerer Air-France-Maschinen in den Weihnachtstagen stellte sich indes eine Panne der amerikanischen Bundespolizei FBI heraus. Die USA haben mit Frankreich ein Abkommen getroffen, wonach die französische Seite Passagierlisten von als Risiko eingestuften Flügen bereits mindestens eine Stunde vor dem Start übermittelt. Nach einem Bericht des "Wall Street Journal" übergab das FBI den französischen Behörden eine Liste mit Namen von sechs Verdächtigen.

Zudem wurde die Information weitergegeben, dass Extremisten mit Verbindungen zu al-Qaida die Entführung von Air France-Maschinen planten. Doch bei der Übertragung von Daten kam es zu einer peinlichen Panne. Es wurden nur die Nachnamen, nicht aber die Vornamen weitergegeben, auch die Geburtsdaten fehlten, bestätigte ein Sprecher des französischen Innenministeriums in Paris. Ferner habe es Schwierigkeiten mit der Schreibung der ausländischen Namen gegeben.

Nachdem auf Passagierlisten die vermeintlichen Terroristen entdeckt wurden, hatte die Air France in der Weihnachtszeit sechs Flüge zwischen Los Angeles und Paris streichen müssen. Später habe sich dem Bericht des "Wall Street Journal" zufolge herausgestellt, dass es sich bei einem Verdächtigen um ein Kind handelte, dessen Name offenbar mit dem Chef einer tunesischen Extremistenorganisation übereinstimmt. Zudem wurde ein walisischer Versicherungsagent, eine ältere Frau aus China sowie drei Franzosen verdächtigt.

Die mexikanische Fluggesellschaft Aeromexico strich am Neujahrstag erneut einen Flug von Mexiko-Stadt nach Los Angeles und begründete dies mit US-Sicherheitsbedenken. Aus mexikanischen und US-Regierungskreisen verlautete, man habe befürchtet, dass mutmaßliche Entführer möglicherweise Flugtickets gebucht hätten.

Die British Airways kündigte an, sie werde ihren für heute Nachmittag vorgesehenen Flug von London nach Washington überprüfen. Bereits am Neujahrstag war eine Verbindung von London-Heathrow nach Washington abgesagt worden.




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

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

Ein Heise Artikel besonders interessant wegen der Links zu den neuen Einreisebestimmungen in die USA in der nächsten Zeit

Wie du mir, so ich dir

Florian Rötzer 02.01.2004
Nachdem visumspflichtige Reisende in die USA seit gestern digitale Fingerabdrücke und Fotos von sich machen lassen müssen, wird dies nach der Anweisung eines erzürnten brasilianischen Richters nun auch von US-Bürgern verlangt, die nach Brasilien wollen

Seit dem 1. Januar werden von visumspflichtigen Reisenden in die USA mit der United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology ( US-VISIT [1]) Fotografien gemacht und digitale Fingerabdrücke. Die Daten werden mit einer Liste verdächtiger Personen abgeglichen. Im Laufe des Jahres soll dasselbe auch bei ausreisenden Personen gemacht werden. Ausgenommen davon sind vorerst Einreisende von 27 Ländern, vorwiegend in Europa.

Ab Ende Oktober sollen aber auch Ausländer, die ohne Visum in die USA nach dem sogenannten Visa Waiver Program [2] einreisen wollen, einen maschinenlesbaren Pass mit biometrischen Merkmalen vorlegen müssen ( Die Websites der meisten Regierungen werden kaum benutzt). Gleichwohl genießen die Bürger einige Länder jetzt noch einen Ausnahmestatus. Die EU hat mit der US-Regierung bereits vereinbart, dass biometrische Merkmale in Pässen aufgenommen werden sollen, und will dies auch selbst einführen. Bundesinnenminister Schily hatte im November mit Tom Ridge, dem Minister für Homeland Security, die Schaffung einheitlicher Standards bei der Aufnahme biometrischer Daten in Pässen, Ausweisen und Visa vereinbart.

Die Ausnahmeregelung für manche Länder und die Prozedur überhaupt stieß zumindest in Brasilien auf öffentlich geäußerten Widerspruch. Am Dienstag forderte der brasilianische Außenminister, dass die US-Regierung auch brasilianische Bürger vom US-Visit-Programm ausnehmen soll, ansonsten würden einreisende US-Bürger denselben Kontrollen unterworfen.

Der Richter Julier Sebastiao da Silva vom Bundesstaat Mato Grosso ging noch weite [3] und hat am Dienst mit einer gerichtlichen Verfügung die Zollbehörden seines Landes angewiesen [4], einreisende US-Bürger denselben Schikanen zu unterziehen. Seit gestern müssen Amerikaner an einigen Flughäfen, darunter auch dem von Sao Paulo, daher ihre Fingerabdrücke abnehmen und sich fotografieren lassen, wenn sie nach Brasilien einreisen wollen.

Da Silva, dessen Anordnung außer Kraft gesetzt werden kann, wenn er seine Befugnisse überschritten hat, greift dabei zu harten Formulierungen:


Ich betrachte das Gesetz als absolut brutal. Es bedroht die Menschenrechte, verletzt die Menschenwürde, ist ausländerfeindlich und steht für die schlimmsten Schrecken, die von den Nazis begangen wurden.

Die Beziehungen zwischen Brasilien und der Bush-Regierung sind angespannt. Der sozialistische Präsident Inácio Lula da Silva hatte den Irak-Krieg scharf kritisiert und zudem die US-Regierung durch Reisen nach Kuba, Libyen und Syrien verärgert. Ebenfalls in Reaktion verlangte Brasilien bereits Visa von einreisenden US-Bürgern.


Links

[1] http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_03…
[2] http://travel.state.gov/vwp.html

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/te/16434/1.html

[Joerver]

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

[Joerver]

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[greese]

Hallo Joerver,
damit Du nicht allein in Deinem negatives über W. Bush schreiben mußt:

Amerika Eine neue Wirtschaftsblase entsteht

Von David Pauly,
Bloomberg News 29. Oktober 2003

Moment! Amerika ist doch tatsächlich dabei, schon wieder eine Wirtschaftsblase entstehen zu lassen - und dieses Mal könnte sie historisch kaum zu überbieten sein. Die Regierung steuert auf eine unbestimmte Serie jährlicher Haushaltsdefizite in Höhe von rund 500 Milliarden Dollar zu, während sie Unsummen von Geldern aufnimmt, um zu Hause Steuerkürzungen und höhere Zuschüsse im Gesundheitswesen oder ihr Engagement beim Kampf gegen den Terrorismus und der Verbreitung der Demokratie im Ausland finanzieren zu können.
Hierzu ein paar Fakten: Auf Basis seiner jüngsten Ergebnisse würde der Ölgigant Exxon-Mobil zur Erwirtschaftung von 500 Milliarden Dollar 33 Jahre benötigen. Das letzte Rekord-Haushaltsdefizit verzeichnete Amerika im Jahr 1992 mit 290 Milliarden Dollar. Ein Defizit in Höhe von einer halben Billionen Dollar entspricht in etwa fünf Prozent der aktuellen amerikanischen Wirtschaftsproduktion. Die Regierungen der Euro-Länder sind indes dazu aufgefordert, ihr Haushaltsdefizit nicht über die festgesetzte Marke von drei Prozent des Bruttoinlandsproduktes steigen zu lassen. Bei einem jährlichen Defizit in Höhe von 500 Milliarden Dollar würde die amerikanische Staatsschuld in rund 14 Jahren doppelt so hoch sein.
Die Aussicht auf die mit dieser Schuld verbundene steigende Zinsbelastung ist erschütternd. Gerade jetzt, wo sich die meisten Amerikaner auf ein Platzen der Aktienspekulationsblase eingestellt haben, und sie zu dem Schluß gekommen sind, daß eine Abkühlung des überhitzten Immobilienmarktes zu bewältigen, wenn nicht sogar wünschenswert wäre.
Anreizwirkung der Steuersenkungen fragwürdig
Die Regierung unter George W. Bush sowie ein entgegenkommender Kongreß haben für den Zeitraum bis 2010 Einkommensteuersenkungen in Höhe von 1,7 Billionen Dollar verfügt. In diesem Jahr sollen die Steuerkürzungen eigentlich auslaufen, aber das ist Augenwischerei. Bush selbst möchte sie nämlich dauerhaft weiterführen. Diese Steuersenkungsinitiative soll einen Anreiz für die privaten Haushalte schaffen, mehr auszugeben, sowie das Wirtschaftswachstum ankurbeln; die Steuereinnahmen der Regierung sollen dabei gerade so wachsen, daß die durch die Kürzungen hervorgerufenen Steuerausfälle ausgeglichen werden können. So, wie es derzeit aussieht, ist dieses Vorhaben mit Blick auf das Ausgabenprogramm der amerikanischen Regierung fragwürdig und absolut unmöglich.
Für Medicare besteht die große Verlockung darin, Rentnern ihre Medikamente zu bezahlen - geschätzte Kosten für die nächsten zehn Jahre: 400 Milliarden Dollar. Diese zusätzliche Verbindlichkeit wird dann eintreten, wenn sich die Regierung gerade darüber Gedanken machen dürfte, wie sie denn die mit diesem Versicherungsprogramm verbundenen Kosten senken könnte. Nach Schätzungen der von der Regierung eingesetzten Treuhänder wird der Medicare-Trustfonds angesichts des derzeitigen Bedarfs im Jahr 2026 pleite
sein. Zur gleichen Zeit bittet Bush den Kongreß, zusätzlich 87 Milliarden Dollar für militärische Zwecke und den Wiederaufbau im Irak sowie in Afghanistan zu bewilligen. Die Regerung spricht von einem möglichen Mehrbedarf in Höhe von 30 bis 55 Milliarden Dollar - je nachdem, wie viel Öl der Irak verkaufen kann. Bush wird das Geld auf jeden Fall bekommen. Der Kongreß kann nämlich nicht verantworten, die amerikanischen Truppen einer noch größeren Gefahr auszusetzen.
Historische Erfahrungen überwiegend negativ
Das Budget Office des Kongresses hat - sogar ohne Berücksichtigung der angesprochenen Zusatzausgaben - das Haushaltsdefizit für 2004 auf 480 Milliarden Dollar festgesetzt, nach 374 Milliarden Dollar für das im September zu Ende gegangene Fiskaljahr 2003. Traurigerweise haben sich die Bush-Vorgänger mit ähnlichen Programmen gescheitert: Ende der sechziger Jahre gab Lyndon Johnson Unsummen für den Vietnam-Krieg sowie diverse Inlandsprogramme aus. Die Inflationsrate stieg zwischen 1967 und 1968 - Johnsons letztem Präsidentschaftsjahr - von drei Prozent auf 4,7 Prozent, und dann auf 6,2 Prozent im darauf folgenden Jahr. Richard Nixon sah sich 1971 dazu gezwungen, der Nation eine Preis- und Lohnkontrolle aufzuerlegen. Ronald Reagan versuchte es mit dem „Steuersenkungen für Wohlstand“-Trick, nachdem er 1980 gewählt worden war. Bis 1983 hatte sich das Haushaltsdefizit dann auf sechs Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts (BIP) ausgeweitet, was nach wie vor ein absolutes Rekordniveau nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg darstellt.
Bushs Vater, George H.W. Bush, und Bill Clinton sahen sich schließlich dazu veranlaßt, die Steuern wieder zu erhöhen. Dies, in Verbindung mit der boomenden Wirtschaft der neunziger und Ausgabendrosselungen, führte in den vier Jahren bis 2001 kurzzeitig zu Haushaltsüberschüssen. Gegenüber der Politik hat die Wirtschaftshistorie allerdings einen niedrigeren Stellenwert: Per Definition handelt es sich bei den Republikanern um Menschen, die sich ständig über Steuern beklagen, die sie eigentlich mit Leichtigkeit zahlen könnten. Die Demokraten sind indes der Auffassung, daß die Regierung ihnen Geld schuldet. Auf lange Sicht hat es noch keine der beiden Parteien geschafft, ohne „Deficit Spending“ auszukommen. Amerika hat bislang immer überlebt und dabei Wohlstand genossen - soviel steht fest. Angesichts der momentanen Perspektiven in puncto Ausgaben, (die sich belastend auswirkende) Schuldenrückzahlung, Inflation und (hohe) Zinsen möchte man jedoch einfach nur den Kopf einziehen.

Ich sehe das ähnlich und meine nach wie vor, daß Clinton der bessere Präsident war und Bush zumindest einen soliden und ausgeglichenen Haushalt hinterlassen hat.
Grüße
greese

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Approximately 2003 reasons to be grateful it`s almost December 31

By Dave Barry

Sunday, December 28, 2003; Page W12


It was the Year of the Troubling Question.

The most troubling one was: What the heck happened to all those weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be in Iraq? Apparently there was an intelligence mix-up. As CIA Director George Tenet noted recently, "Our thinking now is that the weapons of mass destruction might actually be in that other one, whaddyacallit, Iran. Or Michigan. We`re pretty sure the letter `i` is involved."

Some other troubling questions from 2003 were:

* If Californians hated Gray Davis so much, why did they elect him governor twice? Did Gray have photos of the entire California electorate naked? Can we see them?

* Why did Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck -- whose sole achievement in 2003 was to co-star in "Gigli," a film so bad it was used to torture suspected terrorists -- receive more media attention than the entire continent of Asia, and nearly as much as Kobe Bryant?

* Who`s watching all these "reality" TV shows? Nobody admits to watching them; everybody agrees they`re even stupider than those infomercials wherein Ron Popeil spends 30 minutes liquefying vegetables to the rapturous delight of a live, if half-witted, audience. And yet "reality" shows keep getting ratings. Who are the viewers? Have houseplants learned to operate remote controls?

* Can young people wear their pants any lower? Their waistbands are now at approximately knee level. Where will this trend end? The shins? The feet? Will young

people eventually detach themselves from their pants

altogether and just drag them along behind, connected to their ankles by a belt?

We don`t know the answers to any of these questions. All we know is that 2003 is finally, we hope, over. But before we move on, let`s put our heads between our knees and take one last look back at this remarkable year, which started, as is so often the case, with . . .

JANUARY


. . . which begins with traditional New Year`s Day celebrations all over the world, except at the Central Intelligence Agency, which, acting on what it believes to be accurate information, observes Thanksgiving.

In college football, the University of Miami Hurricanes defeat Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl and reign as national champions for roughly a week, at the end of which a Fiesta Bowl official -- a man with the reaction time of a sequoia, who has been standing in the end zone the whole time, reflecting on the final play -- throws a penalty flag, thus giving the game to Ohio State in what future legal scholars will deem the most flagrant miscarriage of justice in human history. Not that we Miami fans are still bitter.

On a brighter note, President Bush announces a plan to boost the sagging U.S. economy via a two-pronged stimulus package consisting of (1) visiting Crawford, Tex., and (2) prayer.

Meanwhile, a claim by the Raelians, a UFO cult, that they have produced a human clone baby named Eve is increasingly viewed with skepticism by scientists. "Having looked at their so-called evidence," state the scientists, "we strongly suspect that the clone baby is actually named Rachel."

In medical news, researchers studying heart attack victims announce that a person who drinks a glass or two of wine or beer is, quote, "significantly more likely to do the macarena."

World tension mounts when North Korea announces that it is withdrawing from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, on the grounds that it`s really hard to pronounce "proliferation." Faced with clear-cut evidence that the North Koreans are actively developing weapons of mass destruction, President Bush vows to determine whether North Korea "is located anywhere near Iraq."

In politics, Rep. Harold Farnwimble of Ohio becomes the only Democratic member of Congress to formally declare that he is not running for president. He immediately surges ahead in the polls.

On the technological front, a fast-spreading "worm" virus cripples Internet e-mail traffic, briefly bringing the international penis-enlargement industry to . . . well, to its knees.

In pro football, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeat the heavily favored Oakland Raiders and win the Super Bowl, despite the objections of Fiesta Bowl officials who want to award the victory to Ohio State.

Speaking of setbacks, in . . .

FEBRUARY


. . . U.S. coalition-building efforts are dealt a severe blow when France announces that it will not participate in the impending Iraq invasion, a decision that, in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "could seriously impair our ability to surrender."

American citizens show their disdain for all things French by boycotting French wine, calling french fries "freedom fries," and taking showers.

Elsewhere in the War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security urges Americans to stock up on food, water, flashlights, duct tape and plastic sheeting. Within hours, al Qaeda surrenders, stating: "We cannot fight flashlights and duct tape."

Meanwhile, tension between the United States and North Korea continues to mount as North Korea, in what the White House calls "a deliberate act of provocation," uses nuclear missiles to destroy Columbus, Ohio. A visibly angry President Bush warns the North Koreans that they "better not give any of those missiles to Iraq."

On the economic front, the struggling airline industry undergoes another round of cost-cutting, highlighted by United Airlines` announcement that, beginning in March, passengers on international flights "will have to eat each other."

On Valentine`s Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays: fear.

In entertainment news, Rachel the imaginary UFO cult baby is signed to do a "reality" TV show. In yet another indication of the nation`s worsening obesity crisis, a new medical study concludes that Americans are now so fat that "they are causing tides."

Late in the month, a massive "Storm of the Century" blizzard batters the Northeast with icy blasts and holds the region in its wintry grip, blanketing New England with white stuff as emergency crews struggle to keep the news media supplied with weather cliches.

And things only get worse in . . .

MARCH


. . . when North Korean troops invade Oregon, prompting a grim-faced President Bush to declare that "time is running out for the Iraqi regime." But the United States continues to have trouble getting other nations to join the coalition, and is forced to bribe Turkey by giving the Turkish government an "economic aid package" consisting of $37 billion in cash, plus unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes, plus what is described as a "hard-to-get video" of Britney Spears. With Turkey onboard, the coalition now consists of seven nations, assuming you count Guam, Puerto Rico and Staten Island as nations.

As it becomes clear that an Iraqi invasion is imminent and war is at hand, Democrats in Congress, setting aside partisan politics, pledge "total, unwavering and unconditional support" for the president and commander in chief, "unless anything bad happens."

While all this is going on, Osama bin Laden attempts to surrender to U.S. authorities, but is told to come back later, as everybody is busy.

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein, in a last-ditch effort to stay in power, declares that he has been the victim of "identity theft," and somebody else, using his name and Social Security number, has actually been running Iraq for the past two decades. In response, the United Nations Security Council, meeting in emergency session, votes, 15-0, to continue patronizing expensive Manhattan restaurants.

But it is too little, too late. On March 19, coalition forces attack Iraq; within days they control most of the southern part of the country and have taken many prisoners, including two of the three known Dixie Chicks. They do not immediately uncover any weapons of mass destruction, but do find a warehouse containing a large quantity of what is believed to be refined sugar, which CIA intelligence analysts note "is a leading cause of tooth decay."

In non-war news:

* An outbreak of the SARS virus in Asia is blamed for dozens of deaths, many of them travel agents committing suicide.

* The Academy Awards are held, with the Oscar for best picture going to "Chicago," only to be taken away by a Fiesta Bowl official and awarded to Ohio State.

And speaking of drama, in . . .

APRIL


. . . coalition forces capture Baghdad, and hopes soar for a quick resolution to the conflict when a huge statue of Hussein is toppled before a cheering Iraqi crowd. But these hopes are quickly dashed when, tragically, the statue fails to land on Geraldo.

Hussein himself is nowhere to be found, though he does release a videotape announcing plans to take his career "in a new direction," possibly including a "reality" TV show called "Queer Eye for a Dictator Guy," in which he will undergo a makeover by five gay men, who will then be executed.

On the Weapons of Mass Destruction front, coalition troops discover three barrels of lard, described by U.S. intelligence sources as "a heart attack waiting to happen."

As the war grinds on, some welcome moments of comic relief are provided by the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, who becomes an international laughingstock by continuing to insist, despite overwhelming evidence, that the Americans are being routed. He is quickly hired as a Fiesta Bowl official.

In other news:

* The Masters golf tournament goes smoothly despite a mass protest by an estimated four people against Augusta National`s membership policy, defended by a person named "Hootie," of accepting only deceased males. "Someday, we may decide to accept women," says Hootie. "But only if they are males."

* The New York Times suffers a credibility crisis when numerous stories by reporter Jayson Blair are found to contain inaccuracies, such as the assertion, in a story about the Washington-area sniper case, that the sun is carried across the sky by a giant turtle. ("In fact," notes the Times, "it is the moon.") Blair, thoroughly disgraced, is forced to accept a six-figure book contract.

* The Georgia legislature, finally yielding to intense pressure to eliminate a controversial symbol of the Old South, votes, after passionate debate, to abolish slavery.

* American Airlines, in a move to cut labor costs, replaces some pilots with baggage handlers, but stresses that this change applies "only to daytime flights."

* North Korean troops capture Wisconsin.

But things brighten a bit in . . .

MAY


. . . when President Bush lands on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California and declares, to a crowd of sailors, that major combat has ended. The jubilation is dampened somewhat when, moments after the president`s plane departs, the carrier is severely damaged by a car bomb.

Meanwhile, in Iraq itself, looting continues to be a problem, as dramatized by the discovery that both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are missing. On a more positive note, efforts to establish a Western-style democracy in Iraq move forward with the arrival, as consultants, of Florida election officials. Within hours the nation plunges back into chaos.

Elsewhere abroad, Chinese health authorities, stung by accusations that they have been slow in reacting to the SARS virus, announce that they will execute anybody who gets sick.

In domestic news, Congress enacts massive tax cuts in an effort to, in the words of a Republican leader, "see if we can push the deficit over the skillion-dollar mark." The major Democratic presidential candidates denounce the cuts and vow to repeal them, because promising to increase taxes is a proven vote-winner on the planet they come from, namely, Planet Walter Mondale.

Florida becomes the most recent state to ban smoking in restaurants. California, determined to stay ahead of the trend, bans eating in restaurants.

In an inspiring story of courage, hiker Aron Ralston, trapped in a remote Utah canyon, frees himself by amputating his own right arm. Somehow he manages to fashion a tourniquet and hike back to civilization, where he is slapped with a $17 million negligence lawsuit by lawyers representing the arm.

North Korean troops occupy the Washington Monument.

In sports, golfer Annika Sorenstam competes in a PGA tournament, setting off a major round of diaper-changing among the membership of Augusta National. Meanwhile, Nike signs a $90 million endorsement deal with 18-year-old basketball player and Hummer owner LeBron James Inc. To pay for this, Nike raises the average price of a pair of its sneakers to $385, which includes $1.52 for materials, and 17 cents for labor.

In yet another sign of declining national educational standards, a 12-year-old Vermont girl wins the National Spelling Bee in Washington by spelling "horse." She actually spells it "h-o-r-s," but the judges rule that this is "close enough."

In entertainment news, CNN switches to a new format that consists entirely of Larry King talking to former prosecutors about Laci Peterson.

Speaking of upbeat, in . . .

JUNE


. . . hopes for peace in the Mideast soar when President Bush meets with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a landmark summit, which goes really well until gunfire erupts over the seating arrangements.

Meanwhile, a political controversy brews over a little-noticed statement in the president`s January State of the Union address, in which he asserted that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was "located right next to Connecticut." The CIA heatedly denies responsibility for the error, noting, "We clearly said Delaware."

On the crime front, Martha Stewart is indicted on charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. "Also," states a federal prosecutor, "we believe that some of her casseroles contained human body parts."

Speaking of unhealthy: An outbreak of monkey pox (really) forces federal authorities to ban the sale of, among other animals, Gambian giant pouched rats. It is not immediately clear why anybody would want a giant pouched rat, or why such a person would not deserve to get a disease.

On the literary front, the blockbuster bestseller of the year is the long-awaited fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers. Another hot seller is Sen. Hillary Clinton`s new book, I Can`t Help It if I`m a Saint, in which, with great candor and openness, her ghostwriter reveals the most intimate details of Sen. Clinton`s life, except the parts that might be interesting, which fall within Sen. Clinton`s Zone of Privacy. Promoting her book on a nationwide, multi-city Zone of Privacy Tour, Sen. Clinton repeatedly denies that she plans to run for president, insisting that she is totally dedicated to "representing my constituents in, you know, that state."

North Korean troops, growing desperate for attention, announce plans to appear in a new "reality" TV show, tentatively titled "We Have Conquered Your Nation, Capitalist Scum," but it is canceled when network executives find out that nobody involved is blond.

The downward spiral continues in . . .

JULY


. . . when President Bush goes to Africa for a five-day visit that goes quite well, considering the fact that the president, relying on U.S. intelligence reports, is under the impression he is touring Switzerland. Once the confusion is straightened out, the president has what the White House describes as "a very constructive meeting" with "a very influential group" of elephants.

Meanwhile, hopes for democracy dim in Iraq when the postwar governing council of Iraqi leaders, holding its first meeting, votes to hire James Carville. On a positive note, U.S. forces kill Uday and Qusay Hussein, who are immediately signed to appear on a "reality" TV show called "Who Wants to Take a Gander at the Bodies of Two Slimeball Dictator`s Sons?"

In the Caribbean, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepts a group of Cubans attempting to travel from Cuba to Florida in a 1951 Chevrolet pickup truck. The Coast Guard arrests the Cubans and sinks the truck after a computer check shows that it has an expired registration. "Also," states the Coast Guard, "they were not signaling lane changes."

Domestically, the big news is in California, where -- in a catastrophe long predicted by geologists -- a massive, violent tectonic shift opens a huge fault in the earth`s crust, releasing a vast mutant, swarming horde of gubernatorial candidates. "It`s terrible!" reports one rescue worker. "There`s porn stars, washed-out actors, strippers, fanatics, lunatics and somebody named `Cruz Bustamante.`" Federal troops are ordered into the state, where they immediately become stuck in traffic.

Disney World, in what turns out to be a hugely successful promotion, holds the first-ever "North Korean Troops Day."

In sports, Lance Armstrong wins a record-tying fifth Tour de France and celebrates, as is traditional, by having his bicycle seat surgically removed from his butt.

In entertainment news, CNN, concerned about flagging viewer interest in the Laci Peterson format, switches to "All Kobe, All the Time." The music industry, in what is seen as a last-ditch effort to halt the sharing of music files on the Internet, asks a federal judge to issue an injunction against "the possession or use of electricity."

Speaking of which, the big domestic story in . . .

AUGUST


. . . begins on a quiet weekday morning in rural northern Ohio, where 83-year-old widow Eileen Freemonkle decides that, for a change, she will put two Pop-Tarts into her toaster, instead of her usual one. This rogue action -- never anticipated by the designers of the nation`s electrical power grid -- sets off a chain of events that ultimately blacks out the entire Northeast. As rescue crews work overtime trying to keep people in the affected areas supplied with news about the developing Kobe Bryant situation, Congress swings into emergency action; within hours, Democrats and Republicans have issued literally hundreds of press releases blaming each other. Power is finally restored several days later by power company workers, aided by bored North Korean troops.

In Iraq, U.S. troops capture a cousin of Saddam Hussein known as "Chemical Ali"; a search of his person fails to uncover any weapons of mass destruction, but he is carrying a Bic pen that, as CIA analysts are quick to note, "could poke out somebody`s eye."

Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in human history, prompting Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare, to Jay Leno, that he is running for governor of California. In other political news, Howard Dean emerges as the leading Democratic presidential candidate, thanks to a novel Internet fundraising strategy in which he pretends to be a wealthy Nigerian businessman.

In a controversial ruling, a federal court orders a monument depicting the Ten Commandments removed from the Alabama Supreme Court building after an audit shows that it actually has 14 commandments, including two that say "Roll Tide!" In other religious news, Episcopal Church leaders, in a highly controversial decision following bitter debate, confirm the church`s first openly Jewish bishop.

In the arts, Madonna, demonstrating the courage, creativity and talent that have made her name synonymous with the word "Madonna," kisses Britney Spears. This results in a worldwide tidal wave of publicity, followed by the emergence, on both performers, of lip sores.

And speaking of alarming, in . . .

SEPTEMBER


. . . Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.

Meanwhile, President Bush goes before the U.N. General Assembly to ask for help in rebuilding Iraq. After enjoying a hearty international laugh, everyone adjourns for dinner at upscale Manhattan restaurants.

In domestic politics, Gen. Wesley Clark joins the crowded field of Democratic contenders and declares that, if he is elected president, his first official act will be "to actually register as a Democrat." In other political news, the California governor race is temporarily thrown into disarray when residents of the other 49 states file a class-action lawsuit demanding the right to vote in the recall election, on the grounds that "it`s on TV all the time."

But the hot political news is a huge scandal that erupts in Washington after conservative columnist Robert Novak writes a column in which he reveals that the wife of a guy who was critical of the Bush administration`s Iraqi policy and went to Africa on a fact-finding mission is in fact a CIA agent (the wife is, we mean), which he (Novak) allegedly was improperly told by a high-level White House source, who some people allege is Karl Rove, although he (Rove) (also Novak) heatedly denies this, and if you think this scandal is incomprehensible, you are in the vast human majority, but people in Washington are still so excited about it that they have to change their underwear hourly.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Isabel makes landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, forcing the evacuation of 23,000 North Korean troops.

In the War on Telemarketing, a federal judge in Oklahoma blocks the implementation of the federal Do Not Call list on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Hours later, he reverses the ruling on the grounds that his house is surrounded by people with torches.

There is another popular uprising in . . .

OCTOBER


. . . when the people of California, by a large majority, vote to send incumbent governor Gray Davis back to his pod. They replace him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wins easily despite allegations that he gropes women, which he assures the voters that he will never do in his capacity as governor "without a really good reason." In his victory statement, Schwarzenegger announces that he will appoint a stunt governor, who will handle the tasks that he is physically unable to perform, such as pronouncing words.

In other California news, fires rage out of control in large sectors of the state, destroying hundreds of homes and an estimated 27,000 Starbucks.

In Washington, Congress approves President Bush`s request for $87 billion to Iraqify Iraq, so that it will be more Iraq-like. The money will also be used for the War on Terror, including $23.99 to pay for what is described as "a complete overhaul" of the U.S. intelligence community`s Magic 8-Ball. On the economic front, there is good news from the Commerce Department, which reports a sharp upturn in the nation`s economy, credited primarily to spending by North Korean troops.

In the Democratic presidential race, Sen. Bob "Bob" Graham drops out, narrowing the field to 2,038 people, if you count Dennis Kucinich.

In a surprising development, conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh shocks his millions of listeners when, confirming tabloid reports, he reveals on his popular syndicated show that he is, biologically, a woman. He promises to get treatment.

In immigration news, federal agents in 21 states descend on Wal-Mart stores that are allegedly employing illegal immigrants; the agents emerge hours later, glassy-eyed, holding bags filled with hundreds of dollars` worth of bargains but unable to remember what they went in there for in the first place.

China, culminating a two-decade effort to develop a manned spaceflight program, puts its first astronaut in orbit. Work begins immediately on a program to develop a way to get him back down.

In health news, authorities in Boston, Chicago and New York report a rash of suicide attempts after the Florida Marlins, a franchise with essentially the same amount of tradition as Britney Spears, win their second World Series in six years. The Marlins are helped by a fluke play in the National League playoffs when a foul ball, about to be caught by Cubs outfielder Moises Alou, is deflected by a man who is later identified as a Fiesta Bowl official.

And speaking of foul, in . . .

NOVEMBER


. . . a big political stink erupts over adding drug benefits to Medicare, with Republicans and Democrats battling fiercely to see who can pander the hardest to the crucial senior citizen voting bloc without letting the other voting blocs figure out how much they will have to pay. The Republicans prevail with the help of AARP; this angers some AARP members, who attempt to burn their membership cards in protest, but are unable to work those newfangled childproof cigarette lighters.

In other political news, Democratic front-runner Howard Dean creates a stir when he says he wants to be the candidate of "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." After harsh criticism from his 2,037 opponents, Dean clarifies his position, explaining that he meant "guys using their pickup trucks to take Confederate flags to the dump to burn them because Confederate flags are bad."

In a move that outrages traditionalists, Massachusetts legalizes gay marriage. California, not to be outdone, outlaws marriage between heterosexuals.

In a dramatic Thanksgiving Day surprise, President Bush makes a top-secret trip to Iraq, where he serves turkey to the troops and delivers a moving speech thanking them for their efforts. The visit puts the troops in high spirits until about three minutes after the president leaves, at which point the turkey, which turns out to be a suicide turkey, explodes.

In entertainment news, CBS cancels its airing of the made-for-TV miniseries "The Reagans" after conservatives object to the portrayal of Ronald Reagan, who is played in the movie by a heavily made-up Bette Midler. Similar charges are leveled against NBC for its movie about Jessica Lynch, who is forced to issue a statement stressing that, despite what the movie suggests, she had "nothing to do with raising the flag at Iwo Jima."

In other entertainment news, pop superstar Michael Jackson again finds himself in legal trouble when authorities in Santa Barbara order him fingerprinted and booked on charges of "extreme creepiness, even for California." Jackson`s attorney expresses outrage, telling a press conference that his client "doesn`t even have fingerprints."

And the strangeness only gets stranger in . . .

DECEMBER


. . . which begins on an upbeat note thanks to strong holiday retail sales, as measured by the economic indicator of Mall Shoppers Injured in Fights Over Sony PlayStations. In other positive news, the Commerce Department reports that the economic recovery has finally resulted in job creation. "So far, it`s only the one job, and it`s in urinal maintenance," notes the department. "But if things work out, it could become full time."

On the War on Terror front, the nation gets a chilling reminder of its continued vulnerability when more than 200 federal airport security workers are hospitalized because of continued exposure to what medical investigators describe as "really funky passenger feet."

In a move that concerns legal scholars, the Supreme Court announces that it is switching to a new "reality" TV format, called "Who Wants to Be a Justice?" in which ordinary citizens will help the court decide cases. In its first decision, the court, by an 11-9 vote, raises the national speed limit to 140 mph.

In other entertainment news, Madonna kisses Cher, Emeril, Paris Hilton, Barney, Flipper and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

In a medical breakthrough, a Houston-based team of surgeons, working for 17 hours in a risky, first-of-its kind operation, is able to separate a 21-year-old woman from her cellular telephone. She expires within hours, but doctors report that the phone is stable, and they expect its condition to improve dramatically "once it finds a new host."

The month`s biggest surprise occurs when U.S. troops finally capture a filthy and bedraggled Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole along with 11 other members of the cast of the CBS reality show "Survivor: Iraq." The former dictator immediately hires attorney Johnnie Cochran, who reveals that his defense strategy will be based on the legal argument that "if there`s no WMD, you must set him free."

Finally, in a heartwarming story of the season, on Christmas Eve, U.S. military radar detects a mysterious object streaking across the sky. A telescopic investigation reveals that the object is what NASA describes as "a heavily modified" 1953 Ford pickup truck, driven by Cuban refugees, apparently bound for the moon.

Here`s hoping they make it. Here`s also hoping that 2004 is a wonderful year, or at least better than 2003.

Which shouldn`t be hard.

Dave Barry will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Ich stelle mir vor Deutschland hätte Schröder und Merkel gewählt.



POLL ANALYSES
December 30, 2003


George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton Most Admired in 2003
Third time outright for Bush, sixth for Clinton


by Jeffrey M. Jones
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup`s annual poll of the most admired people in the world shows George W. Bush receiving the distinction as most admired man in the eyes of the American public for the third consecutive year, and Hillary Rodham Clinton as the consensus choice for most admired woman for the sixth time, and for the first time since 2000. The Rev. Billy Graham once again finished among the Top 10 men, the 46th time he has done so, while Queen Elizabeth II of England appeared among the most admired women for the 39th time.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031230.asp

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



Republicans Are at Risk of Becoming an Endangered Species
By Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey
Former Rep. Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey (R-San Mateo), a co-founder of Earth Day in 1970, was in the House from 1968 to 1982.

January 2, 2004

Thirty years ago, I was pleased to stand at President Nixon`s side as he signed the Endangered Species Act into law. It was tough legislation, but also popular in a way that is all but unimaginable today: The Senate passed it unanimously and only a dozen of my colleagues in the House opposed it.

In the last three decades, the act has done much to protect eagles and other endangered species by protecting their habitats. I`m proud of what the law has accomplished.

I`m not so proud of my Republican Party and its current attitude toward this landmark statute.

Back in 1973, the environment was a bipartisan issue. Both parties strongly supported the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act and many other bedrock laws that have done so much to make our lives enjoyable. Yet today, the Newt Gingrichs and Tom DeLays and others have led the Republican Party to abandon the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt. There are a handful of pro-environment Republicans still in the Congress, but they are outnumbered by people who put corporate campaign contributions and business and development interests ahead in their priorities.

The Endangered Species Act — which turned 30 on Dec. 28 and remains a visionary piece of legislation — is a public commitment by a great democracy to care for the rest of the creatures with which we share the planet.

The act has been remarkably effective. Peregrine falcons, brown pelicans, American alligators and many other species, once on the verge of disappearing, were aided by the law and now thrive. Still-protected species — black-footed ferrets, California condors and manatees among them — would almost certainly be extinct if not for this law. Just last month, I was privileged to see a pair of young condors circling in the Santa Lucia Mountains below Carmel. Twenty years ago, there were no wild condors in California.

Now, however, the administration and its congressional allies are in a pitched battle against the act. The administration has moved to exempt the military from the law.

I once was in the Marine Corps. We do not need to drive species to extinction at Camp Pendleton or Guantanamo Bay or Hunter Liggett to keep our armed forces adequately trained and prepared for combat.

The administration has stopped designating "critical habitat" for listed species except under court order. It has stopped adding to the list of threatened and endangered species unless ordered to do so by a judge. It has moved to exempt the Forest Service from abiding by the law on the pretext of fire prevention. It is working to weaken the requirement that endangered species be protected from pesticides.

And that list barely scratches the surface. The assault on the law is widespread and relentless.

The administration and its comrades in arms argue that the law is ineffective, expensive and in need of drastic overhaul. In truth, they are acting as agents for the timber industry, the mining industry, land developers, big agriculture and other economic interests that sometimes find their profits slightly decreased in the short run by the need to obey this law.

These points are key: Species-protecting measures can have economic consequences on narrow interests in the short term, but in the long term the economy overall — along with the public and the natural world — benefits from a healthy ecosystem.

When I served in Congress, conservatives and conservationists worked together in friendship. Something dark and onerous has happened since the Republicans took over the House. It`s time for Republicans to stand up and try to keep the party true to its historical concept that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the preservation of endangered species.

If we stand back and allow Democrats to be identified as the sole preservers of environmental values, the GOP could soon return to the minority status it occupied for most of the last 70 years. And that, however unfortunate for the party, would be a good thing for eagles, turkeys, ducks and rainbow trout.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.komall.org/inter%20view/chomsky.htm

An interview with Noam Chomsky


Hawzheen O. Kareem
- As an opponent to USA policies, which political wing you belong to?

If you mean Democrat or Republican, the answer is: Neither. It has often been pointed out by political scientists that the US is basically a one-party state -- the business party. with two factions, Democrats and Republicans. Most of the population seems to agree. A very high percentage, sometimes passing 80%, believe that the government serves "the few and the special interests," not "the people." In the contested 2000 election, about 75% regarded it as mostly a farce having nothing to do with them, a game played by rich contributors, party bosses, and the public relations industry, which trained candidates to say mostly meaningless things that might pick up some votes. This was BEFORE the actual election, with the accusations of fraud and selection of Bush with a minority of the popular vote.
I tend to agree with the majority of the population on these matters, and believe there is a significant task ahead to create a more democratic culture, in which elections are far more meaningful and there is also meaningful ongoing political participation by the general population. More serious political scientists in the mainstream describe the US not as a "democracy" but as a "polyarchy": a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification. There is surely much truth to the conclusion of the leading American social philosopher of the 20th century, John Dewey, whose main work was on democracy, that until there is democratic control of the primary economic institutions, politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business."

- What are the goals of the American existence in the Iraq and Middle East?

The primary goal, uncontroversially, is to control the immense energy reserves of the Persian Gulf region, Iraq included. That has been a prime concern of the Western industrial powers since the time when Iraq was created by the British, to ensure that Iraqi oil reserves would be in British hands and the newly-created state of Iraq would be barred from free access to the Gulf. At that time the US was not a leading actor in world affairs. But after World War II, the US was by far the dominant world power, and control of Middle East energy reserves became a leading foreign policy goal, as it had been for its predecessors. In the 1940s, US planners recognized that (in their words) Gulf energy resources are "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Naturally, they intended to control it -- though for many years they did not make much use of it themselves, and in the future, according to US intelligence, the US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa and the Western hemisphere). Nevertheless, it remains a very high priority to control the Gulf resources, which are expected to provide 2/3 of world energy needs for some time to come. Quite apart from yielding "profits beyond the dreams of avarice," as one leading history of the oil industry puts the matter, the region still remains "a stupendous source of strategic power," a lever of world control. Control over Gulf energy reserves provides "veto power" over the actions of rivals, as the leading planner George Kennan pointed out half a century ago. Europe and Asia understand very well, and have long been seeking independent access to energy resources. Much of the jockeying for power in the Middle East and Central Asia has to do with these issues. The populations of the region are regarded as incidental, as long as they are passive and obedient. Few know this as well as the Kurds, at least if they remember their own history.
US planners surely intend to establish a client state in Iraq, with democratic forms if that is possible, if only for propaganda purposes. But Iraq is to be what the British, when they ran the region, called an "Arab facade," with British power in the background if the country seeks too much independence. That is a familiar part of the history of the region for the past century. It is also the way the US has run it`s own domains in the Western hemisphere for a century. There is no indication whatsoever of any miraculous change. The US occupying forces have imposed on Iraq an economic program that no sovereign country would ever accept: it virtually guarantees that the Iraqi economy will be taken over by Western (mostly US) multinational corporations and banks. It is a policy that has been disastrous for the countries on which it has been imposed; in fact, such policies are a prime reason for the current sharp difference between today`s wealthy countries and their former colonies. There is, of course, always a domestic sector that enriches itself by collaborating in running the "facade." So far, the oil industry has been excluded from foreign takeover, because that would be too blatant. But it is likely to follow, when attention turns elsewhere. Furthermore, Washington has already announced that it intends to impose a "status of forces agreement" that will grant the US the right to maintain military forces in Iraq and, crucially, military bases, the first stable US military bases right at the heart of the world`s major energy reserves.

- As an expert in American history and policy is it suitable for Kurds to put their hope and trust completely in American project in Iraq?

You know better than I the famous Kurdish saying about putting trust in anyone. It holds for others as well, but Kurds familiar with their own history need no reminders of how they were sold out by the US in 1975, left to be massacred by the US client state in Iran, and how the people who are now in charge in Washington fully supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst atrocities and long after the war with Iran was over, for reasons that the Bush I administration declared quite openly: its responsibility to support US exporters, though they added the usual rhetoric about how supporting their friend Saddam would contribute to human rights and "stability." These same people -- now back in power in Washington -- also supported Saddam when he crushed the 1991 uprising that might have overthrown the tyrant, and again explained why. One can read in the New York Times that the "best of all worlds" for the US would be an "iron-fisted military junta" that would rule Iraq just the way Saddam did, and that Saddam offers more hope for Iraq`s "stability" than those who seek to overthrow him. They now pretend to be outraged by the mass graves in the South and the Halabja atrocities, but that is pure and transparent fraud, as we can see by looking at how they acted when the atrocities occurred. Of course they knew all about them, but did not care. And with all the later pretense about the Halabja massacre, how much medical aid have they provided for the victims over the past decade? Furthermore, this has nothing particular to do with the United States. That is, unfortunately, the standard way in which power systems operate, secure in the knowledge that the intellectual classes at home will construct a suitable cover of high ideals. That has even been true of the worst mass murderers: Hitler, the Japanese fascists, and for that matter Saddam Hussein.
For the weak to put their trust in systems of power is simply to ask for catastrophe. They may choose to cooperate with powerful states, but if so, they should do so without illusions. And again, no one knows this better than the Kurds, not just those in Iraq but in Turkey and elsewhere.

- USA did not found mass destruction weapons in Iraq and it is now talking in realizing democracy in Middle East, will this project be successful, and will that democracy be real one?

Having failed to discover weapons of mass destruction, Washington shifted its propaganda to "establishing democracy." That flatly refutes their earlier claim that the "only question" was whether Saddam would disarm. But with a sufficiently obedient intellectual class, and loyal media, the farce can proceed untroubled. To evaluate the new propaganda claim, a rational person would ask how those who know proclaim their "yearning for democracy" have in fact acted, and act today, when their interests are at stake. I will not run through the record, but those who are interested in evaluating these claims should certainly do so. They will discover that "democracy" is tolerated, but only when it is a "top-down form of democracy" in which elites who collaborate with US business and state interests retain control -- I happen to be quoting from one of the leading authorities on Latin American democracy, who writes as an insider, having served in the "democracy enhancement" programs of the Reagan administration, which devastated Central America, and left a trail of horror in the Middle East and southern Africa as well. Furthermore, the same policies are pursued today, without the slightest change. Is the US bringing democracy to Uzbekistan? Or to Equatorial Guinea, also ruled by a monster comparable to Saddam Hussein, but warmly welcomed by the Bush White House because he sits on a very large pool of oil. Take Paul Wolfowitz, described by the propaganda system as the leading "visionary" seeking democracy, whose "heart bleeds" for the suffering of poor Muslims. Presumably that explains why he was one of the leading apologists for General Suharto of Indonesia, one of the great mass murderers and torturers of the modern era, and continued to praise him well into 1997, just before he was overthrown by an internal revolt. It is all too easy to continue. For the rich and powerful, illusions about themselves are satisfying and convenient. Many find it quite pleasant to lavish praise on themselves, a major role of intellectuals, throughout history. For the weak and defenseless, faith in illusions is not a wise course -- as the victims of centuries of imperial practice should certainly understand.

- Is the current wars of USA to protect its national security are legitimate? How you consider USA national security?

US national security is threatened only by terror and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- which, sooner or later, are likely to be combined, perhaps with horrifying consequences. US and other intelligence agencies, and independent foreign policy analysts, predicted that the invasion of Iraq would lead to an increase in terror and proliferation of WMD, and their predictions have already been verified. The reasons are obvious. The world dominant power announced its intention to attack anyone it wishes, without credible pretext or international authorization, in the National Security Strategy of September 2002. It then moved at once to undertake an "exemplary action" to demonstrate to the world that it means exactly what it said, invading an important country that it knew of course to be virtually defenseless. Watching this, potential targets do not say: "thank you, please cut my throat." Rather, they turn to means of deterrence, and sometimes revenge. No one can compete in military force with the US, which spends about as much as the rest of the world combined. But the weak do have weapons: namely, terror and WMD. That is the reason for the near-universal predictions on the part of experts that terror and WMD would be stimulated by the declaration of the National Security Strategy, and by the Iraq invasion. The Bush administration understands this as well as intelligence agencies and independent analysts. They do not prefer to harm US national security and subject the population to severe threats. It is simply not a high priority for them, as compared with others: dominating the world, and pursuing a radical reactionary domestic program aimed at dismantling the progressive legislation of the past century that was designed to protect the general population from the ravages of market systems. They also want a very powerful state: as soon as they took office, they increased government expenditures (relative to the economy) too the highest level since the first time they held power, 20 years earlier, in the Reagan administration levels. But the powerful state they want to nourish is to serve the interests of the rich and privileged, not the general population. And the international and domestic goals, in their eyes, are far more important than security, or even survival. There is nothing novel about that. Again, those who know some history will recognize that political leaders quite often choose the risk of catastrophe in pursuit of power, domination, and wealth.

- To what extent USA seeks the international legitimacy and agreements?

For a long time the US has shown disdain for the Security Council, the World Court, and international law and institutions generally. That is not in the least controversial. But this administration is so extreme in its contempt for international law and institutions that it has even been subjected to unprecedented condemnation by the foreign policy elite. Furthermore, it is all so open and brazen that there is really no need to discuss the topic.

- were UN and other international organizations successful in protecting their independence?

Obviously not. The Bush administration informed the UN a year ago that it could be "relevant" by following US orders, or it could be a debating society (as Colin Powell put it). That continued, and continues today, not just in the case of Iraq. Keeping only to the Middle East, the US has continued its practice of the past 30 years of protecting its client state of Israel by vetoing Security Council resolutions and blocking General Assembly resolutions, and of course by providing the military aid and economic support for its client state to continue its programs of integrating the valuable parts of the West Bank within Israel. That is one of the reasons why the US has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions (UK second, no one else even close), since the 1960s, when the UN was beginning to be somewhat independent of US domination as a result of decolonization and the recovery of the industrial powers from the war. It is not of course the only reason. The US also vetoes Security Council resolutions on a host of other issues, including even a call for all states to observe international law -- not mentioning the US, though everyone understood to whom it was directed.

- You considered USA as a leader of the terrorists, why? and to what extent could it protect the human values?

I have not called the US "a leader of the terrorists," but I have documented in detail the long and horrendous record of US terrorist acts and crucial support for the terrorism of its clients. In reviewing this record, I use the official US government definition of the term "terrorism." But few are willing to use the official definitions, because this is the consequence that follows at once. If you are not convinced, look at the ample documentation -- including the history of the Kurds, running right to the present, though the crucial US support for state terror against the Kurds was primarily in Turkey in the 1990s, when Turkey became the leading recipient of US military aid (aside from Israel and Egypt) as it was driving millions of Kurds from the devastated countryside, killing tens of thousands, and carrying out every imaginable kind of barbarism, some of the worst crimes of the terrible 1990s, right near you. I have personally seen some of the results, in the miserable slums of Istanbul to which refugees were driven, in the city walls of Diyarbakir where they attempt to survive, and elsewhere. But surely you must know all of that, right next door. And that is only a very small part of the story, and omits the direct implementation of terrorist atrocities. About that there is a long and ugly record. In fact, the US is alone in having been condemned by the World Court for what amounts to international terrorism, in its attack against Nicaragua. The Court ordered the Reagan administration -- those now in power again in Washington -- to terminate its terrorist war against Nicaragua. Of course the administration disregarded the Court order, at once escalating the terrorist war, and vetoing Security Council resolutions supporting the Court judgment. The US is not alone in these practices, by any means. Rather generally, such practices to to run roughly run in parallel with the power to commit the crimes. Again, that is familiar to the victims over the centuries, or at least should be. Can systems of power protect human values? Certainly they can, and sometimes they do, the US included. This happens when protecting human values serves power interests, or when an aroused citizenry demands it. Both of those factors were responsible for US protection of Iraqi Kurds in the 1990s, while at the same time the US was providing the decisive military and diplomatic support for the atrocious repression of the Kurds across the border -- though the population of the US was and remains unaware of these crimes; the massive evidence was suppressed by the media and the intellectual classes, as is commonly the case.

- In some of your works you said that there is no hope of a better future since USA power is progressing, why are you a pessimistic man? Does that mean that the American model will not be successful?

I never say that. Rather, the opposite. There is great hope for a better future, and to create it should be a primary commitment for people in the US, the West generally, and the rest of the world. And there are very hopeful signs, which I constantly stress. As for the "American model," it depends what you mean. The people of the United States have many wonderful achievements to their credit: protection of freedom of speech, for example, is unique in the world, to my knowledge, and many other rights have been won. These have not been gifts from above, but the result of dedicated popular struggle. If that is the model you have in mind, I hope it will be more successful, in the US and elsewhere. If by the "American model" you mean what is proclaimed in the Bush National Security Strategy and implemented in practice, or the neoliberal economic model that is designed to transfer control of most of the world to transnational corporations linked to one another and to a few powerful states -- what the international business press calls "the de facto world government" -- then I certainly hope it will not be successful, as should we all.

- To what extent media and propaganda is successful in making American citizens follow the policies of their government? Could the opponents of that policy reach their voice to others?

It varies. Take, for example, the invasion of Iraq. The invasion was virtually announced in September 2002, along with the National Security Strategy. That was followed by a massive government/media propaganda campaign that quickly drove large parts of US opinion completely off the international spectrum. A majority came to believe that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the US, that he was responsible for the crimes of September 11 2001 and was planning new atrocities in cooperation with Al Qaeda, etc. Those beliefs were closely correlated with support for the invasion, not surprisingly. They were known at once to be completely false, but it did not matter: lies proclaimed loudly and incessantly become a Higher Truth. Nevertheless, the propaganda campaign was only partially successful. Protest against the invasion reached levels beyond anything in the history of Europe or the United States. When the US attacked South Vietnam in 1962 -- as it did, uncontroversially -- there was no protest at all. Protest did not begin to reach a serious level for 4-5 years; by then South Vietnam, the main target of the US attack, had been virtually destroyed, and the aggression had spread to most of Indochina. For the first time in the history of the West, there was enormous protest against the invasion of Iraq even before the war was officially declared. That is only one of many examples of how power systems have lost control of good parts of the population. The worldwide global justice movements, which are also unprecedented, are another striking example. And there are many more.

- Some critisize you as the most militant American among those who are opponent to Israel, some say that you, as a jew, hates yourself. How are comes that you criticizing Israel in such manner?

The charges are interesting. Those who know the Bible know their origins. The charges trace back to King Ahab, who was the epitome of evil in the Bible. King Ahab condemned the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel. The flatterers at King Ahab`s court agreed. Elijah was a "self-hating Jew," to borrow the terminology of the contemporary flatterers at the court, because he was criticizing the policies of the King and calling for justice and respect for human rights. Similar charges were familiar in the old Soviet Union: dissidents were condemned for hating Russia. And there are other examples in military dictatorships and totalitarian states. Such criticisms reflect deeply held totalitarian values. For a dedicated totalitarian, ruling powers are to be identified with the people, the culture, and the society. Israel is King Ahab Russia is the Kremlin. For totalitarians, criticism of state policy is criticism of the country and its people. For those who have any concern for democracy and freedom, such charges are merely farcical. If an Italian critic of Berlusconi were condemned as "anti-Italian," or as a "self-hating Italian," it would elicit ridicule in Rome or Milan, though it was possible in the days of Mussolini`s Fascism. It is particularly interesting when such attitudes are expressed in free societies, as in the case of those you are quoting.

I In fact, I do not particularly criticize Israel, but I do strongly criticize the crucial role of the US -- my country, after all -- in supporting barbaric crimes of its client state, and barring a peaceful political settlement along the lines that have been supported by virtually the entire world since the 1970s. For the totalitarian mentality, this is "hating Israel," or "hating the United States." King Ahab and the flatterers at his court, the Kremlin and its commissars, and others who call for abject submission to power will doubtless agree. Those who treasure freedom, justice, and human rights will follow a different path, as throughout history.

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Friday, January 02, 2004
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1403
Is War about Oil or Bad Ideas?

by Morgan O. Reynolds

[Posted January 1, 2004]

Name a war and the alleged causes are numerous: man`s innate aggression, vainglorious princes, stupid tyrants, imbalances of power, preserving the union, the military industrial complex, ties to al-Qaeda, WMDs, democracy, freedom, and a hundred other reasons. And what about access to natural resources like, say, black gold? Such issues are rarely mentioned.

With regard to war, Hobbes asserted three principal causes, "First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; the third, for reputation."

Many of us suspect that G.W. Bush thirsts for the last. Major politicians wear buttons saying, "ME," don`t they? As Thomas Campbell wrote in 1799, "What millions died—that Caesar might be great!"

It is hard to see Bush the younger as great, but his imagination may be more fertile than mine.

Bush and his supporters argue that Hobbe`s motive number two really drives their astute invasions: we launch preemptive wars against the bad guys over there to make you folks safer back here. There`s doubt about how well this theory will work out in practice. Somehow, a manual on "How to win friends and influence people around the world" authored by the gentle souls at the Pentagon, with superior firepower at the center, and then executed on unwilling subjects in distant lands, is not all that reassuring.

Maybe I`m wrong. If the tables were turned, I guess we North Americans would embrace invading Chinese, Latins or Arabs bent on improving our ignorant way of life and then be pals forever more. Still, I can`t quite see it. The tendency to resent being conquered by a foreign military is universal.

That leaves material gain as a motive for war (all three of Hobbe`s causes, of course, may operate simultaneously). The economic success of the West rested on the fact that it "succeeded better in checking the spirit of predatory militarism than the rest of mankind," wrote Ludwig von Mises. Reason, not accident, led the West to develop the institutions to safeguard the individual`s rights against expropriation and confiscation. Capitalism is the only system based on individual rights, the only one that bans force. That permitted saving and investment on a wide scale and hence mass production resulting in unprecedented economic progress. Private property and relative freedom to trade gave humanity the longest period of peace in history.

Statism scrapped all that. Only a veneer of individual economic rights remains in the U.S. polity. Why do modern unlimited governments prefer aggression to peace? What transformed limited wars into total war? The short answer is that the welfare state replaced the laissez-faire state. A multitude of sovereign nations at peace is possible under laissez faire, but it`s impossible under interventionism. In an interdependent world, another government`s interference in oil or trade is too important to be left to local politicians.

Interference in business generates nationalism, and economic nationalism generates bellicosity, as Mises said. If people, goods and investments cannot move across borders, then armies pave the way.

Despite the fact that the international division of labor requires the abolition of war, the economic philosophy espoused today by nearly everyone is nationalism, protectionism, massive taxation and borrowing, cheap money, forced redistribution, and regulation. Will those damaged by another government`s restrictions, expropriation and confiscation sit back and tolerate it? "Not if they believe that they are strong enough to brush it away by the use of arms," writes Mises. "The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war."

In a world of arbitrary barriers against trade and foreign investment, Hitler sought lebensraum (elbow-room), suzerainty over resources in economic backwaters, as did Japan. Ordinary folks in Germany and Japan expected these takings to yield a higher standard of living. Today, the pugnacious Mr. Bush, leader of a rather well-endowed, continental-size nation, seeks "democracy" overseas—that is, stable oil supplies, including secure pipelines and related investments from central Asia all the way to the Med. Surprising, isn`t it, how Russia`s Putin is not quite on board with all this U.S. invading and meddling in his backyard?

Today`s neocons genuinely believe that the key to durable peace is establishing democracies throughout the world. Two problems here: first, it will require lots of warring and, second, even if achieved it will fail because peace depends on governments abandoning unlimited interventionism. As Mises said, "The tragic error of President Wilson was that he ignored this essential point."

Oil is not really the root of war today. It`s bad ideas about economic policy. "Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire," Mises wrote. "It cannot be preserved under the ideology of government omnipotence. . . . The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war."

---

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Volume 15, Issue 1. January 1, 2004.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/1/dreyfuss-r.html

Phoenix Rising
Tucked away in the recent Iraqi appropriation was $3 billlion for a new paramilitary unit. Close students of Vietnam may see similarities.
Robert Dreyfuss


With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration`s hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA`s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America`s death squads or Israel`s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely to look chillingly familiar.

The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.

"They`re clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," says Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism. Ironically, he says, the U.S. forces in Iraq are working with key members of Saddam Hussein`s now-defunct intelligence agency to set the program in motion. "They`re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things," Cannistraro says.

The plan is part of a last-ditch effort to win the war before time runs out politically. Driving the effort are U.S. neoconservatives and their allies in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney`s office, who are clearly worried about America`s inability to put down the Iraqi insurgency with time to spare before November. They are concerned that President Bush`s political advisers will overrule the national-security team and persuade the president to pull the plug on Iraq. So, going for broke, they`ve decided to launch an intensified military effort combined with a radical new counterinsurgency program.

The hidden $3 billion will fund covert ("black") operations disguised as an Air Force classified program. According to John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at globalsecurity.org, the cash, spread over three years, is likely being funneled directly to the CIA, boosting that agency`s estimated $4 billion a year budget by fully 25 percent. Operations in Iraq will get the bulk of it, with some money going to Afghanistan. The number of CIA officers in Iraq, now 275, will increase significantly, supplemented by large numbers of the U.S. military`s elite counterinsurgency forces. A chunk of those secret funds, according to Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst, will to go to restive tribal sheikhs, especially in Sunni-dominated central Iraq. "I assume there are CIA people going around with bags of cash," says Goodman.

But the bulk of the covert money will support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force. "The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance," says Pike. "And it has to be politically loyal to the United States."

Unable to quell the resistance to the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon is revamping its intelligence and special-operations task force in Iraq, a classified unit commanded by an Air Force brigadier general. It`s also pouring money into the creation of an Iraqi secret police staffed mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council. Those militiamen are linked to Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress (inc), the Kurdish peshmerga ("facing death") forces and Shiite paramilitary units, especially those of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Technically illegal, these armed forces have been tolerated, even encouraged, by the Pentagon. Some of these militias openly patrol Baghdad and other cities, and in the south of Iraq, scores of Islamic-oriented paramilitary parties, with names like Revenge of God, are mobilized.

Because the militiamen who will make up the paramilitary force are largely from former Iraqi exile political groups, many have personal scores to settle. They will be armed with detailed lists, seized from government files, of Iraqi Baathists. Sporadic but persistent revenge killings against Hussein loyalists have already plagued Iraq. In Baghdad, Basra, and scores of smaller cities and towns, hundreds of former Iraqi officials and members of the Arab Baath Socialist Party have been gunned down, and the murderers have not been arrested or, in most cases, even pursued. Virtually signaling open season on ex-Baathists, Maj. Ian Poole, spokesman for the British forces controlling Basra, told The New York Times: "The fact is, these are former Baath Party officials. That makes it hard to protect them."

Chalabi`s INC is promising to use its own intelligence teams to act forcefully against opponents of the United States. Chalabi, the darling of U.S. neoconservatives and the Pentagon`s choice to be Iraq`s first prime minister, is leading the charge for the "de-Baathification" of Iraq. When elements of the U.S. Army in Iraq seek to enlist the support of mid- and low-level Baath officials in trying to put a national bureaucracy back into place, Chalabi objects, often clashing with U.S. Army officers overseeing civil affairs.

Echoing Chalabi are various U.S. hawks and neocons. "The Kurds and the Iraqi National Congress have excellent intelligence operations that we should allow them to exploit," read a Wall Street Journal editorial. "Especially to conduct counterinsurgency in the Sunni Triangle." More explicitly citing similar U.S. operations during the Vietnam War were Tom Donnelly, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century. Schmitt wrote a paper calling for a counterinsurgency effort modeled on the so-called COORDS program in Vietnam, an umbrella effort that included the notorious Phoenix assassinations. And, over lunch at a Washington eatery, I asked a neoconservative strategist how to deal with Iraq. "It`s time for `no more Mr. Nice Guy,`" he said. "All those people shouting, `Down with America!` and dancing in the street when Americans are attacked? We have to kill them."

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is beginning to resemble Vietnam in more ways than one. American forces under attack are reportedly responding with indiscriminate fire, often killing combatants and innocents alike. Body counts are disputed, including one prominent instance in Samarra when U.S. forces claimed 54 Iraqi rebels killed but angry townspeople said that the dead numbered less than a dozen (and included women and children). Houses of suspected insurgents are being blown up. The wife and child of Izzat Ibrahim, a fugitive Iraqi official thought to be coordinating the insurgency, were seized and held hostage. The entire village of Auja, Hussein`s hometown near Tikrit, was surrounded by barbed wire and turned into a strategic hamlet, with ID cards issued by U.S. forces needed to enter and exit it.

In early November, the Pentagon civilians ordered the U.S. military in Iraq to launch a heavily armed offensive against suspected strongholds of the resistance, using fighter bombers, laser-guided missiles, gunships and helicopters against targets of questionable importance, such as empty factories and warehouses. "It`s an absolutely insane strategy," says Bob Boorstin, who oversees national-security policy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Until the offensive was launched, U.S. Army officers had been attempting, with uneven success, to rally local populations and adopt a hearts-and-minds approach. But in accordance with the neocons` policy of no more Mr. Nice Guy, the Pentagon ordered the aggressive new stance that took shape as Operation Ivy Cyclone and Operation Iron Hammer. "I was astounded by the warmth and fuzziness of our generals," says Danielle Pletka, AEI vice president for foreign- and defense-policy studies, who just returned from a visit to Iraq. "Well, they got orders: `You need to fight, and fight hard.` And it suddenly dawned on them that these were bad people, and maybe we need to go out and whomp the crap out of them."

Yet "whomping" is hardly a strategy, and in Iraq the United States is clearly flailing, with a trial-and-error approach that seems haphazard and rudderless. Underlying the neocons` worry is a nagging concern that Bush, who sided with the neocons by launching the global war on terrorism and by going into Iraq, could abandon them for some form of cut-and-run strategy in order to protect his re-election efforts. Some say openly that the White House is "going wobbly," while others, like the AEI`s Donnelly, believe in Bush`s steadfastness but admit to having second thoughts. "For a neocon like me, having a member of the Bush family carrying the banner is a bit unnerving," says Donnelly, wryly.

But Boorstin, and many others in Washington, believe that Karl Rove, the White House`s political guru, is losing patience with the bungled situation in Iraq. "I have no doubt that Karl Rove is ready to cut and run," says Boorstin. That sentiment is virtually seconded by Pletka, who maintains close contact with White House and Pentagon officials. "Some of the people around the president do want to cut and run," she says, "but not his foreign-policy advisers."

The latest offensives, combined with the counterinsurgency efforts, seem partly aimed at convincing Rove that there`s no choice but to continue to gamble that the Iraqi venture will pay off. "This is an unusual president," says Richard Perle, an AEI fellow, member of the Defense Policy Board and perhaps the chief architect of U.S. Iraq policy. "He risked his presidency to do this in Iraq." But Perle is worried that politics could trump policy. "I hope it doesn`t become a political issue, because that would encourage all of those who want us to fail, all of those arrayed against us," he says. "If we were to retreat, I shudder to think of the wave of terrorism it would unleash.


Robert Dreyfuss
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "Phoenix Rising," The American Prospect vol. 15 no. 1, January 1, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to

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washingtonpost.com
Soldier Killed When Helicopter Shot Down in Iraq
Ethnic Disputes Continue to Flare in Kirkuk

By Alan Sipress and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 2, 2004; 4:27 PM


BAGHDAD, Jan. 2--One U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded Friday when their armed reconnaissance helicopter was shot down while troops on the ground were conducting operations near the volatile town of Fallujah, military officials said.

Hours later, U.S. forces bombarded suspected insurgent positions around the Iraqi capital in a nighttime attack involving mortars, artillery and A-10 and C-130 aircraft.

The attack, the results of which were not immediately known, came a day after U.S. troops and Iraqi police and civil defense personnel raided a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad that military officials said had been used to harbor terrorists and hide weapons.

The Thursday raid at the Um Tabul mosque prompted an angry demonstration by more than 1,000 worshipers after Friday prayers. Mosque leaders charged that U.S. troops had defiled the mosque -- an accusation denied by the military -- and argued that weapons seized there were only for self-defense.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters that soldiers guarding the helicopter crash site had come under fire from insurgents posing as journalists and that four of the attackers were arrested.

A driver for the Reuters news agency said three Iraqis working for Reuters had been fired upon by U.S. troops as they filmed a checkpoint near the crash site. Reuters reported that it was told later that the three had been detained.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, meanwhile, at least one Kurd and two Arabs were reported killed in another day of ethnic disturbances over the future of the oil-producing center, which is coveted by Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen groups.

According to a spokesman for the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter crashed at about 12:50 p.m. near Fallujah. The Army`s Central Command later confirmed that the aircraft was shot down by rebels.

After speaking with commanders of the 82nd Airborne Division, which operates in the Fallujah area, Kimmitt said, "They are fairly convinced that it was enemy fire."

Reuters quoted an Iraqi policeman who witnessed the crash as saying the helicopter had been hit by a missile.

"We were in a joint patrol with U.S. troops to remove land mines and I saw a helicopter hovering in the sky which was hit by a missile," Mohammad Abdul Aziz told the agency. "It was split into two and went down in flames."

U.S. forces afterward cordoned off a plowed field that was littered with pieces of the aircraft, a two-person observation helicopter that is often used to help guide troops on the ground and that is typically armed with air-to-ground missiles. Reporters were kept away from the scene of the crash, which occurred about 32 miles west of Baghdad.

Soldiers also conducted searches in Fallujah after the crash, blocking off streets and searching shops and homes as helicopters flew overhead, the Associated Press reported.

Kimmitt said paratroopers securing the crash site came under fire from "five enemy personnel" who drove up to the scene in two dark Mercedes cars. He said the five were wearing "black press jackets with `press` written in English" and that they fired small arms and rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. soldiers. No soldiers were reported injured in the incident.

Kimmitt said one of the Mercedes was tracked to a nearby house and that "four enemy personnel" were captured.

Fallujah, a stronghold of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the so-called "Sunni triangle" of Hussein loyalists, has been a hotbed of insurgent activity against U.S. forces since the occupation began in April. U.S. helicopters have come under fire in the area on a number of occasions.

Kimmitt strongly denied that soldiers had defiled the Um Tabul mosque, saying that great care was taken to respect its sanctity. He said 32 persons were detained there, including several believed to be non-Iraqis. He said troops found high explosives, hand grenades, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and thousands of rounds of ammunition inside the mosque, which he said had been used for "criminal and terrorist activities."

The cleric in charge of the mosque, Abdulsatar Janabi, acknowledged that weapons had been seized, but asserted that the quantity was much less than Kimmitt said. "In every mosque in Iraq we keep light guns for self-protection," he told Reuters.

In Kirkuk, the latest casualties occurred during clashes overnight between Iraqi police and protesters. Residents told reporters that shootouts erupted when police tried to stop armed Arabs from attacking Kurds.

The Kirkuk police commander, Shirko Shakir, said police detained a wounded Arab gunman after a protest led to an exchange of gunfire with police, Reuters reported. Police said one Kurd was killed and another wounded when they came under fire from Arab gunmen as they were walking in an Arab neighborhood.

Jalal Jawher, the local head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, told reporters later that two Arabs had also been killed and several wounded when police fired on Arab attackers.

Shakir blamed the violence on provocateurs loyal to Hussein.

The city has been tense since an incident last week in which Arab and Turkmen protesters were fired upon by Kurdish gunmen as the protesters approached the PUK headquarters in Kirkuk. As many as five people were reported killed and more than two dozen wounded in the shooting.

The protesters were demonstrating against a Kurdish plan to have Kirkuk join an autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Iraq where Kurds established self-rule at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Arabs and Turkmen in the city want Kirkuk to remain under the control of an Iraqi central government in Baghdad.

Kirkuk`s population of more than 1 million is divided roughly into thirds among the three ethnic groups.

In other developments in Iraq:


A U.S. soldier was killed and six others were injured when a truck flipped onto its side while heading toward Baghdad International Airport. The military said the cause of the crash was under investigation.


Soldiers arrested two men described as key figures in the insurgency, U.S. officials said Friday. A man known as Abu Mohammed was captured Thursday after being identified as involved in moving foreign fighters and cash through a rebellious area west of Baghdad. In a separate raid in Samarra, soldiers arrested a tribal leader, Sheik Kahtan Yehia, who was accused of sheltering former Iraqi vice president Izzat Ibrahim, the highest-ranking figure on a U.S. most-wanted list who is still at large.


The dean of political science of Mosul University, a minor official in the former Baath Party who had been appointed by Hussein, was kidnapped and apparently assassinated. The body of Adel Jabar Abid Mustafa was found Thursday with two gunshots to his head.


An oil tanker truck, part of a U.S. military convoy, burst into flames as the convoy was heading toward a based near the troubled town of Ramadi. Witnesses said it was hit by a rebel rocket or roadside bomb, the AP reported.


About 60 miles south of Mosul, one U.S. soldier was slightly injured when a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter made an emergency landing near the town of Qarayah. A military spokesman said the helicopter developed a problem with its tail rotor.

Branigin reported from Washington.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Free of Saddam, Jailed by Poverty

Posted by Dahr Jamail
Date: Jan 02, 2004 - 01:40 PM
I took yesterday ‘off’ by basically hibernating inside my hotel room. As has happened so often before, I found myself tired and depressed after covering so many different aspects of the occupation-from maimed and dead bodies in hospitals, to one demolished building after another staring me in the face throughout Baghdad, to witnessing grinding poverty, to the constant threat of being blown up by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) or shot by a trigger happy US soldier. After awhile it all tends to get a guy a bit down.

I can only imagine how the people of Iraq get by on a daily basis, and continue to push forward with life, having endured years of war, 13 years of devastating sanctions, and now an occupied homeland.

Today I went to the Iraqi Air Defense Ministry. Or more precisely, what’s left of it. For what used to be a proud complex of buildings in central Baghdad which housed generals and airmen from the Iraqi Air Force, is no longer. Bombed during the Anglo-American Invasion, many of the buildings have been reduced to large heaps of broken concrete and metal.

What is left of the other buildings has been looted to the bare walls; even the marble siding has been pillaged. As some journalists and myself walk through the complex towards the back, nothing but garbage, dirt, broken glass, useless scraps of tin and various sorts of rubble litter the ground all around.

Like guts hanging from the ceiling, long pieces of scrap metal swing lifelessly. Whatever they supported or were attached to, has long since been looted. The typical black flame marks are smeared above the outside of the window areas.


Children living in the former Iraq Air Defense Ministry

Today the Air Defense Ministry serves as a makeshift refuge for people and families with little or no income. Children with dirt smeared into their faces and arms run about the area near two swimming pools, which now are filled with one meter of dark brown scum, littered with garbage floating lifelessly above.

Hussein Khalaf Hussein, a shoeless man with unshaven stubble on his face invites us into a building where several families and men are squatting. Barren rooms serve as homes for people, with only a couple of blankets and a few dishes lying around on the grimy floor. He gives us the quick rundown of how the area is divided into four sections. Each section has a representative who brings and distributes food and supplies (when lucky enough to find some) to families in their section.

Mr. Hussein is a Shia man who fought the Iraqi Intifada which stood up against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991 when the Americans asked them to do so, promising support. After the uprising was crushed when the American’s failed to follow through on the promise of supporting it, like so many others Mr. Hussein fled the country for his own survival.

He returned from Lebanon two weeks ago.

While we are talking another man tells us that some British army personnel brought them some blankets six weeks ago. As far as the Americans, two months ago some men came by to take photos of everyone in the gutted buildings, but have brought no supplies.

Another man walks up to us and says,

“Saddam is gone, and look at us! We have nothing. No medicine. No food. Living like animals. What have the Americans done for us? The Americans make all these promises, but have done nothing, and they have made everything so expensive.”

Mr. Abbas Abu Fadel, is a Shia man who lives in one of the old houses in the complex which used to be inhabited by Ba’athist Generals. Abu Fadel has been here longer than everyone else, having moved in immediately after the invasion of Baghdad and now serves as a representative of one of the sections of this area.

He invites us into his home at the edge of the bombed out complex for tea and to talk with us. As per Arab custom, he is welcoming and pleasant, saying,


Abu Fadel and his boys, living in the former Iraq Air Defense Ministry

“Anyone invited into my home is my family and my friend. You are most welcome here.”

We sit on the carpet of the scantily furnished room; a lone television sits off to the side on the single piece of furniture-an old cabinet with a few stuffed animals sitting atop it.

He tells us how he escaped from the Iraqi Army in 1989, but was thrown in jail on a regular basis by the Ba’athists for distributing anti-Saddam leaflets. Between his stints in jail he would sneak around to do work as an air conditioner repairman.

A large explosion booms in another part of Baghdad while he talks with us.

“I was poor, and I still am. This is my life. This is the life for all of us here. We are only here because there is nowhere else. My landlord kicked me out of where I was living before because I had no money.”

Tanks rumble down the road next to the home he and his family of five are squatting in.

According to Abu Fadel, there are 375 families living in squalor here, and a total of around 4,000 people.

He shows us a stack of forms from the Iraqi Organization for Victims of Terrorism. He says this organization is supported by the US in order to give compensation for people who suffered under the rule of Saddam Hussein.

“I hand out these forms to all of the people here, and tell them to fill it out and turn it in to try to get some money and food.”

I ask if anyone has had any success in being compensated by the Americans, via this Iraqi organization.

”All I have gotten has been from NGO’s and rich Iraqi people who donate things for the poor.”

He points to the compensation form he is holding in his hand,

“This is nothing. This is only promises.”

We ask how he feels about the Americans being in Iraq.

“The Americans are here, but we can’t complain about them occupying our country. They tell us they are here to help us, yet we know they are occupiers. For now there is nothing we can say because they tell us they are here to defend us from the people who support Saddam.”

He obviously has mixed feelings about the all powerful military of the US who effectively removed the nightmare of Saddam Hussein from the lives of the Shia people like himself.

“At first I disagreed that Iraq was occupied. We supported the Americans in getting rid of Saddam. Now I admit we are occupied. My opinion is that I give them another 6 months, maybe 2 years to help us rebuild. I know they came here for the oil though.”

Abu Fadel sips some tea and continues.

”I think the US will take all of the oil. But Saddam also took all of the oil for 35 years, so what is the difference? The oil didn’t help me then, and it doesn’t help me now, so why should I care? Sure it makes me upset, but what can I do about it?”

He is asked what he will do in the future.

“I don’t have the power to stand against the Americans, so I’ll close my mouth and wait. It’s better for me that the nightmare of Saddam is gone. We will follow our leaders. If they say wait, we wait. If they say fight, we fight. Right now we wait.”

“This is my country. I hope George Bush will be honest with us and do as he has promised. I just want a place to live and to not be forgotten. I want to be safe and live a normal life. This is all that I want and need.”

He continues,

“I would continue to live here if the American`s rebuild this and let us stay here. Under Saddam I couldn’t dream of this; I have a television, CD player, and carpets.”

After our talk, he takes us out to show us more of the compound, of how other families are living. His home is luxurious by comparison.


Family living in restroom of the former Iraq Air Defense Ministry

A family of seven has moved into a large public bathroom. Dirty carpets cover the floor, and a shoe-shine box sits near the entryway.

The man living here stands up and apologizes to us for his home.

We walk amongst the rubble under a dreary grey sky to view another bombed out section. While walking Abu Fadel says,

“I think our leaders will call for jihad against the Americans because we are all living in such a terrible situation.”



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=95

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N Korea agrees US nuclear visit
North Korea has invited American experts to visit its top nuclear facility at Yongbyon.
The visit, set to take place next week, will mark the first time outsiders have seen the plant since inspectors were forced to leave a year ago.

A US paper said the team will include a nuclear expert, congressional aides and a former state department member.

The White House has confirmed the invitation, but stressed it was not an official US Government mission.


"It`s not our deal," deputy state department spokesman Adam Ereli told journalists at a news briefing in Washington.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the January visit could not go ahead without the blessing of the Bush administration, the BBC`s Jon Leyne in Washington says.

A congressional visit to North Korea planned for last October was blocked by the White House, our correspondent says.

This time it appears that President Bush is more open to the prospect of dialogue with Pyongyang, he adds.

North Korea is under pressure from its ally China to resume talks with the US on its nuclear ambitions. The last round of negotiations, held in Beijing in August, ended without progress.

The USA Today newspaper said the visitors to Yongbyon would include Sig Hecker, a former director of the US` top nuclear facility, the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Other delegates were said to include a China expert from Stanford University, two Senate foreign policy aides who have visited the North Korean capital of Pyongyang before, and a former State Department official who has been involved in negotiations with North Korea.

An official at the South Korean Foreign Ministry confirmed the report`s detail to the BBC, though it remained unclear which of the various facilities at Yongbyon would be open to the visitors.

The BBC`s Seoul correspondent, Charles Scanlon, says that North Korea has threatened on a number of occasions to show off what it calls its nuclear deterrent, and the visit would provide such an opportunity.

North Korea and the US have been locked in a stand-off over the nuclear issue for over a year.

Last year the North claimed to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods being stored at Yongbyon, enough to help it build up to six more nuclear weapons.

Foreign intelligence agencies have been sceptical about the claims, but have been unable to check them.

Some analysts see the North`s claims as bargaining counters, as it seeks to negotiate diplomatic recognition and economic aid from the US.

The negotiations have been bogged down over the timing of concessions to be made, but news of the proposed visit suggested some diplomatic progress had been made.

The Bush administration withdrew support for a congressional visit to North Korea in October because it said the timing was not appropriate. The Congressmen had also been promised a tour of Yongbyon.

North Korea said at the weekend that it would take part in fresh diplomatic talks with the US and its allies early this year.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/3362389.s…

Published: 2004/01/02 21:34:11 GMT

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Nur die Wiederwahl zählt!

Rebranding Bush as man of peace
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington, Simon Tisdall and Nicholas Watt
Saturday January 3, 2004
The Guardian

The White House has retreated from its doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive military action and is returning to traditional diplomacy in an effort to repackage George Bush as a president for peace.

Signs of the new strategy that have emerged in the past few weeks include:

· North Korea, where authorities yesterday agreed to allow US inspectors to visit its nuclear complex next week.

· Iran, where the US proposed, through UN channels, sending a high-level humanitarian mission after last week`s earthquake - although Tehran last night asked for any visit to be delayed.

· Libya, where the US welcomed Muammar Gadafy`s surprise decision to give up weapons of mass destruction.

· Iraq, where the Bush administration is pressing for greater involvement from the international community.

· Palestine, where US peace envoy John Wolf may be sent to try to restart talks.

The signs of a thaw in US relations with these and other countries point to a different approach emerging in Washington. It emphasises cooperation, dialogue and diplomacy in place of the policies that have characterised the Bush administration`s thinking to date. While Mr Bush publicly asserts Washington`s right to defend its interests by any means, in practice he is increasingly pursuing a collaborative approach.

"There is a definite shift in US policy in everything but words," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control expert. "The official doctrine has not changed but all our actions have, and the result is a shift away from military action towards diplomatic engagement. First with Iran, then with Libya and now with North Korea, we see a much greater effort to affect changes in regime behaviour rather than changes of regime."

Analysts in Washington say the Bush administration has little choice if it is to fulfil a highly ambitious election year agenda that seeks to disarm "rogue states" such as North Korea while advancing towards a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, encouraging conflict resolution in Sudan, and achieving credible transformations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All these objectives are complicated and to some degree hindered by the "war on terror" against a resurgent al-Qaida, and by America`s failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Despite notable successes in overthrowing and capturing Saddam Hussein and toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, White House hopes of bringing democratic governance in Iraq and Afghanistan hang in the balance amid continuing violence and discord.

Iraq is crucial to the administration`s policy shift - either because, as conservatives argue, leaders of other rogue regimes learnt a lesson from Saddam`s fate, or, as others say, because the conflict has so extended the military, Washington cannot contemplate the opening of a new front.

"It`s just the force of reality, the consequences of Iraq which has made them change," said Anatol Lieven, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Even by their standards it is not rational to think that America can run another war."

With elections 11 months away, Mr Bush does not want to be vulnerable to claims that he has presided over a warmongering strategy that has left Americans little safer than September 11 2001. His shift follows an established pattern in Washington of politicians moving to the centre during an election year.

But Mr Bush has an additional consideration with Iraq. He is keenly aware that the electorate`s judgment of his performance depends heavily on events there. Despite a rally in his popularity after Saddam`s capture two weeks ago, opinion polls suggest overall attitudes towards the war have not fundamentally changed. Public concern at American casualties in Iraq has continued to rise and, ominously for Mr Bush, the violence in Iraq has not lessened.

White House policy is also being influenced by Washington`s allies, notably Britain. After the chasms over Iraq, the US and the Europeans seem to have reached an understanding about the right mix of diplomacy and force - particularly during negotiations with Iran and Libya.

Britain`s influence is particularly strong. British government sources were reluctant to talk about the US change of tack last night for fear of giving any impression of gloating. But any signs that Mr Bush is moving back to a multilateral foreign policy will be welcomed in London - if only in private - as a vindication of Tony Blair`s strategy of dealing with the president. Friends describe this as "complete solidarity in public, and complete candour in private".

Sources say Mr Blair`s relationship with Mr Bush is so strong that an informal weekly video conference has now become a regular fixture in their diaries.

The conferences are primarily designed to discuss Iraq, though the two leaders have also discussed other issues such as Iran. Sensitive issue, such as Libya, are discussed on more secure lines.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the prime minister`s chief foreign policy adviser, talks on an almost daily basis with Condoleezza Rice, the president`s national security adviser. Sir David Manning, the British ambassador in Washington, meets Dr Rice regularly.

The change in direction is also a result of the constant struggle for influence between pragmatists and hawks that has been a defining feature of the Bush administration. The neo-conservatives appear to be losing ground, with speculation about upcoming bureaucratic reshuffling.

"The state department pinstripes have replaced the department of defence bluster," Mr Cirincione said.

The move to negotiated, diplomatic solutions is unlikely to be welcomed by the vice president, Dick Cheney, the most influential of Washington`s hawks, who have often dominated policy making.

But in an interview published this week, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, seemed to suggest the policy battle was finally going his way. Mr Powell acknowledged that the administration`s top priority in the coming months would be cooperative peace making, rather than war making.

"I`m going to work very hard in making clear to our friends in Europe and elsewhere in the world that America is a partner - spend more time with them, spend more time listening to them and finding ways what we can cooperate together," Mr Powell told the Washington Post.

On Iraq, Mr Powell indicated that a switch in US policy was required. He said the UN and Nato had essential roles to play and the US needed to persuade other countries to forgive or reschedule Iraq`s $120bn (£67bn) foreign debts.

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The new cold war
The long struggle between the US and Russia has found a new focus

Jonathan Steele
Saturday January 3, 2004
The Guardian

In the dying weeks of another war-filled year, one bit of good news was the non-violent uprising which toppled Eduard Shevardnadze`s regime in Georgia. But as the Caucasian republic goes to the polls tomorrow to choose a successor, the risk of bloodshed remains high and powerful external forces are trying to determine how the new president behaves.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Georgia is the cockpit of a new cold war. During the Soviet period the struggle between the US and Russia was on a global scale. Massive arsenals were locked in stalemate in Europe, but wars ravaged Africa and Asia as the superpowers found it easier to compete there by interfering in local conflicts without the fear of nuclear conflagration. These were the so-called proxy wars.

The USSR`s collapse did not end the rivalry. It merely recast it on a more complex stage which stressed deviousness rather than outright hostility. Washington wooed post-communist Russia with offers of partnership while expanding the old anti-Russian alliance, Nato, to take in former Soviet allies as well as the three Baltic states.

Even as that task was being completed, the Clinton administration was turning its attention to Russia`s southern flanks in central Asia and the Caucasus. With Russia`s formal system of control dismantled, the aim was to reduce as much of Moscow`s political and economic influence as possible.

Georgia was a good candidate to start the process because Shevardnadze, as Soviet foreign minister, had shown great readiness to comply with western demands. Aid money poured in, making Georgia the biggest per-capita recipient of American government funding after Israel. Help also went to develop a range of civil society organisations, from private media to polling organisations and new political parties. While few would quarrel with the need for "good governance" initiatives in authoritarian or failed states, it would be better if they were run by less partisan bodies, like international non-governmental organisations or the United Nations agencies, than by states with an imperial agenda.

However, by 2003, after 10 years of Shevardnadze`s rule, "reform" in Georgia was unimpressive. The country had become an archetype of the worst kind of post-communist state, where a corrupt rentier class of narrowly selected officials and mafia businessmen enriched itself through smuggling, crony privatisation, theft from the few remaining state enterprises, and control of customs duties and port revenues.

They tolerated opposition newspapers and multiparty polls on the assumption that state control of television would allow them to manipulate the electoral contest, while loyal officials would announce fraudulent results if voters went wrong. The last line of defence was always the army and police who, it was thought, would put down protests by force in order to save the regime because they were part of it.

Serbia broke the mould in September 2000. Popular frustration over corruption and a failing economy, plus anger over too many lost wars, produced Europe`s first post-communist revolution. When the regime tried to cheat on the election results, people took to the streets in huge numbers and the army split. This was different from the revolutions of 1989, which were more political than economic. They also took place under a single-party system in which large sections of the leadership had themselves lost faith and wanted a soft landing.

Milosevic`s downfall led to predictions that Georgia would be the next post-communist state to have an uprising. There was similar anger over crony capitalism. Shevardnadze had not sparked any wars, but nationalists were upset that he had failed to regain two lost provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the November street protests and is expected to win tomorrow`s election, is a nationalist who regularly plays that card in his speeches.

Bush`s people supported Clinton`s strategy of diminishing Russia. In power, they sharpened it. They exploited the terrorism scare of 9/11, plus Putin`s desire for US acquiescence to his failed war in Chechnya, as a way to get Moscow`s consent to the establishment of US bases in central Asia. Geared as a temporary measure against the Taliban, they are determined to keep them for possible use against Russia, China and the Middle East. They accelerated the "pipeline wars" in the Caucasus by pressing western companies to cut Russia out of the search for oil in the Caspian and make sure that none was transported through Russia.

Why then did Washington decide to abandon Shevardnadze? It was not an uncontested move. Before the November fraud, most US officials hoped to see him remain in office until his term expired next year, provided he let the opposition form a majority in parliament, start to root out corrupt officials, and debate the drafting of a new constitution which might reduce the power of the presidency.

Even after the fraud some US officials wanted to keep Shevardnadze in power. There were sentimental ties, as well as the argument that direct US interference in regime change could play badly in central Asia and Azerbaijan, raising their rulers` suspicions and encouraging them to balance between Moscow and Washington rather than lean too heavily to the US side. Worries over Saakashvili`s impetuous nationalism and the risk that as president he might try to regain the lost provinces by force, or at least take provocative actions on the border, also played a restraining role.

In the end the US tipped against the old dictator and told him to go. Anger over his cheating in last November`s elections was not the main factor - equally fraudulent behaviour by the Aliev dynasty in nearby Azerbaijan in elections last October produced minimal American protest, even though hundreds of opposition demonstrators were detained and several editors and politicians remain in prison.

Two things probably triggered the US shift. One was fear of instability and even civil war, if the demonstrators did not quickly get their way. The other was the fact that Shevardnadze, for all his pro-western sympathies, was a realist who understood that Georgia needs good political and economic ties to Russia.

The Bush administration was furious last year when Russia`s state-controlled gas giant Gazprom made a long-term deal for continuing supplies to Georgia. First the US ambassador Richard Miles complained that Washington must be informed of such deals in advance. Then Bush`s energy advisor Steven Mann flew to Tbilisi to warn Shevardnadze not to go ahead with it. Meanwhile Saakashvili, and even his more moderate allies like Nino Burjanadze - who is expected to be speaker of parliament again - denounced the Gazprom negotiations.

Saakashvili is sure of election tomorrow, but what happens next is unclear. Like Turkey, Georgia`s other big neighbour, Russia is no longer an imperial power. It has normal regional interests and Georgia is doomed by geography and economics to need good relations with it. Will the new team in Tbilisi move towards a more confrontational anti-Russian nationalism, or will they understand that supporting Bush`s policy of a new cold war in the Caucasus offers Georgia no benefit?


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US soldiers ransack Sunni mosque
Iraq`s minority faith targeted in hunt for weapons

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Saturday January 3, 2004
The Guardian

Surrounded by upturned chairs and an abandoned turban, Sabah Al-Kaisey surveyed his ransacked office yesterday.

The American troops who burst into his mosque on Thursday morning had smashed down the front gate, broken the air conditioners and ripped up the carpets. They had also thrown several Korans on the floor and allegedly punched the man giving the call to prayer in the face.

"They even took our nuts," said Mr Kaisey yesterday, opening the door of the mosque`s empty fridge.

The troops who raided the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, used by Baghdad`s Sunnis, appear to have been looking for weapons used by Iraq`s resistance. They recovered a couple of AK-47s, hand grenades and an anti-aircraft missile, US military officials said.

Abdul Sattar, the mosque`s imam, said the weapons were used by its guards. "They were there to protect ourselves," he told the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera, which showed images of the damaged Korans.

The raid has served to increase the anger and frustration of Iraq`s Sunnis, who feel marginalised and discriminated against in post-Saddam Iraq.

Yesterday, hundreds of worshippers demonstrated against the raid and US occupation.

"This is not the behaviour of liberators but occupiers," Mr Kaisey said, pointing to the metal collection box which had been smashed open by US troops.

They had taken the money which was supposed to go to the poor and also the mosque`s computers, used to produce a bi-weekly newsletter, he said.

"Americans might have the latest technology, but they make little effort to understand people`s souls," he said.

Since the fall of Baghdad nine months ago, Shias, who make up 60% of Iraq`s population, have organised themselves into well-defined political and religious parties.

They have a leading presence on the governing council, the US-picked body which is to take power from the coalition in July.

But the Sunnis, who have traditionally formed Iraq`s ruling elite, have been divided. Last week Sunni elders from across the country announced they were setting up a leadership council or shura to increase their influence on Iraq`s political process. The council includes representatives from all major Sunni religious groups, the Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jama`a al Islamia, as well as Kurds and Turkomans.

The challenge for the coalition is to ensure that the Sunnis feel part of the process, a point made by Tony Blair in a recent speech.

So far the results are not encouraging. During Thursday`s raid US troops arrested 34 people, including several leading members of the shura, before a meeting of the body in Baghdad today.

US military officials said several of those arrested were suspected foreign militants, a claim which the mosque disputed.

"They blindfolded all the worshippers and took them away. You don`t see Muslims attacking the holy places of other people," Abu Hassan, a worshipper at the mosque, said.

Mr Kaisey acknowledged that most of the resistance was being directed by disgruntled Sunnis but pointed out that Shias were involved as well.The coalition also failed to appreciate that Sunnis had suffered under Saddam, he said.

"All of us on the shura council have spent time in prison," he said. "We suffered under Saddam. But at the end of the day this is our country.

"If someone invaded Britain what would you do? You would probably go and fight."

· The US military said that an observation helicopter which crashed in central Iraq yesterday had been shot down by guerrillas. One pilot was killed and another injured.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Muslim men took part in Friday Prayers in the damaged Jameh al-Zaman Mosque in the earthquake-devastated city of Bam in southeastern Iran.
January 3, 2004
Iran Turns Down American Offer of Relief Mission
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

ASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — Iran has rebuffed an offer from the United States to send a delegation led by Senator Elizabeth Dole to assist in the distribution of relief supplies to earthquake victims in Bam, the Bush administration said Friday.

The offer had been seen by the administration as a gesture of American concern for Iran at a time when the United States has declared that some — but not all — of Iran`s recent actions have been positive and could lead to a resumption of dialogue to improve relations.

Administration officials said Tehran cited the overwhelming difficulties facing relief workers in the ancient city of Bam in southeastern Iran as the reason it could not accommodate the American offer now. The officials did not rule out the possibility of a future visit, however.

"We have heard back today from the Iranians that, given the current situation in Bam and all that is going on there now, it would be preferable to hold such a visit in abeyance," said J. Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman. "Therefore, we are not pursuing it further at the moment."

Mr. Ereli said the message from Iran had been conveyed to James B. Cunningham, the deputy American representative to the United Nations, by the Iranian permanent representative at the United Nations, Dr. M. Javad Zarif.

Dr. Zarif could not be reached for comment.

Administration officials said the decision to make the offer to send Mrs. Dole, a former president of the American Red Cross, came after the senator suggested the idea herself.

A spokesman for Mrs. Dole, a North Carolina Republican, said that based on her experience overseeing relief deliveries from the Red Cross to Rwanda, Somalia and other disaster areas, she wanted both to assist operations in Iran and to report back to Congress.

The mere possibility of an exchange between Washington and Tehran, even on a nonpolitical subject, piqued the interest of diplomats and specialists who have been watching the twists and turns of American policies since President Bush labeled Iran a member of the "axis of evil" two years ago.

The United States has repeatedly denounced Iran for what American officials say is an advanced nuclear weapons program and broad support for Hezbollah and other militant groups that have attacked Israelis, Americans and others.

On the other hand, the United States has recently praised Iran for its support of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In October, the United States welcomed Iran`s agreement to open its nuclear facilities to inspection, but considered as inadequate Tehran`s decision to "suspend" its uranium enrichment operations, which Washington wants to see dismantled. Direct conversations between American and Iranian officials on Iraq and other subjects were held sporadically until May, when the United States suspended the talks after determining that a series of bombings in Saudi Arabia were carried out by groups based in Iranian territory.

From the beginning, there has been an internal debate over whether the administration should take a conciliatory approach to Iran or a confrontational one, including military pressure and interdiction of nuclear materials shipped to and from the country.

Mrs. Dole`s spokesman said she broached the idea of a relief mission with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Monday and also with Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader.

The offer to send Mrs. Dole was first disclosed Friday by The Washington Post.

In a statement issued Friday evening, Mrs. Dole said she had acted after seeing television reports of the "horrendous Iranian tragedy." She said she still hoped that "this humanitarian visit will be accepted by the Iranians because the American people are most willing to help."

An administration official said Mr. Bush had, at the same time, been discussing with his aides the possibility of making a stronger show of American concern, possibly by sending a high-level delegation that would include a member of his own family.

"It occurred to everyone to add A and B and get to C," said the official, referring to those two factors. "The administration was looking for a message saying that we care and wanted to help them in a moment of need."

No political intent aimed at signaling a change in administration policy was intended, the official said. Indeed, Mr. Bush on Thursday said Iran still had to rid itself of terrorists and nuclear weapons programs and to open its political system before relations could improve.

"Political motives should not be read into it," an administration official said, referring to the offer to send the delegation. "Nor do we read political motives in the fact that the Iranians said it`s not a good time to do it."

There was even some debate in the administration about whether Iran had definitively shut the door on a visit to deal with the disaster, which struck last week and killed as many as 40,000 people. One official described Iran`s reaction as a rejection but then corrected himself to say the trip was "in abeyance — whatever that means."

The United States has ordered a temporary easing of trade restrictions on Iran to speed the flow of aid.

Like North Korea, another member of the "axis of evil" proclaimed by Mr. Bush, Iran has bedeviled the administration by what American officials regard as its erratic behavior — occasionally supportive on some matters but unrepentant on backing Islamic militant organizations and on its nuclear ambitions.

By all accounts, the relief delegation envisioned by Mrs. Dole was not intended to serve as a vehicle to renew talks. But officials acknowledged that in such a situation, one small step could lead to another, and that before long the two sides could be talking again.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Jeden Sonnabend und Sonntag:












Strips published on this date 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 years ago.
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full…

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Passengers on British Airways flight from London gather luggage at Dulles. The flight was delayed two hours.

Meiner Meinung nach wird hier in unverantwotlicher Weise Schindluder getrieben mit unbestätigtigten Vermutungen, allein um die Hysterie in den USA aufrechtzuerhalten.

The only thing NeoCons have to fear is the end of the fear itself.

washingtonpost.com
3 Air Routes Focus of Scrutiny
Flight From London to Dulles Canceled Again

By Dana Priest and Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 3, 2004; Page A01


Three international flight routes -- London Heathrow to Dulles International Airport, and Paris and Mexico City to Los Angeles -- are the focus of an intense manhunt for al Qaeda terrorists being carried out by intelligence and law enforcement authorities on three continents, U.S. officials said yesterday.

British Airways announced yesterday the cancellation of four more flights, including Flight 223 today from Heathrow to Dulles -- the same flight that was canceled Thursday and yesterday -- and its return. The other two flights were scheduled for Heathrow and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, today along with a return flight Sunday.

In the past two weeks, the more than 15 flights that have been canceled, delayed, turned around or escorted by U.S. fighter aircraft were identified by an inexact combination of dates, flight numbers and routes obtained through intercepted communications and through interrogations with al Qaeda detainees and other credible informants in U.S. and foreign custody, intelligence officials said.

In some cases, such as the six Air France flights canceled before Christmas, names on the passenger manifest raised suspicions enough to warrant cancellations on routes that already were of concern, officials said.

Some information used to make a decision to cancel or delay a flight was verified or judged credible only shortly before takeoff or after the plane had departed, said intelligence officials. They described the nature of the hunt as extremely fast-paced and based on fragmentary information.

In one example of a quick decision based on fresh intelligence, passengers on a Dulles-to-Heathrow flight were ordered off the plane Thursday by U.S. authorities moments before it was set to leave the gate, officials disclosed yesterday. After all luggage and cargo were removed and screened again, only the luggage was reloaded before the plane was cleared for takeoff nearly four hours later.

In most cases, U.S. authorities insisted the flights be altered or passengers interviewed but gave foreign officials only minimal evidence for actions. U.S. and foreign officials said yesterday that despite the lack of specifics, cooperation between intelligence agencies and aviation officials remains strong.

But some policymakers and airline industry representatives had complained publicly about the cancellations and the significant financial pain they are causing for airlines, as well as the headaches for travelers.

"They provided just generalities and no details of names, groups or circumstances whatsoever," said Agustin Gutierrez Canet, a spokesman for Mexican President Vicente Fox. "The Mexican government had no other option but to cancel the flights. It is the moral responsibility of the United States government to provide more information."

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, however, called U.S. requests "legitimate."

"It`s a time of tension, a time of risk. I prefer the principle of precaution," said Sarkozy, during a tour of Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside Paris, where he assessed security measures in place. "When a large, friendly country asks you to reinforce security measures, and are themselves taking security measures, nobody should reproach them."

One French official said almost daily the Americans raise objections to flights because some passengers have names of people similar or identical to people on the U.S. government`s various watch lists.

French officials confirmed a report in yesterday`s Wall Street Journal that none of six individuals whose names appeared suspicious to U.S. authorities on the manifests of flights canceled before Christmas turned out to be of interest. One turned out to be a 5-year-old boy with the same name as a suspected Tunisian terrorist, another was an elderly Chinese woman and a third was a Welsh insurance agent.

One passenger who did not show up for the flight has fled and cannot be found, a U.S. intelligence official said. He was described as a male of Middle Eastern descent who is a pilot, according to another U.S. intelligence official. No known terrorist has been on a flight or has been arrested.

U.S. and foreign officials pointed to the frustrating nature of their intelligence in explaining why they could not provide more specifics to foreign airlines or travelers.

"Unfortunately, oftentimes the intelligence is vague and al Qaeda does not tell us specifically how, when, where and at what time they`re going to hit," Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian J. Roehrkasse said. "We remain very concerned about al Qaeda`s desire to use aircraft as weapons, and we have received credible information about flights originating outside of the United States."

Complete passenger manifest lists are usually not available to U.S. authorities until an hour or less before takeoff. Some airlines do not turn over the complete passenger manifest until the door is "wheels up," or the aircraft is closed, with all passengers on board, and it is headed for the runway for takeoff, said one FBI official. "To the extent we can scrub [names] in advance, we do," the official said.

Intelligence officials, however, said they believed potential hijackers would likely travel under clean aliases. U.S. officials must check manifests using a dozen watch lists because the planned consolidation of such data has yet to be completed.

"Every time you cancel flights, every one indicates a win for the other side," said Doug Laird, an aviation security expert and former director of security for Northwest Airlines. "I don`t think canceling flights and rescreening of passengers builds confidence. It does the opposite."

British Airways continues to operate two other daily flights between Heathrow and Dulles, and said it was flying in a larger plane to Dulles yesterday evening to accommodate passengers whose flights were canceled.

Virgin Atlantic, which also flies from Heathrow to Dulles and several other U.S. airports, warned of extensive delays from John F. Kennedy and Newark international airports. United Airlines said its passengers have not undergone additional security screening procedures, nor have any of its domestic or international flights been detained or delayed for security reasons.

Staff writer Robin Wright and correspondents Keith Richburg in Paris and Kevin Sullivan in Mexico City contributed to this report.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, second from right, inspects a police checkpoint at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris.
washingtonpost.com
Nations Comply Guardedly on Cancellations


By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 3, 2004; Page A10


LONDON, Jan. 2 -- Britain, France and Mexico are responding with swift compliance along with puzzlement and skepticism to U.S. demands for flight cancellations based on terrorism concerns.

The public response by the governments of all three countries has been guarded and uncertain. There has been little information about the content or reliability of the intelligence that has led to the cancellations. In one exception, the French disclosed that passenger lists included names similar to or the same as those of suspects.

In London, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Britain`s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, part of the MI5 domestic intelligence service, conducted an independent assessment of intelligence provided by the U.S. government and concluded that the threat justified cancellation on Friday of Flight 223 from Heathrow Airport to Dulles.

Another official, also speaking anonymously, said the flights to Dulles were canceled this week because authorities could not scrutinize and cross-check the passenger manifest against suspected watch lists in time. Normally, he said, British Airways cannot provide a complete list of passengers and data such as addresses, credit card numbers and other details until the plane is in the air. Workers for the airline have sought to put together such data earlier so that each passenger could be scrutinized ahead of time. "The problem is we don`t get a full picture until people actually get to the airport," the official said.

A British Airways spokesman said Friday`s flight was canceled due to a direct order from British security officials. "In terms of security direction, we follow British government guidance," said the spokesman, Iain Burns. "When the government tells us to shut down, we shut down."

Another source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described airline security officials as "perplexed" by the fact that the authorities were demanding that only Flight 223 be canceled. Other flights to the United States have been delayed in recent days, but none has undergone the scrutiny focused on 223.

Passengers expressed mixed feelings about the cancellation. William Mallett, 38, his wife, Cathy Lewis, and their 1-year-old son, Jack, were on their way through passport control as the announcement was made. "The staff said they wouldn`t be checking us in unless there was a very good chance the flight was going to go," Mallet told the Press Association news agency.

Mallett, a transportation consultant who lives in Arlington, said: "I have been telling myself that if they are paying attention to this flight in particular, that is a good thing. It means there is more likely to be a problem when they are not paying attention to the flight, but I am still nervous."

Some of the passengers were redirected onto British Airways Flight 225 Friday evening, which took off for Dulles after a 40-minute delay.

British Airways bills itself as the world`s largest transatlantic carrier, with 33 flights daily to 18 destinations in North America. Burns said the company had not begun to assess the potential economic impact of the cancellations.

In France, six Air France flights were canceled last week at the request of U.S. officials. But French officials were careful not to fault the Americans. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the U.S. requests "legitimate," visited baggage handling and immigration facilities at Charles de Gaulle Airport on Friday, before descending to the tarmac to watch an Air France Boeing 747 take off for Los Angeles. A light armored vehicle escorted the plane to its takeoff position.

In Mexico City, Agustin Gutierrez Canet, spokesman for President Vicente Fox, said officials from the Department of Homeland Security contacted CISEN, Mexico`s national security agency, requesting that Aeromexico Flight 490 from Mexico City to Los Angeles be canceled on Wednesday and Thursday. He said the U.S. officials said the planes would be denied landing rights in Los Angeles.

Fernando Cevallos, Aeromexico`s vice president for airports, said inspectors from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration have been stationed in the Mexico City airport to observe the boarding of passengers on all flights bound for the United States. He said they do not question passengers or conduct inspections.

Gutierrez said officials searched the aircraft and all luggage "extremely carefully" and found nothing unusual. Mexican authorities at CISEN asked U.S. officials for more details of the security concerns about the Aeromexico flights, he said, but U.S. officials simply said the concerns were based on "intelligence." Cevallos said the civil aviation agency officials were told there was "specific information about a potential risk" on the Aeromexico flights.

Gutierrez, who was critical of U.S. procedures, said Mexico would continue to comply with similar requests from U.S. officials. Mexico has placed armed police officers on some flights to the United States at the request of U.S. officials. But Gutierrez said the cancellation of flights has not been an effective strategy.

"This alarm situation has been a failure," Gutierrez said. "We have found nothing suspicious. Nobody has been detained and nobody has found a bomb or anything like that."

Correspondents Keith B. Richburg in Paris and Kevin Sullivan in Acapulco, Mexico, and special correspondent Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Aids Security of Musharraf
Efforts Build After Attacks in Pakistan

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 3, 2004; Page A01


After two recent assassination attempts that bear the markings of al Qaeda, the U.S. government is stepping up efforts aimed at protecting Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and urging him to crack down further on Islamic terrorism groups, U.S. officials said.

The United States had sent electronic jamming devices that helped foil the first attempt on Musharraf by interfering with the detonation of explosives, officials said. Since the attacks, U.S. officials have increased intelligence sharing and other efforts to help Musharraf`s security forces, although the United States is not providing bodyguards, a step taken to safeguard Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. FBI officials in Pakistan are helping to investigate the attacks on Musharraf.

Musharraf`s longevity and the stability and cooperation of Pakistan, the world`s most politically fragile nuclear power, are critical to the U.S. campaign to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda operatives. U.S. military and intelligence officials believe bin Laden and other al Qaeda members are hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Musharraf has positioned himself as an ally of the United States in its war on terrorists.

If Musharraf were to die in an attack, U.S. military and intelligence officials said they believe the Pakistani army would quickly move to appoint a successor -- with the most likely candidate being the army vice chief of staff, Gen. Muhammad Yousaf Khan, viewed by U.S. officials as pro-American and likely to continue Musharraf`s prosecution of al Qaeda.

"My assumption is the army will assert itself and shove the civilians into the background" if something happened to Musharraf, said Teresita C. Schaffer, a former ambassador to Sri Lanka who heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies` South Asia program.

Musharraf survived assassination attempts on Dec. 14 and Dec. 26 that occurred barely 500 yards apart in the heavily guarded city of Rawalpindi, the army`s headquarters.

In the first, detonation of a remote-controlled bomb was delayed by electronic jamming equipment on the president`s vehicle. The bomb exploded less than a minute after his motorcade passed. In the second attempt, two pickup trucks rammed Musharraf`s motorcade, which was traveling at 80 mph. Musharraf was unharmed, but 15 people, including four military policemen, were killed.

"There is a very strong suspicion that it was al Qaeda," one U.S. intelligence official said.

One of the assailants is believed to be Muhammed Jamil, who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to the Pakistan newspaper Dawn. He reportedly is a member of Laskhar-e-Muhammed. That group is believed to have been set up by Pakistani intelligence to fight in Kashmir -- disputed territory Pakistan and India have fought over twice -- and is thought now to provide training to al Qaeda.

Jamil was captured in Afghanistan during the war there and was turned over to Pakistan authorities who later released him after interrogation, the paper said.

The CIA dramatically increased its funding to and intelligence-sharing with many countries after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but nowhere was this joint cooperation more extensive than in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. After the assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Musharraf reversed Pakistan`s traditional support for Afghanistan`s Taliban government and began to move against al Qaeda and its affiliates, some of which had been sustained by Pakistan`s intelligence services over the years.

The CIA has urged Musharraf to take a harder approach toward extremist groups and has been routinely sharing intelligence with Pakistan`s security services about terrorist movements into the country, Pakistan experts said.

The most immediate threat to Pakistan`s stability should Musharraf be killed would not be the security of his nuclear arsenal, which is under strict army control, said Pakistan experts in and out of government. More pressing for the United States would be the potential for domestic upheaval. Musharraf`s hold on power seems secure for now -- he won a vote of confidence Thursday in parliament -- but it has required constant work on his part to maintain some measure of support from Islamic groups in Pakistan, some of which chafe at his pro-American positions.

"The biggest challenges will be the future of Pakistan`s domestic politics," said Ashley J. Tellis, a former National Security Council official at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He`s trying to negotiate a new government, where Pakistan can eventually move to civilian rule. Those issues will be up for renegotiation" should he leave power.

The assassination attempts highlight the fragility of Musharraf`s position, experts said.

"Musharraf has really carried out this extraordinary juggling act for years," said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center and a longtime Pakistan expert. "He`s declared Pakistan on the right side of terrorism, but Pakistan continues to provide support for groups we consider terrorist. His juggling act has gotten really hard. Balls are likely to drop."

Krepon and others said Musharraf`s choice is to proceed with the contradictory approach or "come down very hard on groups that are his sworn enemy."

Should he choose the latter, officials said Musharraf would be able to turn immediately to the United States for help. "We`ve offered a lot," one senior administration official said.

Musharraf`s cooperation after Sept. 11 and the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan gave the CIA and U.S. military the opening -- and political cover from Congress, which had restricted military relations with Pakistan for the last 10 years -- to dramatically increase ties.

FBI and CIA officials have worked closely with their Pakistani counterparts to capture more than 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. U.S. Special Operations forces maintain at least two bases in the country for operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban along the mountainous, off-limits tribal border with Afghanistan, where Musharraf has begun to increase security patrols.

The administration is seeking $3 billion in economic and military aid to Pakistan over five years, half of it for security and military equipment and training.

Pakistan experts believe the country`s nuclear weapons and equipment would remain secure, even with an abrupt change of leadership. "The security of the nuclear weapons is as good or bad as the security of the Pakistan army," Schaffer said. "Yeah, you have to worry about it" but not because of Musharraf.

The United States has been working to induce Pakistan to improve its safeguards, including the transportation and accounting of nuclear and nuclear-related material since the Sept. 11 attacks. Pakistan is believed to have manufactured at least enough highly enriched uranium for 40 nuclear weapons. Components for such weapons are stored in separate locations, reportedly in the Punjab province, where loyalty to the army is high.

The day before the second attempt on his life, Musharraf reached an agreement with the opposition Islamic parties, some allied with militant groups, to step down as chief of the army within a year. In return, he won agreement for some constitutional changes he had unilaterally enacted last year.

Asked about Pakistan`s stability in the aftermath of the assassination attempts, President Bush said Thursday he had spoken with Musharraf. "Obviously, terrorists are after him. And he sounded very confident that the security forces would be able to deal with the threat. President Musharraf . . . has been a stand-up guy when it comes to dealing with the terrorists. We are making progress against al Qaeda because of his cooperation."

Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Too Much Power




Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page B06


THIS YEAR`S intelligence authorization bill provided a little-noticed and dangerous expansion of a peculiar and unaccountable FBI investigative power. Last-minute efforts to modify the provision in conference committee failed, unfortunately, so the bureau now has more power to compel the production of certain business records in national security investigations, with no court oversight and in nearly total secrecy. The use of "national security letters" is not new, but in light of new authorities provided the FBI in the USA Patriot Act, Congress should be finding ways to curtail their use, not expand it.

National security letters are a form of administrative subpoena that permit the FBI to request from businesses records of, among other things, telephone and Internet activity or financial data from banks and other financial institutions bearing on investigative targets in counterintelligence or terrorism cases. These subpoenas are secret; the recipient cannot disclose having received one. And the letters can be issued by relatively low-level bureau officials without going to any court. In the Patriot Act, Congress made this process easier, removing the requirement that the FBI have specific facts linking the subject to a foreign power to justify each letter. Now, to issue a national security letter, the FBI merely has to certify that the information is "relevant" to a national security investigation. The only reason national security letters have not posed a significant threat to civil liberties is that they have applied only to relatively narrow categories of records.

That will now begin to change. The definition of "financial institution" in the new law is expanded to include insurance companies, pawnbrokers, dealers in precious metals, the Postal Service, casinos, travel agencies and more. The FBI, on the authority of individual supervisory agents, can now get any of these businesses to disclose its dealings with anyone if the bureau deems those records relevant to counterterrorism. This is more unchecked power than the agency ought to have.

The Patriot Act already gave the FBI wide-ranging power to seek a much broader category of "business records" -- but with the approval of a special court that authorizes surveillance in national security cases. The standard is not high, but by giving a federal judge the chance to look at the application, the law creates some accountability. Ironically, it is this unobjectionable provision in the Patriot Act that has attracted the ire of civil libertarian and library groups. In our view, the objections are wrongheaded; the provision merely parallels the government`s authority in criminal cases to seek business records using grand jury subpoenas. But now Congress has taken action that really is worth worrying about, giving the government another authority for whose use it need seek leave only from itself.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
What Is Safe Enough?


By Ellen Goodman

Saturday, January 3, 2004; Page A21


BOSTON -- Could we rewind the videotape to Dec. 15, when Howard Dean qualified his pleasure at the capture of Saddam Hussein by saying that it "has not made America safer"? Dean was instantly lambasted by his opponents, especially Joe Lieberman, who said the doctor was climbing "into his own spider hole of denial."

Well, six days later, after the sort of terrorist "chatter" designed to make your teeth chatter, the country was put on orange alert for a "spectacular" attack rivaling those of Sept. 11. Then six Air France flights destined to fly into the homeland were grounded. And finally, under "emergency rules," our government has required armed guards on foreign flights.

Are we safer yet?

Meanwhile, in Libya, Moammar Gaddafi turned around and allowed nuclear inspectors. But in Pakistan there was another assassination attempt on Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whose country has its own nuclear weapons, materials and scientists.

So, are we safer yet?

This is not a rhetorical question or a smarty-pants refrain or a defense of Dean. It`s a straightforward inquiry that is sure to underlie the new year and the presidential campaign.

Everyone knows that Sept. 11, 2001, shifted the American sense of vulnerability. And sense is the right word. People who assess risk for a living will tell you that since 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, more than 100,000 have died on the highways. They will also tell you that these figures have little to do with how we feel.

The point of terrorism, after all, is terror. As Jessica Stern, author of "Terror in the Name of God," says, "The radius of psychological damage from a terrorist strike is much bigger than the material damage."

Last year President Bush said that "we refuse to live in fear" and justified a preemptive war against Iraq as a strike against fear. This year the Bush campaign will simultaneously tell us how dangerous the world is and how much safer the administration has made it.

Democrats, and not just Dean, will say we are not safe enough, or not in safe hands. In a recent preview, Wesley Clark said that if he`d been president, "we`d have had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago, and the world would have been a lot safer."

Are we safe, safer, safest, yet? What is safe enough? If we won`t live in fear, don`t we have to live with fear?

This is a country that is, by every actuarial table, extremely safe. But it`s also a country where toothpaste comes with a warning label and a mad cow can set off a vegetarian stampede.

Our reactions to the current orange alert ranged across a bell curve of fear. A shoebox on library steps in New York led to 5,000 people being evacuated. It held a stuffed snowman. A mayor told an NPR reporter that his city was "on the front line of the war on terrorism." His city was Peoria, Ariz.

At the same time, Americans went home for the holidays. And in D.C. a colleague blithely brushed away the alert by saying "orange is the new yellow" as if it were a fashion statement.

Part of the problem is that safety is not just relative, it`s mobile. If we protect against anthrax, does the terrorist move to smallpox? If we hire air guards to prevent terrorists from infiltrating the flight deck, will terrorists infiltrate the air guards? Or hop a freight?

In safety, as in thermodynamics, you cannot get to absolute zero. Or as Paul Simon sings, the nearer the destination the more you keep sliding away.

The biggest struggle with the "sense" of vulnerability is where to put our dollars and our worries. As a member of the duck-and-cover generation, my worst-case scenarios are nuclear and, as John Edwards has said most strongly, I do not rest assured. At the same time, I feel more manipulated than comforted by the way we launched a war against fear. The arrest of Saddam Hussein makes me feel delighted but not safer.

I remember what an administration official said about Pakistan`s nuclear arsenal: "It`s what we don`t know that worries us." He could have said it about anything. We`ll recognize the right choices only when we look back in that instrument Dr. Dean describes ironically as a "retrospectascope."

So this year, we`ll hear candidates promising to be the architect of a better safety zone. Listening from the uneasy radius of terrorism, it`s up to us to figure out a place where safe enough is enough.

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Published on Friday, January 2, 2004 by Knight-Ridder
Pace of Attacks on U.S. Troops Hasn`t Slowed Since Saddam`s Capture
by Tom Lasseter

BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein`s capture three weeks ago hasn`t slowed the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, which now seems more entrenched than ever, according to a review of recent attacks and interviews with U.S. and Iraqi officials.

U.S. and Iraqi officials say they now doubt that Saddam had a significant role in directing guerrilla attacks. They say that while his interrogation has led to some arrests, basic information is still lacking about the guerrilla cells that are attacking U.S. and allied troops with sophistication and brutality.

"We don`t think, as some have speculated, that he was the central figure managing the entire anti-coalition operation," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. Still, officials believe the former leader played some role. "Do we fully understand where Saddam fits in? We`re putting that puzzle together."

U.S intelligence officials in Washington said Saddam has begun cooperating with U.S. interrogators, but they said he claims he wasn`t involved in directing the resistance and denies he had links to al-Qaida or other international terrorist groups who now appear to be joining the guerrillas.

The pace of attacks on U.S troops weeks after Saddam`s capture has shaken U.S. officials` confidence that they know whom the insurgents are and has made targeting the insurgents difficult at best. Some people working with U.S. forces say many detained in the crackdown against anti-U.S. forces know little about the organization or seem to be uninvolved in the insurgency.

Even something as basic as the number of anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq is a mystery. "We`ve seen varied assessments that range from 500 to 5,000 or even higher," Kimmitt said. "I don`t think we really have a good fix on that number."

As for how the various cells might relate to one another, officials admit they are working on hunches as much as anything.

Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who commands the Army`s 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, said he`s convinced that there`s a central planning, training and supply network behind the homemade roadside bombs that explode nearly daily around the country.

However, "I can`t tell you that I have absolute confidence that I am correct," Dempsey said. "They just seem to have a quality about them." Other officials say attacks around the country in the past week have differed so much in technique - from suicide bombings to mortar assaults - that it seems unlikely they`re the work of a single organization.

The pace of killing and maiming of American troops hasn`t slowed since Saddam`s Dec. 13 arrest.

In the 14 days prior to Saddam`s capture, 11 American soldiers were killed. In the 14 days that followed, that figure was 14, not including four Bulgarian and two Thai soldiers who also died.

On Christmas Day in Baghdad, there were 18 attacks, including nine nearly simultaneous ones by rocket-propelled grenades, that slammed into embassies, the so-called "Green Zone" that serves as the coalition`s headquarters, and an Iraqi apartment complex, setting off a barrage of explosions that terrified much of the city.

Three days later, in the southern town of Karbala, four suicide bombers killed 18 people, including six coalition soldiers, and wounded more than 150. On New Year`s Eve, again in Baghdad, a car bomb tore through a popular upscale restaurant, killing at least five and wounding dozens.

Unlike attacks in places such as Israel, there are no subsequent claims of responsibility. As a result, Iraqis and U.S. military officials are left to wonder whether the bloodshed is the result of a single large organization, disparate cells or lone fighters.

American civilian officials cast the ongoing attacks as an attempt to sabotage the handover of authority to a new Iraqi government in July, but several members of Iraq`s Governing Council said last week that the guerrilla war has turned into a terrorist free-for-all fueled by U.S. failure to seal the country`s borders.

"It`s a terrorist war now," said council member Songul Chapouk, who represents Iraqi Turkmen and the city of Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad. "Many people in my city were (Saddam Hussein loyalist fighters), but I see them and they are working now, not out conducting attacks."

The struggle to understand the attacks becomes clear on the ground. The town of Ramadi, for example, is a hotspot west of Baghdad.

Home to many Saddam loyalists, it has become a poster child of the troubled Sunni Triangle, a mass of land populated by Sunni Muslims, who share the same religious practices as Saddam and, in many cases, were privileged under his rule. When Saddam was captured, hundreds took to the city`s streets in protest.

American troops are broadly unpopular there. "No one in Ramadi likes them," said Ahmed Faiq, a soft-spoken pharmacist. "They don`t understand the situation here."

Wassam Khali, a furniture maker, agreed. "It`s better for everyone if the Americans leave Iraq," he said. "If they stay, maybe there will be a revolt against them."

Saddam`s capture has had only "minor impact" in Ramadi, said Lt. Col. Thomas Hollis, who commands a battalion of soldiers in Ramadi.

Hollis, of the 1st Infantry Division, was standing in front of a map full of color-coordinated pushpins. Ramadi was marked with one big cluster of red pins for homemade bomb attacks, yellow for vehicle ambushes and blue for weapons cache finds.

Hollis` troops, who arrived in Iraq four months ago, have made adjustments for the Ramadi challenge. For instance, Bravo Company, which normally has 14 armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles and no Humvees, now rides in five Bradleys and 12 Humvees, giving it greater agility. Officers such as 1st Lt. Jeff Flach, who usually specializes in coordinating air defense for the mechanized units, have been shifted to civil affairs operations that reach out to locals.

"We`re asking guys trained in artillery to do diplomacy, state department stuff," Flach said.

The insurgents have made adjustments, too, however.

After a series of traffic checkpoints nabbed vehicles carrying weapons, the rebels started moving weapons by boat on the Euphrates River, coming ashore at night to bury caches of rocket-propelled grenades, artillery shells and mortar rounds. U.S. soldiers have started patrols along the river, looking for freshly dug ground.

In a more serious example, rebels in Ramadi have forsaken once-common mortar attacks, which usually hit dirt and concrete and caused few casualties, in favor of deadlier car bombings. In the last three weeks, a suicide car bomber at a military base in Ramadi killed one soldier and injured 14, while another in the nearby town of Khaldiya killed 17 Iraqi police officers and wounded dozens.

The fighters are also becoming increasingly compartmentalized, Hollis said.

Early in the postwar conflict, insurgents would be caught with artillery rounds rigged into homemade bombs that they planned to hide under rocks. Now, Hollis said, when they catch someone who set off a bomb, he usually knows only the person who planted it. And the person who placed it knows only the deliveryman, who in turn, can name no one higher than the middleman for the bomb maker. And the bomb maker came into contact with the guy with the raw materials, not the person who bought them.

Often, U.S. soldiers detain people who have no connection to the insurgency. "Every day I have the same problem," said Alan Zeid, a contract interpreter for the 1st Infantry in Ramadi. "It`s 90, 95 percent of the time, they`re bringing in the wrong guy. But it`s what they have to do."

Lasseter reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Knight Ridder correspondent Hannah Allam contributed to this report.

The following information may be used by those papers wishing to chart U.S. casualties for the 14 days prior to and 14 days after Saddam`s capture:


Nov. 29 - 2 dead, 1 wounded

Nov. 30 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 1 - 1 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 2 - 1 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 3 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 4 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 5 - 1 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 6 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 7 - 1 dead, 2 wounded

Dec. 8 - 1 dead

Dec. 9 - 31 wounded (car bombing in Mosul)

Dec. 10 - 2 dead, 4 wounded

Dec. 11 - 1 dead, 14 wounded (car bombing in Ramadi)

Dec. 12 - 1 dead, 3 wounded

Dec. 13 - Saddam captured, 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 14 - 1 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 15 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 16 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 17 - 1 dead, 1 wounded

Dec. 18 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 19 - 1 dead, 2 wounded

Dec. 20 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 21 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 22 - 2 dead, 2 wounded

Dec. 23 - 0 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 24 - 4 dead, 0 wounded

Dec. 25 - 2 dead, 4 wounded

Dec. 26 - 2 dead, 1 wounded

Dec. 27 - 0 dead, 0 wounded (6 non-U.S. coalition dead, 26 wounded in Karbala car bombings)

Source: U.S. Central Command.

Copyright 2004 Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services

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

Noch einer reif für die Klapsmühle. Nicht nur Bush hört Stimmen.
Wie schon gesagt, ich warte auf die erste Marienerscheinung in Texas. Crawford als Lourdes Amerikas.

THE NATION



Televangelist Robertson Says Bush Will Win in `Blowout`
From Associated Press

January 3, 2004

NORFOLK, Va. — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Friday he believed God has told him President Bush would be reelected in a "blowout" in November.

"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk," Robertson said on his "700 Club" program on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network, which he founded. "I really believe I`m hearing from the Lord it`s going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It`s shaping up that way."

"The Lord has just blessed him," Robertson said of Bush. "I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn`t make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he`s a man of prayer and God`s blessing him."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, a frequent Robertson critic and executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he had a prediction of his own: "Pat Robertson in 2004 will continue to use his multimillion dollar broadcasting empire to promote George Bush and other Republican candidates."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Von San Francisco Blick auf Alcatraz

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Die Bomben von Karbala
von Robert Fisk
Independent / ZNet 29.12.2003

Gestern in Karbala - ein abgetrennter Arm samt Hand liegt wenige Meter neben dem zerborstenen Tor zum Karbalaer Bürgermeisterbüro. Ein menschliches Drama, nicht weniger blutig wie jene Story über Hussein, den schiitischen Märtyrer des 7. Jahrhunderts. Die goldene Kuppel des Hussein-Schreins ist hier gen Osten durch den Smog zu erkennen. Einige sagen, der Arm gehöre zu einem Polizeimajor - einer von 11 Polizisten, die den 4 grausamen Anschlägen vom Samstag in dieser allerheiligsten Stadt zum Opfer fielen -, andere behaupten, der Arm gehöre dem Mann, der die Lastwagenbombe bis zu den Toren fuhr. Auf dem Parkplatz im Freien geschockte polnische und bulgarische Soldaten. Viele von ihnen sitzen in ausrangierten russischen Fahrzeugen, die Saddams Armee fuhr, bevor sie vor 8 Monaten aufgelöst wurde. Sie sehen sich die Szenerie mit einer seltsamen Mischung aus Scheu und Verachtung an. Eine Meile entfernt waren 4 Bulgaren getötet worden, als ein anderer Mann einen Öltanklaster auf ihr getarntes Hauptquartier zusteuerte. Ich ging auf einen bulgarischen Offizier zu - er stand wenige Meter neben dem 6-Meter-Loch, das die Bombe in die Straße gerissen hatte -, aber er wandte sich ab und weinte. Insgesamt starben 19 Männer beim Massaker von Karbala. 11 Polizisten, 5 bulgarische Soldaten*, 2 Thai-Soldaten und ein Zivilist - eine der höchsten Opferbilanzen der Selbstmordanschläge im Irak seit “Befreiung” des Landes im April. Damals, während der Invasion, war die Regierung Bulgariens - als Teil von US-Verteidigungsminister Rumsfelds “Neuem Europa” - mit die enthusiastischste Unterstützerin Präsident George Bushs gewesen. Neben der Universität von Karbala, wo die Bulgaren ein Bataillons-Hauptquartier eingerichtet haben: das gleiche Ausmaß an Zerstörung. Der Tanklaster war zunächst über ein Spielfeld gesteuert worden, um dann auf das dreistöckige Gebäude zuzuhalten. Die Wachsoldaten hatten das Feuer eröffnet, bevor er den inneren Einfassungszaun erreichen konnte.

Bushra Jaafar, 19, befand sich auf dem Campus - in ihrer Biologie-Klasse - als sie gegen 12 Uhr 30 die ersten Schüsse hörte, die auf den Tanklaster abgefeuert wurden. “Professor Hussein sagte, wir sollten alle weg von den Fenstern, er hat wohl erraten, was gleich passieren wird”, erzählte sie mir gestern in ihrem Haus in den Slums. “Dann gab es eine Riesenexplosion, und das ganze Glas kam herein”. Teile des Tanklasters waren eine halbe Meile vom Ort des Anschlags weggesprengt worden. Sie wirbelten hoch durch die Luft und landeten in Bushras Hinterhof. Ihr Vater Nuri, ein 54jähriger Veteran des Iran-Irak-Kriegs, sagt, die anderen (drei) Explosionen seien nur Minuten später erfolgt. Ein exzellentes Timing - 4 separate Selbstmordanschläge binnen weniger Minuten. Und die Angegriffenen waren jämmerlich unvorbereitet.

Die Bulgaren hatten ihr Hauptquartier unter einem Camouflage-Netz verborgen - wie ihnen einst von der Sowjetarmee beigebracht. Aber sie hatten versäumt, den Fußballplatz zu sichern. Der Bomber erreichte den Stacheldrahtzaun am Haupttor und jagte seinen Truck in die Luft. Teile der Außenwand (des Gebäudes) kollabierten in den Vorhof. Die bulgarischen Soldaten stehen unter polnischem Oberbefehl - in diesem für die Irak-Besatzungsarmee zentralen Sektor. Jetzt sah man die Soldaten, wie sie auf dem beschädigten Dach herumschlenderten bzw. draußen durch die Schuttberge. Sie traten gegen den Zaun, der sich als so nutzlos erwiesen hatte und kletterten über den kollabierten neuen Mobilfunkturm, dessen Eisenstreben durch die Explosion herausgerissen wurden. In der Universität waren die Studenten von tausenden Glassplittern getroffen worden. Insgesamt gab es 126 Verletzte, ein Zivilist wurde getötet. Am meisten betroffen waren wie üblich die Angehörigen der von den USA bezahlten neuen irakischen Polizeitruppe. Imad Naghim, ein 30jähriger Polizeirekrut, befand sich mit 4 Kollegen in einem Auto gegenüber dem Bürgermeisterbüro, als der Bomber ankam. Naghim musste fast 24 Stunden operiert werden. Gestern befand er sich im Aufwachraum der Notaufnahme des Hussein-Hospitals. Gerade, als wir dort waren, öffnete er die Augen, winkte uns mit blutverschmierter Hand zu. Seine Lippen formten die Worte: ‘Salaam Aleikum’ - Friede mit euch. Stirn, Kiefer, Leib und Oberschenkel waren eingegipst, sein Gesicht gesprenkelt mit dutzenden winzigkleiner, roter Einschlaglöcher. “Noch ein Kollege in dem Auto hat überlebt”, sagt uns sein Onkel Adnan mit leiser Stimme. “Die andern beiden Männer im Wagen waren sofort tot. Er hat sehr viel Glück gehabt”. Imad wusste noch nicht, wieviel Glück er hatte. Zwei seiner Freunde waren bereits beerdigt. Aber wie konnte das passieren, dass der Truck bis vor das Tor des Bürgermeisterbüros kam? Schließlich gibt es dort Beton-Schikanen und vor dem Tor eine Straßensperre, bemannt mit amerikanischen Soldaten der 101sten Airborne Division sowie zusätzlichen irakischen Polizisten. Ein höherer Polizeioffizier - hoch genug, um eine schwarze Lederjacke und Jeans zu tragen anstatt Uniform -, trat ein. Er erklärt uns Folgendes. Der Bomber war einem Konvoi bis in die Straße (vor dem Gebäude) gefolgt, er hatte sich einfach an das hinterste Fahrzeug “gehängt”; so war er am amerikanisch-irakischen Checkpoint vorbeigekommen. Er kam bis vor das Tor. Dort hatte er sich in mit lautem Knall selbst geopfert. Der braune Rauch wirbelte Polizeiautos und zivile Fahrzeuge wie Spielzeug über den Parkplatz. Ein irakischer Polizeioberst hatte sich in dem Konvoi befunden. Wie aber war es dem Bomber gelungen, von der Ankunft des Konvois zu erfahren? Gestern in Karbala sprach niemand aus, was etliche westliche Sicherheitsleute in Bagdad schon lang vermuten: Die Aufrührer, die Rebellen, die gegen die Besatzungstruppen und deren irakische Sicherheitsleute kämpfen, müssen Spione in der neuen Polizeitruppe haben. Wie sonst hätte der Bomber wissen können, dass er auf diesen Konvoi zu warten hat? Der Oberst sollte eine Ansprache halten. Er ist der Chef der Verkehrspolizei hier in Karbala. Jeder Cop wusste sicher Bescheid über das Treffen. Die übrigen 3 Selbstmordattentäter hatte man vermutlich instruiert, ihre Attacken genau im selben Moment zu starten. Eine Planung, wie wir sie im Irak bisher nicht für möglich hielten.

Bushra Jaafar und ihre College-Freunde hatten Angst - seit die Soldaten ihre Basis neben dem Universitäts-Campus errichtet hatten. “Wir wussten, dass sie ein Ziel sind - alle Lehrer wussten es, darum hat Professor Hussein ja auch gleich begriffen, was die Schießerei zu bedeuten hat”. Dennoch war Bushra wütend, als man ihr sagte, der Unterricht müsse für eine Woche ausfallen. Sie symbolisiert das Beste an diesem “Neuen Irak”. “Ich bin jetzt bereit, an meine Universität zurückzukehren”, sagt sie. Überall in Karbala haben die Bulgaren gestern halbherzig Checkpoints eingerichtet - als würden diejenigen, die diese Bomber losschickten, 24 Stunden später durch die Straßen kreuzen. Im großen Schrein von Hussein - dem Märtyrer, den sie im Jahr 686 nach Christus zerstückelten -, strömten derweil tausende Pilger, überwiegend Iraner, durch die goldenen Pforten, so, als gehöre der Aufstand im Irak einem anderen Zeitalter an. Fast jede größere irakische Großstadt wurde inzwischen von Selbstmordbombern attackiert. Einzig Basra blieb - bislang - verschont. In Basra sind die Briten.

Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin

Nach den Anschlägen von Karbala verweigern 30 bulgarische Soldaten, die im Januar in den Irak kommen sollten, ihren Einsatz.





[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Karbala Bombings" ]

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Saturday, January 03, 2004
War News for January 3, 2004

Nach seiner Pause siehe unten, wieder jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in mortar attack near Balad.

Bring `em on: US soldier killed, one wounded as US helicopter shot down near Fallujah. Troops securing the crash site were also ambushed.

Bring `em on: Train derailed in RPG ambush near Habbaniyah.

Bring `em on: Three US troops wounded in convoy ambush near Ramadi.

Bring `em on: US patrol ambushed in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: University professor assassinated in Mosul.

Bring `em on: One killed, one injured in ethnic violence in Kirkuk.

CENTCOM reports one soldier killed, six injured in vehicle accident near Baghdad.

CENTCOM reports one US soldier killed, one wounded by accidental weapons discharge.

Bulgarian troops decline Iraq deployment.

Analysis: Ethnic conflict in Kirkuk.

Protests in Baghdad over mosque raid.

Massive unemployment still causes resentment in Iraq.

No decrease in anti-US violence since Saddam`s capture. " U.S. and Iraqi officials say they now doubt that Saddam had a significant role in directing guerrilla attacks. They say that while his interrogation has led to some arrests, basic information is still lacking about the guerrilla cells that are attacking U.S. and allied troops with sophistication and brutality."

Revenge killings in Mosul. "`All of these people were attacked because they were soft targets,` said Brigadier Hikmat Mahmoud, spokesman for the Mosul police directorate. `It`s an attempt to destabilise the situation here. Twenty of my police officers have also been killed – these people just want to hit the reconstruction effort.` But local journalist Roaa al-Zrary has a different explanation for the killings which she has been investigating since they began in October with the murder of outspoken newspaper editor Ahmed Showkat – her father. `These are carefully chosen targets and they are killed in a very professional manner," she said. "What connects them is that they were either Baath party members who have started to work with the Americans, or they were involved with current operations against the Baathists.`"

About those freedoms for Iraqi women Lieutenant AWOL was crowing about.

Report on the ICDC. "Some U.S. trainers in Tikrit say the Iraqi force is ill-equipped, prone to corruption and so trigger-happy that some have shot at their own comrades. Added to that is the threat of anti-American guerrillas targeting Iraqis cooperating with the coalition. By some estimates, it will take years before this ragtag militia of former Iraqi soldiers, impoverished farmers and jobless men and youths will be able to shoulder the burden of securing Saddam Hussein`s hometown."

Recruiting for the ICDC.

Lieutenant AWOL supports the troops. "The Bush administration is considering dramatic increases in the fees military retirees pay for prescription drugs, a step that would roll back a benefit extended 33 months ago and risk alienating an important Republican constituency at the dawn of the 2004 campaign season." Military Officers Association of America legislative alert on this issue. "Given only two days to respond, all Services reportedly objected to the plan. Our sources indicate this initiative didn`t start in the Pentagon, but was directed by the Office of Management and Budget - the budget arm of the White House."

Army expects to extend Stop-Loss program again. "The announcement of a further expansion of the program, which Army officials confirmed was imminent, comes amid evidence that the Army is straining to meet its growing commitments around the world."

Report on female American soldiers in Iraq. "American women have participated more extensively in combat in Iraq than in any previous war in U.S. history. They`ve taken roles nearly inconceivable just a decade or two ago - flying fighter jets and attack helicopters, patrolling streets armed with machine guns and commanding units of mostly male soldiers. Seven have been killed in combat."

Lucky soldier. Lucky he didn`t shoot his own nuts off.

Commentary

Opinion: Iraq isn`t Vietnam. "The Bush administration, in Iraq, is still looking for its Ngo Dinh Diem. It ignores the political lesson of Vietnam, which is that no leader in Iraq will be capable of rallying the country, or its major religious or ethic components (except the minority Kurds), whose program is not national sovereignty, an end to American occupation, and national renewal on Iraq`s own terms. That means an Iraq in full control of its resources, its security, and its foreign policy. This is not what the Bush administration wants."

Opinion: Message of Christianity lost to right-wingers. "The far right wing of the Republican Party seems to have trouble following many of the tenets and principles of Christianity and democracy: loving thy neighbor, not stealing, not killing (war and the death penalty are their biggest personal problems), freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc. This group is tightly focused on icons or symbols…the Bible; the flag; the American eagle; the Constitution; the Bill of Rights, and so on. Though focused on the icons, they are pathologically unable or unwilling to tolerate other peoples` beliefs."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two Connecticut soldiers injured in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: North Carolina soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Stars and Stripes report on two wounded soldiers recovering in Germany.






# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:12 AM
Comments (2)
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Here in western Washington State, we had our first significant snowfall. When I left for work tonight, I saw about four inches of fresh powder snow on the ground. I live in the country. The land here in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains is blanketed by green forests and small farms with red barns. The boughs of the firs and evergreens surrounding my own house and barn are heavy with snow. There is something breathtakingly spectacular about a rural snowfall. On winter nights like this, I almost always find serenity in the peaceful countryside, the smell of the cedar smoke from my neighbors` wood stoves and the silent majesty of lightly falling snow captured in the headlights of my truck as I drive to work.

But since the stuff is all over the road, my goddam truck is now stuck fender-deep in a drainage ditch full of cow shit across the road from a stinking dairy farm and I just walked five miles back to my house through this cold, wet crap with every mangy-assed farm dog on that miserable road yapping at me, I am not a happy son of a bitch tonight.

So there won’t be an update tonight. I’m going to break out some scotch and listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Bucky Pizarelli while I sit by the fireplace. Tomorrow I’ll call one of my farmer neighbors and borrow a tractor to pull my truck out of the muck, so there might not be an update for a couple of days.

Happy New Year to all of you.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 1:06 AM

[Joerver]

Bulgarian Troops Refuse to Go to Iraq




By Associated Press

January 2, 2004, 11:19 PM EST

SOFIA, Bulgaria -- More than two dozen Bulgarian soldiers are refusing deployment in Iraq, following the deaths of five countrymen in an attack in the Mideast country, a senior military official said Friday.

Between 25 and 30 soldiers of the second Bulgarian contingent, due to leave for Iraq in early January to replace the troops there now, have decided not to go on the mission, said Gen. Nikolai Kolev, the army chief of staff. The withdrawals would not affect Bulgaria`s mission in Iraq, he added.

All soldiers in Bulgaria`s Iraqi missions have volunteered to take part.

Bulgaria, a staunch supporter of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, last August sent a 485-soldier light infantry battalion to Iraq.

Some of the replacement soldiers changed their minds after five of their countrymen were killed a week ago in a blitz of four suicide car bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars that blasted coalition military bases and the Iraqi governor`s office.

The troops who withdrew will have to refund the costs of their training and medical examinations, Kolev said.

Government officials have said that Bulgaria will remain a firm member of the U.S.-lead coalition, despite the deaths.

"Keeping our military contingent in Iraq is a question of principle," Prime Minister Simeon Saxcoburggotski said earlier this week.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

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DER SPIEGEL 2/2004 - 05. Januar 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,280460,00.html
USA

"Ein entsetzlicher Fehler"

Der Historiker Paul Kennedy über die Verstrickung der Weltmacht USA im Irak, ihr Verhältnis zur islamischen Welt und den Einfluss der neokonservativen Ideologen auf George W. Bush

SPIEGEL: Professor Kennedy, in den USA hat ein Wahljahr begonnen. Für die Herausforderer von George W. Bush und den Präsidenten selbst wird der Irak ein heikles Wahlkampfthema werden, fast jeden Tag gibt es neue Anschläge. Was tobt derzeit dort - ein Krieg, ein Mittelding zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ein Guerillakampf?


Kennedy,58,
britischer Geschichtswissenschaftler, ist Direktor für Internationale Sicherheitsstudien an der amerikanischen Universität Yale. Er wurde bekannt durch den Weltbestseller "Aufstieg und Fall der großen Mächte".

Kennedy: Es sieht nach einer sehr langen Phase asymmetrischer Kriegführung aus - gegen eine Vielzahl von Feinden: Mitglieder der Baath-Partei, Saddam-Loyalisten, einige internationale Mudschahidin, religiöse Fanatiker, die die amerikanische Präsenz im Land für inakzeptabel halten. Washington hat im Irak einen entsetzlichen Fehler begangen. Die Berater des Präsidenten haben sich militärisch wie auch politisch geirrt, und jetzt zahlen wir einen hohen Preis dafür.
SPIEGEL: Hat der Kampf gegen den Terrorismus die Zahl der Terroristen vermehrt?

Kennedy: Ohne Zweifel, vor allem in der jüngeren Generation. Zu den verstörendsten Bildern aus dem Irak gehören für mich die von den 80 oder 90 Jugendlichen, die auf dem Dach der abgeschossenen Hubschrauber oder ausgebrannten Humvees herumspringen und jubeln. Für das Projekt von Demokratie und Toleranz haben wir eine ganze Generation verloren.

SPIEGEL: Doch genau dafür hat Bush den Krieg angeblich geführt.

Kennedy: Wir sollten dem Irak keine Demokratie nach westlichem Vorbild aufzwingen. In mancher Beziehung ist die Regierung Bush eben doch die ideologischste Regierung Amerikas seit vielen Jahren. Selbst Ronald Reagan, der wie ein Ideologe klang, war tatsächlich ungeheuer pragmatisch, mit Außenminister George Shultz an seiner Seite. Die Regierung Bush dagegen wähnt sich wirklich auf einem Kreuzzug. So beging sie die größte Sünde, die in der Staatskunst möglich ist: Sie hört nur, was sie hören will.

SPIEGEL: Und sieht, was sie sehen will, selbst wenn Massenvernichtungswaffen bislang nicht gefunden wurden.

Kennedy: Jedenfalls kann sich die US-Regierung nicht auf einen Mangel an Geheimdienstinformationen herausreden. Sämtliche verfügbaren Fakten haben Wolfowitz und Rumsfeld, Cheney und Bush ja vorgelegen - sie wollten sie aber nicht zur Kenntnis nehmen.

SPIEGEL: Es stimmt also, dass neokonservative Ideologen diese Regierung gekidnappt haben, wie US-Kritiker vermuten?

Kennedy: Mein Freund, der Historiker Volker Berghahn, hat einmal die deutsche Geisteshaltung vor 1914 als eine Art Autismus beschrieben, als Unfähigkeit, sich selbst aus der Distanz zu betrachten. Das sehe ich zurzeit auch hier in Amerika.

Den Irak-Krieg lediglich als Krieg ums Öl zu beschreiben scheint mir eine zweitrangige Erklärung zu sein. Ich denke noch nicht einmal, dass der Krieg aus innenpolitischen Motiven geführt wird. Ich fürchte, er hat mit einer bestimmten Geisteshaltung zu tun. Solange ich keine gegenteiligen Beweise sehe, glaube ich, dass diese Regierung wirklich angetrieben wurde von ihrer Vision für Amerikas Rolle in der Welt, von einer Art Sendung. Da sind nicht Zyniker am Werk. Sie meinen, was sie sagen.

SPIEGEL: Die Mission besteht darin, Amerikas überragender Macht Geltung und Wirkung zu verschaffen, ein amerikanisches Imperium zu errichten. Was zeichnet in der jetzigen Weltlage eigentlich ein Imperium aus?

Kennedy: Nach der traditionellen Definition übernahmen die Briten etwa die Herrschaft in Bombay, installierten einen regierenden General, verfügten über koloniale Truppen und lokale Kollaborateure und kontrollierten die Außenbeziehungen. Nun, diese Idee vom Empire ist für kompliziertere Verhältnisse zu schlicht. Denn wenn Sie zum Beispiel Buenos Aires um 1900 besucht hätten, dann hätten Sie sich auch im britischen Imperium geglaubt: Der Schienenverkehr gebaut von schottischen Ingenieuren, Schiffsverbindungen nach Liverpool und Southampton, die Investitionen kamen alle aus London, die Architektur war europäisch, die Exportprodukte Fleisch und Lebensmittel wurden nach England ausgeführt.

SPIEGEL: Also eine Art informelles Empire?

Kennedy: Genau. Und wenn Sie sich heutzutage jene Länder anschauen, in denen der amerikanische Einfluss so enorm ist - Südkorea, die Philippinen bis nach Afghanistan, die Golfstaaten -, nun, das sieht aus wie ein Imperium, handelt wie ein Imperium, läuft wie ein Imperium, und es quakt wie ein Imperium - wahrscheinlich ist es ein Imperium.

SPIEGEL: Doch von jeher gab es Zweifel daran, dass die USA auch wie ein Imperium handeln können, weil seine Bürger nicht bereit sind, den Preis dafür zu zahlen.

Kennedy: Ich denke, die Amerikaner können den Preis bezahlen und sind bereit dazu, wenn sie von der Sache überzeugt sind oder zumindest glauben, dass sie es wert ist. Der Unwille, der zurzeit deutlich wird, ist nicht eine Frage der Kosten - auch wenn jüngst wieder 43 000 Reservisten und Nationalgardisten in den Irak entsandt wurden.

SPIEGEL: Hat der Unwille damit zu tun, dass die amerikanischen Streitkräfte sich vorwiegend aus der Unterschicht rekrutieren?

Kennedy: Heutzutage ist es nicht mehr die Elite, die dient. Nur ein einziger Senator hat einen Sohn beim Militär. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg hingegen konnte Churchill seinen Sohn nicht davon abhalten, auf dem Balkan zu kämpfen. Roosevelt hat verzweifelt versucht, seinen Sohn zurückzuhalten, aber der fand, er habe die Pflicht, in den Krieg zu ziehen. Doch wo sind denn heute die Kinder jener Administration, die diesen Feldzug vorangetrieben hat?

SPIEGEL: Was fällt momentan schwerer ins Gewicht - die militärische Konfrontation mit der Guerilla im Irak oder die Schwierigkeiten, den Krieg zu legitimieren?

Kennedy: Bisher ist die militärische Bedrohung bescheiden. Gewiss, mitunter Dutzende Soldaten in einer Woche zu verlieren ist eine traurige und schlechte Nachricht. Aber Henry Kissinger sprach hier in Yale unlängst über die Bombardierung Kambodschas und die Tet-Offensive der Vietcong damals im Vietnam-Krieg. Er sagte, dass die Entscheidung zur Ausweitung des Krieges in einer Zeit fiel, als 500 Amerikaner pro Woche bei Angriffen der Vietcong, die über die kambodschanische Grenze kamen, gestorben sind.

Was mich im Irak momentan mehr beunruhigt, ist der Rückzug des Roten Kreuzes, der Vereinten Nationen oder der Weltbank. Die ganze Logik der Regierung Bush bestand ja darin, das Monster zu verjagen oder zu fangen und danach vieles den Vereinten Nationen, Unicef und dem World Food Programme zu überlassen. Nun passiert das Gegenteil, Saddam ist gefasst, das Militär bleibt, und die zivilen Hilfsorganisationen halten sich zurück, weil sie sich das Risiko nicht leisten können.

SPIEGEL: Sie blicken also pessimistisch auf die Zukunft des Irak?

Kennedy: Ich bin pessimistisch, denn was im Irak passiert, wirkt sich auf die gesamte Region aus. Wir haben ein substanzielles und langfristiges Problem in unseren Beziehungen mit der arabischen Welt. Ich sehe auch keine politische Lösung an der palästinensisch-israelischen Front. Der israelische Premier Scharon macht mit seiner Härte alles noch viel schlimmer. Die Kräfte von Wut und Frustration sind zu stark.

Amerika hat das nicht angestiftet. Unruhe und Zorn waren schon in der gesamten islamischen Welt verbreitet, von Algerien bis Indonesien. Aber Amerika hat es befördert und die Lage dadurch weiter verschlimmert. Was den Nahen Osten anbelangt, bin ich wirklich hoffnungslos.

SPIEGEL: Sehen Sie, ein Brite in Amerika, etwa auch die Zukunft Amerikas in trübem Licht?

Kennedy: Nein, da bin ich eindeutig zuversichtlich. Amerika hat ungeheure intellektuelle und zivile Ressourcen. Auch demografisch sind die USA weitaus besser aufgestellt als die meisten europäischen Länder, die ja in eine finstere Zukunft blicken. Zudem hat die geografische Weite der USA eine eigentümlich psychologische Wirkung: Sie schürt die Vorstellung, dass sich die Menschen und das Land ständig erneuern und neu erfinden können.

Die Regierenden in Washington mögen irren, die Generäle Fehler in Bagdad begehen, es wird von Zeit zu Zeit vielleicht einen Anthrax-Anschlag oder einen terroristischen Überfall geben - aber man muss sich schon ein sehr drastisches Szenario ausmalen, damit ein so großes Land mit fast 10 Millionen Quadratkilometern und 288 Millionen Menschen wirklich hart getroffen werden kann.

SPIEGEL: Das klingt, als glaubten Sie, die USA blieben auf unbestimmte Zeit die Weltmacht schlechthin.

Kennedy: Nein, ich glaube, dass die USA ihre Vormachtstellung schon in 50 Jahren an China verlieren können. Es gibt glaubwürdige Prognosen, dass bei stetigen Wachstumsraten China dann die größte Wirtschaftsmacht weltweit sein wird. Die USA rücken an die zweite Stelle, gefolgt von Indien. Aber das wäre ja keine Katastrophe für die Amerikaner, solange sie ihr Territorium, ihre Ressourcen und ihr Pro-Kopf-Einkommen stabil halten können.

SPIEGEL: Professor Kennedy, wir danken Ihnen für dieses Gespräch.



Das Gespräch führten die Redakteure Carolin Emcke und Gerhard Spörl.







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

© DER SPIEGEL 2/2004

[Joerver]

God Reveals the Future to Beelzebub

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

Inspiration: Pat Robertson: God told him it`s Bush in a `blowout` in November.

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
GI Killed in Iraq Attack; 2 Die in Blast


By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 3, 2004; 12:56 PM


BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents hit a U.S. base in central Iraq with mortar shells, killing one American soldier and wounding two others, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday. Two other soldiers were killed in a separate bomb attack.

The mortars struck a base of the Army`s 4th Infantry Division near Balad, about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad on Friday night, Sgt. Robert Cargie said.

One of the shells exploded near a trailer used as a bedroom by troops, and a soldier standing in its doorway was killed. Two other soldiers were struck by shrapnel and taken to a combat support hospital, where they were in stable condition, Cargie said.

In a separate incident Friday, two U.S. soldiers on patrol south of Baghdad were killed by a homemade bomb, a military spokesman said. Three others were injured in the explosion and evacuated to a hospital.

Overnight, the U.S. military bombed the sparsely populated southern edge of Baghdad to root out insurgents believed to be launching mortar shells and rockets, hours after a U.S. military helicopter was shot down west of the capital, killing one soldier.

Soon after the helicopter crashed on Friday, the military said attackers posing as journalists fired assault weapons and rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. paratroopers guarding the burning aircraft.

But there was confusion since Reuters news agency reported that its team at the scene was fired at by U.S. troops and three were later detained by the military.

"Our guys are still in detention and we still haven`t been informed of any specific accusations against them," said Andrew Marshall, Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad.

Elsewhere, insurgents attacked an American tanker truck convoy, setting one ablaze.

Coalition forces raiding a Sunni Muslim mosque arrested 32 suspected non-Iraqi Arab insurgents and seized an arms cache. Hundreds of Iraqis protested outside the mosque after the raid.

In Baghdad, a military spokesman said the shelling of the Doura neighborhood was part of an offensive dubbed Operation Iron Grip. Residents said it appeared U.S. fire was targeting fields in the neighborhood.

Bordered by date palm farms, the sparsely populated area once was home to a number of former officials in Saddam Hussein`s government and is now the site of a U.S. military base.

Operations like Iron Grip send "a very clear message to anybody who thinks that they can run around Baghdad without worrying about the consequences of firing (rocket propelled grenades), firing mortars," U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters Friday. "There is a capability in the air that can quickly respond against anybody who would want to harm Iraqi citizens or coalition forces."

He said troops from the 82nd Airborne Division were "fairly convinced that it was enemy fire" that brought down the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter near Fallujah, a flashpoint in the insurgency.

As paratroopers from the 82nd surrounded the crash site, five men "wearing black press jackets with `press` clearly written in English" fired on them, Kimmitt said. He said it was the first time he had heard of assailants in Iraq posing as journalists.

The Reuters team was led by Iraqi cameraman Salem Uraiby, who was filming from a checkpoint using a camera on a tripod and was wearing a flak jacket clearly marked "press," the agency said

"We were fired on and we drove away at high speed," driver Alaa Noury said. He said a second car driven by another Iraqi journalist had been fired upon in the same incident. One of the cars remained in Fallujah, Reuters said.

Kimmitt said attackers in two cars fled the scene and that soldiers doing a sweep through the town, with helicopters circling overhead, tracked down one of the cars and arrested four "enemy personnel."

Rebels previously have shot down U.S. helicopters elsewhere in the so-called "Sunni Triangle," the heartland of Saddam`s support and a center of resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.

In the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces since the Iraq invasion began in March, 17 soldiers were killed on Nov. 15 when two Black Hawk helicopters collided above Mosul in what the military called a likely grenade attack.

Also Friday, hundreds of angry protesters gathered outside the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque after U.S. soldiers and Iraqi defense force officers raided the mosque overnight.

Kimmitt said the U.S and Iraqi soldiers seized explosives, guns and ammunition and arrested 32 people believed to be non-Iraqi Arabs "based on their dialect." The military says foreign Islamic militants opposed to the occupation have infiltrated from neighboring borders.

A 5,000-gallon oil tanker also erupted in flames near a U.S. military base on the road to the western town of Ramadi. The military said it was in a convoy attacked with a roadside bomb, a grenade and small arms fire. Three American soldiers suffered burns and shrapnel wounds.

In ongoing raids to hunt down former Iraqi officials, U.S. soldiers captured Abu Mohammed, believed to be moving foreign fighters and cash through a tense area west of Baghdad, and three other suspects, the military said Friday.

Soldiers in Samarra blew up the house of Talab Saleh, who is accused of orchestrating attacks against U.S. troops, witnesses said. They said the troops arrested Saleh`s wife and brother and said they would not be released until Saleh surrenders. The military had no immediate comment.


© 2004 The Associated Press

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Far From Baghdad, Soldiers And Pilgrims Shake Hands

By Robert Fisk in Basra

03 January 2004: (The Independent) Most of Iraq is peaceful, they keep telling you at afternoon follies. An abiding theme of the occupation authorities - even when another American helicopter is shot down - is that life is normal in most of Iraq.

So I took the road to Basra yesterday, through the shrine-city of Najaf where they are still repairing the Mosque of Ali after the car-bombing which killed Ayatollah Mohamed al-Hakim last summer, and down the long road to Samawah. It grows hot as you drive south but the looters were still in coats and scarves on the highway. They had turned the grey desert into molehills for miles, trowelling down to the 4,600-year-old Sassanian past of Mesopotamia. I bounded up to the nearest thieves. Found anything? "Only a few pots so far," announced a teenager with a cigarette dangling from his lip. The looters have so thoroughly despoiled the cities that gave birth to our own civilisation that it`s gone beyond tears.

But then on the road south of Nasiriyah, an extraordinary sight. Two American Humvees and military police having their pictures taken by Iranian pilgrims. Impossible. Incredible. The sons of the Islamic Revolution chatting to the military representatives of the Great Satan. But true.

They were a nice crowd of Iranians and Americans. Tehran beards and chadors meet the local Colorado National Guard. The soldiers were laid back, a young woman from Colorado Springs cheerfully smiling into a dozen Iranian cameras, pilgrims to the Najaf and Kerbala shrines moving into frame. These pictures would be brought out, in the weeks to come, around a hundred Tehran dinner tables.

The soldiers chatted to those Iranians who spoke English, pitied their two-day bus journey from Tehran, privately bemoaned their own fate at spending 11 months in Iraq. They didn`t like the war, didn`t think they should be in Iraq, didn`t believe it was about democracy. "I spent a week in Baghdad and that was enough," one of the Americans said. "It`s really shit up there." And so, of course, it is. Which is why the folks from Colorado have an easy time in Basra, basking in the residual gratitude of a Shia population still celebrating the end of their Baathist tormentors.

Will it last? "I doubt it," a bespectacled sergeant remarked. They all talked about "occupation" rather than "liberation" - which is why, I guess, they really do come from the land of the free. Or maybe it`s because you can`t stop soldiers talking.

Further down the motorway, tanker convoys hummed along the carriageways, hundreds of trucks, oil carriers from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, fuelling the entire American occupation army while the people of Iraq wait for days in four-mile gas queues, herded into order by armed militiamen. This is Halliburton easing the springs of war and lining its pockets. A burnt-out American truck lay at one side of the highway, a massive portable building slewed onto its side on the south-bound carriageway where a military truck had slipped its load.

That was when a Humvee overtook me at speed, its visored, flak-jacketed crew swinging their heavy machine-gun at all us civilians. Then one of the masked figures gave us a wave and a thumbs up and I saw what he`d written in dust on the window of his Humvee - "Take Me Home". Now there`s the voice of the occupation army.

[ospower]

Bitte guckt euch mal um!

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Dispatch From The Provinces

US Military Mis-Information and Terrorism in Iraq

Dahr Jamail

3 January 2004: (ICH) I learned yesterday that one of the main sites which posts the writings of independent journalists and activists in Iraq, www.electroniciraq.net, has been banned from at least one of the US military bases in Iraq.

Celebrate free speech, read a banned website!

Like other repressive dictatorships and regimes, the US military has now followed suit in Iraq by attempting to select what its personnel should and should not read.

It is happening at home in the US as well. For example, the only news I see about Iraq on major American news outlets yesterday is about the one US soldier killed when his helicopter was downed. Iraqis who observed the chopper being hit by a rocket reported watching it being broken in two pieces and falling to the ground in flames. Thus, the other soldier, while reported as being injured, more than likely must have been very seriously injured. Again, no specific reporting on that either.

However, this could have something to do with the fact that a Reuters news team filming at the scene was fired upon by the Americans, then detained by military personnel near the crash site.

A military spokesperson stated that the military believed the Reuters team were resistance fighters posing as media. The US military today reported that the Reuters news team was firing machine guns and RPG at US military at the site.

There was no news about another US soldier who died yesterday by being shot by a weapon that discharged while being cleaned. Nor was there news about another US soldier who died when a truck he was riding in with a large convoy flipped, killing him and injuring several others. The toll of the occupation on US military personnel in Iraq mounts daily, just as it does on the Iraqi people.

Last night huge explosions rocked the outskirts of Eastern Baghdad.

Today a few of us decided to go check into it ourselves.

While driving around the farmlands of rural Baghdad in Al-Dora, a beautiful area of palm groves and green fields, we came across a man who told us Iraqi witnesses reported a US Humvee Patrol hit by a large roadside bomb, killing 5 soldiers, and injuring 2 others yesterday.

If this was true, it is yet another case of unreported news by US media, as there has been nothing of US soldiers being killed in Al-Dora by an IED yesterday.

We continued down the road, and soon came upon a huge crater, one meter deep, and 20 meters away off the other side of the road were skidding tire marks and a palm tree partly burned. Off the side of the road near this crash were small pieces of Humvee, a bloody bandage, a piece of green cloth with blood on it, and some bullet casings. Down in the dirt where the Humvee struck the palm tree sat a US grenade, splattered with blood.

Over near the crater was a partially used I.V. bag and a piece of paper with instructions on how to perform CPR, written in English of course.

Three Iraqi boys at the scene tell us that at 11:45am yesterday, the 2 Humvee Patrol was hit by the bomb. One Humvee was tossed off the other side of the road and burned, and the other was partially destroyed. They too, reported 5 US deaths, and 2 wounded.

One of the journalists in our group called CPIC from the scene, and they confirmed that a US patrol was hit by an IED yesterday here, but only 2 dead and 3 wounded.

More men arrived at the scene and agreed with the 5 dead, 2 wounded casualty count, and told us they were working in the nearby fields and saw the aftermath of the strike. They told us more soldiers arrived shortly after the attack and promptly detained 15 men from nearby homes.

While interviewing the men at the scene a huge explosion is heard in the distance. One of the men slaps his hands together, as if dusting them off, and says, “America finished!”

I checked the internet upon arriving back at my hotel to find that there was no report from a news agency about this attack yesterday, even though CPIC had confirmed the attack and at least 2 US soldiers killed.

We continue on down the street to find a farmhouse where a bomb from the nightly attacks the US has hit, via Operation Iron Grip.

In this Albu Aitha area of Al-Dora, it is nothing but farmers and wide open fields, lined with rows of palm trees.

Just beside an old stone house here, an older man points out a large crater, shrapnel scars marking the front of the home and huge chunks ripped out of a nearby palm tree.

The family had been eating dinner two nights ago and the bombing began. They were in a nearby room from area near the strike, or they would have been hit by shattered glass and shrapnel from the explosion.

Hamid Salman Halwan, the owner of the home, said, “Two nights ago they bombed here from 6-9pm, then resumed it again at 4am. I think it was jets shooting missiles, because I could hear the engines. Last night they bombed some more in this area. I suppose they think resistance fighters are hiding in the fields here.”

His wife tells us her children are afraid of any noise now, and have trouble sleeping at night. The family hasn’t slept in their home since the bombing 2 nights ago, for fear of another strike on their home.

“We don’t know why they bomb our house and our fields. We have never resisted the Americans. There are foreign fighters who have passed through here, and I think this is who they want. But why are they bombing us?”

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters Friday that Operation Iron Grip in this area sends “a very clear message to anybody who thinks that they can run around Baghdad without worrying about the consequences of firing RPG’s, firing mortars. There is a capability in the air that can quickly respond against anybody who would want to harm Iraqi citizens or coalition forces."

The family took us out into their nearby fields to show us a plethora of unexploded mortar rounds. The white bombs are sticking halfway out of the hardened mud as children play around them, pointing to them with excitement.

I count 9 small tails of the mortar rounds sticking into the air in this small section of the field.

Mr. Shakr, the brother of the man whose home was struck by a bomb, points to a distant hill and says, “The Americans shot mortars at us from there. You can see the crater where one exploded, but here are the rest. We had been told the Americans only use sound bombs here, but now we know different.”

He goes on to say that it was two nights ago when the Americans shot mortars at their fields behind their home, from 6:30-10pm, then again at 4am.

We asked if the family had requested that the Americans come remove the unexploded ordnance.

Mr. Shakr, with a very troubled look, said, “We asked them the first time and they said ‘OK, we’ll come take care of it.’ But they never came. We asked them the second time and they told us they would not remove them until we gave them a resistance fighter. They told us, ‘If you won’t give us a resistance fighter, we are not coming to remove the bombs.’”

He holds his hands in the air and says, “But we don’t know any resistance fighters!”

He grows somber, and quietly says, “We will have to leave this land because we cannot farm our fields with bombs in them.”

A little further into this area which has been struck so hard by ‘Operation Iron Grip’ we speak with a man standing in front of his farm house.

He invites us to his home and we sit sharing chai in the setting sun. His 3 year old boy, Halaf Ziad Halaf, walks up to us and with a worried look on his face says,

“I have seen the Americans here with their tanks. They want to attack us.”

Halaf’s uncle leans over to me and says,

“The Americans are creating the terrorists here by hurting people and causing their relatives to fight against them. Even this little boy will grow up hating the Americans because of their policy here.”

Dahr Jamail, is an independent American journalist reporting from Iraq

Copyright: Dahr Jamail.

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Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

William Pfaff: Bush is ignoring the political lesson of Vietnam
William Pfaff IHT
Saturday, January 3, 2004



PARIS This year will be the year of all the answers. We will learn whether George W. Bush remains president of the United States. His fate will tell us whether the basic shift in American foreign policy he carried out will last beyond November 2004. We will discover whether the electorate supports pre-emptive and preventive war, mounted when a U.S. administration judges this necessary.

We thus will know whether the Bush administration`s National Strategy Statement of September 2002 represented a simple lapse in traditional military policy and ethics, or reflects a lasting rupture in how Americans think about the rest of the world.

That, in turn, will automatically tell us whether the alliance-based cooperation and constructive multilateralism of U.S. policy since World War II is truly finished.

We will know who has won in Iraq.

Iraq`s fate is the most important variable in any attempt to assess where the United States will stand a year from now. If a secure and at least nominally sovereign Iraqi government exists a year from today, alongside American bases in that country, the United States will have won the Iraq war. The odds are low that there will be such a government.

The possibility that the United States might lose the Iraq war has yet to be seriously discussed at the level of national politics and policy. There is an all but universal assumption that American power will in the end crush anything that resists it.

It is true that some critics have warned of a "new Vietnam," but they nearly always do so in terms that suggest only that the eventual victory will be more costly than the Bush government expected.

The Vietnam analogy is wrong in military terms. The insurgents in Iraq are not an organized, disciplined national movement, amply supplied with arms and leadership from a sister country across the border, itself protected by a nuclear power. That was South Vietnam`s case, with North Vietnam and China backing the NLF insurrection.

The relevant analogy of Vietnam with Iraq is political. The Bush administration`s ambition in Iraq is identical to that of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations in Vietnam. It is to find or shape a plausible national movement that will turn the country into a strategic American ally.

In Vietnam there was from the start a Westernized national force, the Catholic elite and educated middle classes that had run the country when it was a French colony. But they represented too narrow a segment of the population and were too weak to overcome the dynamic, Communist-led National Liberation Movement, which combined peasant nationalism with Marxist utopianism.Frustrated by the failure of Ngo Dinh Diem - the Catholic mandarin and nationalist whom the United States had brought back from American exile and installed in power - to impose himself across the country, the Kennedy administration instigated a military coup and acquiesced in his murder.

It replaced Diem with the first in a series of generals, one after another of whom failed in turn, essentially because they represented the interests and ideas of the United States against Vietnamese nationalism. Eventually the Nixon administration abandoned the last of the generals, Nguyen Van Thieu, and formally withdrew from the war, calling this "Vietnamization." When Saigon fell two years later, President Richard Nixon blamed the U.S. Congress and the liberal press.

The Bush administration, in Iraq, is still looking for its Ngo Dinh Diem.

It ignores the political lesson of Vietnam, which is that no leader in Iraq will be capable of rallying the country, or its major religious or ethic components (except the minority Kurds), whose program is not national sovereignty, an end to American occupation, and national renewal on Iraq`s own terms. That means an Iraq in full control of its resources, its security, and its foreign policy. This is not what the Bush administration wants.

Washington initially projected a two-year democracy-building program under U.S. supervision. Military resistance in the "Sunni triangle," an ominous growth of anti-American tension within the Shiite community, and the lack of convincing national leadership caused the administration to decide in November to accelerate the "Iraqization" of the occupation.

Now there is supposed to be an Iraq government in Baghdad by July, still under overall American suzerainty and with 100,000 U.S. troops still stationed in the country. That does not appeal to Iraq`s nationalists.

There is debate in the United States over the Iraq invasion, but surprisingly little dissent among U.S. foreign policy elites, officials, commentators and presidential candidates concerning the general American policy of intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, meant to "install democracy."

If the administration`s Iraq policy fails, not only the Bush presidency will be in jeopardy in 2004. So will this complacent cross-party assumption that Pax Americana is America`s new destiny. That, in itself, would not be a bad thing.

Tribune Media Services International

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

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Is America Becoming Fascist?
The similarities between American fascism and particularly the National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.


by Anis Shivani
04/27/03

Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their favor is dismissed as indulging in "conspiracy theory." Liberals insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of "politics as usual. Liberals are quick to note certain obvious dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit (under present American rules of political discourse, she has been duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New York Times or The Nation, American writers dare not speak the truth.

The blinkered assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual patient`s history. The Times and other liberal voices have been obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after Hitler`s Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in 1933. Speed stuns and silences.

Max Frankel, former editor of the Times, quotes from biographer Joachim Fest in his review of Speer: The Final Verdict: " . . .how easily, given appropriate conditions, people will allow themselves to be mobilized into violence, abandoning the humanitarian traditions they have built up over centuries to protect themselves from each other," and that a "primal being" such as Hitler "will always crop up again." Is Frankel really redirecting his anxiety about the primal being that has arisen in America? When Frankel says that "Speer far more than Hitler [because the former came from a culturally refined background] makes us realize how fragile these precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always threatened," is this an oblique reference to the ground shifting from under us?

The Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush`s extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush`s governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective.

To pose the question doesn`t mean that this is a completed project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of history in a different direction. Yet after repeated and open corruption of the normal electoral process, several declarations of world war (including in three major addresses, and now the National Security Strategy document), adventurous and unprecedented military doctrines, suspension of much of the Bill of Rights, and clear signals that a declaration of emergency to crush remaining dissent is on the way, surely it is time to analyze the situation differently.

Absent that perspicacity, false diagnoses and prescriptions will continue. It is fine to be concerned about tyrannous Muslim regimes, and surely they need to set their own house in order, but not now, not in this context, and not under the auspices of the American fascist regime. Liberals don`t yet realize, or fail to admit, that they may have been condemned to irrelevance for quite some time; the death blow against even mild welfare statism might already have been struck.

The similarities between American fascism and particularly the National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.

American fascism is tapping into the perennial complaint against liberalism: that it doesn`t provide an authentic sense of belonging to the majority of people. And that is a criticism difficult to dismiss out of hand. As the language of liberalism has become flat and predictable, some Americans have become more ready to accept an alternative, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it sounds vigorous and muscular.

America today is seeking a return to some form of vitalism, some organic, volkisch order that will "unite" the blue and red states in an eternal Volkgemeinschaft; is in a state of perpetual war and militaristic aggression targeting all potential counters to hegemony; has been coercing and blackmailing its own victims and oppressed (justified by anti-political correctness rhetoric) to return to a mythical national consensus; has introduced surveillance technology to demolish the private sphere to an extent unimaginable in the recent past; and fetishizes technology as the futuristic solution to age-old ills of alienation and mistrust.

And we are right in the mainstream of the Western philosophical and political tradition in this subtle (overnight?) transformation. Liberal democracy was replaced by Mussolini by these two Holy Trinities: Believe, Obey, Fight, and Order, Authority, Justice. These slogans seem to replace every liberal system sooner or later. Italian propagandistic slogans included: War is to man as childbirth is to woman, and Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. Sooner or later, the mob is persuaded that fascism best addresses its unfulfilled spiritual and psychological needs. Sooner or later there is a Hitler, and even if there isn`t a leader as charismatic as him, there is an anti-modernity counter-revolution.

The enlightenment everywhere has contained the seeds of its own destruction. Fascism merely borrows from the enlightenment`s credo that violence may sometimes be necessary to achieve valid political ends, and that human reason alone can lead humanity to utopia. Is Nazism an absolute aberration? Is America totally immune to fascism? Then we might as well discredit Rousseau`s "general will," Hegel`s historical spirit, Goethe and Schelling`s romanticization of nature and genius, Darwin`s natural selection, and Nietzsche`s superman. When all is said and done, a Kant or Mill is never a match for a Nietzsche or Sorel. Industrial malaise (now post-industrial disorder), evaded by the dead-ends and delusions of liberalism, leads only to a romantic revolution, which is fine as long as it is in the hands of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold, but becomes eventually converted to a propaganda-saturated Third Way. Since liberalism doesn`t take up the challenge, fascism steps in to say that it offers an answer to centrifugal difference and lack of common purpose, and that it will dare to link industrial prosperity with communal goals.

How great a deviation from the roots of the enlightenment, the foundations of its self-justification, is the Manichean demonization of enemies, aliens, impure races, and barbaric others? America today wants to be communal and virile; it seeks to overcome what is presented by propagandists as the unreasonable demands for affirmative action and reparations by minorities and women; it wants to revalorize nation and region and race to take control of the future; it seeks to remold the nation through propaganda and charismatic leadership, into overcoming the social divisiveness of capitalism and democracy.

We have our own nationalist myths that our brand of fascism taps right into. In that sense, America is not exceptional. In the near future, America can be expected to embark on a more radical search to define who is not part of the natural order: exclusion, deportation, and eventually extermination, might again become the order of things. Of course, we can notice obvious differences from the German nationalist tradition: but that is precisely the task of scholars to delineate, rather than pretend that fascism occurred only in Italy and Germany and satellite states in the first half of the century, and occurs today only in Europe in minor movements that have no chance of gaining political supremacy.

It is wrong to pretend that fascism takes hold only in the midst of extreme economic depression or political chaos. (A perception of crisis or instability is indispensable to realizing fascism, however.) Fascism can emerge when things are not all that bad economically, politically, and culturally. The surprise about Weimar Germany is how well the political system was at times working, with proportional representation (almost an ideal of strong democracy theorists) providing political expression for a full range of ideologies. Germany was economically strong, an industrial powerhouse, despite having had to overcome massive disabilities imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In the early thirties, Hitler`s rise was facilitated by massive unemployment (perhaps forty percent of Germans were unemployed), but this was a phenomenon throughout the Western world.

The key point to note is that at many junctures along the way, it was possible that Hitler`s rise might never have happened. And that the elites accepted Hitler as the best possible option. All this makes Hitler and Nazism unexceptional. The basic paradigm remains more or less intact: we only have to account for variations in the American model. Capitalism today is different, so are the postmodern means of propaganda, and so are the technological tools of suppression. Besides, American foundational myths vary from European ones, and the romanticism propounded by Goethe, Schelling, Wagner and Nietzsche contrasts with a different kind of holistic urge in America. But that is only a matter of variation, not direct opposition. Liberals who say that demographics work against a Republican majority in the early twenty-first century do have a point; but fascism can occur precisely at that moment of truth, when the course of political history can definitely tend to one direction or another. A mere push can set things on a whole different course, regardless of underlying cultural or demographic trends. Nazism never had the support of the majority of Germans; at best about a third fully supported it. About a third of Americans today are certifiably fascist; another twenty percent or so can be swayed around with smart propaganda to particular causes. So the existence of liberal institutions is not necessarily inconsistent with fascism`s political dominance.

With all of Germany`s cultural strength, brutality won out; the same analysis can apply to America. Hitler never won clear majorities; yet once he was in power, he crushed all dissent. Consider the parallels to the fateful election of 2000. Hitler`s ascent to power was facilitated by the political elites; again, note the similarities to the last two years. Hitler took advantage of the Reichstag fire to totally change the shape of German institutions and culture; think of 9/11 as a close parallel. Hitler was careful to give the impression of always operating under legal cover, even for the most massive offenses against humanity; note again the similarity of a pseudo-legal shield for the actions of the American fascists. One can go on and on in this vein.

If we look at Stanley Payne`s classical general theory of fascism, we are struck by the increasing similarities with the American model:

A. The Fascist Negations
Anti-liberalism
Anti-communism
Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups . . .[are] more willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).
B. Ideology and Goals
Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state.
Organization of some new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic structure.
The goal of empire.
Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed.
C. Style and Organization
Emphasis on aesthetic structure . . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects.
Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia.
Positive evaluation and use of . . .violence.
Extreme stress on the masculine principle.
Exaltation of youth.
Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command.
American fascism denies affiliation with liberalism, communism, and conservatism. The first two denials are obvious; the third requires a little analysis, but fascism is not conservatism and it takes issue with conservatism`s anti-revolutionary stance. Conservatism`s libertarian strand, an American staple (think of the recent protestations of Dick Armey, the departing Bob Barr, and the Cato Institute against some of the grossest violations of civil liberties), would not agree with fascism`s "nationalist authoritarian state." Reaganite anti-government rhetoric might well have been a precursor to fascism, but Hayekian free market and deregulationist ideology cannot be labeled fascism.
Continuing to look at Payne`s list, we note that the goal of "empire," that much proscribed word in official American vocabulary, has found open acceptance over the last year among the fascist vanguard. Voluntarism has been elevated to iconic status in the current American manifestation of fascism. It takes a bit more effort to notice American fascism`s "emphasis on aesthetic structure. . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects," but reflection suggests many innovative stylistic emphases. The mass party militia, especially large bands of organized, militarized youth, seems to be missing ­ for now. Violence is glorified for its own sake. The masculine principle has been elevated as the basis of policy-making. Command is authoritarian, charismatic, and personal. It is true that a charismatic leader like Hitler is missing from the scene; but one would have to ask if this is not a redundancy in the American historical context. Perhaps we are a society mobilized by very small degrees of charisma, unlike more informed, impassioned, ideologically committed electorates.

Roger Griffin holds that fascism consists of a series of myths: fascism is anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-rational, charismatic, socialist, totalitarian, racist and eclectic. If one wishes to argue that American fascism is by no means socialist, one ought to take a deeper look at National Socialism`s conception of socialism. In a sense, America is a socialist society, to the extent that the government is the main driving force behind technology, innovation, and science: the military-industrial-academic complex. National Socialism was comforting to the right-wing capitalists because they believed that socialism was a convenient fiction for the ideology. Nevertheless, fascism`s vitalism and holism militate against any facile interpretations of what socialism means. Fascism is eclectic and ready to abandon economic principle for what it perceives as the greater good of the nation. As Sternhell has described it for Germany, fascism in the American synthesis is a cultural rebellion, a revolutionary ideology; totalitarianism is of its very essence. There are more similarities than immediately apparent between Marxism as it was put into practice by the twentieth century communist states, and "socialist" ideology put into practice by the various fascist states.

Ian Kershaw has evaluated the similarities between Italian and German fascism:

Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic expansionist tendencies;
an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working class organizations and their Marxist political philosophy;
the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population;
fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimized leader;
. extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence and ruthless repression;
. glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from the First World War;
. dependence upon an "alliance" with existing elites, industrial, agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political breakthrough;
. and, at least an initial function, despite a populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the stabilization or restoration of social order and capitalist structures.
Viewed in this perspective, in only the last few months America has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism. Its imperialist and expansionist tendencies need to be couched less and less in Wilsonian idealist terms for mass acceptance. Unions can still be considered an oppositional, populist force, but working class cohesion has nearly been destroyed. Still, it needs to be said that instead of fascism appealing across class and geographical lines, the country remains divided between the liberal (urban, coastal) and proto-fascist (rural, Southern) factions. Also, the plebiscitary leader has not yet fully emerged. Oppositional groups are often self-silencing, but the most of the ruling establishment continues to practice a mild form of liberalism, and hopes that if things get too out of hand it can mobilize public opinion against brutal suppression. Although not all elites have yet been co-opted, think of Dershowitz`s advocacy of torture and Larry Summers`s patriotic swing. There is general agreement on militaristic aims. The attempted stabilization of the social order in the form of the culture wars fought in the previous decade is one of the less appreciated manifestations of emerging fascism.
George Mosse describes fascism as viewing itself in a permanent state of war, to mobilize masculine virile energy, enlisting the masses as "foot soldiers of a civic religion." As Mosse points out, fascism seeks a higher form of democracy even as it rejects the customary forms of representative government. Propaganda is pervasive in America; we only need to delineate its descent from the Nazi form. Mosse rejects the notion that fascism ruled through terror; "it was built upon a popular consensus." Fascism is a higher consensus seeking to bring about the "new man" rooted in Christian doctrine. Can there be a better description of the nineties American culture wars instigated by the proto-fascists than the following?:

When fascists spoke of culture, they meant a proper attitude toward life: encompassing the ability to accept a faith, the work ethic, and discipline, but also receptivity to art and the appreciation of the native landscape. The true community was symbolized by factors opposed to materialism, by art and literature, the symbols of the past and the stereotypes of the present. The National Socialist emphasis upon myth, symbol, literature and art is indeed common to all fascism.

Most of this is obvious, except the reference to literature and art; but think of the fetishization of the Great Books and the mythical classical curriculum by Bennett and his like. In thus viewing fascism above all as a cultural movement, the objection might be raised that American fascism lacks a distinctive stylistic expression that iconizes youth and war. Instead, it might be argued that it suffers from callow endorsement by dour old white males, whose cultural appeal is limited in the discredited stylistic forms they employ. To some extent this is true, but one must never underestimate the fertile ground American anti-intellectualism provides for more banal forms of propaganda and cultural terrorism than needed to be deployed by Nazism. (Eminem does electrocute Cheney in his video, but in real life Cheney rules.) American communication technology, as was true of Nazi Germany, has pioneered whole new methods of trivialization of "mass death" and elevation of brutality as a "great experience."

War is both necessary and great, and that is America`s continuation of the fascist fascination with revitalization of "basic moral values." Furthermore, the puritanism of American fascism does not necessarily conflict with the Nazi emphasis on style and beauty: Nazism annexed "the pillars of respectability: hard work, self-discipline, and good manners," which explains "the puritanism of National Socialism, its emphasis upon chastity, the family, good manners, and the banishment of women from public life." The analogs to Karl May`s widely circulated novels in Weimar and Nazi Germany can probably be found here, as can America`s answer to Max Nordau, rebelling against decadence in art and literature, and maintaining that "lack of clarity, inability to uphold moral standards, and absence of self-discipline all sprang from the degeneration of their [artists`] physical organism." Think only of the demonization of Mapplethorpe and others, the emasculation of the NEA, and the continued attack on alleged artistic degeneracy. We must be willing to consider expanded definitions of how romanticism has been incorporated by American fascism.

Liberals might complain that in America there hasn`t been a declared revolution, a transformation that asserts itself as such. But as noted above fascism simply takes over the liberals` language of "clarity, decency, and natural laws," as well as its ideals of "tolerance and freedom." That sounds like the sleight-of-hand performed by the fascists here. As Mosse says:

Tolerance. . .was claimed by fascists in antithesis to their supposedly intolerant enemies, while freedom was placed within the community. To be tolerant meant not tolerating those who opposed fascism: individual liberty was possible only within the collectivity. Here once more, concepts that had become part and parcel of established patterns of thought were not rejected (as so many historians have claimed) but instead co-opted - fascism would bring about ideals with which people were comfortable, but only on its own terms.

So to be liberal means to be intolerant, out of sync with the American democratic spirit. That suggestion has taken hold among large numbers of people.

The current American aesthetic appreciation of technology ("smart" bombs) is also of a piece with Hitler`s passion. Fascism is not a deviance from popular cultural trends, but only the taming of activism within revived nationalist myths. Mosse holds that fascism didn`t diverge from mainstream European culture; it absorbed most of what held great mass appeal. It never decried workers` tastelessness; it accepted these realities. The same principles apply to American fascism.

Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ur-Fascism," identifies fourteen characteristics of "eternal fascism": not all of them have to be present at the same time for a system to be considered fascist, and some of them may even be contradictory: "There was only one Nazism, and we cannot describe the ultra-Catholic Falangism of Franco as Nazism, given that Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian, otherwise it is not Nazism." Eco is intelligent enough to suggest a family of resemblance, overlap, and kinship, and the analyst`s task is to note which particular characteristics apply to a system, and understand the reasons for the absence of others, rather than dismiss the fascist categorization if a single feature from a previous fascist variant doesn`t apply: "Remove the imperialist dimension from Fascism, and you get Franco or Salazar; remove the colonialist dimension, and you get Balkan Fascism. Add to Italian Fascism a dash of radical anti-Capitalism (which never appealed to Mussolini), and you get Ezra Pound. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (completely extraneous to official Fascism), and you get one of the most respected gurus of Fascism, Julius Evola."
It is noteworthy about Eco`s matrix that all fourteen of his characteristics of ur-fascism apply to America to some degree: 1. "the cult of tradition" (which may be "syncretic" and able to "tolerate contradictions"); 2. "the rejection of modernism" and "irrationalism"; 3. "the cult of action for action`s sake"; 4. "dissent is betrayal"; 5. "fear of difference," or racism; 6. "the appeal to the frustrated middle classes" [this seems to cause the most trouble to American liberals; Eco clarifies, "In our day, in which the old `proletarians` are becoming petits bourgeois (and the lumpen proletariat has excluded itself from the political arena), Fascism will find its audience in this new majority.]; 7. "obsession with conspiracies," along with xenophobia and nationalism; 8. "the enemy is at once too strong and too weak" [note the simultaneous characterization of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and no doubt future Islamic "terrorists" as capable of irrevocably harming us and being impotent to really do so]; 9. `Pacifism is. . .collusion with the enemy," "life is a permanent war," and only a "final solution" can herald an age of peace; 10. "scorn for the weak" imposed by a mass elite; 11. "the cult of death" [American fascists ascribe this characteristic to terrorists, when in fact it is one of their own supreme defining characteristics]; 12. transferring of the "will to power onto sexual questions," or "machismo"; 13. "individuals have no rights," and fascism "has to oppose `rotten` parliamentary governments"; and 14. "Ur-Fascism uses newspeak."

No doubt, fascism is a descriptor too carelessly thrown around; but Nixon and Reagan, no matter how reprehensible their politics, were not quite fascist. Bush is the most dangerous man in contemporary history: Hitler didn`t have access to weapons that could blow up the world, and no American or other leader since World War II with access to such weapons has been as out of control. Perhaps a non-controversial statement may be that the fascist tendency always exists, at the very least latent and dormant. But when more and more of the latency becomes actualized, there comes a point when the nature of the problem has to be redefined. We may already have crossed that point. As Eco notes, "Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms ­ every day, in every part of the world." And as Eco reminds us, Roosevelt issued a similar warning.

Since liberals don`t understand the magnitude of the crisis global capitalism faces, they don`t understand the extent of the desperate, last-ditch effort to find an ideological glue ("terror") to hold together the centrifugal forces in the American population. Part of the confusion is that this is fascism but not really fascism ­ it is only its simulation, although no less horrifying for that reason ­ because all the twentieth-century ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) are rapidly dissolving.

Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments at:
[e-mail]

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"The Panama Deception" Part I

This film shows how the U.S. attacked Panama and killed 3 or 4 thousand people in an invasion that the rest of the world was against. (Sound familiar?) It won the Academy Award for best documentary.
PartI
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/panama1.wmv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/panama1.wmv

Part II Here
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/panama2.wmv

This film shows how the U.S. attacked Panama and killed 3 or 4 thousand people in an invasion that the rest of the world was against. (Sound familiar?)

The excuse given was to get the drug lord, General Noriega, who had been on the CIA`s payroll for 20 years.

We see not only the devastation we did to poor cities in Panama, but also how our media was complicit in the way all of this was presented to the American public.

Some of the people featured in this video are,

Professors Michael Parenti, Peter Dale Scott, Jeff Cohen (executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting or FAIR), Mark Hertsguaard (journalist and author), Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll (Ret. U.S.N.), U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel of New Yourk, Sabina Virgo (national labor organizer) and various Panamanian human rights activists. (Actress) Elizabeth Montgomery narrates this excellent video.

Directed by Barbara Trent

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The Meatrix: The lie we tell ourselves about where our food comes from. Flash presentation.


http://www.themeatrix.com/


Unbedingt anschauen, Das Vorbild ist die Matrix.

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The truth about WMD lies beyond Hutton
Michael Meacher
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer

Lord Hutton will report shortly on the `circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly`, but is likely to regard as beyond his remit such key questions as how the September 2002 dossier appears to include several dishonest claims and whether the country was falsely led into war. It is crucial, if Lord Hutton feels unable to tackle these central issues, that a separate judicial inquiry is now set up to establish beyond doubt what the truth really is and what the implications are for Britain`s governance.

On 10 February last year, five weeks before the war started, the Government`s Joint Intelligence Committee gave its assessment that there was no evidence that Iraq had provided chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaeda, though in the event of an imminent regime collapse `there would be a risk of transfer of such material`; in other words an attack on Iraq would increase the risk of terrorism. Tony Blair did not disclose this briefing before the war, and it only became known when the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee released it on 11 September.

It is quite clear that throughout 2002 both Washington and London were actively seeking, contrary to intelligence assessments, evidence to justify the case for war. Four key items were deployed for this purpose. One was almost immediately exposed as plagiarised from a student thesis more than 10 years old. The other three were documents purporting to show that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger, the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMDs within 45 minutes, and `evidence` from a top-level Iraqi defector that Iraq had produced several tons of the deadly nerve agent VX.

Each of these raise worrying questions of credibility which require systematic investigation by an independent inquiry. However, enough of the facts are now known to draw some important conclusions.

After months of failed requests, the International Atomic Energy Agency obtained the Niger documents from the US Government, and within a matter of hours established they were obviously forged and announced this on 7 March 2003, 10 days before the start of the war. CIA sources confirmed on 11 July that they had advised Britain to omit the Niger allegations in its September 2002 dossier. So on what justification was it included in this dossier?

Similar concerns surround the 45-minute claim. At the Hutton inquiry Dr Brian Jones from the Ministry of Defence, who described himself as `probably the most experienced intelligence official working on WMD`, said his leading chemical weapons expert was concerned he could not point to any solid evidence of production. Yet the Prime Minister`s foreword in the dossier stated unequivocally that `what I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons`. So why was the 45-minute claim included, at the request of the Prime Minister according to Alastair Campbell?

The fourth piece of evidence was used on 25 February 2003 when Tony Blair told the House of Commons that `it was only four years later, after the defection of Saddam`s son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered`. However, a week later Newsweek obtained details of Kamel`s actual IAEA and Unscom debriefing. That reveals he said exactly the opposite. Does this mean that Kamel`s testimony was twisted to make the case for war when its public disclosure was not anticipated?

All these questions about Iraqgate 2003 arise because, as the BBC reported on 7 July, `members of the Foreign Affairs committee said that without full access to all the relevant papers and witnesses, nobody could resolve the row satisfactorily ... The committee`s inquiry is hampered by Ministers` continued refusal to allow it to see intelligence papers and question intelligence personnel`. That in a nutshell is why a full judicial inquiry is still urgently needed into why Britain went to war in Iraq.

· Michael Meacher was Environment Minister, 1997-2003


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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British soldiers `kicked Iraqi prisoner to death`
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
4 January 2004
Eight young Iraqis arrested in Basra were kicked and assaulted by British soldiers, one of them so badly that he died in British custody, according to military and medical records seen by The Independent on Sunday.

Amnesty International has urged its members to protest directly to Tony Blair about the death of Baha Mousa, the son of an Iraqi police colonel, and to demand an impartial and independent investigation into the apparent torture of the Basra prisoners. A major at 33 Field Hospital outside the southern Iraqi city said that one of the survivors suffered "acute renal failure" after "he was assaulted ... and sustained severe bruising to his upper abdomen, right side of chest, left forearms and left upper inner thigh".

British military authorities have offered Mr Mousa`s relatives $8,000 (£4,500) in compensation, providing they are not held responsible for his death, but the young hotel receptionist`s family plans to take the Ministry of Defence to court. His body was returned to them, covered in bruises and with his nose broken, after he and seven colleagues were arrested by British forces in Basra last September and held in military custody for three days.

One of the other workers has given a frightening account of their ordeal. Baha Mousa, he says, was tied and hooded and then repeatedly kicked and assaulted by British troops, begging all the while to have the hood removed because he could no longer breathe.

A death certificate provided by the British Army states that Baha Mousa had died of "asphyxia". A restricted medical document from a British hospital says a surviving prisoner, Kifah Taha, suffered his injuries "due to a severe beating". The IoS has copies of both documents.

After Mr Mousa`s death, the Army`s Special Investigation Branch opened an investigation. The Ministry of Defence told the IoS yesterday that there was "nothing in the records to suggest an inquiry was not still ongoing". But two soldiers who were arrested have since been released, and no charges have been made.

Mr Mousa`s violent death left two children orphaned: his 22-year-old wife died of cancer shortly before his detention by British troops.

Part 2:

`The British said my son would be free soon. Three days later I had his body`

The last time Lieutenant Colonel Daoud Mousa of the Iraqi police saw his son Baha alive was on 14 September, as British soldiers raided the Basra hotel where the young man worked as a receptionist.

"He was lying with the other seven staff on the marble floor with his hands over his head," Col Mousa says today. "I said to him: `Don`t worry, I`ve spoken to the British officer and he says you`ll be freed in a couple of hours.`" The officer, a second lieutenant, even gave the Iraqi policeman a piece of paper and wrote "2Lt. Mike" on it, alongside an indecipherable signature and a Basra telephone number. There was no surname.

"Three days later, I was looking at my son`s body," the colonel says, sitting on the concrete floor of his slum house in Basra. "The British came to say he had `died in custody`. His nose was broken, there was blood above his mouth and I could see the bruising of his ribs and thighs. The skin was ripped off his wrists where the handcuffs had been."

Baha Mousa left two small boys, five-year-old Hassan and three-year-old Hussein. Both are orphans, because Baha`s 22-year-old wife died of cancer just six months before his own death.

No one hides the fact that most if not all the eight men picked up at the Haitham hotel - where British troops had earlier found four weapons in a safe - were brutally treated while in the custody of the Royal Military Police. One of Baha`s colleagues, Kifah Taha, suffered acute renal failure after being kicked in the kidneys; a "wound assessment" by Frimley Park Hospital in Britain states bluntly that he suffered "generalised bruising following repeated incidents of assault".

When Col Mousa and another of his sons, Alaa, visited Kifah Taha in a Basra hospital immediately after his release to seek news of Baha, they found the wounded man - in Alaa`s words - "only half a human, with terrible bruises from kicking on his ribs and abdomen. He could hardly speak."

But another of Baha`s colleagues - who pleaded with The Independent on Sunday not to reveal his name lest he be rearrested by British forces in Basra - gave a chilling account of the treatment the eight men received once they arrived at a British interrogation centre in Basra. By a terrible coincidence, the building had formerly been the secret service headquarters of Ali Majid, Saddam`s brutal cousin, known as "Chemical Ali" for his gassing of the Kurds of Halabja and later military governor of the Basra region.

"We were put in a big room with our hands tied and with bags over our heads. But I could see through some holes in my hood. Soldiers would come in - ordinary soldiers, not officers, mostly with their heads shaved but in uniform -- and they would kick us, picking on one after the other. They were kick-boxing us in the chest and between the legs and in the back. We were crying and screaming.

"They set on Baha especially, and he kept crying that he couldn`t breathe in the hood. He kept asking them to take the bag off and said that he was suffocating. But they laughed at him and kicked him more. One of them said: `Stop screaming and you`ll be able to breathe more easily.` Baha was so scared. Then they increased the kicking on him and he collapsed on the floor. None of us could stand or sit because it was too painful."

But not one of the prisoners says he was questioned about the discovery of the weapons in the hotel. Indeed, the man who hid the two rifles and two pistols in the hotel safe - one of the partners in the hotel, Haitham Vaha - fled the building after the British arrived and is still on the run. His father and another business partner, Ahmed Taha Mousa - no relation to either Kifah Taha or Baha Mousa - are still in British custody in southern Iraq. At least one of the men beaten by the British says that he would happily hand Haitham to the British forces if he found him.

Amnesty International has demanded an impartial and independent inquiry into Baha`s death and the mistreatment of the other Iraqi prisoners, but the Ministry of Defence is attempting to keep its investigation within the Army. Two soldiers originally arrested in connection with Baha`s death have since been released - and Baha Mousa`s family is outraged. "We are going to sue the British Army in London," his brother Alaa says. "They gave us $3,000 in compensation, then said we could have another $5,000 - but they wouldn`t accept responsibility for his murder.

"We reject this money. We want justice. We want the soldiers involved to be punished. How much would a British family receive if their innocent son was arrested by your soldiers and beaten to death?"

The Mousa family were given an international death certificate by the British Army at the Shaibah military medical centre outside Basra. It was dated 21 September, but again carried an indecipherable signature. It stated that Baha`s death had been caused by "cardiorespiratory arrest: asphyxia". But the anonymous British officer who signed the document failed to fill in the column marked "due to/as a consequence of". He also failed to fill in the column marked "approximate interval between onset (of asphyxia) and death". More seriously still, the British Army failed to complete the form`s request for "Regt. Corps/RAF Command" and "Ship/Unit/RAF Station".

An inquiry was opened into Baha Mousa`s death on 18 September by 61 Section of the 3rd Regiment, Royal Military Police`s Special Investigation Branch. Captain G Nugent, the officer commanding 61 Section, named a Staff Sergeant Jay as chief investigating officer of case number 64695/03. From the start, the SIB were faced with overwhelming evidence that British soldiers had kicked and beaten the prisoners in their custody.

Major James Ralph, the anaesthesia and intensive care consultant at the British Military Hospital`s 33 Field Hospital at Shaibah, stated in a letter - a copy of which is in the IoS`s possession - that Kifah Taha "was admitted to our facility at 22.40 hours on 16th September. It appears he was assaulted approximately 72 hours ago and sustained severe bruising to his upper abdomen, right side of chest, left forearms and left upper inner thigh." He described Kifah Taha as suffering from "acute renal failure".

Col Daoud Mousa says that his son was deliberately kicked to death by the soldiers because they discovered that his father had persuaded the British officer - "Second Lieutenant Mike" - to arrest several British soldiers who were stealing money from the hotel during the raid. "I saw two of the soldiers at the back of a safe, wrenching it open and stuffing money into their shirts and pockets - Iraqi dinars and foreign money. The officer made one of the men open his shirt and he found the money and the soldier was disarmed. But the military inquiry didn`t want to hear about this - they weren`t interested in the theft or why the soldiers who were stealing the money would want to mistreat my son as a result of what I did."

Alaa says that it was three days before they learned the truth about what had happened to Baha. "I was at home and I went outside to find the street filled with British soldiers. They didn`t have Baha`s name right, but they said they were looking for the family of the man `whose wife died of cancer`. I said it must be Baha and one of the officers said: `Can you come with us?`

"A sergeant came into our home, his name was Jay, and he sat on our sofa and said: `I have come to tell you about the death of your brother Baha.` It was like a revolution in our house - there was screaming and shouting and crying. The British said they wanted my father, Daoud, and one of us to come to identify the body. He said a doctor from Britain was coming to examine the body." Alaa described how he later met a "Professor Hill", a pathologist who, he says, later acknowledged that there were "very clear signs of beating on the body" and that two of Baha`s ribs had been broken.

Robert Harkins, the British political officer in the city, arranged for the Mousa family to meet Brigadier William Moore, commander of British forces in Basra. The family say that Brig Moore, though he expressed his condolences to Daoud Mousa, refused to allow an Iraqi lawyer to participate in the British inquiry. "He told us that since this had happened inside the British Army, the British Army would conduct the investigation," Alaa says.

The brigadier issued a statement on 3 October, expressing his "regrets" that their son "died while under British jurisdiction" and promising that if the military police concluded that a crime had been committed, "those suspected will be tried ... under the laws of the United Kingdom." The family initially accepted $3,000 of compensation for Baha`s death - they say they thought that by offering this, the British were accepting responsibility - but they refused to sign a letter they received last month from a British claims officer called Perkins which offered a further $5,000 as a "final settlement" of the "incident" which would be made "without admission of liability on behalf of the British Contingent of the Coalition Forces in Iraq".

An MoD spokeswoman said yesterday that "as far as I`m aware, as of the beginning of December, the investigation was ongoing - nothing in our records suggests it is not still ongoing". But no charges appear to have been made, no soldiers are currently under arrest and Alaa Mousa and his father Daoud remain infuriated by their treatment.

"Are the soldiers responsible for killing Baha to go unpunished?" Alaa asks. "Why can`t we be involved in this? If these men have no punishment, they will do this again.

"We are not saying the British are `occupiers`. We think you came here to Basra to save us from Saddam. But you should not treat my family like this, just paying us money when you kill Baha and ... then stopping us being involved in finding out what really happened. If you go on like this, your `big welcome` in Basra will be over."


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. Reprinted for Fair Use educational purposes only.

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Scott Ritter: The search for Iraqi WMD has become a public joke. But I, for one, am not laughing
Hutton stopped far short of a real investigation into the Blair government`s abysmal abuse of power
04 January 2004


President George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January last year, told the world that Saddam Hussein had promised he would disarm his weapons of mass destruction, and that this promise had not been fulfilled. Bush spoke of the Iraqi president retaining massive stocks of chemical and biological agent, as well as an ongoing nuclear weapons programme.

On 20 March 2003, Bush ordered American military forces, accompanied by the armed forces of Great Britain, to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. In hiding since the fall of Baghdad, Saddam was finally run to ground in December. On his capture, he is reported to have said that WMD was an issue created by George Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. This is a claim that has increasing validity.

Tony Blair had already been embarrassed by a growing recognition that his own intelligence-based estimates regarding Iraqi WMD were every bit as cooked up as the American president`s. He faced further ignominy when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, publicly mocked his assertions that David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector turned CIA agent who headed the so-far futile search for WMD in occupied Iraq, had found "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories". Dismissed by Bremer as a "red herring", Blair`s discredited comments only underscore the sad fact that the issue of Iraqi WMD, and the entire concept of disarmament, has become a public joke.

The misrepresentation and distortion of fact carried out by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair is no joke, but rather represent an assault on the very fabric of the concept of a free and democratic society which they espouse to serve. The people of the United States are still waiting for a heavily divided Congress to break free of partisan politics and launch a genuine investigation. This should certainly look at the massive intelligence failure surrounding the gross distortion of the Iraqi WMD threat put forward by the US intelligence community. But perhaps more importantly, the investigation should focus on the actions of the White House in shaping the intelligence estimates so that they dovetailed nicely with the political goals and objectives of the Bush administration`s Iraq policy-makers.

Many in Great Britain might take some pride in knowing that their democracy, at least, has had an airing of the pre-war Iraq intelligence which has been denied their American cousins.

The Hutton inquiry has been viewed by many as an investigation into the politicisation, or "sexing up", of intelligence information by the British government to help strengthen its case for war. It stopped far short of any real investigation into the abysmal abuse of power that occurred when Blair`s government lied to Parliament, and the electorate, about the threat posed by Iraq`s WMD. There was no effort to dig deep into the systematic politicisation of

the British intelligence system, to untangle

the web of deceit and misinformation concerning Iraq peddled over the years by the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and British intelligence.

The damage done goes well beyond the borders of the US and Britain. One must also calculate the irreparable harm done to the precepts of international law, the viability of multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, and the concepts of diplomacy and arms control which kept the world from destroying itself during the last century.

Iran, faced with 130,000 American soldiers on its border, has opened its nuclear facilities to inspection. North Korea has done the same. Libya, in a surprise move, has traded in its own overblown WMD aspirations in exchange for diplomatic recognition and economic interaction with the West. But none of these moves, as welcome as they are, have the depth and reach to compare with the decision by South Africa or the former republics of the Soviet Union to get rid of their respective nuclear weapons. The latter represented actions taken freely, wrapped in the principles of international law. The former are merely coerced concessions, given more as a means of buying time than through any spirit of true co-operation. Sold by George Bush and Tony Blair as diplomatic triumphs derived from the Iraq experience, the sad reality is that these steps towards disarmament are every bit as illusory as Saddam`s WMD arsenal. They are all the more dangerous, too, because the safety net of international law that the world could once have turned to when these compelled concessions inevitably collapse no longer exists.

Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector from 1991-98. He is the author of `Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America`
4 January 2004 12:46



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with troops in Basra, Iraq.
January 4, 2004
Blair Rallies Troops During Surprise Visit to Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:52 a.m. ET

BASRA, Iraq (AP) -- On a surprise trip to Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sunday that nations that develop weapons of mass destruction are a ``huge liability for the whole security of the world.``

Blair, the main U.S. ally in Iraq, arrived Sunday in the southern city of Basra to thank British troops for their part in the war.

Blair said the former regime of Saddam Hussein was ``abhorrent`` and that the U.S.-led campaign to topple Saddam was vital to global stability.

``If we backed away from that, we would never be able to confront this threat in the other countries where it exists,`` he said.

The United States and Britain cited Saddam`s alleged programs to develop chemical, nuclear and biological weapons as a main justification for the war, but have come under criticism as no evidence of such programs has been found.

``No government that owes its position to the will of the people will spend billions of pounds on chemical and biological and nuclear weapons whilst their people live in poverty,`` he said.

``Brutal and repressive states that don`t actually have the support or consent of their people that are developing weapons which can cause destruction on a massive scale are a huge, huge liability to the whole security of the world,`` he said.

He referred to ``the virus of Islamic extremism that is a perversion of the true faith of Islam.``



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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January 4, 2004
THE ATOMIC CLUB
If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don`t More Nations Have It?
By GREGG EASTERBROOK

LIBYA has pledged to dismantle its atomic weapons program. That is obviously good news, in addition to being a victory for George W. Bush`s aggressive foreign policy. But what, exactly, is Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi giving up? Not much.

"Libya was in no position to obtain access to nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future," says a statement by the Federation of American Scientists, an independent group that tracks arms control issues. After visiting Libya last week, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, declared the country`s program at "very much at an early stage." Libya may be closing down its nuclear program because it wasn`t working anyway.

This points to an important reality about nuclear weapons: they are extremely difficult to make. Claims that bomb plans can be downloaded from the Internet, or that fissile material is easily obtained on the black market and slapped together into an ultimate weapon, seem little more than talk-radio jabber. Nations like Libya that have made determined attempts to obtain atomic munitions have not even come close.

Saddam Hussein, while leader of Iraq, spent billions of dollars and many years pursuing atomic weapons, without success. It now appears his nuclear program was put into limbo sometime during the 1990`s, perhaps for the pragmatic reason that it wasn`t working. Pakistan, which may have played a role in various other bomb efforts in the developing world, had hundreds of engineers working for decades to devise its atomic device. North Korea devoted a high percentage of national resources to decades` worth of research before, probably, it acquired an atomic bomb. Iran`s nuclear program, which dates to the last shah, has been working on a weapon for a quarter century so far.

In Libya`s case, beginning in the 1970`s the government sought assistance of various kinds from Pakistan, China and the former Soviet Union. Soviet technicians helped Libya build a small research reactor at a place called Tajura. The Qaddafi regime later tried, unsuccessfully, to buy a large power-generation reactor from a Belgian company, possibly hoping it could be refitted for production of weapons material.

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that American forces recently seized a shipload of centrifuge equipment bound for Libya. The seizure might have been a factor in Colonel Qaddafi`s decision to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons - though Washington officials said that before the ship was seized, American intelligence agents had already quietly visited Libya, at Colonel Qaddafi`s invitation, to inspect the sites that the country proposed to shutter.

Atomic bombs have proved difficult for countries like Libya to make for several reasons. The "enrichment" of uranium or plutonium to weapons-grade concentrations is a fantastically complex undertaking, involving reactors that cost billions of dollars or centrifuge facilities that are also costly and complicated. Atomic bomb engineering and fabrication involve extremely precise calculations, exotic materials and unusual specialized components that even enormous cost-is-no-object government programs in the United States and the old Soviet Union found hard to manufacture.

Attempts by developing nations to make an ultimate weapon have gone slowly even though they have concentrated on atomic bombs - the kind dropped on Japan in 1945 - rather than the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which have never been used, except in tests. (Making a hydrogen bomb involves even more complex calculations, precision manufacturing and rare substances, like the hydrogen isotope tritium. )

In 1979, a national controversy erupted when The Progressive magazine printed an article describing the hydrogen bomb`s basic engineering principles. Commentators proclaimed that many nations and even individual terrorist cells would respond by building hydrogen bombs.

Yet since 1979, no nation has joined the hydrogen bomb club. After decades of work, India and Pakistan exploded only 1945-style atomic bombs. (Six years ago, India announced that it had conducted underground tests of a thermonuclear bomb, but analysts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded that only the 1945-style atomic part of the device actually detonated.)

Both the Israeli and the now decommissioned South African ultimate-weapon programs sought atomic, not hydrogent, bombs. The engineering, construction and manufacturing challenges of the hydrogen bomb are so great that even the United States, Britain, France, China and the former Soviet Union had great difficulties fabricating it.

North Korea now appears to have succeeded in making several atomic devices of the 1945 variety. It agreed last week to allow an unofficial United States delegation to visits nuclear weapons complex, at Yongbyon, so perhaps North Korea`s progress will be known soon.

Atomic weapons of the 1945 type are horrible enough, so the international threat posed by North Korean weapons may turn out to exceed any threat posed by Mr. Hussein`s Iraq. But it took North Korea decades to acquire an atomic threat, even under circumstances of total national fixation on weapons development, and total government contempt for the needs of its citizens.

Iran`s nuclear program continues to grow more disturbing. The nation possesses a large Russian-designed reactor called Bushehr that is expected to become operational in about two years.

"Twelve to 15 months after the reactor goes into operation, it will contain roughly 60 bombs` worth of near-weapons-grade plutonium," the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonpartisan group in Washington, recently warned.

After news reports in 2003 asserted that Iran had secret nuclear installations in a place called Kolahdouz, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors visited the location and found nothing worrisome. But last year, inspectors did find traces of highly enriched uranium at two Iranian nuclear sites, including a "pilot" enriching facility at Natanz.

Iran is known to be working on both centrifuges and lasers to enrich uranium, and has been cagey with the international agency about its importation and manufacture of some uranium byproducts related to weapons manufacturing. There seems to be a strong prospect that Iran will eventually have a bomb - but attained only after vast investments of money, time and technological skills.

Other nuclear proliferation dangers continue to mount around the world. Syria has tried to buy reactors from China and Argentina; currently, Russia is helping Syria build a small reactor that is officially for "research" purposes.

Algeria has a small reactor at a place called El Salam, and claims its purpose is to make isotopes for medical research. But the "medical" reactor is ringed by antiaircraft missiles, and the Federation of American Scientists said in a study that the El Salam site "has a theoretical capacity to produce from three to five kilograms of plutonium a year, approximately equivalent to one nuclear weapon."

It remains possible that some government or terrorist organization could assemble a crude atomic device that would explode with far less power than the Hiroshima bomb, but with more force than any conventional munitions. And "dirty bombs" - radioactive material scattered by conventional explosives - might be effective weapons of terror. Merely the word "radiation" could set off panic in a big city, regardless of whether a dirty bomb actually dispersed enough radiation to pose general danger.

For the moment, Libya`s decision to abandon its fruitless atomic program serves as a reminder that the ultimate weapon is, thankfully, not easy to come by. Numerous governments have invested billions of dollars and years of effort in trying to build atomic warheads, and have not been successful.


Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor at The New Republic, is the author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better and People Feel Worse," published by Random House.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 4, 2004
Deal Reached on New Afghan Constitution
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:06 a.m. ET

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghanistan`s constitutional convention agreed Sunday on a historic new charter, overcoming weeks of division to reach a compromise meant to bind together this war-ravaged nation`s mosaic of ethnic groups, the chairman said.

Just a day after warning the summit was heading to humiliating failure, council chairman Sibghatullah Mujaddedi told the 502-delegates meeting under a giant tent in the Afghan capital that last-ditch diplomacy secured a comprehensive deal.

``We are very happy that all the members of the loya jirga have reached a very successful agreement,`` Mujaddedi said.

He gave no details of how an impasse over whether to grant official status to minority languages, an issue which brought the meeting close to collapse, had been solved.

But he said a new draft of the document would be distributed to the delegates shortly and that U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai would join the gathering later Sunday to oversee the charter`s official ratification.

The accord is expected to give Karzai the strong presidential system he had been insisting on.

Karzai has argued strongly for a dominant chief executive to hold the country together as it rebuilds and reconciles after more than two decades of war, and said he wouldn`t run if he didn`t get his way.

U.S. and U.N. officials worked tirelessly to broker a backroom agreement to bolster a peace process begun after the ouster of the Taliban two years ago.



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press |

[Joerver]

The Manthey brothers — from left, Hans Joachim, Aloys and Paul — traveled recently to the farm in Gostomia in northwestern Poland that was owned by the Manthey family until they were expelled, along with other German families living in Poland, after World War II.

Es wird im Thread immer wieder behauptet, dass in den US-Zeitungen sehr wenig über D steht. Ganz stimmt es nicht.
In den großen Zeitungen sind regelmäßig Berichte über D. Man muß nur in den richtigen Abteilungen nachschauen.
Hier ein Artikel über ein schwieriges deutsches Problem.
Ich stelle normalerweise keine Artikel über D in meinen Thread, Ausnahme sie beschäftigen sich mit dem Thema des Threads.



January 4, 2004
In Poland, 2 Families Find Some Wrongs Defy Fixing
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

GOSTOMIA, Poland — The situation seemed ripe for unpleasantness as Aloys Manthey and his two older brothers drove their Mercedes S.U.V. onto the concrete slab courtyard of Zbigniew and Maria Siejak`s farm in this quiet Polish town.

On one side were the Mantheys, led by Aloys, a 66-year-old travel agent, who makes no secret of his belief that this 80-acre farm is theirs by right, expropriated from them 58 years ago and never forgotten. On the other side, the Siejaks, now retired, have lived here for more than 20 years. How would they respond to a group of rich Germans saying that they were victims of past injustice and that in a just world they would have their old home back?

Somewhat improbably, there was no angry confrontation at the farm in this poor but beautiful area of lakes and forests and rolling fields of wheat. Sometimes, what begins as a defiant statement of principle dissolves when principle confronts real life, and when that happened here on the Manthey brothers` sentimental trip to Gostomia, something new seemed to emerge in an old story involving Poles, Germans, history, land, money and looming European unification.

But to begin at the beginning.

Aloys Manthey is as good a representative as there is these days of a certain aggrieved sensibility in Germany — one that troubles many people in Poland and that other former Eastern bloc countries find extremely objectionable. He is the leader in his locality in northwestern Germany of the Association of Expellees, an organization claiming a million members that represents the interests of the estimated 12 million to 13 million Germans who were expelled from Poland and other countries when World War II ended.

Mr. Manthey contends that these expulsions amount to a sort of victimization of Germans roughly equivalent to the German victimization of the Poles themselves, or even the Jews. The idea is unpopular in Poland and seems to have only modest support among a majority of Germans, but it is an article of faith among many of those who lost their homes all those many decades ago.

"There were two crimes, the Holocaust and the forced expulsions," Mr. Manthey said, sitting at a table in a Polish inn the night before the visit to Gostomia. "As a result of the forced expulsions, three million Germans died, and for that reason I think we`re entitled to a memorial in Berlin, a center — maybe next to the memorial to the Jews."

When asked to cite his source for claiming such numbers, he produced only a brochure printed by his group. Still, there is no doubt about his story. After the war, this part of what had been Germany was handed over to a reconstituted Poland, and the Germans who lived here, were forced to migrate west. Many were killed, beaten and raped.

In recent years, Mr. Manthey, who specializes in taking elderly Germans on visits to their former homes in other countries to the east, has come here to Gostomia — which he prefers to call by its former German name, Arnsfelde. On this latest trip, with two of his three living brothers, Paul, 72, and Hans Joachim, 73, in tow, he invited a reporter along to hear the family story and to serve as a kind of witness.

The Mantheys spent a few days here, retracing the route they took in 1945 when they fled from the Soviet Army, visiting the tombstone that they erected three years ago to their father, Paul Manthey, who was mugged and killed by Polish soldiers in late 1945. They spoke of the time a few weeks after that when a Polish family (not the Siejaks) turned up and told the Mantheys that their farm no longer belonged to them. "They just came to the farm and said, `This is ours; you have to get out,` " Mr. Manthey said.

"There`s no compensation for us," Hans Manthey put in gloomily, making an oblique reference to the groups, especially Jews and slave laborers, who have received some compensation for wartime losses.

In the morning, the Mantheys visited the City Hall in Walcz, the county seat, about eight miles from Gostomia. They met with local political officials and the main topic of conversation was whether the Mantheys could, under Polish law, buy back their old farm. That is where everybody on this trip began to behave according to some unforeseen script.

Fears are often expressed in Poland that, once the country becomes part of the European Union, scheduled to happen in May, there will be a host of claims for restitution by Germans for properties seized from them after the war, or that wealthy Germans will buy up the land, the lakes and the forests and Poles will no longer own their country.

Such Polish nervousness, fanned by occasional bursts of nationalist rhetoric from the German Association of Expellees, has led the Polish government to enact restrictions on ownership of land by foreigners here. The restrictions were explained to the Manthey brothers in Walcz.

"That`s not fair," Aloys Manthey responded. "When will this be put on an equal footing? Poles can buy land in Germany."

"No, a Pole can`t buy land in Germany," retorted Zdzislaw Tuderek, the mayor of Walcz.

Mr. Manthey said: "Yes he can. The Turks in Germany have Turkish passports but they buy lots of property."

In fact, Mr. Manthey is correct; anybody can buy property in Germany, though not everybody can live in Germany. The meeting ended with assurances to Mr. Manthey that exceptions were possible, and the brothers then drove to Gostomia.

There on their former land, they were received by the Siejaks not with hostility or suspicion but with coffee, cake, cordiality and the wish that Mr. Manthey would indeed buy the old homestead back. The Siejaks, who bought the old Manthey farm from the people who expropriated it after the war, would like to move to a condominium on the Baltic Coast. They cannot afford the winter heating bill on the farm, but they cannot find anybody willing to buy it, and, as it turned out, Mr. Manthey was not willing to buy it either.

"We thought it would make a wonderful hunting lodge for you," Mrs. Siejak said.

The asking price, about $78,000 for the 80 acres, the house and the farm buildings (these last admittedly not in good shape) was probably about what Mr. Manthey paid for his S.U.V.

On other occasions, asked whether he would buy back the farm, he had replied, "Why should I pay for something that already belongs to me?" Now, politely, not wishing to spoil the friendly mood, he said, "I don`t think there`s much to hunt here."

So, the Mantheys really may or may not actually want their farm back, except in principle, and there seems to be a lesson about history and change in that. The Siejaks were also expellees, coming from a formerly Polish part of what is now Belarus when Stalin absorbed it into the Soviet Union after World War II. For them, it seemed natural to assume a sort of shared victimization with the Mantheys.

"I grew up among Germans in 1945 when they were expelled," Mr. Siejak said. "So even then I knew that someday these people would want to come back and show their children where they came from."

The Siejaks do not speak of compensation. Citizens of a country that disappeared entirely from the map for centuries and where borders have repeatedly shifted may not expect that all the wrongs of the past, not even all those of World War II, can be righted. In their own way, the Mantheys, richer by far than the people who replaced them here, now know that this is true.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 4, 2004
The Things They Carry
By JAMES TRAUB

I.

A few weeks ago, I asked Howard Dean how, given his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, he felt he could overcome the Democrats` reputation as the antiwar party. ``I think you`re still in the old paradigm, which says that they`re the party of strength and we`re the party of weakness,`` Dean admonished me as I sat across from him on his campaign plane. The chaos in Iraq, he said, had upended the old stereotypes. In John F. Kennedy`s day, Dean pointed out, the Democrats enjoyed the reputation as the party of resolution. ``I think this may be the year to regain it, oddly enough,`` Dean said. ``Oddly enough`` is right. It seems awfully unlikely that in the first presidential election since 9/11, against a president who has spent most of his administration carefully cultivating and reinforcing his role as commander in chief, the Democrats can regain the status as the party of national security, which they lost during the Vietnam War. But that is precisely what party strategists were hoping through the fall as American troops got caught in the mayhem of Iraq and the nation`s standing in the world plummeted lower and lower. And they had reason to think so. A poll conducted in November by the nonpartisan PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 42 percent of Americans said that the president`s handling of Iraq decreased the likelihood of voting for him, versus 35 percent who said it had increased the likelihood. Another poll taken around the same time found that a majority of respondents believed that President Bush is ``too quick to use our military abroad`` and that he practices a ``go-it-alone foreign policy that hurts our relations with allies.`` Earlier, Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and policy organization headed by the consultants James Carville and Robert Shrum and the pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, published a study with the following conclusion: ``When Democrats put out a clear message on national security, it now plays Bush`s post-9/11, post-Iraq message to a draw.``

It`s not just the war in Iraq that prompted these hopes of realignment; it`s the Bush administration`s penchant for bellicosity, its barely concealed contempt for the United Nations and for many of America`s traditional allies, its apparent confusion about how to deal with North Korea. Even some traditional internationalist Republicans believed that the Bush administration had abandoned many of the central tenets of the last several generations of national security policy while squandering much of the global good will that came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And for the chief presidential candidates, or at least for Dr. Dean, for Gen. Wesley Clark and, intermittently, Senator John Kerry, the war in Iraq became the central metaphor for the larger failure of the Bush administration to make Americans feel safe in a deeply unsafe world -- the thin edge of the wedge that would dislodge ``the old paradigm.``

When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ``I`m not betting on it, and I`m hoping against it, but there`s no indication that I should be expecting anything else.`` What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein`s capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein`s apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats -- and a considerable number of freshly polled voters -- that the party hadn`t disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded.

II.

In October, the Center for American Progress, a new liberal policy institute, held a two-day conference in Washington designed to lay out the foundations of an alternative, and politically viable, national security policy. The panels at the symposium (which was also sponsored by the Century Foundation and The American Prospect magazine) featured, in the main, nonideological figures offering sober and pragmatic counsel: reserve the right to act pre-emptively but don`t make a doctrine of it; do peacekeeping right; focus on ``failed`` states like Afghanistan and Sudan; devise carrots as well as sticks to deal with state sponsors of terrorism; forge a global strategy to deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

For the keynote speaker, the sponsors invited not a conventional liberal but Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter`s hawkish national security adviser, a fervently anti-Soviet Polish emigre reviled during the cold war by the Democratic Party`s left wing. I expected Brzezinski to be at least mildly sympathetic to the Bush administration. I was wrong. ``American power worldwide is at its historic zenith,`` he told his audience, which consisted largely of technocrats and midlevel Clinton administration officials. And yet, he noted: ``American global political standing is at its nadir. Why?`` First, Brzezinski said, because of the ``paranoiac view of the world`` summed up in the expression -- a paraphrase of President Bush -- ``He who is not with us is against us.`` Second, because of ``a fear`` -- of terrorism -- ``that periodically verges on panic`` and is stoked by ``extremist demagogy.`` To Brzezinski, the Bush administration`s unilateralism, and its militarism, constituted a radical break with a consensus that stretched across several generations and presumably included not only cold warriors like himself but also the liberals he once opposed, like Cyrus Vance, Carter`s secretary of state.

More striking still was the closing speech delivered by Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who is often spoken of in Washington as a probable presidential candidate in 2008. Hagel sounded a decorous, Midwestern version of Brzezinski`s rather frantic alarums. ``Crisis-driven coalitions of the willing by themselves are not the building blocks for a stable world,`` he said. And, ``Iraq alone cannot define our relationships.`` And even, ``Other countries have their own interests, and those interests need to be acknowledged and heard.`` Presumably that included France. Hagel also observed that ``the American image in the world is in need of immediate and long-term repair`` and suggested such instruments of ``soft power`` as educational and professional exchange programs, as well as increased language training for American students.

There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration`s claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right -- but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.

III.
Brzezinski`s question -- Why is so much of the world against us? -- is, in fact, the starting point for the Democratic critique of the Bush administration. The sheer velocity of the change from worldwide sympathy to worldwide antipathy is almost incredible, and while much of the new anger comes from the very nature of our superpower status, the conduct of the Bush administration has plainly had a lot to do with it as well. In an article in Newsweek on the eve of the war in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria, that magazine`s foreign-policy analyst, pointed out that some nations offered America only quiet support on Iraq ``not because they fear Saddam Hussein but because they fear their own people.`` The Bush administration had asked a very great deal and offered less than nothing. Zakaria noted that ``with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.`` And of course the United States is now paying a price for that in Iraq, where it cannot find either enough foreign troops or funds to supplement its own.

Conservatives have a longstanding answer to the argument for multilateralism. As Condoleezza Rice, now Bush`s national security adviser, wrote in a much discussed essay in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 campaign, ``The belief that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power`` proceeds from a deep discomfort with the fact of America`s power. This discomfort is, in turn, the residuum of Vietnam. There`s some truth to that claim. One Democratic policy figure I spoke to said, ``If you listen to the Democrats in Iowa, you sometimes get the impression that the U.N. is going to save us from the situation.`` And yet, at least when they`re not preaching to the Iowan choir, Democrats generally use hardheaded, looking-out-for-No.-1 language that Rice herself would have trouble taking exception to. They forswear ``mushy multilateralism,`` in John Kerry`s phrase, for what Senator Joe Lieberman calls ``muscular multilateralism`` -- multilateralism not as a source of legitimacy but as an instrument to advance our own interests.

The consequences of unilateralism in Iraq dominate the debate. Yet if you talk to Democratic policy experts, Iraq rarely appears as the country`s top national security priority. In ``An American Security Policy,`` a study ordered by Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, and written by a group that included top former Clinton aides like William Perry, the former defense secretary; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, Iraq appears as only the fourth of six major areas of concern. The first is ``The Loose Nukes Crisis in North Korea,`` and the second is the overall problem of weapons of mass destruction in Russia, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere.

As Graham Allison, an expert in nonproliferation issues at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, says: ``Iraq was a Level 2 issue. The Level 1 issue is that a terrorist could detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City instead of flying two planes into the World Trade Center.`` Allison considers this eventuality ``more likely than not.`` He proposes a coalition of nuclear powers designed to ensure that all nuclear weapons, and all fissile material, are strictly controlled -- multilateralism at its most muscular. He says he believes that even countries like Iran (though not, perhaps, North Korea) could be persuaded to join. ``But you have to choose your priorities,`` he adds. ``You have to be willing to drop regime change in order to pursue something more important.``

Clearly, the policy makers in the administration do not agree that regime change and fighting proliferation are unrelated, and in recent weeks they have produced what they maintain is proof of their belief: Libya`s agreement to abandon its unconventional weapons programs for fear (the administration says) of being the next Iraq. At the same time, the administration has starved the budget for nonproliferation measures. After first trying to zero-out the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides money to help the Russians keep their thousands of nuclear weapons secure, the administration ultimately agreed to keep financing steady at $451 million, or one-tenth the annual cost of the national missile-defense program.

All the major candidates continue to press the loose-nukes issue as an opportunity to demonstrate that the old distinction between hawk and dove is an artifact of another era. In a major foreign-policy address delivered last month, Dean accused the administration of being ``penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to addressing the weapons-proliferation threat`` and proposed a tripling of spending in the area -- an idea lifted from the hawkish ``American Security Policy`` document -- with an equal amount to come from America`s allies.

The underlying critique offered by Democratic policy experts is that the Bush administration, for all its bluster about how 9/11 ``changed everything,`` has in fact not adapted to the transformed world into which it has been catapulted and is still chasing after the bad guys of an earlier era. The administration understands war, but not the new kind of multifaceted, globalized war that must be fought against a stateless entity. As Ashton B. Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, puts it, ``We`ve done one thing in one place`` -- or two, counting Afghanistan. What about the other things in the other places? What about diplomacy, for example? Do we have some means beyond threats of military action to induce Iran and Syria to stop sponsoring terrorists? Do we have some means of persuading the European allies to toughen judicial processes so that terrorism suspects can`t walk away -- a United Nations treaty, for example?

It may very well be true, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying, that ``weakness is provocative,`` but so is belligerence. The administration`s Hobbesian worldview is well suited to the task of fighting enemies, but not to the task of winning over the far greater number of skeptics and fence-sitters. The State Department asked a nonpartisan group to study American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world; the report, issued in October, concluded that ``a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety.`` These were weapons we wielded boldly during the cold war; we allowed them to lapse in the 90`s, when the only instrument that seemed to matter was the marketplace. The study found that the State Department has all of 54 genuine Arabic speakers, that outreach efforts rarely reach beyond capitals, that the American-studies centers that were once ubiquitous around the globe scarcely exist in the Arab and Muslim world.

The exact same case may be made in the matter of foreign aid, which has also dwindled away since the 60`s. Not only does the United States spend far too little; the funds are not directed to the areas Americans are most worried about. The administration`s Millennium Challenge Account program, which offers additional aid to democratizing countries, has been widely praised, but Robert Orr, another Clinton administration official, who now makes his home at the Kennedy School, says, ``The Millennium Challenge grant is only for high-end countries, none of which are involved with terrorism.`` What are we offering to countries like Pakistan or even Somalia? It turns out that we have allowed our aid capacity to shrink as drastically as our public diplomacy mechanisms have. ``We only have 2,000 people left with A.I.D.,`` Orr says, referring to the Agency for International Development. ``That`s why we have to subcontract everything to the World Bank and the I.M.F. But they don`t share our priorities about terrorism; we can`t get them to invest in Afghanistan or Pakistan.``

Toward the end of our conversation, Dean said to me: ``The line of attack is not Iraq, though there`ll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, `What have you done to make us feel safer?` I`m going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,`` whom Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ``Our model is to get around the president`s right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.``

IV.

When the Democratic candidates mention John Kennedy -- and they do so as often as possible -- they are not trying to evoke an image of youth and vigor, or even of commitment to social justice, as Bill Clinton was. No, they are trying to remind listeners of the last time the Democrats were considered the party of national security. In a major foreign-policy address, John Kerry summoned up the ghosts not only of Kennedy but of Truman and F.D.R. as leaders who ``understood that to make the world safe for democracy and individual liberty, we needed to build international institutions dedicated to establishing the rule of law over the law of the jungle.`` True enough, but the party`s line of descent from those mid-20th-century heroes was shattered 35 years ago, and the question of patrimony remains bitterly contested.

It is useful, in this regard, to consider the career of Henry M. Jackson, the last of the so-called cold-war liberals. Jackson was a senator from Washington, a contemporary of Kennedy who shared Kennedy`s liberalism but also his hard-line views on the Soviet Union. The Democrats got clobbered in the 1956 election, when their presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, who represented the liberal wing of the party, proposed ending the draft and unilaterally halting tests on the hydrogen bomb. Kennedy, Jackson and others began to chart a new direction right away by suggesting -- speciously, as it turned out -- that President Eisenhower had allowed a ``missile gap`` to open between American and Soviet forces. (Dean presumably hopes to emulate Kennedy`s political success rather than his commitment to the truth.) There was nothing paradoxical about this Democratic stridency: one hallmark of the cold-war liberals was a chafing impatience toward the principle of ``containing,`` rather than challenging, the Russians. When Kennedy became president, he built up the stocks of Polaris subs and Minutemen missiles. (``Dr. Strangelove`` was released in 1964.)

After Kennedy`s death, Jackson continued to carry the mantle of cold-war liberalism. He compared early protesters against the Vietnam War with Hitler`s appeasers, and he championed virtually every new weapons system that came along. By 1968, however, when the Tet offensive began moving the Democratic Party sharply to the left on issues of war and peace, Jackson was increasingly isolated. In 1969, he led the charge for President Nixon`s antiballistic missile. Virtually all Northern Democrats opposed the weapons system, which was given Congressional approval thanks to a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. The debate, as one of Jackson`s biographers, Robert Gordon Kaufman, notes, ``symbolized the dramatic transformation since 1960 in the outlook of the Democratic Party on foreign policy and national defense.`` Liberal Democrats ``now considered that the prime danger to U.S. national security was the arrogance of American power rather than the menace of Soviet Communism.``

The Vietnam War spelled the end of cold-war liberalism. Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972 but lost to George McGovern, the leader of the peace wing, who had opposed almost all the weapons systems that Jackson supported. The battle inside the party continued with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, who divided his foreign-policy team between the dovish Vance and the hawkish Brzezinski; the contest reached its theatrical climax when Carter nominated Paul Warnke, a former McGovern adviser, as chief negotiator on the 1979 SALT II arms talks. Warnke had stated that he would be willing to make unilateral cuts to the American nuclear arsenal. Jackson, who opposed the negotiations altogether, used Senate hearings to depict the nominee as an enemy of military prepared-ness. He brought in witnesses from the Committee on the Present Danger, an assemblage of Democratic hawks, many of whom would soon be known as ``neoconservatives.`` Warnke was confirmed, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year derailed the arms talks and helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan years institutionalized the Republican advantage on national security issues. Reagan adopted a policy of saber-rattling toward the Soviets unheard of since the Kennedy administration. Many of the Democratic neocons defected to Reagan, though Jackson remained a Democrat, and a cold-war liberal, to the last. (He died in 1983.) The rest of the party opposed Reagan`s verbal posturing, his ``anti-Communist`` proxy fights in places like Grenada and El Salvador and the enormous increases in defense spending that, combined with tax cuts, were producing enormous deficits. Democrats depicted the MX missile and then Star Wars as symbols of an unhinged determination to counter an increasingly feeble Soviet threat.

It remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact, spend the Soviets into the ground. Nevertheless, the cold war ended on the Republicans` watch, and so Reagan`s unyielding stance was given much of the credit for bringing it to a close. And while the G.O.P. emerged from that era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of fecklessness -- a status brought home in the most mortifying possible manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank wearing a tanker`s helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

V.

The habits of thought shaped by the cold war appeared to become irrelevant almost as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. United States security was no longer threatened by a single foe apparently bent on countering America`s every move; for a while it seemed that U.S. security was no longer threatened at all. Americans learned soon enough that the world would not permit this peaceful, mercantilist fantasy, but the great questions of war and peace that did arise revolved around humanitarian crises -- in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere -- rather than strategic ones. The burning issue of the day was summed up in the title of an article by Richard Haass, then a scholar at the Brookings Institution: ``What to Do With American Primacy.`` How, that is, was America to deploy its extraordinary power? How were we to adjudicate between the competing claims of ``interests`` and ``values``? Do we intervene to prevent genocide? What about subgenocidal violence? And if we intervene, do we operate through the U.N. Security Council or through a ``posse`` of our own devising?

The words ``dove`` and ``hawk`` took on entirely different meanings in the 90`s, for it was the hardheaded realists, many on the right, who wanted to limit the use of force to the protection of key national interests and the morally driven idealists, many of them liberals, who favored intervention. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who remained chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first eight months of the Clinton administration, describes in his memoirs a briefing in which Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations and pushing for an American role in the wars inflaming the former Yugoslavia, burst out, ``What are you saving this superb military for if we can`t use it?`` (Powell writes that he almost had an ``aneurysm.``) Albright cites the same story in her own memoirs to make a very different point, for she was a ``hawk`` on the Balkans, a liberal interventionist fighting what had become the institutional reticence of the military. During the 2000 campaign, Bush`s foreign-policy advisers were much given to ridiculing Albright`s description of America as ``the indispensable nation,`` and it was her brand of moral activism that Bush vowed to curtail.

The attacks of 9/11 ended the brief post-cold-war interval and recreated elements of both the psychological and the strategic environment of the cold-war 1960`s. Once again, it was we who were targeted; once again, we would be engaged on many fronts against an ideologically committed foe. And Americans probably feel more vulnerable today than they have at any time since the depths of the cold war. President Clinton once observed that at such moments, Americans prefer a message that is ``strong and wrong`` to one that is ``weak and right.`` But Clinton, who inoculated the Democrats against attacks on so many domestic issues, never had the opportunity, or perhaps never saw the need, to do so in terms of national security. The terrorist attacks made the moral quandaries of the 90`s look like luxuries and restored the old party stereotypes with a vengeance. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans enjoyed an astounding 40-point advantage on the question of which party was best at ``keeping America strong``; the election was understood as a referendum on national security policy, and the G.O.P. swept the board.

Democratic strategists initially expected to concede the issue of national security in 2004. Howard Dean said that he planned to conduct his campaign on ``balancing the budget and having a health insurance program for everybody.`` Other candidates, like Representative Richard Gephardt, barely mentioned foreign policy at all. But when Bush tried and failed to get a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, decisively alienating almost all of our European allies in the process, foreign policy was back in play. Candidates and their chief aides began beating a path to the well-padded refuges of Clinton administration officials -- the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School. ``Everyone talks to Sandy Berger,`` Robert Orr says. ``But now they`re calling the second-tier people like me.``

When Bush submitted a resolution to Congress authorizing his war aims in the fall of 2002, he posed the first litmus test on the use of force in the age of terror. (The war in Afghanistan had enjoyed near-universal support.) Whether out of conviction or a fear of failing that test, many leading Clinton administration officials, including some who considered Iraq a Level 2 issue, came out in favor of the war. And so, despite their misgivings, did Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Senator John Edwards. But Dean, out on the hustings, discovered that the war was extremely unpopular among many Democrats. Back in the fall, he supported a slightly more restrictive form of the resolution that ultimately passed Congress; now, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, he uncorked an applause line that reshaped the campaign: ``What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president`s unilateral intervention in Iraq.``

Dean had happened upon a very large gulf between the Democrats in Washington and many of the party`s most passionately engaged members. He was already becoming the tribune of the virulently anti-Bush wing of the party on domestic policy, and now he plumbed equal depths on the question of the use of force. ``Dean made Iraq a political manhood test,`` laments Will Marshall, a well-known Democratic centrist and head of the Progressive Policy Institute. ``His conflation of anti-Bush sentiment and antiwar sentiment ratcheted the debate toward what has at least echoes of the old antiwar stance.`` By the time President Bush submitted his request for an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan in September, the politics of the war inside the party had shifted drastically. Conventional wisdom had it that no candidate seen as pro-war could get a foothold among the highly liberal primary voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, even though polls found that Democrats in both states preferred a candidate who had approved of the war but criticized its conduct. Kerry and Edwards voted against the appropriation, Gephardt and Lieberman for it. Lieberman found that he was encountering such hostile audiences in Iowa that he decided not to contest the caucuses there.

The litmus test for nomination, it seemed, was incompatible with the litmus test for election -- a predicament the Democrats knew all too well. And the candidates who tried to split the difference only confirmed the impression that the party was willing to play politics with national security. Democratic strategists began to use the expression ``heading over a cliff.`` And some of them began to cast about for a savior.

VI.

The opening speaker at the Center for American Progress`s foreign-policy symposium was Gen. Wesley Clark, who had been invited long before he declared himself a candidate for president. Clark was speaking from New Hampshire, and he appeared on two giant screens. His hollow cheeks, his banked intensity, his palpable sense of solemnity and the sheer immensity of his image gave an air of almost desperate urgency to his words. He spoke angrily of the way Bush had destroyed the international relationships and undermined the institutions that previous presidents nurtured and that he himself, as NATO commander during the war in Kosovo, used as instruments to forge a sense of common purpose. The war in Iraq, he said, was a mistake of historic proportions -- ``a disastrous turn of events in our history.`` And then, his mien grave and gaunt, Clark said something that produced an audible murmur in the room: ``There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9/11. You can`t blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers.``

This was not the Wesley Clark who struck such a spark of hope from both senior Democrats and ordinary voters when he joined the race only a month before. Theodore Sorenson, the Kennedy speechwriter, had introduced Clark by saying, ``He does not have to dress up as a flyboy to be called commander in chief.`` Clark was supposed to be the irrefutable answer to all those Rocky the Flying Squirrel jokes. He had fought bravely in Vietnam, as John Kerry had, but rather than going on to oppose the war, he had dedicated his life to the military, and he had capped his career by fighting and winning a war that exemplified the virtues of multilateralism. Clark`s resume made him the object of wildly varying strands of political enthusiasm. The filmmaker Michael Moore, a self-proclaimed Dennis Kucinich Democrat, wrote an open letter in September urging Clark to run. ``The general versus the Texas Air National Guard deserter!`` Moore fantasized. ``I want to see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.`` And that soldier`s soldier Col. David Hackworth -- Hack to Larry King and the CNN audience -- described Clark on his Web site as a fearless warrior and a brilliant thinker.

And yet here was the former Supreme Allied Commander positioning himself slightly to Howard Dean`s left. Indeed, the central paradox of Clark`s campaign, which in recent months has neither gained nor lost much altitude, and remains fixed in a flight path well below Dean`s, is that a candidate whose chief virtue was his credibility on national security issues has proved to be such a peacenik. People around Clark disagree as to the source of his surprising politics. One figure who has given Clark substantial advice says that Clark has moved left owing to the ``political dynamic`` fostered by Dean. Clark himself says that he`s just angry at the commander in chief`s failure to take responsibility. When Clark and I spoke in November, I said that those of us in the audience at the conference assumed that he believed the Bush administration could have and should have stopped the terrorist attacks -- a terrible charge, almost a calumny. No, he said; he meant that the administration had refused to conduct ``an after-action review,`` as he would have done. Of course, if that`s what he meant, he could have said so. It seemed, rather, that he had decided to mine the vein that Dean had worked so effectively.

Clark embodies what is most powerful, but perhaps also what is most vulnerable, about the Democratic critique of the Bush administration`s national security strategy. Clark`s first book, ``Waging Modern War,`` is a minutely detailed account of the Kosovo air campaign, the first, and so far only, war fought by the NATO alliance, which Clark conducted as NATO`s Supreme Allied Commander. You could easily read the book as a primer on the futility of multilateral warfare, for Clark describes his endless battles with the Pentagon, the White House and our 18 allies. On several occasions, the war effort almost collapsed from dissension. But it didn`t: the Serbs ultimately withdrew, the Kosovars returned home and for several years now an uneasy peace has reigned in Kosovo. ``The real lesson of Kosovo is this,`` Clark writes: ``To achieve strategic success at minimal cost, a structured alliance whose actions are guided by consensus and underwritten by international law is likely to be far more effective and efficient in the long term.``

Clark wrote those words in a preface composed after the terrorist attacks, and what he meant was that acting in concert will be more effective than the unilateralism he already saw emerging. He often tells the story of meeting a senior official in the Bush Defense Department (Donald Rumsfeld himself, Clark told me), who said to him, ``We read your book -- no one is going to tell us where we can or can`t bomb.`` Iraq was the anti-Kosovo: the Bush administration orchestrated a breathtakingly successful military campaign by more or less acting alone, but not only sacrificed the legitimacy that comes from joint action but also inherited virtual sole responsibility for the postwar mess. Clark argues that the very consensus war-fighting strategy that produces terribly inefficient wars also greatly increases the likelihood of a successful postwar outcome -- which is what the whole effort is supposed to be about. ``It`s not where you bomb and what building you blow up that determines the outcome of the war,`` Clark said to me. ``That`s what we teach majors in the Air Force to do -- make sure you hit the target. It`s the overarching diplomacy, the leverage you bring to bear, what happens afterward on the ground, that gives you your success. And for that you need nations working together.`` That, in a nutshell, is the Wesley Clark alternative paradigm of national security.

Clark is the seniormost member of a younger generation of soldiers formed not by Vietnam, though he fought there, but by the humanitarian wars of the 90`s -- by Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. What makes modern war modern for Clark is not just high-tech gadgetry but both the limitations and the opportunities provided by public opinion, international law and multilateral institutions. When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 -- we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane -- he said, ``You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,`` thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ``You could then have gone to NATO and said: `O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.``` NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war.

On Iraq, Clark said that he would have tried ``another diplomacy round,`` and then, if Saddam Hussein failed to comply with inspectors` demands, he would have returned to the Security Council to secure an international coalition for multilateral war. (But Clark has also said that invading Iraq, rather than continuing to press the war on Al Qaeda, was ``a strategic mistake.``) After we finished talking, in fact, he flew to South Carolina, where he laid out his alternate plans for Iraq, which feature a Bosnia-type interim government with representatives from Europe, the U.S. and neighboring states and a NATO peacekeeping operation run by an American general.

Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different -- the post-9/11 world. Clark argues persuasively that the NATO ``consensus engine`` forces member governments to ``buy into`` joint decisions. But what if the French or Germans don`t want to buy into Iraq or, say, to a tough posture should Iran start violating critical nuclear safeguards? A key aspect of the neoconservative argument on terrorism, most associated with the analyst Robert Kagan, is that Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch. Clark`s answer is that if we take the concerns of our allies seriously, they will rally to our side. But they may not; Frenchmen may consider the United States, even under a benign President Clark, a greater threat to world peace than Iraq. It may be that in his years with NATO, Clark so thoroughly absorbed the European perspective that he has trouble recognizing how very deeply, and differently, Americans were affected by 9/11.

All this, of course, is airy theorizing; the immediate question for Democrats is whether all of Clark`s medals can act as a flame retardant if and when Karl Rove starts to roast the general as a Europeanized peace-lover. We can`t know, of course, until the experiment begins. James P. Rubin, the former press aide to Madeleine Albright, who is now advising Clark, opines, ``He doesn`t have to show that he`s a tough guy; he doesn`t have to check the boxes.`` That`s the whole theory behind Clark`s candidacy. But is the litmus test really about toughness -- or is it about understanding the transformative effect of 9/11? Will Marshall says that Clark has already stumbled into ``the red zone.`` Marshall says that he still believes that with the right candidate ``we can go toe to toe on this and win our argument.`` He was hoping that Clark would be that candidate. Now, he says, ``we`ll see.``

VII.

Conservative intellectuals have taken to arguing that Democrats, far from being lost in a funk of pacifism, have in fact signed on to President Bush`s national security strategy, albeit with some important quibbles over Iraq. Robert Kagan recently observed that the 2004 election is unlikely to offer ``a national referendum on the fundamental principles of American foreign policy in the post-cold-war, post-Sept. 11, 2001, world`` so long as the leading Democratic candidates, including the supposedly dovish Howard Dean, fully embrace the war on terror that President Bush has declared -- unlike the McGovernites, who believed that ``America was on the wrong side of history.``

Surely this is at least partly right. The foreign-policy debate is no longer ideological, if ideology has to do with differing conceptions of ends, rather than means. The Democrats are not really a peace party. Defense spending, once the great threshold issue separating hawks from doves, has been laid to rest. You have to go as far to the left as Dennis Kucinich to find a candidate who wants to cut, rather than increase, defense spending.

But Kagan is wrong to think that only ends, not means, amount to fundamental, or at least essential, principles. The difference between the idea that international law, multilateral institutions and formal alliances enhance our power -- the Wilson-F.D.R.-Truman-Kennedy idea -- and the view that they needlessly constrain our power, is a very important difference indeed. In an article last spring in World Policy Journal, Dana H. Allin, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O`Hanlon, foreign-policy thinkers from the conservative side of the Democratic spectrum, proposed a doctrine of ``nationalist liberalism,`` which would ``consciously accept the critical importance of power, including military power, in promoting American security, interests and values,`` as the neoconservatives had in the 1970`s. But the doctrine would also recognize that America`s great power ``will create resistance and resentment if it is exercised arrogantly and unilaterally, making it harder for the United States to achieve its goals.`` The authors laid out a ``generous and compelling vision of global society,`` which would include ``humanitarian intervention against genocidal violence; family planning; effective cooperation against global warming and other environmental scourges``; foreign aid; free trade; and large investments to combat AIDS.

All the major Democratic candidates could be considered nationalist liberals. And it`s no surprise: since this is more or less the consensual view of the foreign-policy establishment, practically everybody the candidates have been consulting takes this view. With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did.

O.K., then, it doesn`t. And yet it sure feels as if it does. Iraq has, in fact, become the Democratic manhood test. One of Howard Dean`s 30-second ads in Iowa showed Gephardt standing next to President Bush in the Rose Garden while an announcer said, ``October 2002: Dick Gephardt agrees to co-author the Iraq war resolution, giving George Bush the authority to go to war.`` Dean is running as the candidate who stood up to the president and his own party on Iraq, just as Wesley Clark is running as the candidate whose whole experience demonstrates the madness of Iraq. Dean may well be a nationalist liberal, but his audience members -- the activists, the students -- often are not; he is exploiting that deep discomfort with the exercise of power, the skepticism about American legitimacy that Condoleezza Rice was writing about. (A candidate who says, as Dean does, ``We`re all just cogs in a big machine someplace,`` is not catering to the middle.) This is the cliff that Democratic thinkers fear the party is heading over. As one Senate aide tells me, ``I don`t see how a Democrat who is easy to stereotype as soft, even if it`s unfair, is going to win.``

The Democrats seem trapped between two irreconcilable impulses, or litmus tests. This is especially obvious, and painful, with figures like John Kerry, who has tried to have it both ways. In the run-up to the war, Kerry harshly criticized President Bush for alienating our allies and then voted for the resolution authorizing war. Then he voted against the $87 billion appropriation, complaining that the president lacked a clear postwar plan. As Baghdad plunged into chaos and Dean worked his magic, Kerry began to sound more and more like an antiwar candidate. And then when Saddam Hussein was captured, Kerry criticized Dean for failing to acknowledge the full magnitude of the achievement. It`s no wonder that Chris Matthews tied Kerry into a pretzel when he pressed him on ``Hardball`` to supply a ``yes or no answer`` on Iraq.

You can imagine two very different solutions to the irreconcilable-litmus-test problem. If the capture of Saddam Hussein leads to a rapid improvement of conditions in Iraq, the Democratic litmus test could change, and the party could nominate a candidate who couldn`t be stereotyped as soft. And if, alternatively, conditions in Iraq fully disintegrate, the general election litmus test could change, and Howard Dean could prove to have been prescient. But there is a sizable body of opinion that argues that the Democrats cannot overcome their historic reputation with a candidate who opposed the war, or perhaps even opposed the $87 billion appropriation -- no matter what his other views or his resume.

Michael O`Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: ``Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?`` In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn`t. ``Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?`` O`Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that ``the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.``

Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that`s the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement.




James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about politics and international affairs.




Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
Power Transfer in Iraq Starts This Week
Deadline for Completion Is Set as Talks Continue

By Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page A01


After eight months of debate and delay, the United States this week will formally launch the handover of power to Iraq with the final game plan still not fully in place.

The United States begins the complicated political, economic and security transfer with a general framework and a June 30 deadline for completion. But critical details are still being negotiated between the Iraqis and U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer, some of which could determine whether the new Iraqi government is ultimately embraced by the majority of Iraq`s 22 million people.

"We`re open to refinement, and we`re waiting to hear what people have suggested or will suggest," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview. "What Ambassador Bremer and all of us have been doing in our conversations is listening and hearing and [saying], `Are there better ideas that would make the plan more refined, better and more acceptable to a broader group of individuals and leaders within Iraq?` " Besides figuring out who will rule in Saddam Hussein`s wake, Iraqis over the next two months will have to answer a host of deferred and potentially divisive questions: What kind of government will Iraq have? What will be the role of Islam? How much local rule will ethnic, tribal or religious groups have?

The deadline is Feb. 28 for agreement on these and other basic questions, due to be codified in the recently renamed Transitional Administration Law, the precursor to a constitution.

A month later, Iraqis have to determine their relationship with U.S. troops -- and therefore the United States -- after the handover. One of the thorniest issues will be giving U.S. troops immunity from prosecution for any action they may take, a standard U.S. demand when it deploys troops abroad. But Iraq presents a different set of issues than what American forces face in peaceful environments such as Germany, Italy and South Korea inasmuch as U.S. soldiers could still be fighting in a country not under U.S. control.

Iraqis, who like to note that they have less time than the U.S. founding fathers did to come up with a constitution and new government, are already worried -- and predicting problems. "This is the decisive period -- and we will probably go to the brink a few times before we make those decisions," a prominent Iraqi politician said.

U.S. officials say Washington plans to resolve many of these remaining questions in negotiation with the Iraqi Governing Council, whose initial incompetence precipitated the delays that forced the United States to design the Nov. 15 agreement. The accord outlines the multiphase process, centered on provincial caucuses, to select a provisional government.

Seven weeks after the accord, however, the council has been unable to close the wide differences of opinion among rival Iraqi leaders, ranging from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to the Sunni community once protected by Hussein.

Sistani, a Shiite Muslim cleric who has a larger public following than any other Iraqi, has demanded elections to pick Baghdad`s post-occupation government. But no compromise has been reached, despite a stream of communications among Sistani, Bremer and the Governing Council -- leaving the legitimacy of the process in doubt, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

As the effort to turn over power begins in earnest, symbolic actions are planned: town halls to launch a nationwide political dialogue, graduation this week of an Iraqi army battalion, completion of the new currency exchange, the first cell phone system.

"This next month, we have a thousand things going on. We`re drinking out of a fire hose," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said.

Washington wants to begin transferring specific duties to Baghdad so that inexperienced Iraqis do not suddenly find themselves assuming total responsibility in six months.

In a step pivotal to the transition, Iraq will also once again be the focus of debate at the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 19, when the Iraqi council will appeal for the world body to return. But senior members of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority may not attend the meeting, despite a personal summons by Secretary General Kofi Annan. Repeatedly burned at the United Nations on Iraq, Washington wants the Iraqis to make their own case to the United Nations this time, U.S. officials say.

"It`s time that Iraqis begin representing themselves -- and that the world recognizes that fact," a State Department official said.

The toughest task facing the United States now, many U.S. officials say, is figuring out a way to broaden political participation, the core issue in the debate over elections. The Bush administration refuses to budge from the Nov. 15 agreement, in part for fear that further demands could delay the transition.

To bring more Iraqis into the process, the United States is tinkering with the formation of new Iraqi political bodies -- often creatively but also in piecemeal fashion, based largely on local factors and preferences rather than a uniform standard nationwide.

As a first step, the United States has begun to reconfigure dozens of local city councils originally appointed by U.S. military commanders or provisional authority officials in the field. Some councils have been virtually dissolved, whereas others have only had new members added. The approach usually depends on local politicians and input from the Iraqi Governing Council members from the area.

The United States faces another crucial step in the process of selecting a government this week with the creation of coordinating committees. That selection process could last two months.

In each of Iraq`s 18 provinces, 15-member committees are to select members for caucuses, which will in turn pick legislators for a new national assembly. The exact number in parliament, and whether it has one chamber or two, is another issue to be determined. The legislature will then pick the government.

U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad are exploring ideas that will combine this formula with some form of elections, again perhaps differing in key areas, to accommodate Sistani`s demand. The administration believes it can find common ground.

"The ayatollah has raised issues with respect to how you do the caucus elections, and I think it`s safe to say that we are in a dialogue with him and with others who have an interest in how one actually goes about selecting a transitional assembly and a transitional government," Powell said.

One idea being discussed is having quick local elections for some delegates to the coordinating committees. Under the current formula, in each province five of the 15 members are appointed by the Governing Council, five by the provincial council and one from each of the five largest cities. One problem, however, is whether elections for only five of the delegates from major cities would satisfy Sistani`s call for public input rather than appointment.

The future of the 25-member Governing Council, handpicked by Bremer, must also be decided. Some members argue that it should be preserved as the second chamber of an Iraqi legislature, an idea U.S. officials and many Iraqis oppose. The United States continues to be frustrated by council members, their personal ambitions and their divisive politics, although U.S. officials give them credit for making a more earnest effort recently.

"Ambassador Bremer has a strong working relationship with the Governing Council, and we are eager to move forward on the November 15 political agreement as signed and published," said Dan Senor, the U.S. spokesman in Baghdad. Washington hopes that the various town halls -- one has been held in Basra, another will take place in Mosul soon -- will help generate ideas and feedback for "refinements" in the plan.

"We`re engaged in a robust effort to get all parties engaged in this process. We`re going to be doing a lot of things over the next few weeks. There`s a lot that needs to happen, given the timeline to get all the critical parties to buy into the political process," a senior U.S. official said.

But as the countdown begins to the formal handover, time is also running short.

"We have a six-month marathon ahead of us, so we`re lacing up our shoes and getting ready to roll. It`s not one thing or another dominating the agenda," the senior administration official said. "It`s keeping all the balls in the air and jogging forward at the same time."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a member of the Congregationalist Church and a former Episcopalian, sings along with members of the New Hope Baptist Church in Portsmouth, N.H., in October.
washingtonpost.com
Dean Now Willing to Discuss His Faith
Campaign and Trips to Bible Belt States Changed Him, Candidate Says

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page A01


STORM LAKE, Iowa, Jan. 3 -- Howard Dean, after practicing a quiet Christianity throughout his political career, said he is talking more about his faith because the presidential race has awakened him to the importance of religious expression, especially to southerners.

"I am not used to wearing religion on my sleeve and being open about it," the former Vermont governor told reporters aboard his campaign plane late Friday. "I am gradually getting more comfortable to talk about religion in ways I did not talk about it before."

Dean said frequent trips to Bible Belt states such as South Carolina, where evangelical Christianity flourishes often in public ways, are prompting him to more candidly discuss his faith. "It does not make me more religious or less religious than before. It just means I am more comfortable talking about it in different ways," he said.

He cited the Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- as a strong influence. The Gospels tell the story of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. "As I have gotten older I have thought about what it means to be a Christian and what the role of religion is in my life," Dean said.

Dean`s comments about Christianity provide a rare, if obscured, look at the Democrat who is leading in the polls. He has seldom talked about his family, feelings or religion when campaigning, unlike other candidates who discuss such issues to connect with voters on a personal level.

"The campaign has changed the way I am willing to talk about religion. It has not changed my religious beliefs," Dean reiterated Saturday.

In some ways, Dean is coming to acknowledge a reality of American politics: Voters, particularly in the South, want to hear more about faith and morality from national leaders. This phenomenon has hurt Democrats and helped President Bush, according to strategists from both parties. A recent poll showed 63 percent of voters who regularly attend church back Bush, while a similar percentage of those who rarely or never attend lean toward Democrats. A small shift in support of religious voters could provide a big boost to the Democratic nominee.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), an orthodox Jew, and Al Sharpton, a minister, are the two Democratic presidential candidates who have given their faith and God a role in their campaign rhetoric. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark recently said faith will become a centerpiece of his campaign message, too. Dean is still wrestling with how prominent a place faith should take in his campaign. The more he talks about it, though, the more comfortable he feels, an aide said.

"I am still learning a lot about faith and the South and how important it is," said Dean, a Congregationalist. The Congregationalist Church is a Christian denomination that preaches a personal relationship with God without a strong hierarchal structure guiding it. Dean was reared an Episcopalian, but left the church 25 years ago in a dispute with a local Vermont church over efforts to build a bike path. Dean`s wife is Jewish, as are their two children.

"Faith is important in a lot of places, but it is really important in the South -- I think I did not understand fully how comfortably religion fits in with daily life -- for both black and white populations in the South," he said. Dean has visited South Carolina, which holds its presidential primary Feb. 3, nine times since the beginning of the campaign. "The people there are pretty openly religious, and it plays an ingrained role in people`s daily lives," he said.

Dean`s decision reflects the evolution of a candidate who earlier in the campaign said it was the New England tradition to practice religion quietly. Still, Dean`s remarks about his faith have been mostly confined to discussions with reporters and campaign stops at African American churches in South Carolina. At the same time, he tells Democratic audiences to move elections away from "guns, God and gays."

"What I have not done is figured out is how to talk about [my faith] publicly," he said.

The Democratic front-runner probably will not have much time to elaborate until the presidential race heads South on Feb. 3, an aide said Saturday. But if he wins the nomination, polls show voters want to hear more about faith from political leaders. The general election campaign is when Dean might open up more, the aide said.

The last two Democrats to win the White House -- Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- evoked God and their faith. Both are Christians. Some Democrats have said that Dean may be perceived as too secular because of his affiliation with civil unions for gays, which many Christians oppose.

President Bush, a born-again Christian, is one of the most openly religious presidents in generations and enjoys very strong backing in the South, according to recent polls. In 2000, he won every state in the Bible Belt. It would be tough, though not impossible, for a Democrat to defeat Bush without making inroads in the South, strategists from both parties say.

Dean said he prays daily and has read the Bible from cover to cover. "If there was one experience that deepened my religious faith," Dean said Saturday, "it was the capture of my brother [in Laos] almost 30 years ago."

He rarely attends church services, unless it is for a political event. When he talks about Jesus, he usually focuses on Christianity`s teachings about helping the poor and less fortunate.

When asked Friday night about his favorite book of the New Testament, he cited Job, about a righteous man whose faith was tested mightily by God through great suffering. After thinking about the scripture, Dean pointed out an hour later that Job is from the Old Testament. Dean said Job reinforces the uncomfortable fact of life that "terrible things can happen to very good people for no good reason."

"I think all human beings have to have an explanation for why bad things happen to good people," which resonates with him, in part, because the suffering he witnessed as a medical doctor, Dean said.

At a breakfast here Saturday, Dean had an opportunity to discuss his faith when an Iowan asked what sustains the front-runner when his rivals are relentlessly criticizing him. Instead, Dean shared a secular belief in the power of people to change government.

A few minutes later, when discussing corporate greed, Dean promised if elected president to call business leaders from around the country into the White House to stress ethics and responsibility. "Moral tone is a huge deal in the presidency," he told the audience.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Dean and the McGovern Thing


By Lawrence F. Kaplan

Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page B07



Will commentators never stop comparing Howard Dean to George McGovern? Will they never acknowledge that, far from being a single-issue "peace" candidate, Dean is a sensible moderate who boasts a fairly conservative record?

That`s the repeated complaint from a chorus of opinion-makers who, having uncovered in Dean`s antiwar harangues evidence of "nuance" and "moderation," argue that comparisons to the hapless 1972 candidate mislead more than they clarify. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner instructs, "Dean is fundamentally a moderate. He was a fiscal conservative, rather centrist governor," while the National Journal`s Jonathan Rauch warns that "Republicans chortling that Dean would be the next McGovern had better watch out: He may be the next Clinton." Taking the argument a step further, the Dean 2004 Web site trumpeted the rollout of the governor`s ostensibly tough-minded foreign policy team with the admonition, "McGovernize This!" -- a request, alas, that anyone who bears the slightest familiarity with the writings of its members could all too easily oblige. Which is the burden those who reject the McGovern caricature must bear: In Dean`s case, the caricature happens to be substantially true.

This would hardly be the first time backers of an antiwar candidate have convinced themselves that the truth contains more nuance than it actually does. Arguing that McGovern himself was no McGovernite, his campaign biographer, Robert Sam Anson, insisted that the candidate could "sound almost hawkish" and touted "an almost conservative philosophy." New York Post columnist Pete Hamill assured his readers that McGovern, who "comes at you like one of those big Irish heavyweights in the 1930s," stood a very real chance of winning the election, while peace activist Allard Lowenstein enthused that McGovern was "in a very real way almost too good to be true. He was a centrist . . . He was a bomber pilot."

The election, of course, revealed that Lowenstein`s center was located several degrees to the left of the rest of the country`s. Nonetheless, claims that obviously left-leaning candidates amount to something other than the sum of their words and positions were to become a staple of subsequent Democratic presidential runs, including the present one. But the subordination of fact to wish only gets you so far, and simply asserting that a candidate is a centrist does not -- at least as far as a public arguably better attuned to the substance of centrism than those advancing the claim -- actually make him one.

This has done nothing to dissuade the Dean-is-no-McGovern chorus from adducing evidence to bolster their case in, among other places, Dean`s fiscal record, his past opposition to gun control, and other domestic positions that could fairly be characterized as conservative. Never mind that McGovern himself had opposed gun control, had voted against cuts in defense spending, had earned poor ratings from liberal groups, and boasted a fairly moderate domestic record. The essence of McGovernism was not its namesake`s domestic positions but his vituperative condemnation of America`s conduct in Vietnam and on the international scene more broadly.

What puts Dean squarely in that tradition is his own, very similar bill of particulars, offered at a time when national security ranks once more as an urgent concern for voters. In this arena, Dean and his partisans like to remind audiences that he championed the first Persian Gulf War along with the military campaigns in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Yet, just as the foreign policy positions McGovern touted as a candidate obscured his earlier service as a bomber pilot and his votes in favor of military action in Vietnam, so too do the actual positions of candidate Dean rightly count for more than the foreign policy inclinations of Gov. Dean. And, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, candidate Dean`s critique of America`s global role has been no more confined to Iraq than McGovern`s was to Vietnam. The White House contender`s promise to seek "permission" from the international community before resorting to force, his refusal to "prejudge" Osama bin Laden, his pledge to "tear up the Bush Doctrine," his (subsequently withdrawn) demand that U.S. troops in Iraq "need to come home," his broadsides against the more hawkish members of the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party" -- is it really necessary to point out the echoes of McGovern in this litany?

The answer comes, oddly enough, from the December issue of Playboy magazine, which features a 5,000-word essay that, when not condemning the "warmongers" who have criticized both Dean and McGovern, details and even celebrates the similarities between the two. The author knows a thing or two about the McGovern analogy; indeed Dean, alone among the candidates, sought him out for advice. His name is George McGovern, and he has anointed a successor worthy of the name.

The writer is a senior editor at the New Republic and a Hudson Institute fellow.




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op…
U.S. JUSTICE SYSTEM



In Bush`s America, Rules of War Trump Civil Law
Applying battlefield justice to the murky struggle against terrorism is dangerous--and possibly illegal.
By Kenneth Roth
Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch.

January 4, 2004

NEW YORK — Is the Bush administration`s "war on terrorism" a real war, and thus governed by the rules of armed conflict? Or is it a law-enforcement effort governed by traditional rules of criminal justice?

Two recent rulings by federal appeals courts offered answers to these questions. One involved Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who flew from Pakistan to Chicago in May 2002 allegedly to scout targets for a radioactive "dirty" bomb. Rather than prosecute him, President Bush declared him an "enemy combatant" and claimed that the government had the right to hold Padilla without charge or trial until the end of the "war" against terrorism. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, based in New York, ruled that, absent explicit congressional authorization, the president has no such power.

The second case involved several prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who sought access to U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The Bush administration claimed that because Guantanamo is leased from Cuba, it should be considered sovereign Cuban territory and thus outside the reach of U.S. courts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, rejected this view of Guantanamo, ruling that because the U.S. exercises total control over the base, it is not outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

These kinds of issues stem from the administration`s view that the rules for traditional armed conflict should apply to the war on terrorism. Even though, as the president said, "Our war on terror will be much broader than the battlefields and beachheads of the past. The war will be fought wherever terrorists hide, or run or plan."

The president wasn`t waxing metaphorical here. To him, the war on terrorism is quite literal, and that is worrisome because governmental powers are much greater in wartime.

In ordinary times, governments are bound by strict rules of law enforcement. For example, police can use lethal force only when facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. Once a suspect is detained, he must be charged and tried.

In times of war, these rules are supplemented by the more permissive ones of armed conflict. Under "war rules," an enemy combatant can be shot without warning (unless he is incapacitated, in custody or trying to surrender), regardless of any imminent threat. If a combatant is captured, he can be detained without charge or trial until the end of the conflict.

The existence of war, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, is usually indisputable. But when the scope of war is contested, as in the war on terrorism, there is little law to determine when one set of rules should apply instead of the other. However, the consequences of invoking war rules should make us reluctant to apply them beyond traditional battlefields.

Padilla`s case shows us why. If he were an enemy combatant, as the Bush administration claims, he could have been shot as he stepped off his plane at O`Hare Airport, regardless of any immediate danger he posed. That is what it means to be a combatant in time of war. But summarily killing Padilla was never a real option for the administration, in part because of the public outrage such an action would have sparked. So why, if Padilla is not an enemy combatant for the purpose of being shot, is he an enemy combatant for the purpose of being detained indefinitely?

The Guantanamo case presents a related set of problems. Little information is available about the 660 men and boys currently held on the base, but they seem to include several types of detainees, each with different legal claims.

Some were probably seized by mistake, and they should be released immediately.

Others were Taliban fighters or foreign volunteers integrated into the Taliban`s military. As regular members of Afghanistan`s armed forces, they should have been automatically granted prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention. That would have entitled them to repatriation when the war with the Afghan government ended a year and a half ago.

As for alleged Al Qaeda members captured during the war, they are at least entitled, under the Geneva Convention, to military hearings to determine their status. They would probably fail the more rigorous test for prisoner-of-war status as it applies to irregular forces. Thus, they could be prosecuted for taking up arms against the United States as well as for plotting acts of terrorism. But the Bush administration makes the radical claim that it should be able to detain these men until the end of the "war" against terrorism, whenever that is — without a trial or a hearing to contest their detention.

Finally, there is the growing number of Al Qaeda suspects picked up far from any recognized battlefield and held at Guantanamo. For example, in October 2001 the Bush administration secured the arrest of six Algerian men in Bosnia. After a three-month investigation, Bosnia`s highest court ordered their release for lack of evidence. The administration then pressured the Bosnian government to hand them over anyway. The six now reside at the naval base.

Guantanamo thus represents a dangerous pattern of U.S. conduct. When the administration doesn`t like the outcome of complying with normal law enforcement rules, it switches to war rules. And even then, it applies only war rules it finds convenient — not, for example, those governing prisoners of war.

Errors, common enough in ordinary criminal investigations, are all the more likely when the government relies on the murky intelligence that drives many terrorist investigations. The secrecy of these investigations, with little opportunity for public scrutiny, only compounds the problem. If law enforcement rules are used, a mistaken arrest can be rectified at a public trial. But if war rules apply, a suspect could be detained for life or even killed without the government ever being obliged to prove his guilt.

Terrorism is indeed a serious threat. But the Bush administration`s facile and inconsistent invocation of war rules jeopardizes some of our most basic rights. It is high time that the courts stepped in.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Quarantining dissent
How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech
James Bovard
Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGPQ40MB81.DTL


When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event.

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us."

The local police, at the Secret Service`s behest, set up a "designated free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush`s speech.

The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president`s path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.

Neel later commented, "As far as I`m concerned, the whole country is a free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind."

At Neel`s trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a so-called free- speech area.

Paul Wolf, one of the top officials in the Allegheny County Police Department, told Salon that the Secret Service "come in and do a site survey, and say, `Here`s a place where the people can be, and we`d like to have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.` "

Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to `I don`t agree with you, but I`ll defend to the death your right to say it`?"

Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, "At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome."

One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, "War is good business. Invest your sons." The seven were charged with trespassing, "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct."

Police have repressed protesters during several Bush visits to the St. Louis area as well. When Bush visited on Jan. 22, 150 people carrying signs were shunted far away from the main action and effectively quarantined.

Denise Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri commented, "No one could see them from the street. In addition, the media were not allowed to talk to them. The police would not allow any media inside the protest area and wouldn`t allow any of the protesters out of the protest zone to talk to the media."

When Bush stopped by a Boeing plant to talk to workers, Christine Mains and her 5-year-old daughter disobeyed orders to move to a small protest area far from the action. Police arrested Mains and took her and her crying daughter away in separate squad cars.

The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey, who was arrested for holding a "No War for Oil" sign at a Bush visit to Columbia, S.C. Local police, acting under Secret Service orders, established a "free-speech zone" half a mile from where Bush would speak. Bursey was standing amid hundreds of people carrying signs praising the president. Police told Bursey to remove himself to the "free-speech zone."

Bursey refused and was arrested. Bursey said that he asked the police officer if "it was the content of my sign, and he said, `Yes, sir, it`s the content of your sign that`s the problem.` " Bursey stated that he had already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak. Bursey later complained, "The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing."

Bursey was charged with trespassing. Five months later, the charge was dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for trespassing on public property. But the Justice Department -- in the person of U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. -- quickly jumped in, charging Bursey with violating a rarely enforced federal law regarding "entering a restricted area around the president of the United States."

If convicted, Bursey faces a six-month trip up the river and a $5,000 fine. Federal Magistrate Bristow Marchant denied Bursey`s request for a jury trial because his violation is categorized as a petty offense. Some observers believe that the feds are seeking to set a precedent in a conservative state such as South Carolina that could then be used against protesters nationwide.

Bursey`s trial took place on Nov. 12 and 13. His lawyers sought the Secret Service documents they believed would lay out the official policies on restricting critical speech at presidential visits. The Bush administration sought to block all access to the documents, but Marchant ruled that the lawyers could have limited access.

Bursey sought to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and presidential adviser Karl Rove to testify. Bursey lawyer Lewis Pitts declared, "We intend to find out from Mr. Ashcroft why and how the decision to prosecute Mr. Bursey was reached." The magistrate refused, however, to enforce the subpoenas. Secret Service agent Holly Abel testified at the trial that Bursey was told to move to the "free-speech zone" but refused to cooperate.

The feds have offered some bizarre rationales for hog-tying protesters. Secret Service agent Brian Marr explained to National Public Radio, "These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way." Except for having their constitutional rights shredded.

The ACLU, along with several other organizations, is suing the Secret Service for what it charges is a pattern and practice of suppressing protesters at Bush events in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and elsewhere. The ACLU`s Witold Walczak said of the protesters, "The individuals we are talking about didn`t pose a security threat; they posed a political threat."

The Secret Service is duty-bound to protect the president. But it is ludicrous to presume that would-be terrorists are lunkheaded enough to carry anti-Bush signs when carrying pro-Bush signs would give them much closer access. And even a policy of removing all people carrying signs -- as has happened in some demonstrations -- is pointless because potential attackers would simply avoid carrying signs. Assuming that terrorists are as unimaginative and predictable as the average federal bureaucrat is not a recipe for presidential longevity.

The Bush administration`s anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries.

When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mark Riley observed, "The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by George Bush and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can`t be heard."

Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.

For Bush`s recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city and impose a "virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain`s Evening Standard. But instead of a "free-speech zone," the Bush administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from protesters` messages.

Such unprecedented restrictions did not inhibit Bush from portraying himself as a champion of freedom during his visit. In a speech at Whitehall on Nov. 19, Bush hyped the "forward strategy of freedom" and declared, "We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings."

Attempts to suppress protesters become more disturbing in light of the Homeland Security Department`s recommendation that local police departments view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who "expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government." If police vigorously followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the official lists of suspected terrorists.

Protesters have claimed that police have assaulted them during demonstrations in New York, Washington and elsewhere.

One of the most violent government responses to an antiwar protest occurred when local police and the federally funded California Anti-Terrorism Task Force fired rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders at the Port of Oakland, injuring a number of people.

When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that`s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

Van Winkle justified classifying protesters as terrorists: "I`ve heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn`t just bombs going off and killing people."

Such aggressive tactics become more ominous in the light of the Bush administration`s advocacy, in its Patriot II draft legislation, of nullifying all judicial consent decrees restricting state and local police from spying on those groups who may oppose government policies.

On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft effectively abolished restrictions on FBI surveillance of Americans` everyday lives first imposed in 1976. One FBI internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists "for plenty of reasons, chief of which it will enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of the FBI`s "belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of act which might be criminal," according to a Senate report.

On Nov. 23 news broke that the FBI is actively conducting surveillance of antiwar demonstrators, supposedly to "blunt potential violence by extremist elements," according to a Reuters interview with a federal law enforcement official.

Given the FBI`s expansive definition of "potential violence" in the past, this is a net that could catch almost any group or individual who falls into official disfavor.

James Bovard is the author of "Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil." This article is adapted from one that appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of the American Conservative.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Unfair assault on Greenpeace

Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/EDGQV3KFI21.DTL


PEOPLE WHO commit nonviolent civil disobedience should know there are consequences. You can be hurt, fined or arrested; you may even serve time in prison.

Still, such dissent has a long and honorable tradition in American history -- from the abolitionists to the modern civil rights movement, when sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience captured the nation`s attention and ended legal segregation.

Employing such tactics, two Greenpeace activists in April 2002 climbed aboard a cargo ship off the Florida coast from an inflatable speed boat. Before they could unfurl a banner protesting the alleged importation of mahogany from Brazil -- stringently regulated by the international community to prevent damage to the Amazon`s environment -- they were detained, spent a weekend in custody, were released, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and were sentenced to the time already served.

Normally, that would be the end of the story.

Fifteen months later, however, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Greenpeace, the organization, for authorizing an act of civil disobedience. They used an obscure 1872 law intended to end the practice of "sailor mongering" -- luring sailors with liquor and prostitutes.

Although the organization cannot serve time in prison, it can be placed on probation and required to report its activities to the government. Greenpeace could also lose its tax-exempt status, which would destroy the public interest organization.

Greenpeace was an early critic of the Bush administration. Soon after the Bush inauguration, Greenpeace activists held a demonstration at the president`s ranch where they unfurled a banner reading "Bush: The Toxic Texan. Don`t Mess With the Earth." Ever since, they have a waged a persistent campaign against Bush`s environmental policies.

To Jonathan Turley, a professor law at George Washington University, this obscure "law is being used to prosecute the administration`s most vocal critics in an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment . . . and appears to be part of a broader campaign by (Attorney General John) Ashcroft to protect the nation against free speech."

For much of its history, Greenpeace has used various means of civil disobedience to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear submarines, human rights abuses and threats to the environment.

These protestors are not above the law. When they trespass, stop commerce or otherwise intrude on others` rights, they should be arrested and forced to face the consequences. But the Bush administration is going too far by trying to use the relatively minor offenses of a few individuals to incapacitate an organization.

The prosecution of Greenpeace has the foul smell of politics and an attempt to stifle dissent.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Beim 2. Anlauf hat`s geklappt, nachdem vor drei Wochen Saddam Dean die Titelstory geklaut hat.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3869798/
The Dean Dilemma
ALL THE RAGE: His blunt talk`s propelled him to the top, but some Democrats worry that Dean`s shoot-from-the-hip style and shifting views might doom him in November. The doctor`s ills—and how his foes plan to exploit them

By Howard Fineman
NewsweekJan. 12 issue - The murmurs of doubt are faint, barely audible above the background hum of the Internet cosmos, but they are worth listening to at the moment, for the doubters don`t seem to be "trolls"—provocateurs in digital disguise—and they express concerns about their favorite son, Dr. Howard Dean, in the bosom of his own blogosphere.
Dammit, tell him to get his mouth under control!" says "WVMicko" on a forum conducted by Dean`s official Web site. "He`s been all over the map on a lot of things, and the way he shoots off his mouth is a big reason why." A poster to the site named "Lancaster" frets that his wife is put off by Dean`s confrontational personality. "Her initial reaction to Dean? `That guy scares me.` Now, I`m not a full-fledged Deanie, but I`m strongly leaning that way... but she`s still not convinced that Dean is the right guy for the job." A writer named "irmaly" also views Dean`s personality as a vulnerability. "I am a strong Dean supporter," irmaly declares, "but I think the campaign is missing this most important point—the need to focus strongly on getting up over the perception of `mean, angry Dean.` Dean is portrayed as a man who, rather than share a beer in a local hangout, will fight you for yours. I realize this isn`t true, but Bush and Company knows perception is everything, and they have already had some success at seriously hurting Dean on this perception. I don`t know how you get up over this, but you have to, or we will lose."

Like the meteoric Internet start-up he in many ways resembles, Dr. Howard Dean is poised to merge with—or conduct a hostile takeover of—an "old media" conglomerate, the Democratic Party. For now, the country doctor and former Vermont governor remains the odds-on favorite to win its presidential nomination in a voting process that, technically, began last week when the Michigan party began accepting e-mail requests for e-mail ballots. The first events in the physical territory of politics take place later this month: the Iowa caucuses on the 19th, the New Hampshire primary on the 27th. Of the nine candidates in the race, Dean has raised the most money, claims to have the most cash on hand and has the lead in all the national polls and in those early-voting states, too.
Yet no one since jimmy Carter has risen to front-runnerhood in quite the way Dean has: as a largely invisible outsider catapulted to a commanding position without so much as a nod from the Beltway political kingmakers. Dean`s blunt, combative persona—and his opposition to George W. Bush`s war in Iraq—allowed him to rocket to the top via the Internet. But, on the center stage of traditional politics, he`s a controversial figure, launching attacks but airily refusing (especially now that he`s ahead in the polls) to answer charges of his rivals; given to fights for their own sake, not-so-subtle adjustments of positions, sloppy statements and seemingly self-inflicted wounds. Thus far, the resulting dust-ups haven`t hurt him. In fact, they may have done the opposite, inspiring team spirit among Deanies and branding him vividly as the kind of anti-establishment, hell-for-leather, shin-kicker who grass-roots Democrats want to lead them into mortal combat against the presidential imperium.

Still, there are doubts about Dr. Dean—and a desire to get a second opinion before accepting his diagnosis. The occasional whispers on his blog are amplified to a deafening roar elsewhere—by rivals on the campaign trail who are honing strategies (and sometimes plotting with each other) to stop him; by Beltway insiders, especially Clinton loyalists, who fear (correctly) that Dean represents a changing of the guard, and by Republicans in and out of the White House who cannot wait to get their hands on a man they—and many Democrats—see as a composite reincarnation of big-time losers such as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
Under the old rules—which may or may not apply to likely Democratic primary voters in the Age of Bush—Dean would seem to be ripe for a fall. For starters, he has perpetrated any number of what, in the trade, are known as gaffes, requiring a crew of staffers (and his skill at fast talking) to constantly clean up after his own parade. Political junkies are familiar with the litany. Among other things, Dean has condescended to Southern, rural white men by inferring that they all drive pickup trucks with Confederate-flag decals on the back; metaphorically compared Washington insiders (including, presumably, those few who support him) to cockroaches; inferred that all his major rivals are really Republicans, and admitted that his lack of foreign-policy experience would require him to "plug that hole in my resume" with his vice presidential pick. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Dean dismissed such lists as mere catalogs of his brutal candor. "The definition of a `gaffe` in Washington is somebody who tells the truth but shouldn`t have," he said, echoing the journalist Michael Kinsley, who coined a similar aphorism. Critics see it differently than the governor does. "I think the guy has mad-mouth disease," said James Carville, Bill Clinton`s former top political adviser and dean of the "Stop Dean" spinners.

More serious, Dean`s foes say, is his penchant for adjusting his positions on issues, especially since he`s hawking himself as a nonpolitical Yankee with a backbone as thick as the trunk of a Vermont maple. Indeed, on the war in Iraq, he was opposed from the start and has wavered very little. On other issues, though, there`s been more swaying in the breeze. Years ago he was a supporter of Jimmy Carter`s against the insurgency of Sen. Ted Kennedy and was, therefore, on the pro-business side of the party; now Dean rails against Carter`s political descendants in the Democratic Leadership Council. Dean was for NAFTA and GATT, but now opposes any further free-trade agreements unless they have higher labor and environmental standards. He once thought it might be wise to raise the retirement age to protect Social Security; now he rules that out. Dean once thought Medicare was a miserable, poorly administered program; now he wants to save and expand it.

In Dean`s NEWSWEEK interview, motion seemed evident in his attitude toward Osama bin Laden. In late December, Dean said he believed the "old-fashioned notion" that, if captured, the master terrorist should be bound over for a jury trial. A few hours later he issued a statement saying that bin Laden should, in fact, be dealt with by the same kind of military-run tribunal Saddam Hussein is expected to face. Last week he told NEWSWEEK that, if the American military has bin Laden in its sights, soldiers should kill him. "Of course we ought to off Osama," he said. "I was asked a hypothetical question about what would happen if Osama was captured. If we can get Osama, we ought to get Osama, however we can get Osama."
Dean`s critics accuse him of more than an excess of bluntness and skill at political maneuver. They think the good doctor isn`t always forthcoming, especially on matters that raise questions about his record. They note his aggressive moves to seal his official papers (he did so for a period longer than that of any previous Vermont governor) and his alternately candid and disingenuous explanations for why he had made the move—in anticipation of running for president, he said at one point; to protect the privacy of HIV/AIDS patients, he said later. Foes note that Dean had his own "secret" energy task force in Vermont, though he rightly points out that its membership was disclosed after its work was done.

A very private man in a public business, Dean seems to chafe—as any mortal would—at the scorched-earth disclosure requirements of presidential politics. He may have gotten a bit too comfortable on that score in Vermont, where governors aren`t required to reveal anything about their personal finances. Still, this is the life he has chosen, and reporters and oppo teams from rival campaigns are on the hunt for stories in the numbers. One interesting topic: his sale of shares in five Vermont banks after he became governor. He told NEWSWEEK he had sold them in 1991 as soon as he realized that briefings from a state banking official contained inside information. Dean told NEWSWEEK that he could have profited more handsomely had he been able to hold on to the shares, but campaign officials say that so far they can`t locate records to document precisely when the sale was made. "When she [the banking official] came in and briefed me, I sold the stocks," Dean told NEWSWEEK, "because I knew that that constituted inside information. Or at least I felt that it did."

Dean also may have some more explaining to do about his relationship with a drug company called Astra, which by 1997 was in a limited partnership with another big drug firm, Merck. In 1998, two things were happening in Montpelier: Dean was running for re-election, and drug companies, including Merck, were lobbying against the imposition of price controls on drugs in the state. Over the years Dean, who at the time opposed the price-control plan, had taken campaign contributions from the drug industry, including $3,000 from Merck. (Dean later turned tougher on the industry.)
In May 1998, NEWSWEEK has learned, Dean earned $4,000 for a speech at a conference sponsored by Astra—a firm that, as it happened, was in the midst of defending itself (unsuccessfully) against a major sexual-harassment suit involving 80 female former employees. Dean was scheduled to give another speech to another Astra meeting five months later, in October 1998—until a reporter got wind of his plan. Asked about it at a press conference, Dean at first defended the idea, but within hours changed his mind, saying he didn`t want to give his political enemies ammunition. What he didn`t disclose at the press conference—and, indeed, never mentioned later—was that he had already been paid for the earlier speech to the same controversial company. Tax returns made public by the campaign last year show an additional payment, of $5,000, for a speech in 1999. Dean aides said the payment came from Astra, but were unable late last weekend to provide an immediate explanation for the speech or the fee.

None of which—the gaffes, the changes of stance, the full nondisclosure—rankles Dean`s foes nearly as much as his implied assertion that no one has a right to criticize him, or conspire against him, now that he is the front runner. His eight competitors (and their allies) were infuriated when he rolled out Al Gore not only to endorse him, but to argue that Democrats should mimic the Republican "11th commandment," and speak no ill of other candidates—meaning, primarily, Dean. The rest of the field is especially outraged because Dean, a former wrestler and born rhetorical knee-capper, rose to prominence largely through angry attacks on "traditional Washington politicians" whom he portrayed as kowtowing to Bush in a frenzy of misplaced patriotism following 9/11. "Now he`s stalling for time and wants to call off politics," says Bill Carrick, senior adviser to Rep. Dick Gephardt. "Dean is saying it`s over already, so why get the voters involved?" Indeed, Dean can`t quite resist the temptation to feel that way: in the NEWSWEEK interview, he described the last year as "a tough long crawl, and we`re down to a little bit more than two weeks."

In fact, if Dean`s opponents have their way, his marathon is just beginning. In Iowa, where the locals will meet a week from next Monday in hundreds of caucuses, the 11th commandment doesn`t exist. A shadowy, labor-funded independent group (cheered on, at least indirectly, by the campaigns of Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry) attacked Dean as soft on defense and ignorant on foreign policy. Dean responded with a mailing—he claims not to know about its contents—attacking the two foes as "Bush lite." Dean, who forsook federal funding so he could spend dough with impunity where and when he wanted, is running neck and neck with Gephardt in Iowa, and is pouring resources into the state. So, too, is Kerry, who is desperate to revive his faltering campaign with a surprisingly strong finish there.

Dean`s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, sounds like a football coach praying for a first down that will allow his team to run out the clock. Other campaigns are concentrating on a state or two with the hope of slowing Dean down: Gephardt and Kerry in Iowa; Gen. Wesley Clark, Kerry and Sen. Joseph Lieberman in New Hampshire; Clark and Sen. John Edwards in the seven states (led by South Carolina) that vote on Feb. 3. "The good news is that we`re ahead," says Trippi. "The bad news is that, unlike the rest of the field, we have to run in all 50 states." (The Dean campaign has little hope of winning Oklahoma, Trippi admits, but is airing TV spots there anyway.)

Dean will have the cash to play everywhere, but so, it appears, may one other candidate: Clark. The retired general, a growing favorite of Clintonites and party donors from coast to coast (and with an impressively savvy Internet operation of his own), came relatively close to matching Dean in fund-raising in the fourth quarter of last year (collecting roughly $11 million to Dean`s $16 million). Trippi claims, with some justice, that "we`re the only campaign that can reload" because Clark, despite his impressive Internet showing, is raising money mostly from large donors who are "maxing out" with $2,000 contributions. But if he catches on, Clark might be able to "reload" in a different way, by harvesting big donations from Clintonistas and former supporters of Washington-based candidates who fall by the wayside.

In any case, Clark has the potential to be Trippi`s—and Dean`s—worst nightmare, and a comeuppance of a sort as well: a second, fast-closing Web-based outsider who can, in ways Dean cannot, appeal to insiders while at the same time "plugging that hole" Dean has on defense and foreign policy.

One Dean defense against the rise of Clark may be the devalued—but not quite defunct—campaign of John Kerry, who began last year as the pundits` pick. But his campaign has been riven with confusion and mixed messages from the moment last spring when he voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq.

Now, in one of those cruel ironies that only politics can impose, Dean and Gephardt—for disparate reasons—want to prop Kerry up. Dean`s motive: to make sure that Kerry, not Clark, finishes in second place in New Hampshire; Gephardt`s motive: to siphon crucial votes from Dean in Iowa.

In fact, all of the Un-Deans may conspire, in as many local Iowa caucuses as possible, to throw support to a temporary ally, depending on which of Dean`s foes is most likely to win delegates in each meeting. Trippi denounced the tactic in an angry e-mail to Dean supporters, though there is no evidence of a mass attempt to use it. Carrick reacted with scorn. "Is there a coordinated effort to do that? No," he said. "Do I hope it happens? Absolutely. I`m sick of their paranoid, creepy attitude." A Dean loss in Iowa—still a possibility—would open up the race, but not just for Gephardt. Trippi`s other deep concern: a strong second-place finish for Clark in New Hampshire, setting up the former general for a quick, Jacksonian (as in Stonewall) raid on the South.

Asked by NEWSWEEK which states Gore lost in 2000 that Dean would win in —2004 (excluding Florida), the doctor mentioned West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, Ohio and New Hampshire, "just for openers. I don`t have the map right in front of me."

But Karl Rove does. In his office at the White House, and at campaign headquarters in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, the people who run "BC04"— the Bush-Cheney re-elect—are savoring the possibility of what they regard as the best outcome: the triumph-damaged Dean, wrapped in miles of videotaped criticism from his fellow Democrats. A top Republican Party official argues that the former governor`s commitment to a "personalized angry campaign of the left" is too deep to be retooled, and would make him easy pickings in the fall. In the BC04 view, Democratic "Blue States" are turning "Purple" under the influence of Bush`s sunny persona, good news on the economy and the capture of Saddam Hussein. Bush strategists scoff at the idea that Dean can compete in the South. And they note that the president`s e-mail list—more than 10 times the size of the Dean campaign`s—is geared to getting out the vote, not for chitchat. But say this for Dean: he`s letting his supporters speak their mind—and even express their concerns about him—and that is good for democracy no matter who wins in November.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

`I`m Feeling Like Job`
Dean on the heat of battle, Osama bin Laden—and Jesus
NewsweekJan. 12 issue - It`s rough at the top, or so insurgent turned front runner Howard Dean is finding out. Dean addressed the incoming fire, his latest thoughts on Osama bin Laden and his favorite Biblical passages in a conversation with NEWSWEEK`s Howard Fineman last week. Excerpts:
FINEMAN: In this campaign so far, what`s been—from your point of view—the most unfair or below-the-belt attack leveled against you?
DEAN: It`s not so much that it`s an unfair below-the-belt attack or anything like that. It`s that what we really ought to be doing is focusing on a positive message. We`re not going to beat each other and we`re not going to beat George Bush if our only message is negative.

But out there in Iowa in that mailing, didn`t you call both Gephardt and Kerry "Bush lite"?
Oh, I don`t see the mailings. I`m talking about being on the stump. God knows what`s going on in the mailings.

There are some people who would say that it takes a little bit of chutzpah for you to complain since at various times you`ve called the people inside Washington cockroaches—
That actually is not true. What I said was that they`ll be scurrying around in Washington just like cockroaches. That is not calling members of Congress cockroaches... A lot of the attacks are about putting words in my mouth that I never said. One of the attacks they don`t bring up very often anymore is the Saddam Hussein thing, that it`s not safer since Saddam Hussein`s been captured—because we now have 23 troops killed and we`re having fighter planes escorting passenger jets through American airspace. I noticed that line of attack disappeared fairly quickly.
Governor, why do you think that so many of the establishment-party figures have reacted with almost comic fear of you, like you`re some kind of evil force from another planet?
Because when you get cozy in Washington, you`d rather lose and maintain your cozy loser`s position than you would take risks and win with somebody from outside Washington. That syndrome happened to Bill Clinton. It happened to Jimmy Carter. If we win the nomination, it`ll happen with us. At the end we need to pull the party together. We need everybody—every single Democrat plus all the new people we`re going to bring into this election.

Do you think that President Bush—having captured Saddam—is tougher to beat than he was? His poll numbers are pretty good; the economy at least on the surface looks OK.
I think it`s too early to tell. The Saddam stuff is going to be temporary because we`re clearly not safer. I think the economy doesn`t reflect what most people think is happening in their own lives, so it`s too early to tell. Until ordinary people feel like their jobs are coming back and they can pay their health-insurance bills and their kids` college-tuition bills again, I don`t think that the economy has turned around.

If the military would get Osama bin Laden in its sights, do you think that they should kill him on sight?
I think that is not my call. I`m not going to get into that.

If you were commander in chief, what would your call be?
If I were commander in chief... we`ve gotta get Osama however we can. If they have the opportunity to kill Osama, they have to do it. Bill Clinton signed that order in 1996 and I certainly support it.

But that would not afford him the opportunity of the presumption of innocence and an attorney, would it?
There`s a lot of stuff that gets totally jerked around. All this stuff about Dean says things that are gaffes—the definition of a gaffe in Washington is somebody who tells that truth but shouldn`t have. All that stuff about Osama is ridiculous. Of course we ought to off Osama. I was asked a hypothetical question about what would happen if Osama was captured. If we can get Osama, we ought to get Osama, however we can get Osama, period.

Do you have a deadline for removing U.S. troops from Iraq?
Absolutely not. I think that would be a big mistake. To remove troops prematurely, Al Qaeda—which was not in Iraq, but is now—will set up shop in Iraq and present an enormous national-security danger.
Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?
I certainly see him as the son of God. I think whether I`m saved or not is not gonna be up to me.

Do you have a favorite Bible passage or book or theologian?
I like the Book of Job.

[Laughs] Does it strike you more personally after this campaign?
I`m feeling a little more Job-like recently.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

[Joerver]

Ein Interview mit Noam Chomsky
von Noam Chomsky und Hawzheen O. Kareem
Komal Newspaper / ZNet 02.01.2004

Als Gegner der US-Politik gehören sie welcher Partei an?

Wenn sie Demokraten oder Republikaner meinen ist die Antwort: keinem von beiden. Politikwissenschaftler haben schon oft gezeigt, dass die USA eigentlich ein Ein-Parteienstaat ist – die Businesss-Partei. Und diese hat zwei Faktionen, die Demokraten und die Republikaner. Der Großteil der Bevölkerung scheint das auch so zu sehen. Ein sehr hoher Prozentsatz, manchmal mehr als 80%, glaubt, dass die Regierung „den Wenigen und den Sonderinteressen“ dient, nicht „den Leuten“.

Die umstrittenen Wahlen des Jahres 2000 betrachteten um die 75% als hauptsächlich eine Farce, die sie nicht betrifft, ein Spiel das von reichen Unterstützern, Parteibossen und der Public Relations-Industrie gespielt wird, welche den Kandidaten beibringt fast nur bedeutungslose Sachen zu sagen, die vielleicht ein paar Stimmen einbringen. Das war noch VOR der eigentlichen Wahl, mit den Betrugsvorwürfen und der Auswahl Bushs mit einer Minderheit der gesamten Stimmen.

Ernsthaftere Politikwissenschaftler des Mainstreams beschreiben die USA nicht als „Demokratie“ sondern als „Polykratie“: ein System in welchem die Elite die Entscheidungen trifft und die Öffentlichkeit dies periodisch bestätigt. Es steckt sicherlich viel Wahres hinter der Schlußfolgerung des führenden amerikanischen Sozialphilosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts, John Dewey, dass die Politik, so lange bis die wichtigsten wirtschaftlichen Institutionen unter demokratischer Kontrolle stehen, ein „Schatten“ sein wird den „die großen Wirtschaftskräfte [engl.: Big Business] auf die Gesellschaft werfen“.

Was sind die Ziele der amerikanischen Präsenz im Irak und im Nahen Osten?

Das hauptsächliche Ziel ist, was nicht angezweifelt wird, die Kontrolle der riesigen Energiereserven des in der Region um den Persischen Golf, eben auch im Irak. Das ist das im Vordergrund stehende Ziel der westlichen Industriemächte, seit der Zeit als der Irak von den Briten erschaffen worden war, um sicherzustellen, dass die irakischen Ölreserven in britischen Händen sein würden, und dass der neu geschaffene Staat Irak keinen freien Zugang zum Golf hat. Zu dieser Zeit war die USA kein führender Akteur im Weltgeschehen. Aber nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war die USA die bei weitem größte Weltmacht, und die Kontrolle der Energiereserven des Nahen Ostens wurde zu einem der vordersten Ziele ihrer Außenpolitik, wie es dies zuvor für ihre Vorläufer war. In den 40ern erkannten die Planer der USA, dass (in ihren Worten) die Energieressourcen des Golfs eine „überwältigende Quelle strategischer Macht“ und „einer der größten Materiellen Preise der Weltgeschichte“ sind. Natürlich hatten sie vor sie zu kontrollieren – aber für viele Jahre konnten sie sie für sich nicht besonders nutzen, und in der Zukunft wird die USA, laut US Nachrichtendiensten, sich mehr auf stabilere Ressourcen am Atlantik (also Westafrika und auf der westlichen Hemisphäre) verlassen.

Eine oberste Priorität bleibt dennoch die Kontrolle der Ressourcen am Golf, von denen erwartet wird, dass sie in der nächsten Zeit 2/3 des weltweiten Energieverbrauchs decken. Abgesehen davon, dass „Profite jenseits den Träumen der Habgier“ erzielt werden, wie ein Standard-Geschichtsbuch über die Ölindustrie es ausdrückt, bleibt die Region noch immer „eine überwältigende Quelle strategischer Macht“, eine [Region mit] Hebelwirkung zur Kontrolle der Welt. Die Kontrolle der Energiereserven des Golfs bietet eine „Vetomacht“ über die Handlungen von Rivalen, wie der führende Planer George Kennan vor einem halben Jahrhundert bemerkt hat.

Europa und Asien verstehen das sehr gut, und sie haben schon lange versucht einen eigenen unabhängigen Zugang zu Ölressourcen zu bekommen. Ein Großteil des Rangelns um die Macht im Nahen Osten und in Zentralasien hat mit diesen Themen zu tun. Die Bevölkerungen der Region werden als beiläufig betrachtet, so lange sie passiv und gehorsam sind. Wenige wissen das so gut wie die KurdInnen, zumindest wenn sie sich an ihre eigene Geschichte erinnern.

Die Planer der USA haben sicher vor im Irak einen Klientenstaat zu etablieren, mit demokratischen Formalitäten, wenn das möglich ist, wenn nur für Propagandazwecke. Aber der Irak soll das sein was die Briten, als sie die Region betrieben, eine „arabische Facade“ nannten, mit der britischen Macht im Hintergrund, wenn das Land zu viel Unabhängigkeit sucht. Das ist ein bekannter Teil der Geschichte dieser Region im vergangenen Jahrhundert.

Es ist auch die Art in welcher die USA ihre eigenen Gebiete in der westlichen Hemisphäre für ein Jahrhundert geführt hat. Es gibt überhaupt keine Andeutung für irgendeine wunderliche Änderung. Die Besatzungstruppen der USA haben im Irak ein wirtschaftliches Programm gestartet, das kein souveränes Land jemals akzeptieren würde: Es garantiert beinahe, dass die irakische Wirtschaft von westlichen multinationalen (hauptsächlich US-) Konzernen und Banken übernommen wird. Das ist eine Politik die für jene Länder denen sie aufgezwungen worden ist verheerend war; In der Tat sind solche Programme ein Hauptgrund für die heutige scharfe Kluft zwischen den reichen Ländern und ihren früheren Kolonien.

Es gibt natürlich auch immer einen inländischen Sektor der sich durch Kollaboration mit der herrschenden „Facade“ bereichert. Bis jetzt ist die Ölindustrie von den ausländischen Übernahmen ausgenommen worden, weil das zu eklatant gewesen wäre. Aber das wird wahrscheinlich noch passieren, wenn die Aufmerksamkeit sich von dort wegbewegt hat. Außerdem hat Washington bereits verkündet, dass es vor hat ein „status of forces“ Abkommen aufzuerlegen, welches es der USA erlauben wird im Irak Militärkräfte zu behalten und, was sehr wichtig ist, Militärbasen, die ersten stabilen US Militärbasen direkt im Herzen der größten Energiereserven der Welt.

Als Experte für amerikanische Geschichte und Politik, glauben sie, dass es gut für die KurdInnen ist, wenn sie dem amerikanischen Projekt im Irak vollkommen vertrauen?

Sie kennen das berühmte kurdische Sprichwort was Vertrauen schenken angeht besser als ich. (Chomsky meint wohl „Kurden haben keine Freunde“). Das gilt auch für andere, aber KurdInnen die mit ihrer eigene Geschichte vertraut sind brauchen nicht daran erinnert werden, wie sie 1975 von den USA verraten worden sind, zurück gelassen um vom US Klientenstaat im Iran massakriert zu werden, und wie die Leute die jetzt in Washington regieren Saddam Hussein in der ganzen Zeit in welcher er seine schlimmsten Gräueltaten beging unterstützten, und das lange nachdem der Krieg mit dem Iran vorbei war, aus Gründen welche die Bush I Regierung ziemlich offen bekannt gab: wegen ihrer Verpflichtung die US-Exporteure zu unterstützen, aber sie fügten die übliche Rhetorik hinzu, wie die Unterstützung ihres Freundes Saddams den Menschenrechten und der „Stabilität“ nützlich sei.

Die selben Leute – die jetzt in Washington wieder an der Macht sind – unterstützten Saddam auch als er 1991 den Aufstand niederschlug der den Tyrann stürzten hätte können, und erklärten wieder warum. Man kann in der New York Times lesen, dass für die USA „die beste aller Welten“ eine „militärische Junta mit einer eisernen Faust“ wäre, die den Irak genauso regieren würde wie es Saddam tat, und dass Saddam mehr Hoffnung für die „Stabilität“ des Iraks bietet als jene welche ihn umstürzen wollen. Sie geben nun vor entsetzt über die Massengräber im Süden und über die Gräueltaten in Halabja zu sein, aber das ist reiner und offensichtlicher Betrug, wie wir sehen können wenn wir nachsehen, was sie taten als diese Gräueltaten passierten.

Natürlich wussten sie alles über [die Massaker], aber kümmerten sich nicht darum. Und mit all dieser späteren Vortäuschung [einer Entrüstung] über das Halabja Massaker, wie viel medizinische Hilfe haben sie den Opfern im letzten Jahrzehnt zur Verfügung gestellt? Außerdem betrifft das nicht nur die USA. Das ist, unglücklicherweise, die Standard-Art auf welche Machsysteme agieren, in der sicheren Gewissheit, dass die intellektuellen Klassen zu Hause eine passende Verschleierung aus hohen Idealen basteln werden. Das war sogar bei den schlimmsten Massenmördern so: Hitler, den Japanischen Faschisten, und eben auch bei Saddam Hussein.

Wenn die Schwachen ihr Vertrauen auf Machtsysteme legen, verlangen sie einfach nach einer Katastrophe. Sie können sich dafür entscheiden mit den mächtigen Staaten zu kooperieren, aber wenn sie das tun, sollten sie das ohne Illusionen machen. Und wiederum weiß das niemand besser als die Kurden, nicht nur hier im Irak sondern auch in der Türkei und anderswo.

Die USA fand im Irak keine Massenvernichtungswaffen und redet jetzt darüber dem Nahen Osten Demokratie zu bringen, wird dieses Projekt erfolgreich sein, und wird diese Demokratie echt sein?

Nachdem sie keine Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden haben hat Washington seine Propaganda auf die „Etablierung von Demokratie“ verlegt. Das ist schlicht eine Widerlegung ihrer früheren Behauptung, dass die „einzige Frage“ wäre, ob Saddam entwaffnen würde. Aber mit einer genügend gehorsamen intellektuellen Klasse und loyalen Medien kann die Farce ohne Störungen weitergehen. Um diese neue Propagandabehauptung einzuschätzen würde eine rationale Person fragen, was jene welche jetzt ihr „Verlangen nach Demokratie“ verkünden tatsächlich getan haben, und heute tun, wenn ihre Interessen in Gefahr sind.

Ich werde nicht die komplette Aufzählung durchgehen, aber jene welche daran interessiert sind diese Behauptungen einzuschätzen sollten das sicherlich tun. Sie werden herausfinden, dass „Demokratie“ geduldet wird, aber nur wenn es eine „top-down Version der Demokratie“ ist, in welcher die Eliten die mit den US- Business und Staatsinteressen kollaborieren die Kontrolle innehaben – Ich zitiere von einer der führenden Autoritäten für Lateinamerikanische Demokratie, der als Insider schreibt, da er in den „Demokratiestärkungs“-Programmen der Reagan-Verwaltung mitgearbeitet hat, welche Zentralamerika verwüsteten und im Nahen Osten und auch im Süden Afrikas eine Spur des Schreckens zurückgelassen haben.

Außerdem wird heute die gleiche Politik verfolgt, ohne die kleinste Änderung. Bringt die USA Demokratie nach Usbekistan? Oder nach Äquatorialguinea, das auch von einem Monster regiert wird, der mit Saddam Hussein vergleichbar ist, aber vom Weißen Haus Bushs herzlich willkommen geheißen wird, weil er auf einem großen See von Öl sitzt. Man betrachte Paul Wolfowitz, der vom Propagandasystem als führender „Visionär“ beschrieben wird, der Demokratie verlangt und dessen „Herz blutet“ wenn er an das Leiden der armen Muslime denkt. Wahrscheinlich erklärt das, warum er einer der führenden Apologeten General Suhartos von Indonesien war, einem der größten Massenmörder und Folterer der modernen Zeit, und ihn noch 1997 lobte, gerade bevor er von einer internen Revolte gestürzt worden ist. Es ist zu einfach fortzufahren.

Für die reichen und Mächtigen ist diese Illusion über sich selbst befriedigend und bequem. Viele finden es recht angenehm sich selbst großzügig mit Lob zu überhäufen, eine der wichtigsten Rollen der Intellektuellen, in der ganzen Geschichte schon. Für die Schwachen und Schutzlosen ist der Glaube an Illusionen kein kluger Entschluss – wie die Opfer von jahrhundertelanger imperialistischer Praxis sicherlich verstehen sollten.

Ist der derzeitige Krieg der USA zum Schutz ihrer nationalen Sicherheit legitim? Was sagen sie zur nationalen Sicherheit der USA?

Die nationale Sicherheit der USA wird nur durch Terror und Massenvernichtungswaffen (MVWen) bedroht – welche früher oder später wahrscheinlich kombiniert werden, vielleicht mit furchtbaren Konsequenzen. Nachrichtendienste der USA und anderer Länder, und unabhängige ausländische AußenpolitikanalystInnen, haben vorhergesagt, dass die Invasion des Iraks zu vermehrtem Terror und vermehrter Verbreitung von MVWen führen wird, und ihre Vorhersagen sind bereits bestätigt worden. Die Gründe sind offensichtlich.

Die führende Weltmacht hat in der Nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie des Septembers 2002 ihre Absicht verkündet jeden anzugreifen, wie es ihr gefällt, ohne glaubhaften Vorwand oder internationale Autorisierung. Dann machte sie sich sofort daran eine „exemplarische Aktion“ durchzuführen um der Welt zu demonstrieren, dass sie genau das meint was sie sagt, und marschierte in einem wichtigen Land ein, von dem sie natürlich wusste, dass es fast ohne Verteidigung war.

Wenn potentielle Ziele das beobachten sagen sie nicht: „Danke, bitte schneid mir den Hals durch“. Sie werden es eher mit Abschreckungsmitteln versuchen, und manchmal mit Rache. Niemand kann, was militärische Stärke angeht, mit der USA konkurrieren, die soviel [für ihr Militär] ausgibt wie der ganze Rest der Welt zusammen. Aber die Schwachen haben Waffen: nämlich Terror und MVWen. Das ist der Grund für die fast einstimmigen Vorhersagen von ExpertInnen, dass Terror und MVWen von der Verkündung der Nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie und der Invasion des Iraks angespornt werden.

Die Bush-Verwaltung versteht das genauso gut wie die Nachrichtendienste und unabhängige AnalystInnen. Sie wollen nicht die Nationale Sicherheit der USA zu schädigen und die Bevölkerung ernsten Gefahren auszusetzen. [Aber] das ist einfach keine hohe Priorität für sie, wenn man sie mit anderen vergleicht: die Herrschaft über die Welt und die Umsetzung eines radikalen reaktionären Programms in ihrem Land, welches darauf abzielt die progressive Gesetzgebung des letzten Jahrhunderts abzubauen, die zum Schutz der allgemeinen Bevölkerung vor den Heimsuchungen von marktwirtschaftlichen Systemen diente.

Sie wollen auch einen sehr mächtigen Staat: sobald sie ins Amt kamen erhöhten sie die Regierungsausgaben (relativ zur Wirtschaft) auf das höchste Level seit der ersten Zeit als sie an der Macht waren, vor 20 Jahren, in der Reagan-Verwaltung. Aber der mächtige Staat den sie wollen soll die Interessen der Reichen und Privilegierten verfolgen, nicht jene der allgemeinen Bevölkerung. Wieder werden jene die ein bisschen etwas von Geschichte wissen erkennen, dass politische Führer sehr oft in ihrer Suche nach Macht, Herrschaft und Reichtum das Risiko einer Katastrophe akzeptieren.

In welchem Ausmaß sucht die USA internationale Legitimität und Vereinbarungen?

Die USA hat schon seit langem ihre Verachtung für den Sicherheitsrat, den Weltgerichtshof und das internationale Recht und [internationale] Organisationen im Allgemeinen, gezeigt. Das wird überhaupt nicht bestritten. Aber diese Verwaltung ist so extrem in ihrer Verachtung für das internationale Recht und seine Institutionen, dass sie sogar von der Elite der Außenpolitik dafür verurteilt worden ist, was noch nie zuvor passiert ist. Außerdem ist dies alles so offensichtlich und dreist, dass man es wirklich nicht besprechen muss.

Waren die UNO und andere internationale Organisationen erfolgreich dabei ihre Unabhängigkeit zu bewahren?

Offensichtlich nicht. Die Bush-Verwaltung hat die UNO vor einem Jahr darüber informiert, dass sie „relevant“ sein kann, wenn sie die Befehle der USA befolgt, oder sie kann (wie es Colin Powell formuliert hat) ein Debattierclub sein. das ging so weiter und geht auch heute noch so weiter, nicht nur im Fall des Iraks.

Wenn man nur den Nahen Osten betrachtet hat die USA ihre Praxis der letzten Jahre weitergeführt, ihren Klientenstaat Israel durch Vetos vor Sicherheitsratsbeschlüssen und die Blockade von Beschlüssen der Generalversammlung zu beschützen, und natürlich indem sie militärische Hilfe und wirtschaftliche Unterstützung für ihren Klientenstaat zur Verfügung stellt, um ihm zu erlauben sein Integrationsprogramm der wertvolleren Teile des Westjordanlandes in Israel weiter zu betreiben.

Das ist einer der Gründe warum die USA beim Veto von Sicherheitsratsresolutionen seit den 60ern, als die UNO als Folge der Dekolonisierung und der Erholung der Industriemächte vom Krieg etwas unabhängiger von den USA wurden, weit in Führung war (gefolgt von Großbritannien, und sonst kam niemand auch nur Nahe [an so viele Vetos] heran). Das ist natürlich nicht der einzige Grund. Die USA spricht ihr Veto gegen Sicherheitsratsresolutionen auch in einer Vielzahl anderer Fälle aus, auch bei einer Mahnung an alle Staaten internationales Recht zu beachten – ohne die USA zu erwähnen, aber jeder verstand, an wen dies gerichtet war.

Sie betrachteten die USA als Führer der Terroristen, warum? Und in welchem Ausmaß könnte sie Menschenrechte schützen?

Ich habe die USA nicht „einen Führer der Terroristen“ genannt, aber ich habe die lange und entsetzliche Geschichte der terroristischen Akte der USA und ihre entscheidende Unterstützung für den Terrorismus ihrer Klienten im Detail dokumentiert. Wenn ich diese Geschichte betrachte, benutze ich die offizielle Definition der US Regierung für das Wort „Terrorismus“. Aber wenige sind gewillt die offizielle Definition zu verwenden, weil das die Konsequenz ist die dann sofort folgt.

Wenn man nicht überzeugt ist schaue man sich die reichhaltige Dokumentation an – auch die Geschichte der KurdInnen, bis heute, obwohl die entscheidende US Unterstützung für den Staatsterror gegen die KurdInnen hauptsächlich in den 90ern in der Türkei stattfand, als die Türkei der führende Empfänger von militärischer Hilfe der USA wurde (abgesehen von Israel und Ägypten), und als sie Millionen von KurdInnen von den verwüsteten ländlichen Gebieten trieb, Zehntausende tötete, und jede nur vorstellbare Art von Barbarei beging, was einige der schlimmsten Verbrechen der furchtbaren 90er waren, gerade hier in der Nähe von ihnen.

Ich habe einige der Folgen persönlich gesehen, in den Slums von Istanbul in welche die Flüchtlinge getrieben worden sind, in den Stadtmauern von Diyarbakir, wo sie zu überleben versuchen, und anderswo. Aber sie müssen das sicherlich selbst wissen, [weil es ja] gleich nebenan [passiert ist]. Und das ist nur ein kleiner Auszug aus dieser Geschichte, und dieser lässt die direkte Durchführung von terroristischen Gräueltaten aus. Auch über das gibt es lange und häßliche Dokumentationen.

Tatsächlich ist nur die USA vom Weltgerichtshof für das was eigentlich internationaler Terrorismus ist verurteilt worden, wegen ihrem Angriff auf Nicaragua. Der Gerichtshof trug der Reagan-Verwaltung – jene die jetzt wieder in Washington an der Macht ist – auf, ihren terroristischen Krieg gegen Nicaragua einzustellen. Natürlich ignorierte die Verwaltung den Entschluss des Gerichtshofes, eskalierte auf der Stelle den terroristischen Krieg, und legte Vetos gegen die Sicherheitsratsresolutionen ein welche das Urteil des Gerichtshofes unterstützen. Die USA ist keinen Falls allein, was diese Praktiken betrifft. Im Allgemeinen sind solche Praktiken in dem Ausmaß vorhanden, in dem die Macht besteht Verbrechen zu begehen. Wiederum ist dies den Opfern seit einigen Jahrhunderten bekannt, oder sollte es ihnen zumindest sein.

Können Machtsysteme Menschenrechte schützen? Natürlich können sie das, und manchmal tun sie das, auch die USA. Das passiert wenn der Schutz von Menschenrechten Machtinteressen dient oder wenn eine aufgebrachte Bevölkerung das verlangt. Beide dieser Faktoren waren für den US-Schutz für die irakischen KurdInnen in den 90ern verantwortlich, während die USA gleichzeitig die entscheidende militärische und diplomatische Unterstützung für die grauenhafte Unterdrückung der KurdInnen über der Grenze bereitstellte – aber die Bevölkerung der USA war und bleibt uninformiert über diese Verbrechen; die entscheidenden Beweise werden von den Medien und den intellektuellen Klassen unterdrückt, wie es oft der Fall ist.

In manchen ihrer Arbeiten sagen sie, dass es keine Hoffnung für eine bessere Zukunft gibt, weil die Macht der USA zunimmt, warum sind sie ein pessimistischer Mensch? Bedeutet das, dass das amerikanische Modell nicht erfolgreich sein wird?

Ich habe das nie gesagt. Eher das Gegenteil. Es gibt große Hoffnung für eine bessere Zukunft, und sie zu schaffen sollte die hauptsächliche Priorität für die Menschen in den USA, im Westen im Allgemeinen, und auf dem Rest der Welt sein. Und es gibt sehr positive Zeichen, was ich andauernd betone. Was das „amerikanische Modell“ betrifft, kommt es darauf an, was sie meinen. Die Menschen in den Vereinigten Staaten haben viele wunderbare Errungenschaften die für sie sprechen: Der Schutz der Redefreiheit [hier] ist zum Beispiel einzigartig auf der Welt, soweit ich das weiß, und viele andere Rechte sind gewonnen worden. Das waren keine Geschenke von Oben, sondern das Ergebnis von engagiertem öffentlichem Kampf. Wenn dies das Modell ist, an das Sie denken, hoffe ich dass es noch erfolgreicher sein wird, in den USA und anderswo.

Wenn Sie mit dem „amerikanischen Modell“ das meinen, was in der Nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie Bushs verkündet wird, und in die Praxis umgesetzt wird, oder das neoliberale wirtschaftliche Modell, welches darauf ausgelegt ist die Kontrolle des Großteils der Welt auf transnationale Korporationen übertragen wird, welche miteinander und mit einigen mächtigen Staaten verbunden sind – was die internationale Wirtschaftspresse „die de facto Weltregierung“ nennt, dann hoffe ich sicherlich, dass es nicht erfolgreich sein wird, was wir alle tun sollten.

In welchem Ausmaß sind die Medien und die Propaganda erfolgreich dabei, die amerikanischen BürgerInnen dazu zu bringen, die Politik ihrer Regierung zu akzeptieren? Könnten Gegner dieser Politik ihre Stimme hörbar machen lassen?

Das ist unterschiedlich. Man betrachte, zum Beispiel, die Invasion des Iraks. Die Invasion wurde eigentlich im September 2002 bekannt gegeben, zusammen mit der Nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie. Dem folgte eine massive Propagandakampagne der Regierung, bzw. den Medien, welche schnell große Teile der US Meinung ganz vom internationalen Spektrum schoben. Eine Mehrheit kam zu dem Eindruck, dass Saddam Hussein eine akute Gefahr für die USA ist, dass er für die Verbrechen des 11. Septembers 2001 verantwortlich war, und dass er in Zusammenarbeit mit Al Kaida neue Gräueltaten plant, usw. Diese Überzeugungen waren sehr nahe mit der Unterstützung der Invasion verbunden, was nicht überraschend ist. Man wusste sogleich, dass sie vollkommen falsch sind, aber das war nicht wichtig: Lügen die laut und unaufhörlich verkündet werden, werden zu einer Höheren Wahrheit.

Trotzdem war die Propagandakampagne nur zum Teil erfolgreich. Der Protest gegen die Invasion erreichte ein Niveau weit jenseits von allem was es in der Geschichte Europas oder den Vereinigten Staaten je gegeben hat. Als die USA 1962 Südvietnam angriff – es ist unkontroversiell, dass sie das tat – gab es überhaupt keinen Protest. Der Protest erreichte für 4 oder 5 Jahre kein ernsthaftes Level; bis dahin war Südvietnam, das hauptsächliche Ziel des US Angriffs, beinahe zerstört, und der Angriff hatte sich auf fast ganz Indochina ausgedehnt. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte des Westens gab es einen enormen Protest gegen die Invasion des Iraks, noch bevor er Krieg offiziell erklärt worden ist. Das ist nur eines der vielen Beispiele wie Machtsysteme die Kontrolle über ziemlich große Teile ihrer Bevölkerungen verloren haben. Die weltweiten Bewegungen für globale Gerechtigkeit, was es auch zum ersten Mal gibt, sind ein anderes starkes Beispiel. Und es gibt viele weitere.

Manche kritisieren sie als den militantesten Amerikaner unter jenen welche Gegner Israels sind, mache sagen, dass sie sich als Jude selbst hassen. Wie kommt es, dass sie Israel in einer solchen Art kritisieren?

Diese Vorwürfe sind interessant. Jene welche die Bibel kennen, kennen auch ihre Ursprünge. Die Vorwürfe gehen zurück auf König Ahab, der in der Bibel der Inbegriff des Bösen ist. König Ahab beschuldige den Propheten Elias Israel zu hassen. Elias war ein „sich selbst hassender Jude“, um die Terminologie der heutigen Schmeichler des Hofes auszuborgen, weil er die Politik des Königs kritisiert hat, und Gerechtigkeit und Respekt für die Menschenrechte verlangt hat. Ähnliche Vorwürfe waren in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion üblich: Dissidenten wurde vorgeworfen Russland zu hassen. Und es gibt weitere Beispiele in Militärdiktaturen und totalitären Staaten. Derartige Kritik spiegelt tief sitzende totalitäre Werte wieder.

Für einen hingebungsvollen Anhänger totalitären Denkens, müssen die herrschenden Mächte mit den Leuten, der Kultur, und der Gesellschaft identifiziert werden. Israel ist König Ahab, Russland ist der Kreml. Für Totalitäre ist eine Kritik des Staates eine Kritik am Land und an seinen Menschen. Für jene welchen Demokratie und Freiheit irgendetwas bedeutet, sind solche Vorwürfe nur ein Witz.

Wenn ein italienischer Kritiker Berlusconis als „anti-Italiener“ oder als „sich selbst hassender Italiener“ verurteilt wird, würde das in Rom oder Milan in die Lächerlichkeit gezogen werden, aber dies war in den Tagen von Mussolinis Faschismus möglich. Das ist besonders interessant, wenn solche Einstellungen in freien Gesellschaften geäußert werden, wie in dem Fall, den sie zitiert haben.

Tatsächlich kritisiere ich nicht besonders Israel, sondern ich kritisiere die entscheidende Rolle der USA – schließlich mein Land – bei der Unterstützung von barbarischen Verbrechen seines Klientenstaates, und bei der Verhinderung einer friedlichen Lösung von jener Art, wie sie von fast der ganzen Welt seit den 70ern befürwortet wird. Für die totalitäre Mentalität bedeutet dies „Israel hassen“, oder „die Vereinigten Staaten hassen“. König Ahab und die Schmeichler an seinem Hof, der Kreml und seine Kommissare, und andere, die erbärmliche Unterwerfung unter die Machthabenden verlangen, werden sicherlich zustimmen. Jene, welche Freiheit, Gerechtigkeit und Menschenrechte schätzen, werden einen anderen Weg gehen, wie es in der Geschichte immer schon gewesen ist.





[ Übersetzt von: Matthias | Orginalartikel: "An interview with Noam Chomsky" ]

[Joerver]

Ich bin wirklich gespannt, was da geschehen ist, obwohl es an sich egal ist, wer Saddam geschnappt ist.
Nur es wäre äußeretst peinlich für BushCo.

Sunday Herald - 04 January 2004
Saddam’s capture: was a deal brokered behind the scenes?
When it emerged that the Kurds had captured the Iraqi dictator, the US celebrations evaporated. David Pratt asks whether a secret political trade-off has been engineered

http://www.sundayherald.com/39096
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For a story that three weeks ago gripped the world’s imagination, it has now all but dropped off the radar.
Peculiar really, for if one thing might have been expected in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s capture, it was the endless political and media mileage that the Bush administration would get out of it .

After all, for 249 days Saddam’s elusiveness had been a symbol of America’s ineptitude in Iraq, and, at last, with his capture came the long-awaited chance to return some flak to the Pentagon’s critics.

It also afforded the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of America’s elite covert and intelligence units such as Task Force 20 and Greyfox .

And it was a terrific chance for the perfect photo-op showing the American soldier, and Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, hauling “High Value Target Number One” out of his filthy spiderhole in the village of al-Dwar.

Then along came that story: the one about the Kurds beating the US Army in the race to find Saddam first, and details of Operation Red Dawn suddenly began to evaporate.

US Army spokesmen – so effusive in the immediate wake of Saddam’s capture – no longer seemed willing to comment, or simply went to ground.

But rumours of the crucial Kurdish role persisted, even though it now seems their previously euphoric spokesmen have now, similarly, been afflicted by an inexplicable bout of reticence.

It was two weeks ago that the Sunday Herald revealed how a Kurdish special forces unit belonging to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) had spearheaded and tracked down Saddam, sealing off the al-Dwar farmhouse long “before the arrival of the US forces”.

PUK leader Jalal Talabani had chosen to leak the news and details of the operation’s commander, Qusrut Rasul Ali, to the Iranian media long before Saddam’s capture was reported by the mainstream Western press or confirmed by the US military.

By the time Western press agencies were running the same story, the entire emphasis had changed however, and the ousted Iraqi president had been “captured in a raid by US forces backed by Kurdish fighters”.

In the intervening few weeks that troublesome Kurdish story has gone around the globe, picked up by newspapers from The Sydney Morning Herald to the US Christian Science Monitor, as well as the Kurdish press.

While Washington and the PUK remain schtum, further confirmation that the Kurds were way ahead in Saddam’s capture continues to leak out.

According to one Israeli source who was in the company of Kurds at a meeting in Athens early on December 14, one of the Kurdish representatives burst into the conference room in tears and demanded an immediate halt to the discussions.

“Saddam Hussein has been captured,” he said, adding that he had received word from Kurdistan – before any television reports.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the delegate also confirmed that most of the information leading to the deposed dictator’s arrest had come from the Kurds and – as our earlier Sunday Herald report revealed – who had organised their own intelligence network which had been trying to uncover Saddam’s tracks for months.

The delegate further claimed that six months earlier the Kurds had discovered that Saddam’s wife was in the Tikrit area. This intelligence, most likely obtained by Qusrut Rasul Ali and his PUK special forces unit, was transferred to the Americans. The Kurds, however, are said to have never received any follow-up from the coalition forces on this vital tip-off and were furious.

Whatever the full extent of their undoubted involvement in providing intelligence or actively participating on the ground in Saddam’s capture, the Kurds, and the PUK in particular, would benefit handsomely.




Apart from a trifling $25 million bounty, their status would have been substantially boosted in Washington, which may in part explain the recent vociferous Kurdish reassertion of their long-term political ambitions in the “new Iraq”.

For their own part the Kurds have already launched a political arrangement designed to secure their aspirations with respect to autonomy, if not nationalist or separatist aspirations.

To show how serious they are, the two main Kurdish groups, the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), have decided to close ranks and set up a joint Kurdish administration, with jobs being divided between the two camps. They have made it clear to the Americans that their leadership has a responsibility to their constituency.

Last week Massoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, called for a revision of the power-transfer agreement signed between the US-led coalition and Iraq’s interim governing council to recognise “Kurdish rights”.

The November 15 agreement calls for the creation of a national assembly by the end of May 2004 which will put in place a caretaker government by June, which in turn will draft a new constitution and hold national elections

“The November 15 accord must be revised and ‘Kurdish rights’ within an Iraqi federation must be mentioned,” Barzani told a meeting of his supporters.

“The Kurds are today in a powerful position but must continue the struggle to guard their unity,” he added.

This renewed determination to fulfil their political objectives is shaking up other ethnic residents in northern Iraq, who fear at best being marginalised; at worst victimised. Over the last week there have been increasingly violent clashes between Kurdish and Arab students, and between Kurds and Turkemens, in the oil rich city of Kirkuk.

Such ethnic confrontations point to another dangerous phase in Iraq’s power-brokering. If the Kurds did indeed capture Saddam first, and a deal was struck about his handover to the US, then it’s not inconceivable that the terms might have included strong political and strategic advantages that could ultimately determine the emerging power structure in Iraq.



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Copyright © 2004 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Sunday, January 04, 2004
War News for January 4, 2003

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

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers killed, three wounded in Baghdad ambush.

Bring `em on: Firefight near Kirkuk. One Iraqi bystander killed.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed in car blast in Mosul.

Bring `em on: US troops attacked in Baquba. Five Iraqi policemen wounded. (Last paragraph.)

Karbala remains tense.

US troops accidentally kill car full of Iraqi civilians near Tikrit.

Reaction to raid on Baghdad mosque.

British soldiers accused of killing Iraqi civilian.

Comprehensive report from troops and officers Iraq. "`The continuing welcome is dependent on making progress every single day, in terms of basic services, in terms of improving electricity flow, in terms of solving the fuel crisis, in terms of very basic needs — ration cards, schools, student-to-teacher ratio, roads, potholes, wells and then repair of basic infrastructure,` said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul."

The Insurgency: Other than the capture of Saddam Hussein seems to have made no impact, US officials know little more than before. "Saddam Hussein`s capture three weeks ago has not slowed the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, which now seems more entrenched than ever, according to a review of recent attacks and interviews with U.S. and Iraqi officials…` We don`t think, as some have speculated, that he was the central figure managing the entire anti-coalition operation,` said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for operations in Baghdad…Even something as basic as the number of anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq is a mystery. `We`ve seen varied assessments that range from 500 to 5,000 or even higher,` Kimmitt said. `I don`t think we really have a good fix on that number.`` As for how the various cells might relate to one another, officials admit they are working on hunches as much as anything."

Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer loses another crucial battle in the information war. "Block said she had heard rumors that one of the suicide bombers was motivated at least in part by rage over alleged rapes of Iraqi women by American soldiers, but that she was flabbergasted by how widely the rape story has spread."

Analysis: The beginning of a critical six months. "Both America and its enemies will have the same six-month window of opportunity stretching to June 30."

Report on Iraqi clan rivalries.

Bringing the war home. "His behavior when he first returned in October could be hard to handle, she says. He did not sleep much and frequently paced the house or woke up looking for his rifle. He would eat anything, even if he wasn`t hungry, compensating for the frequent shortages of rations in the field. Driving, too, brought back his training from Iraq -- he was constantly on the lookout for explosives on roads."

Another soldier returns. "`In Afghanistan, the people were really supportive, and you could see things were getting bigger. Just the people was the biggest difference,` he said. `Where I was in Iraq in Fallujah, there was really not much support from the people at all...We got shot at a lot. It was just an everyday occurrence,` he said."

Casualty Reports

Local story: South Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Alaska soldier injured in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:04 AM
Comment (0)

[Joerver]

Bringing the war home An Oregon veteran back from Iraq remains on edge as he readjusts


01/04/04

PETER SLEETH

I t was just a piece of windblown trash, the basket, bouncing down the street. Ken Misa, a paratrooper just back from Iraq, saw his 5-year-old daughter, Rilynn, grab for it as the two walked toward her school one morning last month.

And he exploded.

"I just snapped. It was an instant reflex," says Misa, a Eugene native. "I yelled, `Don`t touch it!` I grabbed her and she almost fell down."

Rilynn cried, shocked by her father, who for just a moment, was back in Baghdad.

"You just don`t do something like that in Iraq," he says.

In Baghdad, a basket can hide a bomb, the carcass of a dead dog might conceal a homemade land mine, on a rooftop a sniper might lurk.

Back home it`s different, he knows that. Still, some things just will not go away for some of the first combat soldiers now returning from the war in Iraq. Misa`s reaction to his daughter is what psychiatrists call "hyper-vigilance." A smell, a sound, a sight can take veterans back to a place many just want to forget.

Misa is one of what eventually will be tens of thousands of returning Iraq veterans. Like the Persian Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea and World War II veterans before them, they will come home changed. Each of America`s wars has had a lasting effect on the men and women who fought in them and on the society that welcomed them home.

Some Desert Storm veterans still struggle with Gulf War syndrome. Vietnam brought to the public consciousness the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder and controversy over the effects of Agent Orange. Korea produced its own version of post-traumatic stress, and World War II posed the huge problem of reintegrating hundreds of thousands of veterans into American society.

If the past is any guide, the war in Iraq will confront the nation with a need for educational benefits, psychological support programs, and drug and alcohol treatment. And there may be new twists on the age-old costs of sending soldiers off to war.

As the early waves of Iraq veterans return home, they carry with them the intense and unique experience of combat. For many, it was an experience so profound -- so imbued with all life`s emotions magnified in the frightful context of war -- that they can never forget what happened to them. Some return with invisible wounds that will dog them for the rest of their lives, while others will be able to move on with few problems.

Symptoms such as nightmares, sleeplessness and anxiety are common among returning combat veterans, says Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a psychiatrist with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. And, she says, they are not necessarily anything other than temporary.

"It`s amazing what folks can go through and actually survive when they are there and then integrate on their return as part of their maturing process," says Ritchie, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.

No one knows what the experience of soldiers returning from Iraq will be, Ritchie says.

Certainly, the military is more prepared to deal with issues such as post-traumatic stress than ever before, and that will be critical for Iraq veterans. More soldiers have been exposed to violence in Iraq than during the 1991 Gulf War or any U.S. conflict since Vietnam. For many, coming home doesn`t mean their fight is over. For families who have spent months worrying about loved ones, homecoming may be the beginning of a new struggle.

Misa, 30, was a squad sergeant in Bravo Company, 307th Engineer Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division, a regular Army outfit with a storied history that reaches back to World War II`s D-Day invasion. He was awarded the Bronze Star for "heroic or meritorious" service while fighting in Iraq. His Bravo Company comrades are still in Baghdad but scheduled to come home sometime early this year. Misa`s enlistment expired last summer, and he was sent home in October.

Even coming home is something he wrestles with, he says.

"It`s that old saying -- I don`t like jumping out of airplanes, I just like hanging out with people that do," he says. "I`m having trouble with the whole closure thing. I`m here, and they are still there. When I think about it, I probably should have stayed there until the mission was done."

Misa, a 1992 Junction City High School graduate, had seen combat with the U.S. Marines in Somalia. He was in Somalia when Army Rangers were ambushed by warlords and lost 18 men in the brutal downtown Mogadishu firefight chronicled in the movie "Black Hawk Down." When he returned from war this time, he was no stranger to memories of combat or the surprises they can bring.

After he got home from Iraq in October, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by the Army although his case is mild and not unlike what thousands more soldiers like him will go through in coming months.

Amanda Misa met her husband when they were San Francisco State University students after he left the Marines. She supported him when he re-enlisted in the 82nd Airborne. She waited patiently -- and fearfully -- with their two daughters, Rilynn, 5, and Jordan, 2 while Ken fought in Iraq.

The husband who left her for war is not the same husband she welcomed home. He has changed, she says, for the better in many ways, but his anxiety can be painful to watch.

"Now is really the hard part," she says. "This is when my job is just starting. Just getting everybody back together is a big deal."

His older daughter barely recognized him, the youngest one not at all, when he came home. And he has had to relearn a lot about being a father and a full-time dad.

He is much more motivated to finish school, Amanda says, and more attentive to his daughters.

"I think he is much more thoughtful about his life path," she says. "Before, he was doing what he liked, and I think he realizes as a family we have sacrificed a lot."

His behavior when he first returned in October could be hard to handle, she says. He did not sleep much and frequently paced the house or woke up looking for his rifle. He would eat anything, even if he wasn`t hungry, compensating for the frequent shortages of rations in the field. Driving, too, brought back his training from Iraq -- he was constantly on the lookout for explosives on roads.

"When he drove when he first got back, he would swerve when he saw things on the side of the road," she says. "He quit driving for a while."

For his part, Misa at first found home a shock. People treated him strangely, either asking questions he could not answer in a single conversation -- "What was it like over there?" -- or treating him as if he were delicate glass.

"It was actually like a culture shock," he says. "I couldn`t believe it was happening. It was like, `Whoa!` You have to remember a week before I was patrolling streets in Baghdad with 14-year-olds shooting at me."

The experience of Misa and his unit ranged from sudden and fierce fighting to long periods of quiet, when fear was never absent. In the early days of the war at a town called As Samawah, he fought in intense combat. On the march toward Baghdad, he found himself searching destroyed Iraqi tanks, still filled with the remains of the dead tank crews. In the fall, he was shot in the chest. His flak vest saved his life. To this day, he wears the bullet that hit him around his neck.

And perhaps the worst for him was the night in Baghdad when he had to shoot a man, whom he caught raping an Iraqi child.

So when the questions come, about how it was for him there, he finds them hard to answer.

"Yeah, I shot at people, but that`s the least of it," he says. "We were there to help people. You try to explain to them it`s war. It`s all chaos. It`s hell. It`s starvation, It`s sleeplessness."

And then, you are home.

Misa fills his days caring for his daughters, vacuuming the house while his wife works or doing laundry. It is a great life he says, but still, there are the memories.

Last week, Misa re-enlisted for a one-year stint as a sergeant in the California National Guard. He did it, he says, primarily because it will help him pay for college. When he met his wife, he was studying behavioral science at San Francisco State. He would like to finish that degree.

Yet beyond the money, he says, he is still a soldier in his own view and probably always will be one, for the better and for the worse.

"Every night I dream about Iraq," he says. "If I don`t dream about it, it`s on my mind all the time."

Peter Sleeth: 503-294-4119; [e-mail]



Copyright 2004 Oregon Live. All Rights Reserved.

[Joerver]

CIA plans new secret police to fight Iraq terrorism
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 04/01/2004)


Nine months after the demise of Saddam Hussein`s regime and his feared mukhabarat (intelligence) operatives, Iraq is to get a secret police force again - courtesy of Washington.

The Bush administration is to fund the new agency in the latest initiative to root out Ba`athist regime loyalists behind the continuing insurgency in parts of Iraq.


An ICDC soldier checks an Iraqi man during a patrol in Tikrit
The force will cost up to $3 billion (£1.8 billion) over the next three years in money allocated from the same part of the federal budget that finances the Central Intelligence Agency.

Its ranks are to be drawn from Iraqi exile groups, Kurdish and Shi`ite forces - in addition to former mukhabarat agents who are now working for the Americans. CIA officers in Baghdad are expected to play a leading role in directing their operations.

A former United States intelligence officer familiar with the plan said: "If successfully set up, the group would work in tandem with American forces but would have its own structure and relative independence. It could be expected to be fairly ruthless in dealing with the remnants of Saddam."

The secret police will be the latest security force created by the US and its Iraqi political allies in an attempt to quell the insurgency.

Although officially banned by the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), militia groups are already patrolling cities and towns in many areas of Iraq against the backdrop of an increasing number of extra-judicial killings of prominent former Ba`athists.

The Pentagon and CIA hope to organise the various and sometimes competing groups into a single force with the local knowledge, the motivation and the authority to hunt down pro-Saddam resistance fighters. According to officials in Washington, the new agency could eventually number 10,000. Initially at least, salaries will be paid by the CIA, which has 275 officers on the ground in Iraq.

Former CIA officials compare the operation to the Phoenix programme in Vietnam, which was launched in 1967. That programme sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure supporting the Vietcong through assassinations and abductions secretly authorised by Washington.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorism, said: "They`re clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam." He said that small units of US special forces would work with their Iraqi counterparts, including former senior Iraqi intelligence agents, on covert operations.

The force is intended to take on a crucial role for Washington in post-Saddam Iraq. The Pentagon and CIA have told the White House that the organisation will allow America to maintain control over the direction of the country as sovereignty is handed over to the Iraqi people during the course of this year.

John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at the Washington-based Global Security organisation, told The Telegraph: "The money for this has been buried in the `other procurements` section of the Air Force budget. The CIA is funded out of that category.

"The creation of a well-functioning local secret police, that in effect is a branch of the CIA, is part of the general handover strategy. If you are in control of the secret police in a country then you don`t really have to worry too much about who the local council appoints to collect the garbage."

In the short term, CIA officials expect that the very existence of a strongly pro-American security force will terrify civilians who are currently supporting the insurgency into refusing assistance and aid to Ba`athist rebels. Despite the capture of Saddam last month, attacks on US personnel and Iraqis co-operating with them have continued into the New Year.

The scheme is believed to have been heavily backed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, a key advocate of the war to oust Saddam. After deciding in November to accelerate the handover of political power to a sovereign Iraqi authority, Mr Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials are anxious that Iraq should not fall under radical Islamist control or degenerate into civil war.

"The presence of a powerful secret police, loyal to the Americans, will mean that the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set," said Mr Pike. "To begin with, the new Iraqi government will reign but

Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

[Joerver]

David Kay to Search for WMD on Mars

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) head David Kay has announced that his team will commandeer the Spirit Rover on Mars in pursuit of Iraq`s WMD.
"First off I would like to say that it is only a coincidence that ISG (700 Million) and the NASA budget (820 Million) where about the same.

Unfortunately for tax payers, not only has ISG been unable to find any WMD, but we have not been unable to find any receipts for the money that ISG has spent to-date. Frankly, I think NASA`s rover project will have better luck finding life on Mars!

We all know that Saddam Hussein had WMD. After all, the president, vice president and secretary of state, etc. wouldn`t lie to the American people would they?

I mean, if they weren`t lying, that would mean that this administration is incredibly incompetent, and we can`t have people thinking that before an election, now can we?

The president already is embarrassed enough by the Homeland Security and Justice Department!

Therefore, we need to vigorously keep looking for WMD on Mars, Venus, asteroids, Wal-Marts, Neverland, etc. at least until December 2004! After that, who gives a damn," said Kay.

[Joerver]

Purported Bin Laden Tape Mentions Saddam Capture
Sun January 4, 2004 04:34 PM ET

By Heba Kandil
DUBAI (Reuters) - The Arabic television channel Al Jazeera aired on Sunday an audio tape purported to be from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in which he mentioned the arrest of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by U.S. troops in December.

If authenticated, the tape would be proof that the man whom the United States is hunting down for masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities is still alive despite Washington`s intensive efforts to find or kill him.

The voice which sounded like previously broadcast recordings by the al Qaeda leader said Muslim and Arab leaders were jolted by the Saddam`s ouster, since it showed that dictatorial regimes could be toppled by foreign forces.

"More dangerous from their (Muslim leaders`) perspective was the opening of the door for the use of external force to change dictatorial regimes, especially after they saw the capture of their former comrade in treachery and collaboration with America," he said, referring to Saddam.

The State Department did not have any immediate comment on the tape.

The voice on the tape, which sounded like previous recordings from the al Qaeda leader, urged Muslims to fight the U.S. occupation in Iraq, criticizing Gulf Arab governments for supporting the U.S. invasion and urging Muslims to fight U.S. forces with arms and not through dialogue.

He warned that the fall of the Iraqi capital Baghdad would be a precursor to the U.S. occupation of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states.

"There should be no dialogue with the occupiers except with arms and this is what we should strive for," the voice said.

"The West is trying to kill whoever carries the banner of Islam under the pretence of combating terrorism because they all know that jihad is the effective power to foil all their conspiracies."

The voice also criticized Middle East peace moves, singling out the U.S.-backed "road map" for peace and a symbolic peace accord signed in Geneva as an "attempt to destroy al-Aqsa mosque and to vanquish jihad (holy struggle) and Mujahideen in Palestine."

The tape, which was similar to a long-winded sermon on various topics, also slammed a recent Gulf Arab accord to remove any references that might be seen as encouraging militancy in the school books.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Weblog: Dahr: Conflicting Numbers & Surreal Press Conf.
Posted by Dahr Jamail | on Sunday, January 04, 2004 - 06:39 PM

Yesterday I reported on an attack upon a US Humvee patrol in Al-Dora, Baghdad, which is in the Al-Rashid district.

However, statements taken from three boys and five men who witnessed the US military clean-up and medical evacuations all reported the same story: The US military flew in medical choppers to air lift 2 wounded soldiers from the scene. They all witnessed at least five bodies loaded into US vehicles and driven from the scene.

These statements were taken from some scene of the incident the day after it occurred, as well as taken from several men from other areas of Al-Dora.

A phone call from the scene of the incident to the Coalition Public Information Center (CPIC) provided information that the US military reported two dead and three wounded soldiers.

This is confirmed by accessing the following information:

According to press release 04-01-03C on 2 January, US Cent Com reports 2 dead, 3 injured Task Force 1st Armored Division Soldiers Killed in Ambush in Al Rashid district at about noon when their convoy was struck by an IED, then the soldiers taking small arms fire after the explosion.

The full press release may be seen here:

http://www.centcom.mil/CENTCOMNews/Casualty_Report.asp?Casua…

The same press release can be found on the Combined Joint Task Force seven website, release #040103g, with the same dead and injured count, here:

http://www.vcorps.army.mil/www/CJTF7/Releases/releases_jan/c…

Thus, the usual conflict in the number of US soldiers killed and injured rests between the many Iraqis who witnessed the scene during the US cleanup and medical evacuations, and the figures given by CENTCOM and Combined Joint Task Force 7.


CPR instructions at site of IED blast in Al-Dora where US patrol was hit.

The US military in Iraq has been under constant scrutiny for under-reporting US casualty figures from attacks throughout Iraq. The effect of this is to give the impression to both the media and people of Iraq, as well as people in the US that the degree of loss of life by US military personnel in Iraq is lower than it may actually be.

Thus, the sense of urgency the US military is faced with in Iraq isn’t being conveyed to the public. For example, I just moments ago returned from a CIPIC press conference by General Kimmit where he stated there are 25 attacks per day on coalition forces.

Nor are people being allowed the opportunity to grasp the seriousness of the mounting US casualties in Iraq as a result of the occupation.

This being an election year in the US only brings more doubt about the actual figures being reported by the military here as compared to the numbers provided by Iraqis witnessing the attacks and/or the medical operations which ensue.

Virtually every investigation I’ve conducted on events of this nature has provided a disparity in the numbers of US dead and wounded between those reported by CPIC and Iraqi witnesses; be they civilians, hospital staff, or figures from the morgue.

This point is further underlined by the incident in Samarra at the end of November when the US military claimed a convoy came under attack by a highly organized group of Fedayeen fighters and responded by killing 54 of them. Upon further investigation by myself and several other journalists to the hospital, morgue, and several interviews in Samarra, the highest Iraqi body count recorded was 8. The US military never adjusted their figures to reflect this, despite the fact that no more than 8 bodies have ever been found as a result of this battle.

Not only has the US casualty rate in Iraq continued unabated since the capture of Saddam Hussein, it has increased.

On a daily basis US soldiers are dying here, as well as being severely wounded. When one looks at a general headline on a news website and reads: 1 US soldier killed, 2 wounded, it is not shown the degree to which these soldiers are wounded. Many have suffered permanent brain damage, loss of feet, legs, hands, arms. There lives are changed forever by permanent disabilities; rather than the impression the mainstream media leaves of injured by cuts and bruises.

The system of information control runs deep in Iraq today. The CPA has recently released a law stating that no public demonstrations are allowed without their approval and consent. If a demonstration occurs without said, the people will be detained promptly.

During the aforementioned press conference this evening, attended not only by media but the additional 15 US soldiers in the room, I paid close attention to the words used by General Kimmit and the very uptight man in the suit standing next to him assisting him in answering questions posed by the media.

After laughing and looking at one another while smiling on two different occasions while giving a press conference while reporting attacks on US troops resulting in them dying and being wounded, the two men at the podium used interesting terms in order to avoid the term ‘resistance.’

Resistance fighters are thus referred to as ‘anti-coalition fighters’, ‘anti-coalition suspects’ (detainees), and of course the mainstay, ‘terrorists.’

We are shown a slick video taken by military personnel of a raid conducted on the Ibn Taimiyah Mosque last Thursday. This raid brought great scrutiny on the CPA for disrespecting the traditions and culture here, due to the fact that US soldiers raided it wearing their combat boots and wielding weapons. They rolled up the pray rugs while looking for tunnels hiding weapons caches, and coming up empty on the tunnels.

While the raid did yield many weapons, TNT, and grenades, the method in which it was conducted may be more detrimental to the occupiers efforts than the fruits it yielded.

They arrested its prayer leader, Shaikh Mahdi Salah al-Sumaidi, a member of the Supreme Council for Religious Guidance, along with 20 of his assistants. General Kimmit went out of his way to point out in the video, how the Sheikh was bound and handled as fairly as all the other detainees.

My Iraqi friend sitting next to me holds her hand to her forehead, holding her head and shaking it slowly while watching the bound Sheikh, as well as the soldiers wearing boots in the mosque, carrying weapons, and rolling up the rugs. She is in disbelief.

While US soldiers may need to conduct raids on mosques, wouldn’t a better policy be to let IP’s (Iraqi Police) or Iraqi Civil Defense personnel handle this culturally sensitive operation?

In addition, General Kimmit went out of his way to stress that IP’s and ICDC’s were ‘fully integrated’ in the force that raided the mosque. If so, why didn’t these men conduct the raid? Why were only US soldiers seen in the mosque on the video?


General Kimmit with assistant at CPIC press conference showing video of Mosque.

During the rattling off of statistics of numbers of raids, detainees, and weapons caches found, there is never any mention of Iraqi civilian casualties.

Instead, they discuss a ‘whole new group’ of Iraqis stepping forward to help the coalition since the capture of Saddam Hussein. They divide these two groups into the ‘Hopefuls’ (those who want to help now that he is gone) and the ‘Fearfuls’ (those who were too afraid to help while his shadow was still at large).

After the carefully conducted press conference comes to a close, I walk out of the surreal atmosphere of the CPIC in the fancy conference hall, back into the insecure streets of Baghdad to return home. The usual sporadic gunfire from various parts of the city echoes off the buildings as night falls over the land of the ‘Hopefuls’ and ‘Fearfuls.’

[Joerver]

Southern comfort for troops and locals as Basra tries to regain that riviera touch
Despite pockets of violence, British soldiers enjoy tranquil life

Luke Harding in Basra and Linda MacDonald
Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian

It is Basra`s latest tourist attraction: Saddam Hussein`s luxury yacht, still lying half-submerged in the city`s shabby harbour. The yacht was one of first targets in the coalition`s campaign nine months ago to get rid of Saddam. But the missile failed to sink Al-Mansour (The Victory) - which now lies half across the Shatt al-Arab waterway, together with the rusting hulks of Iraqi gunboats sunk in the war with Iran.

It is a sign of how far southern Iraq has come that while Tony Blair was addressing the troops yesterday Iraqi tourists were taking a pleasure cruise past Saddam`s ruined yacht.

"I left Iraq 22 years ago because of Saddam," said Mohammad Ali, a chemistry teacher on a cruise with his Iranian wife and family. "I`m so happy to be back. The British did us a favour. They got rid of the biggest dictator in the Middle East."

In contrast to the daily mayhem in the rest of Iraq, the British-occupied south of the country is - comparatively - a tranquil place. Locals hope it could eventually regain its reputation as Iraq`s riviera.

There is violence here, of course: kidnappings and carjackings by the armed bandits who lurk on the road north of Basra are common. Over the weekend unidentified assassins shot dead a local lawyer; three days before Christmas gunmen killed a Christian alcohol seller as he went to buy vegetables in the market.

But Iraq`s increasingly well-organised resistance has made little effort to launch attacks on the British troops who have been encamped in Basra since June, with their HQ in one of Saddam`s riverside palaces.

The last British soldier killed in action in Iraq died in late August. "It`s all about managing the Shia mood," the troops` commander, Brigadier David Rutherford-Jones, said before the prime minister`s arrival. "Their expectations are very high. I sense that they are outpacing reality a little." He added: "These are big issues."

So far Basra`s Shia religious parties appear to be playing a waiting game - confident that once the British pack up and leave, the city will be theirs.

Sitting in an office decorated with posters of the recently assassinated Shia leader Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, Abu Hamza al-Basri, spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), said he had a "good relationship" with coalition forces.

He was grateful they had got rid of Saddam, but the British had made "mistakes", he said. They had refused to allow his party`s armed wing, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade, from taking over local security.

Recently, senior Bush administration officials have admitted it will be virtually impossible to disband Iraq`s militias before sovereignty is handed over to a provisional Iraqi government in July - a decision that will leave the Badr brigade in control of Basra. "The British are not doing enough. There is a lot of killing," Mr Basri complained.

Other Basra residents expressed disgruntlement at the British military`s failure to build a bridge over the river and its new tough policy on oil smuggling.

"The British captured my tanker. It was loaded with diesel for my boat. They thought I was a smuggler," said Hamid Hussein, a 29-year-old boatman offering harbour cruises from Basra`s shabby corniche.

But the reality is that the 10,000 British soldiers in Iraq are not confronting the same kind of brutal insurgency faced by the Americans further north.

Iraq is divided into three chunks - the tranquil south occupied by a British-led multinational force which includes Italian and Dutch troops; Kurdistan; and Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.

There, Saddam Hussein`s capture just over three weeks ago does not appear to have discouraged the insurgents, as some observers optimistically suggested, but merely to have galvanised them.

On New Year`s Eve a suicide car bomber blew up a crowded restaurant in central Baghdad, killing eight people and injuring 30, including three journalists. The previous week guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sheraton Hotel; lobbed mortars at the Green Zone, the coalition`s vast Baghdad HQ; hit the Turkish, Iranian and German embassies; and killed four US soldiers in Bequba, north of Baghdad, using their preferred weapon: the roadside bomb. They also launched a major attack in the southern city of Kerbala, using suicide car bombs, killing two Thai and five Bulgarian soldiers.

It is hardly surprising, then, that during this, his second trip to Iraq, the prime minister decided to stick to Basra.

"Down here is very different from up there," Major Charles Mayo, the British military`s spokesman pointed out, speaking at the army`s other main base in Basra`s international airport. "We have the support of the local population."

He added: "I think that is because we talk to them. The soldiers are learning a bit of Arabic. They learn how to say things like: `Please get out of your car.` They try to be polite."

But the success of Basra is as much the result of the city`s new-found prosperity as of the emollient style of British troops, who patrol the rubbish-filled bazaars on foot.

Here, posters of martyred Shia clerics have replaced ones of Saddam. Since Saddam`s fall sales of satellite dishes and mobile phones - which use the Kuwait network - have boomed.

Thousands of cars arrive every day by ferry from Dubai, Qatar and Oman, along with second-hand fridges, washing machines and furniture.

Basra`s electricity supply, meanwhile, is better than Baghdad`s, where pylons were looted or destroyed. The city`s population of 1.2 million has 290 megawatts of the 330 it needs. The water supply is poor but improving; work has begun on a new sewage system.

"Basra is economically more important than Baghdad," said Hamid Alrobai, receptionist at the Sultan Palace Hotel, one of the many new businesses that have sprung up.

Given the chance, Basra would be beautiful again, Mr Alrobai added. "The problem is that Saddam stole many of the date palms and put them in his palaces. It`s going to take time."

Keeping the peace


Founded by Caliph Omar in 637AD, Basra was occupied by the British from the end of the first world war until 1930

2003


April 7 British tanks push into Basra. Three British soldiers killed

May 29 Tony Blair visits troops in Basra

June 23 British soldiers fire on demonstrators after soldier shoots dead protester

June 24 Six British military personnel killed, eight wounded in two incidents in southern Iraq near Amara

July 27 British reservist killed when patrol ambushed by angry crowd

August 14 British soldier killed, two wounded in Basra when bomb hits ambulance

August 23 British serviceman killed, one wounded in Basra when vehicles come under fire

August 28 British soldier killed, one wounded by armed Iraqis in Ali al-Sharqi, 120 miles north-west of Basra

November 11 Four Iraqis, including two policemen, die, nine people hurt, when bomb explodes in minibus in Basra

November 12 Truck bomb outside barracks in Nassiriya kills 19 Italians and 14 others

November 20 Assyrian politician working with coalition abducted and killed

2004


January 3 Local lawyer Zaki Mohammed Saleh al-Khatib shot dead south of Basra

January 4 Blair makes second trip to Iraq


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

Protect us from the protectors
For intelligence chiefs, the war on terror has become good business

Peter Preston
Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian

Attention all passengers thinking of taking another BA223 to Washington. Mr Michael Howard is your main man. "I believe that red tape, bureaucracy, regulations, inspectorates, commissions... came to help and protect us - but now we need protection from them," he says, as one core belief among many. Just so. Now protect us from the department of homeland security.

This US monster, prime pronouncer of orange alerts and airport delays, is a bureaucracy like any other. It makes voracious claims for money like any other (up $14bn, to over $30bn, on security spending since 9/11). It wallows in jargon like any other.

Welcome, for instance, to the new "interagency grants and training website on the DHS website at www.dhs.gov/grants. This website provides information on homeland security and public safety grant opportunities offered by the DHS and other federal departments and agencies and a link to the Compendium of Federal Terrorism Training for State and Local Audiences, an interagency site for training opportunities available to state and local emergency personnel".

Pour many more billions into the CIA. Pour extra billions into the FBI. Pour in shedloads of cash everywhere, and what have you got? A beast with a life and dynamic of its own. But also, significantly, a beast beyond question or criticism. For this is a secret "war", isn`t it?

Nobody, of course, is onside for terrorism. Everyone wants its scourge destroyed. The acrid stench from the twin towers lingers. But there`s a difference between cheerleading and question-asking, a difference between blank acceptance and mind engagement.

Howard Dean, the Democrats` prospective 2004 champion, is reckoned to have made a public gaffe when he wondered whether the US homeland was safer now than it was just after 9/11. Yet he and Mr Howard, discussing first principles, would be bound to embrace each other.

Howard believes that the "people should be big and the state should be small". Dean, from the small state of Vermont, is tough on bureaucratic sprawl. But meanwhile, the US deficit balloons - while the homeland bureaucracy that Tom Ridge, an underwhelming old politician, controls, does its full grow-like-topsy turn. And incoming flights over the holiday, from Paris, Heathrow, Mexico City and the rest, go into a holding pattern without explanation or human consideration.

Got a tip? Apparently. Got a specific steer or an arrest warrant? Apparently not. There are intercepts that spread alarm, but orange is still the colour of very general intelligence - following the lead set by CIA director George Tenet, who explicitly believes that if you think something may be up, but don`t know what it is, then you press every alert button in sight so that al-Qaida thinks you know more than you do and backs away. The result - happy Christmas, happy New Year! - is a constant warning bell ringing, a continuous cringe of public apprehension turned to weariness by repetition. But is it any longer good politics?

The difficulty, for any reasonable politician, lies in getting the balance right. People - ordinary people, ordinary voters - see a threat. They couldn`t do otherwise after 9/11, or Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul and the rest. One day, London or St Louis may be the next target. We pay our taxes; we expect protection. Yet we also have ordinary lives to live. We expect a sense of proportionality.

Here, then, is one sure theme for 2004. Howard Dean has raised it already. Michael Howard - if he truly believes that people "should be masters of their own lives", not "nannied or over-governed" - might well follow suit. Simply: what is the threat out there, and what are the means to confront it? What should we "the masters" be told, and what should be done in our name?

Time for a grown-up debate. Britain has had a bit of one already and will have a bit more shortly, post-Hutton, as the WMD testimony of our joint intelligence chiefs comes under renewed scrutiny. Did they all vamp it up to suit their bureaucratic, back-covering selves? But the basic argument has barely begun in America. So Saddam was a fount of terrorist threats, so he`s locked away: hurray!

Hang on a moment, though. Why - quite apart from Baghdad mayhem - is Dulles closed on a whim and an executive order? Why do orange lights keep flashing? Why is that sky marshal toting his gun? Why was there such a scant sense of homeland security in the holiday headlines? Where has all the money gone? At which point political wisdom, ancient and modern, comes into play.

There`s a real problem with terrorism, to be sure. Never put that out of your mind. Always give it due weight. But don`t forget what becomes of those "who came to protect and help us". If you`re running a department of homeland security and you always need more funds (because, brother, it`s a big, big department), then you have a problem. Success is preventing any more attacks - success also means nothing happening, which means you`ve got a lower profile that makes more budget-busting increases difficult to come by.

Thus there`s every reason to go about your business with manifest display. One thing, uncynically, goes with another. The more flights cancelled, the more you`re obviously doing your job. And your commander-in-chief, descending on Buckingham Palace with a security army the size of the Household Cavalry, is unlikely to disagree in election year: he, after all, created your department in the first place.

Who says that the right can`t create gargantuan bureaucracies too? Who says that Nanny Muddle and her friends always know best? Transparency sucks. And BA 2004, now standing in a remote part of the airport, has a whole lot of understanding left to do.

· [e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

The evidence against Blair that Hutton cannot ignore
MPs must hold the prime minister to account over Kelly

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian

In public, Tony Blair, senior ministers and Whitehall officials are putting a brave face on it. Privately, they are bracing themselves for a damning report by Lord Hutton on the events leading to the suicide of David Kelly, the government`s scientific adviser on biological and chemical weapons.

Or so they should.

Hutton, whose report is due to be released to an expectant world next week, is certain to slap the wrists of the BBC, notably the Radio 4 Today programme reporter, Andrew Gilligan - something the corporation`s editorial executives, and Gilligan himself, are well prepared for.

He will dwell on Kelly`s treatment at the hands of Ministry of Defence officials during the days before its senior scientist decided to end his life. It is traditional - though ultimately it depends on the strength of feeling among backbenchers - that the minister takes the rap for failings of officials.

Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, is widely assumed to be one of Hutton`s casualties. Yet he distanced himself from the whole affair, passing the buck to Downing Street where, he said, all the key decisions which led to the outing of Kelly - an issue which the law lord has made clear lies at the heart of his inquiry - were taken.

So too did the MoD`s top civil servant, Sir Kevin Tebbit. His evidence received remarkably little attention in the press, partly because it was given, after Tebbit recovered from an eye operation, in a specially convened session of the inquiry in October, well after the rest of the evidence was heard.

Tebbit placed Blair at the centre of the strategy which led to Kelly`s unmasking. The decision that the MoD should issue a press statement, the move which led to Kelly being publicly named, was taken at Downing Street, said Tebbit. And Blair was intimately involved.

"The change in stance... was a decision of a meeting taken by the prime minister," Tebbit told the inquiry. "A policy decision on the handling of this matter had not been taken until the prime minister`s meeting."

The July 8 2003 meeting was "decisive", Tebbit insisted. Not only did it decide that the MoD should issue a press statement giving details of Kelly`s background, it also led to the decision to prepare a question-and-answer briefing paper for the media which provided even more clues to Kelly`s identity - including confirmation of his name to those journalists who had guessed it - in a procedure of which Kelly was totally unaware.

Kelly committed suicide nine days later. A few days after that, Blair was confronted by journalists on his aircraft as it prepared to land in Hong Kong. "Why did you authorise the naming of David Kelly?" he was asked. "That is completely untrue," replied Blair.

"Did you authorise anyone in Downing Street or in the MoD to release Kelly`s name?" he was asked. "Emphatically not," responded Blair. "I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly." The PM added: "Nobody was authorised to name David Kelly. I believe we have acted properly throughout."

Hutton may decide he can ignore the blatant contradiction between the evidence he heard and what Blair said - not to the inquiry but to the outside world in his immediate response to his learning of Kelly`s death. But what Hutton cannot ignore is the role the PM played in the decisions - for which, Blair said in his evidence to the inquiry, he took "full responsibility" - leading to Kelly being publicly named.

The key is how much credibility Hutton will give to the PM`s claim that his motivation was to avoid charges of a cover-up, of withholding information from MPs - namely that an individual had come forward admitting privately he had met Gilligan to discuss the government`s dossier on "Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction programme".

What Hutton certainly cannot credibly ignore is the evidence he heard about the lengths which the government took, not to offer information to MPs but to conceal it. He heard how ministers, notably Hoon, wanted to put Kelly forward, but only to tell MPs what suited the government in its war against the BBC, and how MPs were prevented from hearing embarrassing evidence about the contents of the dossier.

Hutton also cannot credibly ignore the mountain of evidence about how Downing Street put pressure on the intelligence agencies to "sex up" the dossier - the essence of Kelly`s complaints and BBC reports - in a way which we now know seriously misled parliament.

The dossier, said Blair when it was launched in September 2002, "concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons which could be activated in 45 minutes".

In July, in a not-so-subtle shift in rhetoric, he said: "I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes." In his address to British troops in Basra yesterday, Blair gave no ground, again emphasising the threat posed by Iraq`s weapons.

It was only at the inquiry that we learned from John Scarlett, head of the joint intelligence committee, and Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, that the 45-minutes claim related all along only to battlefield weapons - just as Robin Cook said in his resignation speech - and not, as the dossier clearly implied, to long-range weapons.

As yet, no such weapons have been found. Intelligence officials, who are also in the frame, are now distancing themselves further from the dossier they were persuaded by their political masters to draw up. "There may be small quantities [of chemical and biological weapons] in Iraq and maybe not," says one. This a very far cry from what Blair signed up to in the dossier and what he told MPs.

The security and intelligence agencies always believed terrorism posed a greater threat to Britain and the west than Saddam Hussein, whatever he did to his own people. And attaching Britain to the Bush administration has made matters worse, as the Home Office`s Beverley Hughes admitted in a BBC Newsnight interview last month.

"Everyone understands" Britain opting out of a key provision of the European human rights convention, she said, referring to the internment of terrorist suspects without trial, because we are "particularly associated" with the US.

Hutton may believe it is not for an unelected judge to provoke a political crisis, whatever the evidence. He may echo the words of his counsel, James Dingemans, who said the inquiry raised issues for "other institutions" - meaning parliament - to pursue.

On such crucial matters as individual probity and waging war, MPs should not let Blair off the hook.

· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian`s security affairs editor. Justifying War, his edited extracts from the Hutton inquiry, will be shown on BBC Four on January 8

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Blair hails troops in Iraq as `new pioneers of soldiering`
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
05 January 2004


British forces will remain in Iraq until at least 2006, Tony Blair signalled yesterday as he staged a lightning trip to Basra to thank troops working for "a noble and a good cause" in the wake of the removal of Saddam Hussein.

In an attempt to justify the war before Lord Hutton`s report later this month, the Prime Minister told servicemen and women that their help in transforming a dictatorship into a prosperous democracy meant they were the "new pioneers of 21st century soldiering".

Mr Blair made it clear that he felt that the 30 June deadline to hand Iraq over to an interim, Iraqi-run authority could be met if adequate political and policing structures were put in place.

But just over seven months since he was last in Basra to herald the official end to the conflict, he conceded that the occupying forces still had to "win the peace" before they could consider going home.

British officials said that even after a new Iraqi-run authority was set up, the threat of terrorism would remain and "there will be a large American and British presence" for the foreseeable future. Govern-ment sources said it was likely to be another two years after 30 June before the last British forces pulled out. Only last month, Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence, said troops would be out by next year.

Mr Blair flew to Basra from Egypt, where he has spent the past 10 days on a winter holiday with his family, before embarking on a tour that took in a visit to a local police training academy, a speech to 600 troops and talks with members of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The Herculean scale of the task facing the British troops was underlined on the first stop on Mr Blair`s packed itinerary, the new Police Training Academy in Az Zubayr, a 15-minute Chinook ride from Basra international airport.

Based in a former prison used to torture opponents of the Saddam regime, a team of 25 British police officers has just started work on re-educating former Iraqi police officers in unarmed combat techniques, witness interviews, statement-taking and "human rights". Around 350 former local policemen are on the course, but more than 6,000 will have to be trained in total by the 30 June deadline.

Other recruiting targets for the new era are equally daunting. As of December, the target strength for the new Iraqi army in the southern sector was 3,000 but not one man has yet been trained. Some 9,000 new police officers are needed, together with 1,400 Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, 1,200 border police and 2,000 oil protection force officers.

However, Mr Blair must have been delighted with the enthusiasm with which he was greeted by the 30 Iraqi recruits yesterday. Ahmed Khalid, 25, put his hand on his heart, an Arabic gesture of respect, as he met the PM. "First, he is Prime Minster, second he had a hand in the liberation of Iraq," Mr Khalid said afterwards.

Another police officer, Munadhi Saadoon, 24, was more prosaic about the benefits brought by the British and Americans. His monthly salary has gone from 20,000 to 200,000 Iraqi dinars, he said.

Mr Blair`s next stop was a speech to 600 British troops at the Shaiydah Logistics HQ, 12 kilometres from Basra. Wearing jacket, jeans and a nice Red Sea tan, he was nevertheless breathless and a little nervous when he began to speak from the hastily erected podium.

He repeated the alleged link between rogue states and deadly arsenals and lavished praise on the military for its work in rebuilding a shattered country. Mr Blair showed genuine emotion as he thanked troops "from the bottom of my heart", a catch in his voice unmistakeable. At the end of his speech, the troops paused before they began to clap respectfully.

Mr Blair made one slip when he referred to weapons of "mass distraction". He quickly corrected himself but the damage was done. Paul Bremer, the US head of the Co-alition Provisional Authority, has already dismissed the lack of WMD finds as a "red herring", and Mr Blair would clearly prefer it if the whole issue went away.

Mr Blair was last in Basra when the Today programme aired allegations that Downing Street had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq.After a 45-minute chat with diffident troops, Mr Blair headed off to Basra to meet its Iraqi governor at a former presidential palace. He then met Mr Bremer to discuss the progress towards meeting the 30 June deadline and the prospect of troops remaining in the country for two more years.

As he returned to the RAF Hercules Globemaster plane at Basra airport, a deep red sun set beside the bright yellow flames of three burning oil wells on the horizon.

After just seven hours, Mr Blair`s trip was over and he was on his way home.

Leading article, page 16
5 January 2004 10:40


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 5, 2004
Kurdish Region in Northern Iraq Will Get to Keep Special Status
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 — The Bush administration has decided to let the Kurdish region remain semi-autonomous as part of a newly sovereign Iraq despite warnings from Iraq`s neighbors and many Iraqis not to divide the country into ethnic states, American and Iraqi officials say.

The officials said their new position on the Kurdish area was effectively dictated by the Nov. 15 accord with Iraqi leaders that established June 30 as the target date for Iraqi self-rule. Such a rapid timetable, they said, has left no time to change the autonomy and unity of the Kurdish stronghold of the north, as many had originally wanted.

"Once we struck the Nov. 15 agreement, there was a realization that it was best not to touch too heavily on the status quo," said an administration official. "The big issue of federalism in the Kurdish context will have to wait for the Iraqis to resolve. For us to try to resolve it in a month or two is simply too much to attempt."

The issue of whether Iraq is to be divided into ethnic states in a federation-style government is of great significance both inside the country and throughout the Middle East, where fears are widespread that dividing Iraq along ethnic or sectarian lines could eventually break the country up and spread turmoil in the region.

Administration and Iraq officials insist that leaving the Kurdish autonomous region intact does not preclude Iraq`s consolidating itself without ethnic states in the future when Iraq writes its own constitution. Indeed, the Bush administration plans to continue to press Iraq not to divide itself permanently along ethnic lines, officials say.

But after June 30, if all goes according to plan, the United States will be exerting such pressure not as an occupier but as a friendly outside power that happens to have 100,000 troops on the ground. Many experts fear that once a Kurdish government is formalized even temporarily, it will be hard to dislodge.

The original timetable for the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq called for self-rule to start in late 2004 or 2005 — after a constitution was written under American guidance. Under that timetable, American officials say, it would have been easier to influence a future government`s makeup, not just on its federal structure but also on such matters as the role of Islamic law.

The new, earlier deadline, intended to ease Iraqi hostility to the occupation and to undermine support for continuing attacks on American troops, has forced the United States to scrap many of its other earlier plans for the future of Iraq.

Originally, for example, the United States had hoped to proceed with the privatization of state-owned businesses established by Saddam Hussein. That hope is now gone as well, American officials concede, in part because of security dangers and possible future legal challenges to any sell-off carried out by an occupying power.

Last summer, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, told an economic forum in Jordan that Iraq would soon start privatizing more than 40 government-owned companies making packaged foods, steel and other items. "Everybody knows we cannot wait until there is an elected government here to start economic reform," he said.

Now Mr. Bremer says repeatedly that such decisions must await Iraqi self-rule.

The precise terms of the future status of the Kurdish region in the transitional government, which is expected to last until the end of 2005, remain a matter of sharp dispute among members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the group handpicked by the American-led occupation that helps guide Iraq`s future.

The five Kurdish members of the council are pressing their own draft of a planned temporary constitution — known as the "transitional law" — that would give the Kurdish area wide authority over security, taxation and especially revenues from its own oil fields, according to Iraqi and American officials. Their draft would call for the Kurdish area to be a part of Iraq, and cede at least some powers to Baghdad, most likely in areas like currency and security forces.

The Kurdish region has enjoyed basic autonomy since 1991, when the United States followed the first Persian Gulf war by establishing a no-flight zone there to prevent Mr. Hussein`s military from attacking.

"The status quo, with substantial Kurdish autonomy, will to a certain degree remain in place in the transitional period," said an administration official. "That is the view across-the-board of the Iraqi Governing Council. But clearly the Kurds are trying to get more than that."

The Bush administration has many times stated its opposition to a permanent arrangement of ethnic states in Iraq, fearing that the country might eventually become another Lebanon, where power is parceled out according to religion.

While visiting the Kurdish region in September, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that while he sympathized with Kurdish aspirations and understood that their leaders did not want to break away from Iraq, he was opposed to a separate Kurdish province or state as such.

"We would not wish to see a political system that is organized on ethnic lines," Mr. Powell said. "There are other ways to do it that would not essentially bring into the future the ethnic problems that have been there all along. They understand that, and we`ll have different models to show them."

In Baghdad, a 10-member subcommittee of the Iraqi Governing Council is now wrestling with its own "models" of how to define the Kurdish area`s powers. The committee is trying to meld its own draft with one put forward by the Kurds, officials said. The subcommittee chairman is Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister who is a Sunni Muslim.

"There is a substantial agreement that the status quo in the Kurdish region would be maintained during the transitional period, with an important caveat," said Feisel Istrabadi, a law professor at DePauw University and senior legal adviser to Dr. Pachachi. "No one is conceding any ethnic or confessional grounds as the basis for any future federal state."

Mr. Istrabadi, who is in Baghdad helping Dr. Pachachi`s committee draft the transitional law to take effect after June 30, said most Iraqis would oppose the establishment of ethnic states. He said such an arrangement would be inappropriate given that Iraq does not have the history of ethnic or sectarian strife that has led to partition of states in other parts of the world.

Some experts have suggested that Iraq should be divided into a Kurdish enclave in the north, a Sunni one in the center and a Shiite one in the south. But this idea has little support at the Iraqi Governing Council and none with the United States.

"You know what the largest Kurdish city in Iraq is?" asked Mr. Istrabadi. "It`s Baghdad. It isn`t like you could draw a line in Iraq and say the Kurds live here or the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, or the Turkomans or the Shiites or the Sunnis live there. In the supposedly Shiite south, there are a million Sunnis in Basra."

The Kurdish region is dominated by two feuding political parties that have been struggling to form a unified government in order to strengthen their hand in pushing for a federalist system that would give them broad autonomy into the future.

At present, Iraq is divided into 18 states, known as governorates, of which three are Kurdish in the mountainous area of the north. A permanently unified Kurdish state stirs worries especially in Turkey and Iran, where there are large and restive Kurdish minorities.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 5, 2004
UK Says British Troops May Be in Iraq Until 2007
By REUTERS

Filed at 4:26 a.m. ET

LONDON (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Monday British troops in Iraq were likely to stay there for years, maybe until 2006 or 2007.

Speaking on BBC radio a day after Prime Minister Tony Blair paid a surprise visit to British soldiers in southern Iraqi city of Basra, Straw said it was ``a fact`` that substantial number of troops would remain in Iraq for a long time to come.

``I can`t give you an exact timescale ... but it`s not going to be months, for sure,`` Straw said.

Asked whether it would be years, he replied: ``Yes, but I can`t say whether it`s going to be 2006 or 2007.``

Blair, Washington`s chief ally in invading Iraq last March and occupying it since, visited Basra on Sunday and told British troops they were ``new pioneers of soldiering,`` fighting against terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and brutal regimes.

Some 45,000 British troops were part of the original U.S.-led invasion force -- the largest British deployment since the Korean war 50 years ago -- but numbers have been steadily reduced. Around 10,000 Britons are now serving in the country.

Blair urged soldiers to concentrate on winning the peace in a country riven by a relentless insurgency against occupying forces, saying that would ensure a stable future.

He said the effort would take time and indicated the troops would be there for the long haul.

Straw said British troops were key to providing the stability in Iraq that was needed to allow a political process to proceed.

``If we were suddenly to pull out, there would unquestionably be a security vacuum,`` he said. ``And that would not only put lives at risk ... but it would also be a setback for the political process.``

U.S. administrators in Iraq have set a timetable to hand over power to Iraqis by the end of June.

Blair used his speech to the troops on Sunday to reiterate his firm belief that he and President Bush did the right thing in invading Iraq.

Blair made weapons of mass destruction the main justification for joining the U.S.-led invasion in the face of stiff domestic opposition. No such weapons have yet been found.



Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd. |

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January 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Getting Away With . . .
By BOB HERBERT

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Two days before Christmas — after nearly two decades of bungling and outrageous misbehavior — the police finally arrested the right man for the rape and murder of a woman in 1984.

But even after a DNA match and a credible confession showed conclusively that the wrong man had been locked up for the better part of 19 years, law enforcement authorities remained reluctant to let him go.

I suppose times have changed. Half a century ago, Darryl Hunt might have been lynched. Instead, he was left to rot in a cell, wrongfully incarcerated, for half his life.

Deborah Sykes was a 25-year-old white woman who was beaten, raped and stabbed to death by a black man on the morning of Aug. 10, 1984. The case was a local sensation, an accelerant in a racial atmosphere that was fiery in the best of times.

Mr. Hunt, 19 at the time, was caught in a search that can fairly be categorized as "any black man will do." Patently unreliable testimony got him convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. And after procedural problems caused the first conviction to be thrown out, he was tried and convicted again.

Mr. Hunt insisted from the beginning that he was innocent. He and his attorney, Mark Rabil, who is white, and several dedicated supporters in the black community, including a former city alderman named Larry Little, spent many long disheartening years fighting a hateful, racist system that was never interested in dispensing justice or finding the real killer.

Even after DNA tests of semen collected from Ms. Sykes`s body failed to show any link to Mr. Hunt or to any of the alleged accomplices fantasized by prosecutors over the years, the courts would not intervene.

But last year an extraordinary sequence of events forced the truth into the open. In response to motions by Mr. Hunt`s lawyers, a judge ordered the state to compare the DNA evidence with genetic profiles of state prisoners compiled in a DNA database. In November The Winston-Salem Journal started an eight-part series that detailed the mistakes, the unreliable witnesses, the official misconduct, the DNA evidence and many other aspects of the case.

With pressure growing, a new generation of investigators ran a broad check of the DNA. Lo and behold, the check led them to a man named Willard Brown whose DNA matched that of semen taken from Ms. Sykes. On Dec. 23 Mr. Brown was arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape, armed robbery and murder.

On Feb. 2, 1985, less than six months after the attack on Ms. Sykes, another woman was abducted, raped and, like Ms. Sykes, repeatedly stabbed. The abduction occurred just a couple of blocks from the spot where Ms. Sykes was attacked.

The second woman survived and identified Willard Brown as her attacker. But for reasons that are not at all clear, he was never prosecuted.

Mr. Brown has confessed to the rape and murder of Ms. Sykes. He said he acted alone and, according to court papers, he expressed remorse for the crime and for the many years Mr. Hunt spent in prison.

But prosecutors were still reluctant to do the right thing by Mr. Hunt. They continued to search for a way to link him to the crime.

At that point a number of prominent white voices were raised, saying essentially that enough was enough. Several white ministers held a press conference to express their dismay at the way the case had been handled.

On Christmas Eve a Superior Court judge ordered the release of Mr. Hunt on an unsecured $250,000 bond pending a hearing in February. His lawyers hope that prosecutors will agree at that point to have his murder conviction vacated.

There are many terrible things about this case. The awful attacks on at least two women. The years lost to Mr. Hunt in prison. And the fact that the relentlessly bad behavior of the law enforcement authorities — the use of unreliable witnesses, the illegal withholding of exculpatory material, the refusal to acknowledge clear evidence of innocence — is so ordinary. This sort of thing goes on all the time.

Mr. Hunt told me he was not bitter, but he did think someone should be held accountable for what happened to him. "If people feel they can get away with anything," he said, "then you will have other Darryl Hunts, from now until the end of time."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Military Split On How to Use Special Forces In Terror War


By Gregory L. Vistica
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A01


With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pressuring the Pentagon to take a more aggressive role in tracking down terrorists, military and intelligence officials are engaged in a fierce debate over when and how elite military units should be deployed for maximum effectiveness.

Under Rumsfeld`s direction, secret commando units known as hunter-killer teams have been ordered to "kick down the doors," as the generals put it, all over the world in search of al Qaeda members and their sympathizers.

The approach has succeeded in recent months in Iraq, as Special Operations forces have helped capture Saddam Hussein and other Baathist loyalists. But in other parts of the world, particularly Afghanistan, these soldiers and their civilian advocates have complained to superiors that the Pentagon`s counterterrorism policy is too inflexible in the use of Special Forces overall and about what units are allowed to chase down suspected terrorists, according to former commandos and a Defense Department official.

In fact, these advocates said the U.S. military may have missed chances to capture two of its most-wanted fugitives -- Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and Ayman Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden -- during the past two years because of restrictions on Green Berets in favor of two other components of the Special Operations Command, the Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

They said several credible sightings by CIA and military informants of Omar entering a mosque this spring in Kandahar, Afghanistan, were relayed to U.S. forces at nearby Firebase Gecko, where a Green Beret team was ready to deploy. But rather than send in the Green Berets, who were just minutes from the mosque, commanders followed strict military doctrine and called on the Delta Force, the team of commandos whose primary mission is to kill and capture targets such as Hussein.

In the several hours it took the Delta unit, based hundreds of miles away near Kabul, to review the information and prepare for the raid, Omar vanished, said the sources, all of whom advise Rumsfeld`s senior aides.

Other informants reported spotting Zawahiri in a medical clinic in Gardez, Afghanistan, in the spring of 2002. Green Berets five minutes away were ordered to stand down so SEAL Team Six, another of the hunter-killer teams, could storm the clinic and capture or kill Zawahiri, according to the sources. But too much time elapsed during preparations, and Zawahiri escaped. The Special Operations Command declined to comment on the reports.

Separate Missions


Both incidents spotlight the ongoing debate over how best to employ Special Operations forces in the global war against terrorism. Special Operations forces refer to a range of soldiers from the Army, Navy and Air Force who are specially trained for sensitive missions, typically secret in nature and frequently involving rescues or assaults on high-value enemy targets.

The military`s policy, in practice, mandates using only "Special Mission Units," such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, to apprehend or assassinate specially targeted individuals. It precludes other Special Forces such as Green Berets -- who are trained primarily to work with indigenous fighters -- from pursuing the most sought-after targets when opportunities arise.

Some experts on counterterrorism contend that it takes the Special Mission Units too long to deploy for unanticipated raids. Some believe equal, if not more, emphasis should be placed on Special Operations forces to develop relationships with local villagers who supply the bulk of valuable information, which is known as counterinsurgency work. In the past year, poor intelligence has often led to the wrong targets being killed or captured.

"For all of the Special Mission Units` efforts, how many high-value targets did they get in Afghanistan?" asked one adviser, a civilian advocate of aggressive unconventional warfare with the Special Operations Command. "None."

Supporters say units such as Delta are the only ones trained specifically to carry out the apprehension or assassination of high-value targets.

"By doctrine and training, targets like that belong to the Special Mission Units," said Richard H. Shultz Jr., a scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a Pentagon consultant. "That`s what they are for."

The Pentagon`s official position is that there is no conflict between the two approaches. Marshall Billingslea, formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said both approaches are being followed and both are vital to achieving success against terrorist organizations. "The hearts and minds element is essential," Billingslea said.

But according to a classified Defense Department policy briefing on the war against the al Qaeda terrorist network and Baathist insurgents in Iraq, the Bush administration is moving away from work with insurgents and favoring more direct-action strikes.

Rumsfeld has long been enamored of the idea of expanding the role of Special Operations forces in fighting terrorists. He has dramatically boosted the budget of the forces and last year ordered the Special Operations Command to draft a strategy to send hunter-killer teams after terrorist cells.

He is considering expanding their role even more. Among proposals under review is to send the Special Mission Units into areas such as Somalia and Lebanon`s Bekaa Valley, where little government authority exists and terrorists congregate, seemingly safe from the long arm of the United States, said officials who are reviewing the plan or have been briefed on it.

"There have been briefings about various operations against various targets," a State Department official said. "We`re prepared to go into these areas," he said, but in a careful way.

`Black` or `White`?


Over the years, such proposals have faced roadblocks, including a shortage of resources, legal questions on Capitol Hill about assassinations, intelligence shortcomings and worries about the political willpower of some officials at the State Department and Pentagon.

According to four officials who have seen it, a top-secret report by Shultz, the Pentagon consultant, contends that despite reliable intelligence on those responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Special Mission Units were never sent to kill or capture the terrorists responsible.

"It was very, very frustrating," retired Gen. Peter Schoomaker told Shultz. "It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender," said Schoomaker, a former head of the Delta Force who is now the Army`s chief of staff. "We were never instructed to mount a serious operation against bin Laden, never."

It was not because of President Bill Clinton`s reluctance to deploy the secret units, concluded Shultz, who would not discuss the classified study. Rather, the Pentagon`s civilian leaders and generals repeatedly came up with what the report called "showstoppers" to dissuade the White House from launching each mission.

Officials in Billingslea`s old office who spoke on background about the study said they are watching that such an attitude does not sabotage the current plans.

Rumsfeld`s "manhunter" plan, as described in memos, is more daring than efforts against terrorist networks during the Clinton years, according to those who have seen it or have been briefed. Rumsfeld`s plan calls for sending Special Mission Units into a number of countries throughout the world.

The capture of Hussein may increase support for Rumsfeld`s global vision for the hunter-killer teams. But this worries some in the Special Operations forces community who see more emphasis on direct action and less on unconventional warfare.

Special Operations forces are divided into two distinct but complementary kinds of combat teams: those involved in direct action -- the "black" Special Mission Units such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six -- and those that support unconventional warfare, the "white" Green Berets and, on occasion, other SEAL platoons.

Although they are capable of killing or capturing terrorists, Green Berets and other "white" units traditionally work to win the trust of local villagers by living and eating with them and taking on their customs and garb. They are also called "force multipliers" because a few Green Berets can turn insurgent groups such as Afghanistan`s Northern Alliance into a more lethal fighting force. Building such relationships takes time, but the payoff is the ability to solicit the kind of intelligence that enables operations.

But "Delta envy" now permeates the ranks, especially among younger soldiers who realize early in their careers that the "kick down the door approach" is what Washington wants, said one civilian advocate of unconventional warfare. "All they want to do is strike missions," he said.

The better policy, he recently told Rumsfeld`s senior aides, is to focus more on counterinsurgency rather than assassinations and snatches.

"We want to know where the high-value targets are in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said. "Who has that information? People at the neighborhood and village level."

A top-secret report by the Defense Intelligence Agency that began circulating in November for senior executives in the intelligence community points out that a "hearts and minds" campaign may have more benefits, particularly in Iraq, than the approach now being followed.

"One of the ways to success in Iraq is . . . creating relationships with the heads of tribes in villages to counter the influences of [Saddam`s] Fedayeen and radical sheiks," said an administration official who cited passages from the report. "The strategy would take time and appropriate resources," the report said, according to the official.

In locating Hussein, Army officers partly followed this approach, interrogating distant members of the former Iraqi president`s tribe. But this was more of a police tactic, rather than using Special Forces to build goodwill with local Iraqis to garner intelligence.

Following Convention


In Afghanistan, Special Operations forces face different problems. Officials with the Special Operations Command, some of whom have made multiple trips to Afghanistan, said little emphasis is being placed on unconventional warfare.

Not only are the Special Forces excluded from major raids, any mission that takes them farther than two miles from a firebase requires as long as 72 hours to be approved, said several officials. When Special Forces do deploy, which is infrequently, say officials who have interviewed troops there, they are required to travel in armed convoys, a practice that alerts the enemy. They also have been ordered to stop assisting militias that helped topple the Taliban to avoid competing with the new national army Afghanistan is trying to organize.

A good example to follow, said several officials, was set by a Green Beret team operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border last year. The team drove an abusive warlord out of the region, helped to establish a town council, and rebuilt schools and roads.

With the help of some Afghan workers, they cut up several 40-ton tanks captured from the Taliban into large chunks of steel. The Afghans sold it last year at a market for enough money to build a much-needed medical clinic.

The villagers repaid the Army team many times over with valuable information, which led to the closure of routes used by the Taliban and al Qaeda to infiltrate parts of Afghanistan, according to Defense Department sources.

But this ingenuity violated at least the spirit of the Pentagon`s kill-and-capture-only policy.

"This type of indirect approach does not fit with the current kick-down-the-door mentality," said one official, a 30-year Army veteran and retired Special Forces officer who has made multiple trips to Afghanistan to interview troops. "Their focus is to capture and kill. It`s easier, it`s quick, and more glamorous," he said. "Based on what I saw, clearly no, it`s not working."

Meanwhile, the Special Forces and others continue to debate whether the emphasis on Special Mission Units is, at times, counterproductive. When Omar and Zawahiri were sighted, for example, it might have been more productive to let the Green Berets scout the mosque and the medical clinic to determine the accuracy of the information.

"Did we know with 100 percent certainty that it was Zawahiri and Omar?" asked the official with the Special Operations Command. "How would you know that if you never went into town? We never got to take a look."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Silence on the Hill . . .




Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A16


IT IS A MATTER of grade-school civics that in American democracy laws are made by the legislative branch. Article I of the Constitution, after all, begins with the arresting statement that "All legislative powers . . . shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Yet ever since it passed the USA Patriot Act after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has stood by in an alarming silence while a fabric of new law governing the balance between liberty and security has been woven by the other two branches of government. Many Republican members profess to be fully content with the Bush administration`s handling of the war on terrorism here at home. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are happy to snipe from the sidelines but offer little in the way of constructive alternatives. Both parties harbor a few honorable exceptions. But in the main, the parties are united in their desire not to sully their hands by engaging seriously in deciding the shape of the law. They are content not to do their jobs but instead to let the Bush administration do what it pleases and take the political and judicial heat for it all.

Congress`s abandonment of the field was especially startling in the year just past -- a year that presented an array of issues that cried out for legislative attention yet received none. Most pointedly, Congress has had nothing to say about how captured enemy combatants ought to be treated, either domestically or abroad. So as U.S. citizens have been held without charge or trial or access to lawyers, Congress has not lifted a finger to put constraints on the executive branch. While the administration has built a detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without describing any sort of public process for inmates, Congress has shrugged. Alleged enemy combatants, after all, don`t tend to be an organized constituency of campaign donors who can garner congressional attention.

Yet in absenting itself from the policymaking process, Congress does not merely fail to protect American liberty. It also fails to aid the executive branch in fighting terrorism. As several recent court decisions show, the courts will be far more likely to uphold executive actions that burden people`s freedom when Congress has clearly acted in support of the president. The legislature`s refusal to create reasonable statutory schemes that thoughtfully balance liberty and security forces the administration to appear in court relying on old precedents, rather than new law. The result, in the long run, could be that judges, in protecting freedom, will tie the government`s hands in ways that unduly burden the war.

This risk has been particularly apparent in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, where a desperate need has been shown for creative legislation to ensure that federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorist cases. Right now, courts are tied in knots by the problem of what to do when an accused terrorist wants to call as a witness high-level al Qaeda operatives captured overseas. This is a problem for which an engaged legislature could offer a solution. Yet Congress is content to let the courts decide the matter -- and the result could either damage the 6th Amendment right of the accused to call witnesses in his favor or make it exceptionally difficult for the government to isolate important detainees abroad. The courts may craft a reasonable compromise, but why should Congress leave that essentially legislative effort to the judiciary?

To some extent, the administration itself deserves blame for the legislature`s passivity. Rather than inviting congressional involvement, it foolishly discourages it -- both out of an ideological attachment to executive power and out of an allergy to any kind of legal restraint on its conduct. But Congress is not supposed to legislate only with the administration`s permission. America, after all, is not a parliamentary democracy where the government sets the legislature`s agenda. Congress is supposed to be an equal branch of government, and it ought to be both aggressively overseeing the administration`s work and actively exploring what laws would enhance American freedom and security. It ought not be giving its powers away.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-usvisit…



Foreign Visitors to U.S. Will Cross Digital Divide
Starting today at major hubs, travelers will be scanned. Some expect delays and loopholes.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Times Staff Writer

January 5, 2004

WASHINGTON — Adapting a concept that supermarkets have perfected, U.S. immigration authorities today will begin using a digital inventory control system to keep tabs on millions of foreign visitors who enter the country with visas.

Instead of bar codes and scanners that shopkeepers use to track cereal boxes, the government will take digital fingerprints and photos to register visitors as they arrive in the United States, and eventually to confirm their departure.

The system — United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, or US-VISIT — will be formally inaugurated today at 113 airports and 14 seaports. Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson is expected to oversee the launch at Los Angeles International Airport, a major gateway for travelers from Asia and South America.

The government calls US-VISIT the most significant immigration technology in decades, and promises it will add only seconds to the processing of arriving travelers. But some are concerned about potential loopholes, and the travel industry worries that the system will create added burdens for law-abiding visitors.

Initially, US-VISIT will have significant gaps. It will register only arrivals, not departures. Technology to digitally record departures by air and sea is months away from deployment, according to optimistic estimates. Moreover, no system has been set up to digitally track either arrivals or departures by land, which account for the majority of border crossings.

That would mean that, at least for the rest of 2004, the government will be like a supermarket tracking merchandise and sales by simultaneously using bar codes and computers, as well as hand counts and paper inventory sheets.

"The exit control part is critically important for a coherent immigration system," said Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. "It`s the exit part that`s always been the challenge."

In addition to the technological questions, the travel industry and others fear that the program could lead to misunderstandings, a decline in tourism and delays at points of entry.

Along the border with Mexico, business groups have warned that the application of US-VISIT could cripple commerce if not carried out carefully. The system is supposed to be phased in at the 50 largest vehicle and pedestrian crossings, such as the one between Tijuana and San Ysidro, by the end of 2004.

Federal officials say US-VISIT is overdue. Congress has been calling for such a system for nearly a decade. The government hopes that it will deter not only potential terrorists, but illegal immigrants as well.

"We are looking at two purposes: to increase security and to improve the integrity of immigration control," Hutchinson, the Homeland Security undersecretary, said in an interview. "A key thing is that we will be able to know who is overstaying their visa and violating the terms of their admission to this country."

With nearly 500 million border crossings a year — many by visitors who come more than once a year — the United States has one of the most open borders in the world.

The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers initially entered legally. Balancing the imperative for tighter security in the face of terrorism with the need to provide access for foreigners traveling for business, tourism or family reasons is one of the biggest challenges for the State and Homeland Security departments.

"We don`t want there to be long delays for international travelers entering the United States," said Rick Webster of the Travel Industry Assn., an umbrella group representing tourism and business travel interests. "If visitors have to wait several hours to get processed, we clearly will need to tell Homeland Security to go back to the drawing board."

U.S. citizens and green card holders will not be subject to US-VISIT, and neither will people from 27 countries whose citizens are not required to have visas to travel to the United States. The Pacific Rim countries on this list include Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. (A complete list, as well as more detailed information on US-VISIT, is available on the Internet at http://www.dhs.gov/us-visit.)

Initially, US-VISIT will affect only people traveling on visas who arrive at major air- and seaports. The government estimates that this category of international visitors accounts for about 24 million border crossings a year.

Arriving visitors will proceed through the usual customs and immigration checks, with two additional steps. First, they will have two fingerprints — the right and left index fingers — scanned by an inkless device. Then, a digital photograph will be taken.

The information will be instantaneously compared with government security databases and watch lists. If there is no match to a suspicious or wanted person, the traveler will be allowed to proceed. If any alerts are raised by the database check, the traveler will have to step aside for further questions.

During 2003 trials of US-VISIT at Atlanta`s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the system added an average of about 15 seconds to arrival processing, the government said.

The departure component of US-VISIT is supposed to take effect by the end of 2004. Visitors leaving the country will be required to have their fingerprints scanned at special kiosks.

Arrival and departure information would then be automatically reconciled, a big improvement over the current system that involves paper records. The government expects to dramatically reduce the number of foreigners who overstay their visas. Overstays account for about a third of the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Hutchinson said the travel industry should welcome the new system because of the added security it will provide. "We are working very hard to make sure that US-VISIT facilitates travel," he said.

US-VISIT would also replace the domestic registration of visitors from mostly Middle Eastern and Muslim countries, which created diplomatic and civil rights controversies.

On the Mexican border, where US-VISIT is scheduled to be phased in at major crossings by the end of 2004, the exit portion of the system is creating anxiety. Currently, people leaving the United States at land crossings do not usually have to stop for American authorities.

Border crossing points are not designed to accommodate exit checks, say critics.

"We are against any exit system that will slow down legitimate trade and travel," said Garrick Taylor, director of policy development for the Border Trade Alliance, a Phoenix-based business group. "We are certainly supportive of the goals of US-VISIT — it`s the implementation that`s got to go right."

At the request of border-area groups, the government is considering a recommendation to exempt Mexican citizens who hold a U.S. border crossing card from US-VISIT.

Holders of the card, who generally have strong work-related or family ties in the United States, account for about 30% of all land crossings.

Hutchinson said no final decisions have been made on how the system will work at land crossings. "The last thing we want to do is develop a system that clogs the borders," he said. "We have a commitment to make sure we do not implement this in a way that harms border communities."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-iraq…

Information Is Flowing After Hussein`s Arrest
Although insurgency has not lost momentum, U.S. says more Iraqis have come forward with details of its structure and command chain.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer

January 5, 2004

BAGHDAD — The capture of Saddam Hussein has prompted many more Iraqis to come forward with intelligence about the armed insurgency, but there has been no letup in the deadly attacks on troops and other targets, U.S. officials said Sunday.

Last week, officials said, coalition forces experienced about 22 attacks a day, slightly above the rate reported before Hussein`s capture Dec. 13.

Some of the recent attacks have been especially lethal. Four soldiers died Friday in three separate attacks, including a roadside bombing, the downing of a helicopter and a mortar strike on a U.S. base. A series of coordinated suicide bombings on Dec. 27 in Karbala, south of Baghdad, killed 19 people — seven coalition soldiers and 12 Iraqis.

Occupation authorities have said repeatedly that they expect acts of violence to intensify as Iraq approaches a scheduled handover of power at the end of June. After visiting troops Sunday in the southern city of Basra, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stressed that the next six months would be a major challenge.

"The important thing is to realize we are about to enter into a very critical six months," Blair told reporters on his flight home. "We have got to get on top of the security situation properly and we have got to manage the transition. Both of those things are going to be difficult."

"The opposition is getting more sophisticated, using bigger bombs and more sophisticated controls," Blair`s senior diplomat in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock, said. "We will go on seeing bigger bangs."

Nevertheless, occupation officials said Sunday that Hussein`s capture has prompted many more informers to come forward with details about the insurgency that have led to raids and other operations.

"What we have seen is this: a gradually increasing number of Iraqis providing intelligence, providing actionable intelligence," said Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq. "The quality has definitely improved since the period leading up to the capture of Saddam Hussein."

Some Iraqis wishing to talk show up voluntarily at U.S. bases. Other informants have been detained in raids and agree to talk in interrogations, U.S. officials said. Some seek reward money for their information; others want no compensation for their cooperation.

The wealth of "humint" — human intelligence, in military terms — is leading to the capture of high-ranking insurgent operatives, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said. Raids have also netted troves of documents, computer disks and other evidence that has led higher up the dispersed insurgency command chain.

"Before, we were getting the foot soldiers," Kimmitt said Sunday at the same Baghdad news briefing as Senor. "Now, to some extent, that`s helping us get some of the mid-level financiers and organizers."

In the last 24 hours, Kimmitt said Sunday, coalition forces had arrested 83 anti-coalition suspects, now a typical daily tally. Among those detained, Kimmitt said, were a pair of brothers believed to be leaders of insurgent cells in Baghdad; a suspect in the downing of a helicopter in Mosul in November; and a man identified as Hussein`s personal photographer.

"The quality of intelligence that is cascading as a result of Saddam`s capture is very much a virtuous cycle," Kimmitt said. "We hope that continues over the days and weeks ahead."

Much of the new information on the armed opposition is from mid-level members of Hussein`s Baath Party. His capture, officials say, has finally convinced many that he will never regain power — and prompted them to turn in other hard-liners.

Those providing information, Senor said, include "people who just want their jobs back in the ministries, want their cars back, want a stake in Iraq, and were hoping that Saddam Hussein would return, because they believed that`s how they would get that Baathist largess showered upon them once again."

"They can no longer be hopeful," he said. "And we find among those individuals … less of a reticence to cooperate."

Also among those coming forward, officials said, were Iraqis who previously avoided cooperating with the coalition because they feared that Hussein and his Baath Party might return and exact revenge on people they regarded as collaborators.

At the same time, officials cautioned that the insurgents` bloody campaign against perceived collaborators — such as Iraqi policemen and civil defense officers — continues to prevent many people from coming forward.

Commanders are still trying to piece together exactly what part Hussein played in the opposition, which U.S. officials say is largely financed and organized by loyalists of the former regime. Some foreign fighters are also involved, officials say, but it is still unclear whether they operate independently or are controlled by supporters of Hussein.

There is a general consensus that Hussein, who was on the run and isolated in hide-outs for eight months, could not have exercised operational control, though he may have had a say in funding, officials say.

"Do we fully understand where Saddam fit in? We`re putting that puzzle together," Kimmitt said last week. "We don`t think … he was the central figure managing the entire anti-coalition operation. Nor do we think he was simply sitting in a hole waiting for somebody to come and capture him."

Authorities here are also still trying to understand the overall nature of the armed opposition, which, officials say, operates in a decentralized, cellular structure, allowing the battle to go on even as coalition forces arrest fighters and cell leaders. U.S. commanders have recently raised their estimate of the number of cells operating in Baghdad from 10 to 14; each is believed to have between 20 and 100 members. But officials still put the overall number of enemy combatants nationwide at about 5,000.

As the battle drags on and a major rotation of U.S. forces looms, commanders are stressing offensive operations against suspected cells, including house-to-house searches, raids, targeted bombings and other tactics designed to utilize the coalition`s superior firepower. Intelligence about the workings of the cells is the key, officials say.

"This is not the kind of fight where we expect somebody to walk out of a house with a white flag and surrender to us," Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who heads the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, said last week. "This is the kind of fight that will end when the insurgency realizes that the weight of progress has made it such that there is no hope for them."


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Associated Press contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Das ist starker Stoff:
It`s the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright.

The S factor explains Bush`s popularity
Monday, January 5, 2004

By NEAL STARKMAN
GUEST COLUMNIST

Millions of words have been written as to the motivations of voters. Particularly in close elections, as in the 2000 presidential contest, pundits and laypeople alike have speculated on why people voted for whom. The exit poll has been a major tool in this speculation.

But the speculation misses the mark by far. It`s increasingly obvious, for example, that none of the so-called theories can explain President Bush`s popularity, such as it is. Even at this date in his presidency, after all that has happened, the president`s popularity hovers at around 50 percent -- an astonishingly high figure, I believe, given the state of people`s lives now as opposed to four years ago.

What can explain his popularity? Can that many people be enamored of what he has accomplished in Iraq? Of how he has fortified our constitutional freedoms with the USA Patriot Act? Of how he has bolstered our economy? Of how he has protected our environment? Perhaps they`ve been impressed with the president`s personal integrity and the articulation of his grand vision for America?

Is that likely?

Granted, there are certain subsections of the American polity that have substantially benefited from this presidency. Millionaires and charismatic Christians have accrued either material or spiritual fortification from Bush`s administration. But surely these two groups are a small minority of the population. What, then, can account for so many people being so supportive of the president?

The answer, I`m afraid, is the factor that dare not speak its name. It`s the factor that no one talks about. The pollsters don`t ask it, the media don`t report it, the voters don`t discuss it.

I, however, will blare out its name so that at last people can address the issue and perhaps adopt strategies to overcome it.

It`s the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright.

It`s not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren`t the people I`m referring to. The people I`m referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They`re perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don`t have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all -- far above all -- they don`t think.

You know these people; they`re all around you (they`re not you, else you would not be reading this article this far). They`re the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace.

Politicians have been aware of this forever; they cater to these people. They offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. They evade directed questions with non-sequiturs. They offer meaningless, jingoistic pap instead of thoughtful policy. And these people, the "S" people, eat it all up with a ladle.

I don`t have a solution to this problem. To claim I did would belie my previous arguments. But I do have some modest suggestions that might provide a start for discussion: an intelligence test to earn the right to vote; a three-significantly-stupid-behaviors-and-you`re-out law; fines for politicians who pander to the lowest common denominator and deportation of media representatives who perpetuate such actions.

It`s well past time that people confront this issue, no matter who`s offended. We are on the way to becoming a nation of imbeciles. I`m certain that a plethora of "George W. Bush" jokes is already being circulated in every capital of the world. We can stop this sapping of our national integrity but we must do it soon, lest the morons become the norm and those of us who use our brains for more than memorizing advertising jingles are ourselves ostracized from society.

Let`s start talking. Let`s bring the S factor out of the closet and into the daylight where we can all see it, gulp at its hideousness and finally make serious attempts to bring it to bay.



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Neal Starkman lives in Seattle. Submissions for First Person, of up to 600 words, can be e-mailed to [e-mail]; faxed to 206-448-8184 or mailed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, P.O. Box 1909, Seattle, WA 98111-1909.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Wolves in Democrats` clothing
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, January 5, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/05/hsorensen.DTL


I`ll bet not one American in 200 knows, or cares, who Al From is. And (let`s go double or nothing) I`ll bet not one in 20 knows, or cares, what the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is.

I know ... now ... because I looked it up last week. And both From and his council are powerful influences in this year`s presidential campaigns.

Mr. From would argue with my description of him, but I`d describe him as a kind of agent provocateur, a plant inserted by the Republicans into the leadership of the Democrat Party. His goal: Wreck the party, turn it into the Republican Lite Party.

If that`s his goal, he`s doing a fine, fine job. And he`s using the DLC to do it. He founded the DLC, a collection of Democrat politicians, in 1985, apparently out of fear that the Democrats were done as a political party. After all, they had not had a president for five full years.

In Al From`s world, any Democrat who thinks like a Democrat is an extremist. A Democrat who thinks like a Republican is a centrist.

Mr. From buys into the myth that George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 were demolished by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan respectively because they were too liberal.

Apparently, he never heard of Watergate, "dirty tricks," the plumbers and Nixon`s CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President). McGovern was about as liberal as Barry Goldwater, but he was honest (for a politician), and that was a fatal disadvantage in a contest against "Tricky Dicky" Nixon.

McGovern also hurt himself when he named Thomas Eagleton, a senator from Missouri, as his running mate. What McGovern didn`t know at the time was that Eagleton had been treated for depression with electroshock treatments. In the eyes of many Americans, that meant Eagleton was not fit to be president. McGovern stood behind Eagleton -- "1000 percent," he said -- and then, a few days later, asked him to resign.

Mondale, on the other hand, didn`t like political campaigning and was inept at it. He lacked experience. Until he ran for president, he had run for reelection a few times but had never advanced to political office on his own. He was appointed to his first two political jobs -- Minnesota attorney general in 1960 and U.S. senator in 1964 -- and he rode Jimmy Carter`s coattails to the vice presidency in 1976.

Mondale demonstrated his lack of political moxie when, in his acceptance speech at San Francisco`s Moscone Center, he said he planned to raise taxes if elected. Shortly after that, he named discredited Carter administration appointee Bert Lance to head the Democratic National Committee. That poorly thought-out appointment created such a furor that Mondale was forced to withdraw it a few days later.

Mondale also had to run against Ronald Reagan, who was wildly popular at the time. Then, as now, the government was pumping a lot of money into the economy to make it look good.

The DLC`s big success, From`s "proof" that the DLC works, is Bill Clinton.

While it`s true that Clinton, a onetime chairman of the DCL, was a lukewarm Democrat, his success can be attributed to his campaigning skills, which are tremendous, and his luck in having Ross Perot siphon votes from his 1992 opponent, George Bush. Bush`s famous broken promise of his first and only term ("Read my lips: no new taxes") was another stroke of good luck for Clinton.

Mr. From`s DLC, it seems, is a party within a party, somewhat like the Christian Coalition was for the Republicans until recently. And, like the Christian Coalition, the DLC is trying to pull America further to the right.

Because of that, the DLC is at odds now with Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and apparent front-runner for this year`s Democrat nomination. The DLC considers Dean too far to the left.

Dean`s vow that all Americans will have some kind of health coverage is seen by the DLC as ultra-leftist, even though universal health care is the norm now in every industrial country that can afford it. Keeping citizens healthy is not exactly a radical idea. Or a new one.

And the DLC sees Dean`s opposition to the war in Iraq as some sort of whacked-out far-left concept, which, if you think about it, is an insult to all the thinking conservatives who oppose a preemptive war not declared by Congress.

So the DLC, which Dean has taken to calling "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party," is doing what it can to detour Dean`s march to the White House.

The DLC has annual meetings, and at least twice has issued lofty "declarations"; in New Orleans in 1990 and in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 2000. The declarations read like party platforms and are full of high-sounding rhetoric. And, like party platforms, they seem to be full of code words and phrases, such as, "We believe the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes."

Now, I`m pretty sure that doesn`t mean you and I should have the opportunities provided by John F. Kennedy`s or George W. Bush`s fortunes, their Ivy League educations or their family connections, so what does it mean?

Classic Republican-speak is what it is, and it means you and I shouldn`t complain about rich people, or, more important, shouldn`t tax them more than they care to be taxed.

Most of the declarations, it seems to me, seek a world in which American businessmen can make a killing.

And that fits with Al From. His biography on the New Democrats On-Line Web site says he is a "member of the Board of Directors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce National Chamber Foundation."

Trust me on this, folks: Anybody who claims to be a Democrat and is cozy with the Chamber of Commerce is not a Democrat; he`s a Republican in drag.

To win in November, it appears, the Democrats will have to defeat not only the Republican candidate but also the saboteurs in their own party, the Democratic Leadership Council.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

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PRIMARY SEASON

Get ready for March Madness

By JON MARGOLIS


Jon Margolis, the former national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, is the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964."



The regular season is over. The playoffs are about to begin.

Which means, as every fan knows, that now they play for keeps, every game counts, and there is no tomorrow.

Well, actually, in this league, sometimes there is a tomorrow,

even for the team finishing third. This is not one of those namby-pamby games like football or hockey. This is the National Politics League, specifically the Democratic Conference, and the tournament begins in two weeks.

Let`s concede at the outset that there are those -- mostly college professors -- who object to viewing politics as sport and assail journalists who cover an election as a "horse race."

But what is an election if not a race? And the question accompanying every race is: Who`s winning?

Besides, some of the candidates ought to be honored that the comparison is to the horse in its entirety.

Yes, the winner of this race gets to do more than stand in a circle with a garland of roses around his neck. He gets to help decide whether you have health insurance, whether the air is clean and whether your kids go to war. But first he has to win. So here, without apologies, are a Fan`s Notes on the playoffs, which have such a bunched-up schedule this year that the whole thing might be called "January-February-March Madness."

Like the plain old March Madness of the NCAA basketball tournament, this competition divides its teams into regional subgroups, and no team gets into the finals without winning its division. Just as Georgetown sometimes gets put into the West Regionals and the Dallas Cowboys are in the NFC East, the selections here are not always geographic, or for that matter rational. So let`s just start by breaking down the divisions:

TheNew England Division: Made up of two teams -- the Vermont Deaniacs led by Howard Dean, and the Boston Brahmins, starring Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts -- this division has produced the biggest surprise.

When the season began, the experts made the Brahmins the favorites, not just for the division but for the whole conference, and dismissed the Deaniacs as a bunch of bush leaguers who couldn`t make the playoffs. But the Brahmins have fumbled and stumbled while the hard-charging, trash-talking, fast-breaking, in-your-face Deaniacs have the best record and head into the playoffs as the favorites.

The Centrist Division: Another two-team division comprising the Midwest Oldtimers, starring Rep. Richard Gephardt, and the Connecticut Moderates, led by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The Oldtimers don`t get their name from Gephardt`s age, though, approaching 63, he is the oldest of the bunch. The name reflects the team`s devotion to old-fashioned Democrats -- union members, family farmers, retirees, residents of fading industrial cities, such as Gephardt`s St. Louis.

There was, of course, some consideration to putting the Moderates in the New England Division. But Lieberman stresses his centrism, not his region. Furthermore, other New Englanders are not sure Connecticut really belongs; half the folks there disdain the Red Sox and root for the Yankees.

The Southern Division: One team, Sen. Bob Graham`s Florida Crackers, has already been eliminated, leaving the Carolina Kids of Sen. John Edwards and the Arkansas Generals led by Wesley Clark. Edwards, who is actually 50, has had to deal all season with opponents laughing at him because he appears to be 12. Clark is the latecomer into the race; after losing his first few matches because he didn`t know what game he was playing, he found his stride and now leads the division.

The Lefty Division: This is the only three-team division, but it doesn`t matter because none of the three can win. Dennis Kucinich`s Cleveland Radicals have scored a few points, and the New York Preachers of the Rev. Al Sharpton execute the smoothest moves on the floor, even if they never score. Like the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago Brauns, engaging though they may be, aren`t going anywhere.

The tournament begins on the evening of Jan. 19 in Iowa, where 150,000 or more Democrats will head to high school auditoriums, church basements and at least one saloon to pull for their team.

After everybody`s fans are counted in each of the state`s 2,131 precincts, the results will be summarized in a process only a tad murkier than the one that resulted in LSU playing Oklahoma today.

They will then be interpreted by state party officials and roughly 10,000 pundits, pontificators and "bloggers" (if you don`t know what that is, consider yourself lucky) and transmitted to a waiting world.

Now, here are a few important differences between the NPL playoffs and the simpler tournaments of the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

First, teams can play in any regional tournament they choose. So both teams from the New England Division and all three from the Radicals will be competing in Iowa. But Clark`s Arkansas Generals and Lieberman`s Connecticut Moderates will not. They didn`t get a bye, exactly; they just opted out because they knew they`d get creamed. But both New England clubs are in the fray, with those Deaniacs threatening to topple Gephardt`s Oldtimers.

Another difference is that the weaker teams can stay in the tournament as long as they choose, which all three from the Lefty Division might do, while the stronger contenders get eliminated by losing just one match. Should Gephardt`s team lose Iowa, where they won in 1988, and which is right next door to his Missouri home, they`d be finished.

Then there`s this matter of interpretation, to which most sports are immune. When the 60th minute has been played or the last batter is out, whichever team has the most points or runs wins. Interpretation is superfluous.

Not in the NPL. Especially in these early contests, the actual score is less important than how it is analyzed. Should John Edwards and his Carolina Kids finish third in Iowa, watch him claim that because he "did better than expected," his team is the real winner.

They might be. Because if they do finish third, Edwards will get the buzz, another phenomenon unique to the NPL. In other sports, what is important is whether you can hit, run, throw, skate, shoot, tackle, etc. How you get talked about doesn`t much matter. In politics it matters, and whoever has the buzz after Iowa will have Momentum, or "the Big Mo" as the elder George Bush once put it, going into the next contest on Jan. 27 in New Hampshire.

Which does not mean that New Hampshire will follow Iowa`s example. Remember New Hampshire`s place in the sporting world: It`s Upset City.

The elder George Bush in 1980, the younger George Bush in 2000, Walter Mondale in 1984 were all as certain to win the New Hampshire primary as, well, as Sonny Liston was certain to dispatch Cassius Clay in February 1964.

All got whupped.

Needless to say, both New England teams have to win here to stay in the tournament, and the early line is that the Brahmins will fail, ending the Kerry candidacy. They might not even be the runner-up. In fact, there is some speculation that the team will fold right after Iowa.

If so, Kerry could decide to support someone else, and here`s another difference between the NPL and other leagues. After losing to the

Chicago Cubs in last year`s National League Division Series, the Atlanta Braves did not have the option of lending Chipper Jones or Greg Maddux to the Cubs to help them in the next playoff round. In this league, Kerry can decide to disband his team and go to bat for another.

Kerry does not like Howard Dean, so he could decide to help, say, Wes Clark`s Generals. With or without Kerry`s help, the Generals could end up finishing second to the Deaniacs. This would elevate Clark to the sought-after position as the "Un-Dean," setting up a two-team battle as the tournament heads south for the following, and possibly pivotal, week, known as "Mini Tuesday."

That`s when geography, and perhaps sanity, break down, as seven states hold their contests, and the relative calm of the previous weeks degenerates into what NPL insiders call "tarmac time." With only hours to spend in each state, the best each team can do is fly from tarmac to tarmac in as many media markets as possible, trying to reach all potential fans.

If by then the race is between Dean`s team and one other, expect the other -- whether it is Clark`s Generals, Gephardt`s Oldtimers or Edwards` Carolina Kids -- to point out that the Deaniacs play too far to the left, leaving the right and center exposed.

Ultimately, though, how a team plays is more important than where it plays. In this league, the winning team is the one with the biggest audience, and fans root for the team they like more than the team they agree with. Were it otherwise, Ronald Reagan`s California Conservatives would not have dominated the league in the 1980s.

If no winner emerges from Mini Tuesday, the contest might last until Super Tuesday on March 2, when nine states (including Georgia) hold primaries and Minnesota holds its caucuses.

It is theoretically possible that the two surviving viable teams will split these contests evenly, prolonging the race. It has never happened in the history of the NPL.

In this context, here are two warnings for casual fans. Do not believe also-rans quoting sports philosopher L. Peter Berra`s famous saying, "It ain`t over till it`s over," and arguing that because no team has won a majority of something known as "delegates," the fight will go on until the Democratic Conference`s midsummer convention in Boston. It`s been half a century since one of those conventions actually chose the conference champ. The converse of Berra`s rule is also true: When it`s over, it`s over.

Of course, only the conference champion will have been determined at this point. The winner will still have to face the Republican Conference champs, George W. Bush`s Texas Shrubs, who had no competition in their conference.

Better rested, with the biggest payroll in history and fielding more experienced players at every position, the Shrubs will enter the finals as overwhelming favorites, so designated by knowledgeable experts.

Heed them well, these experts. They work for newspapers, magazines and television networks.

As did, come to think of it, the experts who assured us that the upstart Florida Marlins were no match for the mighty Yankees.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Margolis, the former national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, is the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964." He also contributed to the book "Howard Dean: A Citizen`s Guide to the Man Who Would Be President."




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Monday, January 05, 2004
War News for January 5, 2003 Draft

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: US soldier wounded during patrol ambush in Tikrit.

Bring `em on: Three US troops wounded in convoy bombing near Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US soldier wounded in ambush near Beiji. Coalition headquarters in Nasiriyah mortared. Both incidents buried deep in this article.

Two British soldiers killed in Baghdad vehicle accident.

CPA brings improvement to Iraqi slum. "Nobody from the Iraqi provisional government or the American military has been to Taji since the war, Abu Wisam said. A humanitarian group came once, with enough blankets for about half the village. Then they went away. But there has been one welcome postwar arrival -- a higher class of trash."

Dutch soldier arrested for shooting Iraqi civilian.

Greenstock warns of more attacks in Iraq.

CPA says Kurdish region will remain autonomous. "The Bush administration has decided to let the Kurdish region remain semi-autonomous as part of a newly sovereign Iraq despite warnings from Iraq`s neighbors and many Iraqis not to divide the country into ethnic states, American and Iraqi officials say.…The issue of whether Iraq is to be divided into ethnic states in a federation-style government is of great significance both inside the country and throughout the Middle East, where fears are widespread that dividing Iraq along ethnic or sectarian lines could eventually break the country up and spread turmoil in the region."

Prosthetics keep pace with technical advances of warfare.

This ain`t good. "The incident has increased tensions in Tikrit, according to a U.S. commander in the town. `It was definitely more tense yesterday,` Lieutenant Colonel Steven Russell said. One of his soldiers was shot in the leg on Sunday as he patrolled the town, which may be a sign of increased hostility in a town where anti-U.S. activity has dropped off in the last few weeks, he said."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Vermont soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: New Jersey soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: South Dakota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Montana soldier wounded in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:35 AM

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

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CPA: Occupiers Are Above the Law

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 05, 2004 - 05:34 PM
On Saturday a car was sprayed with gunfire from US soldiers while trying to pass a US convoy in Tikrit. According to Agence France Presse,

“Police in Tikrit and Salahaddin province, along with the car`s sole survivor, have insisted a US convoy opened fire on a blue Chevrolet Caprice as it tried to pass, riddling it with bullets and killing the driver, a second man, a woman and her nine-year-old child.”


Ramadi home destroyed due to US ‘bad information.’

One month ago a tank drove over a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric in the Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad and killed him. The CPA described this as a “traffic accident.”

40 Iraqi demonstrators throughout Iraq were shot dead by US soldiers during the aftermath following the capture of Saddam Hussein.

During the Anglo-American Invasion of Iraq, on April 7th Americans killed the al-Jazeera correspondent in Baghdad. On the same day, the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad was attacked and its cameraman was killed, along with a cameraman from Spain’s Tele 5 channel.


Samarra resident shot by US soldiers during an attack by resistance fighters. He was shopping in an adjacent market when the attack occured.

How have the Coalition Forces in Iraq been getting away with killing Iraqi civilians, religious leaders, demonstrators, and foreign journalists? It almost appears as though they are above the law.

According to CPA Order Number 17, which deals with the status of the coalition personnel, they appear to be just that-above the law.

According to section 2 of this document, subheading number four, “All Coalition personnel shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of their Parent States and, they shall be immune from local criminal, civil, and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention…”

Just in case Coalition personnel commit an act for which there are no criminal sanctions in their Parent State, subheading five states, “…the CPA may request from the Parent State waiver of jurisdiction to try such act or acts under Iraqi law. In such cases, no Legal Process shall be commenced without the written permission of the Administrator of the CPA. (Paul Bremer)

How convenient.

For the record, Coalition Contractors and Sub-Contractors enjoy many of these same ‘immunity’ benefits as well. Later in said document,

“In respect of acts or omissions of Coalition contractors and sub-contractors as well as their employees not normally resident in Iraq…no Iraqi or CPA Legal Process shall be commenced without the written permission of the Administrator of the CPA.” (Paul Bremer)

Again, quite convenient.

So, if an Iraqi civilian, religious leader, demonstrator or foreign journalist is killed, one would assume there would at least be the option of their family and/or loved ones being able to file a claim for damages, yes?

Well, section 6 of said document, pertaining to claims, states,

“Third party claims including those for property loss or damage and for personal injury, illness or death or in respect of any other matter arising from or attributed to Coalition personnel or any persons employed by them, whether normally resident in Iraq or not and that do not arise in connection with military combat operations, shall be submitted and dealt with by the Parent State whose Coalition personnel, property, activities or other assets are alleged to have caused the claimed damage, in a manner consistent with the national laws of the Parent State.”

The inherent ‘grey area’ of whether a death is related to a military combat operation or not is always in question as well.


Hamad Abdulla Amin in Samarra hospital, injured during attack on US soldiers in his city.

I don’t enjoy reading legalese any more than the next person, but I read this as saying if an Iraqi suffers damages from Coalition personnel, or anyone working for the Coalition, then the claim must be taken up by their ‘Parent State.’

This is Iraqis ‘Parent State’, being that we are in Iraq.

Yet the document says that Coalition personnel and people working for the Coalition are immune to Iraqi law.

So where are Iraqis to file their claim?

As I’ve heard countless Iraqis say, as well as seen painted on so many walls throughout Baghdad,

“Where are our human rights?”



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
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Monday, January 5, 2004; 4:17 PM
NASA on Monday released a sweeping, 3-D panorama of the surface of Mars snapped by the newly landed rover Spirit, as scientists awaited the first detailed color images of the robot`s surroundings.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/360/010504-15p.h…

Help:
Click and drag to navigate. Press [Shift] to zoom in and [Ctrl] to zoom out. Don`t see anything? Please download and install the

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Resist the new Rome
Osama bin Laden
Tuesday January 6, 2004
The Guardian

My message is to urge jihad to repulse the grand plots hatched against our nation, such as the occupation of Baghdad, under the guise of the search for weapons of mass destruction, and the fierce attempt to destroy the jihad in beloved Palestine by employing the trick of the road map and the Geneva peace initiative.

The Americans` intentions have also become clear in statements about the need to change the beliefs and morals of Muslims to become more tolerant, as they put it.

In truth, this is a religious-economic war. The occupation of Iraq is a link in the Zionist-crusader chain of evil. Then comes the full occupation of the rest of the Gulf states to set the stage for controlling and dominating the whole world.

For the big powers believe that the Gulf and the Gulf states are the key to global control due to the presence of the largest oil reserves there. The situation is serious and the misfortune momentous.

The west`s occupation of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries ago, and will continue. There can be no dialogue with occupiers except through arms. Throughout the past century, Islamic countries have not been liberated from occupation except through jihad. But, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the west today is doing its utmost to besmirch this jihad, supported by hypocrites.

Jihad is the path, so seek it. If we seek to deter them with any means other than Islam, we would be like our forefathers, the Ghassanids [Arab tribes living under the Byzantine empire]. Their leaders` concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula`s Arabs.

Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia].

Today they have robbed you of Baghdad and tomorrow they will rob you of Riyadh unless God deems otherwise. What is the means to stop this tremendous onslaught? Some reformers maintain that all popular and government forces should unite to ward off this crusader-Zionist onslaught.

But the question strongly raised is: are the governments in the Islamic world capable of pursuing their duty to defend the faith and nation and renouncing all allegiance to the United States?

The calls by some reformers are strange. They say that the path to defending the homeland and people passes though the doors of those western rulers. I tell those reformers: if you have an excuse for not pursuing jihad, it does not give you the right to depend on the unjust. God does not need your flattery of dictators.

The Gulf states proved their total inability to resist the Iraqi forces [in 1990-1]. They sought help from the crusaders, led by the United States. These states then came to America`s help and backed it in its attack against an Arab state [Iraq in 2003].

These regimes submitted to US pressure and opened their air, land and sea bases to contribute towards the US campaign, despite the immense repercussions of this move. They feared that the door would be open for bringing down dictatorial regimes by armed forces from abroad, especially after they had seen the arrest of their former comrade in treason and agentry to the United States [Saddam Hussein] when it ordered him to ignite the first Gulf war against Iran, which rebelled against it.

The war plunged the area into a maze from which they have not emerged to this day. They are aware that their turn will come. They do not have the will to make the decision to confront the aggression. In short, the ruler who believes in the above-mentioned deeds cannot defend the country. Those who support the infidels over Muslims, and leave the blood, honour and property of their brothers to their enemy in order to remain safe, can be expected to take the same course against one another in the Gulf states.

Indeed, this principle is liable to be embraced within the state itself. And in fact the rulers have started to sell out the sons of the land by pursuing, imprisoning and killing them. This campaign has been part of a drive to carry out US orders.

Honest people concerned about this situation should meet away from the shadow of these oppressive regimes and declare a general mobilisation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans, which started in Iraq and no one knows where they will end.

· This is an edited extract of a recording believed to have been made by the al-Qaida leader, transmitted by al-Jazeera and translated by the BBC Monitoring Service

news.bbc.co.uk


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Trouble looms after coalition tells Kurds self-rule can stay
Owen Bowcott and Brian Whitaker
Tuesday January 6, 2004
The Guardian

Kurdish political leaders have been reassured that their region`s semi-autonomous status will be allowed to continue after the handover to Iraqi self-rule on June 30.

The decision, which will infuriate neighbouring states and antagonise other Iraqis, is likely to have far-reaching consequences for any future constitutional settlement.

There have already been armed clashes in Kirkuk - with Arabs and Turkomans against Kurds - over control of the disputed, oil-rich city. Last week six people were killed.

The deal on preserving regional autonomy was reached at the weekend at a meeting in the Kurdish city of Irbil, when the American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, and his British deputy, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, met Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP). The latter group is determined to extend its control beyond what were once the "safe havens" to the whole of the predominantly Kurdish north, including Kirkuk.

Allowing the Kurds to retain regional government is tacit recognition that the coalition has neither the time nor resources to dismantle the existing Kurdish parliament and administrations if they are to meet the June deadline. Those bodies date back to the end of the 1991 Gulf war, surviving outside of Saddam Hussein`s rule under allied protection.

The British and Americans formally maintain that whether or not Iraq becomes a federal state, with semi-autonomous regions or simply local governorates, is up to the Iraqis.

But by not challenging the status quo, the coalition may leave the Kurds in a stronger position at constitutional talks. Mr Bremer wants a US-style federal constitution in which the largest devolved bodies would become Iraq`s 18 governorates.

"This statement which has come out is a positive one and says the Kurdish areas should have self-rule," Dilshad Miran, the KDP representative in London, said yesterday.

"The borders have not been settled but the US has said it will be semi-autonomy.

"The area will not be agreed until there`s been a proper census and the policies of Arabisation [carried out by the Ba`ath party] have been reversed. It will be a tough negotiation."

A Kurdish semi-autonomous region should be like Scotland within Britain, he said. Defence and foreign policy should be left to Baghdad.

The spokesman for the PUK in London, Howar Haji, said the Americans and British had "agreed that the existing safe havens will continue" to exist after June 30. The Irbil meeting also confirmed that up to 200,000 Kurds expelled from the Kirkuk region under Saddam`s rule will be allowed to return, according to Mr Haji. In the short term the rival KDP and PUK administrations were likely to merge.

Kurdish ambitions are worrying other Iraqis, not least the estimated 2 million Turkomans who live mainly in the north-east. The creation of the safe havens effectively split the Turkomans into those dominated by the Kurds and those ruled by Baghdad. This division would be consolidated by the US plans.

Although Saddam changed the population balance by resettling Arabs there, the Turkomans regard Kirkuk as their city. The Kurds, meanwhile, view the city as an essential part of a future Kurdish state, because of its oilfields.

In an interview with an Arabic paper, the Turkoman member of Iraq`s governing council, Songul Chapouk, hinted that the Turkomans would declare their own "Turkmanistan" if the Kurds looked like fulfilling their ambitions.

Such a move would mark the start of a civil war in the north - one in which neighbouring Turkey could feel obliged to intervene because of its cultural affinity with the Iraqi Turkomans and its fears about its own Kurdish minority.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Georgia
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A rose in winter
Leader
Tuesday January 6, 2004
The Guardian

Georgia is entitled to its moment of optimism. But it may only be a moment. If this former Soviet republic were located in Africa or the Middle East, it would be called a failed state. Its newly elected president, Mikhail Saakashvili, aged 36, faces a task that would daunt a more experienced politician. Although his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, deposed in last November`s "rose revolution", is safely out of the way, Georgia`s infamously corrupt and inefficient state structures remain in place. So inefficient, in fact, that the black economy accounts for an estimated 60% of total activity. The average wage among a population of approximately 5 million is about $20 a month, with monthly state pensions as low as $7. Tax avoidance and non-payment of utility bills is standard practice; then again, bureaucrats plunder state revenues and power cuts are routine.

Georgia groans under a foreign debt of $1.75bn and has repeatedly failed to meet IMF and World Bank prescriptions for relief. It has received over $1bn in bilateral US aid since independence in 1991, more per capita than any country bar Israel, but its industries, tourism, and agriculture have declined, not grown. If all this were not bad enough, there are existential problems, too. Georgia`s territorial integrity is threatened by separatists or autonomists in three of its regions, some of whom are backed in Moscow. Its sovereignty is compromised by the presence of both Russian and US troops. The Russians have been there since the Soviet era; the war in Chechnya has frequently spilled across the Georgian border. The US Green Berets are training Georgian soldiers in counter-terrorism. But these same soldiers may also be used to protect America`s interest in the $3bn trans-Georgia oil pipeline that from 2005 will link the Caspian basin to the west.

Nor is Mr Saakashvili himself a wholly problem-free zone. He cannot help his inexperience. But what some see as his impetuous nationalism could alienate Georgia`s ethnic minorities and hinder bridge-building with the breakaway regions. Although he now says he wants warmer ties, his pro-western instincts, his close, personal links to the US and his vow to close Russian bases will not endear him to Moscow. His partner in rose propagation, Nino Burdzhanadze, the cool-headed pro tem head of state, is in some ways more impressive. But that is to ignore the US-schooled charisma factor (and gender factor) that brought Mr Saakashvili to the fore. "He is young, he has a lot of energy," said Mr Shevardnadze who, wily to the last, voted for him. "He should talk less, work more. Enough of populism. There is a lot to be done."

A lot indeed. Mr Saakashvili was quick to recognise the sheer scale of the task ahead. But to succeed, he will need all the help he can get. Having modelled his putsch on Serbia`s 2000 revolution, it would be a pity if Georgia, after a year or two of broken promises and gradual disillusion, were to slip under his leadership into a Serbian-style regression. The EU has a role to play, as do the OSCE and international financial institutions. Hilary Benn should think what more Britain can do in the way of aid. Russia, having been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by the Americans, would be well-advised to extend a hand to Georgia`s new leader, even if the very thought may set Stalin spinning under the Kremlin wall.

But the main burden must fall on the US which did so very much to facilitate this change of regime. It was Washington, after all, that in effect pulled the rug from under Mr Shevardnadze, groomed and indirectly funded the democratic opposition, and whose strategic, security and oil interests dictated the process. The lack of financial follow-through that has often characterised US interventions in the past must not be repeated in Georgia. King-making is not enough. Nation-building is what counts. And it costs.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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15 Filme gegen den Präsidenten

Die Finalisten des Anti-Bush-Filmwettbewerbs stehen fest. Trash oder Punk sucht man vergebens - die Autoren bedienen sich fast ausnahmslos einer eindringlichen, ernsthaften Filmsprache. SPIEGEL ONLINE zeigt vier der 15 Spots - Fortsetzung folgt.



rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3656.…

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3657.…

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3658.…

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3659.…

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,280648,00.h…

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January 5, 2004
U.S.A.
A Bonanza for Errors
By DER SPIEGEL

America`s Electronic Voting Machines Are Susceptible to Manipulation

Walden O`Dell is entitled to call himself a "Pioneer." The business leader from North Canton, Ohio, has qualified for the honorific because he collected 600,000 dollars for George W. Bush`s election campaign. He accompanied this with a pledge to do everything possible to help Ohio "deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.

But with this statement O`Dell has caused more of a stir than he could have wished. For the "Pioneer" is also chief executive of Diebold Inc., a company that among other things manufactures voting machines. About 40,000 of these are installed in 37 states and are supposed to record and count votes on November 2. Diebold is in second place, right behind the market leader, Election Systems and Software which achieved its top ranking under Chuck Hagel before he, a Republican, was elected senator from Nebraska.

Recently the states have left decisions about the technological side of voting procedures to private companies. It is shocking enough that the giants of the trade are vying to get close to the government. But in addition, O`Dell has inadvertently called attention to how susceptible the machines are to manipulation.

In principle, voting machines work like ATMs: The voter touches the name of his candidate on the screen. But instead of receiving some sort of receipt at the end of the transaction as he does from a money machine, he gets no receipt at all for the vote he has cast. Thus there is no way to check whether the machine has really recorded what it was supposed to have recorded.

And discrepancies are not rare, as was revealed a year and a half ago during spot checks performed in Dallas and Georgia: in thousands of cases the computerized voting machines had either allocated votes to the wrong candidate or not counted them at all. The lame excuse was that the screen had wrongly calibrated itself because of frequent use.

In the meantime, legions of computer freaks have tackled both the computers` software and hardware, discovering plenty of sources for errors. Since the exact time of the transaction is not recorded as it is with ATMs, some sinister forces could arrange ex post facto for a desired result without attracting attention during the customarily low voter turnout. Diebold even admitted that the database had not been encoded before the counting of the votes - a windfall for hackers.

Ironically, the electronic voting machines are supposed to prevent a repetition of the embarrassments that occurred in Florida in 2000, and which tinged the election of Bush with suspicion. Antiquated equipment was unable to read voting cards that had not been properly punched - and consequently they were not counted.

The U.S. Congress is spending just under four billion dollars on modernization of the voting process. A changeover to the digital era will be complete by 2006. By November 2nd this year, new computer screens should be operational at about 20 percent of all polling places.

Now Diebold is thrashing about with all sorts of inadequate explanations for the defective software. Yet the company could learn a lesson from its small, keen competitor. The Avante company combines digital high tech with old-fashioned paper statements. In this way each voter can make sure that the computer has really done what the voter wanted it to do - and manipulation is, at least for the most part, made more difficult.


[translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo]



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2004
Islamic Democracy

fghanistan`s new Constitution offers hope that the beleaguered nation can finally evolve into a modern, democratic state. Forged from weeks of bitter debate at the constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, the document sets the stage for the first real elections in more than two decades, possibly by summer. And it balances the goal of an Islamic state with the promise to abide by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. America`s ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was right to call it "one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world." Now comes the difficult part: turning a decent constitution into a working democracy.

It is possible to see how the promises in this Constitution could be sidestepped by powerful interests in Afghanistan. Many freedoms, like the right to create social organizations or the right to publish without government censorship, could still be limited by laws. That seems to mean that some future president and Parliament could create legislation that would, in effect, shut down news organizations or limit other freedoms. A judiciary that leans heavily on the most conservative Islamic judges rather than on those trained in civil law could be overly restrictive in its judgments. And with the best of intentions, the protection of freedoms will be difficult in a chaotic and increasingly unsafe nation.

Still, there was good news in this document and the way it was approved. The Constitution specifically grants equal rights to women, even promising two Parliament seats in each province to women. That is clear progress after years under the Taliban, which did not believe in women`s education or even adequate health care. A nation of many ethnic groups, most represented at the loya jirga, now has a Constitution that grants some respect for languages other than the dominant Pashto or Dari. And for those worried about the role of the presidency, the president`s powers were softened slightly by adding a second vice president and by giving Parliament the right to approve presidential appointments.

The Bush administration, justifiably thrilled by the outcome, has also acknowledged that the constitution cannot be put into effect without the continued support of the United States and its allies. Future elections would best be run under the wing of the United Nations, but President Bush and his allies will need to help provide the political support and military security to make presidential and parliamentary elections possible.

In the end, Afghanistan`s Constitution, like all such documents, is really a catalog of promises, a framework for the dreams of a new and better government. This one provides an excellent foundation for creating a better Afghanistan.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Rubin Gets Shrill
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Argentina retained the confidence of international investors almost to the end of the 1990`s. Analysts shrugged off its large budget and trade deficits; business-friendly, free-market policies would, they insisted, allow the country to grow out of all that. But when confidence collapsed, that optimism proved foolish. Argentina, once a showpiece for the new world order, quickly became a byword for economic catastrophe.

So what? Those of us who have suggested that the irresponsibility of recent American policy may produce a similar disaster have been dismissed as shrill, even hysterical. (Hey, the market`s up, isn`t it?) But few would describe Robert Rubin, the legendary former Treasury secretary, as hysterical: his ability to stay calm in the face of crises, and reassure the markets, was his greatest asset. And Mr. Rubin has formally joined the coalition of the shrill.

In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors — Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics — argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column. The United States, they point out, is currently running very large budget and trade deficits. Official projections that this deficit will decline over time aren`t based on "credible assumptions." Realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers.

All of this is conventional stuff, if anathema to administration apologists, who insist, in flat defiance of the facts, that they have a "plan" to cut the deficit in half. What`s new is what Mr. Rubin and his co-authors say about the consequences. Rather than focusing on the gradual harm inflicted by deficits, they highlight the potential for catastrophe.

"Substantial ongoing deficits," they warn, "may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits." In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.

Lest readers think that the most celebrated Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton has flipped his lid, the paper rather mischievously quotes at length from an earlier paper by Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw, who make a similar point. Mr. Mankiw is now the chairman of the president`s Council of Economic Advisers, a job that requires him to support his boss`s policies, and reassure the public that the budget deficit produced by those policies is manageable and not really a problem.

But here`s what he wrote back in 1995, at a time when the federal deficit was much smaller than it is today, and headed down, not up: the risk of a crisis of confidence "may be the most important reason for seeking to reduce budget deficits. . . . As countries increase their debt, they wander into unfamiliar territory in which hard landings may lurk. If policymakers are prudent, they will not take the chance of learning what hard landings in [advanced] countries are really like."

The point made by Mr. Rubin now, and by Mr. Mankiw when he was a free agent, is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn`t a birthright. Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity — in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to rein in deficits, paying a political cost if necessary. And in the past that belief has been justified. Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when the budget deficit soared.

But do we still have that kind of maturity? Here`s the opening sentence of a recent New York Times article on the administration`s budget plans: "Facing a record budget deficit, Bush administration officials say they have drafted an election-year budget that will rein in the growth of domestic spending without alienating politically influential constituencies." Needless to say, the proposed spending cuts — focused only on the powerless — are both cruel and trivial.

If this kind of fecklessness goes on, investors will eventually conclude that America has turned into a third world country, and start to treat it like one. And the results for the U.S. economy won`t be pretty.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
10 Dead After Bomb Rocks Kandahar


By Noor Khan
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; 4:32 AM


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A bicycle bomb exploded Tuesday on a street in this southern Afghan city, killing at least 10 people and shattering cars and windows in the area, witnesses and police said.

The victims all appeared to be Afghans who were walking on the street when the blast occurred, Deputy Police Chief Salim Khan told The Associated Press. He said at least 15 other people were injured.

A soldier, Amanullah Popolzai, said authorities detained a man spotted running away from the scene shortly before the explosion. The man, who appeared to be an Afghan member of the renegade Taliban, was caught trying to hide in a nearby home, Popolzai said.

A badly damaged truck lay in the middle of the road after the explosion, its driver among the dead. The torn metal of about a dozen bicycles littered the asphalt.

The bomb had been attached to one of the bikes, Khan said.

The blast occurred in a residential sector of eastern Kandahar, about 100 yards from an Afghan military base. Dozens of Afghan and American soldiers swarmed into the area, sealing it off.

The attack was the latest in a stream of shootings, kidnappings and bombs against civilians as well as soldiers in the south and east of the country, with many of the attacks claimed by Taliban militants.

Many have occurred in the Kandahar area, the former Taliban stronghold that is the focus of a U.S. plan to deploy troops and civilian reconstruction workers across the south to make it safe for summer elections and badly needed reconstruction.

On Monday, gunmen attacked the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Kandahar, throwing a grenade and firing shots but causing no injuries.

Exactly a month ago, a bomb ripped through a bustling bazaar in the city, wounding 20 Afghans, in an attack the Taliban said targeted - but missed - U.S. soldiers.


© 2004 The Associated Press

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A Sunni Muslim calls for holy war during the Friday noon prayer at the Ibn Taimiya mosque in Baghdad after U.S. troops raided the mosque and detained a cleric.
washingtonpost.com
Feeling Besieged, Iraq`s Sunnis Unite
Once-Dominant Minority Forms Council To Counter Shiites and Negotiate Future

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A11


BAGHDAD, Jan. 5 -- Iraq`s minority Sunni Muslims, who enjoyed a favored place under former president Saddam Hussein and now complain of discrimination, have formed a national council to press their interests with U.S. occupation forces and counter the threat of domination by rival Shiite Muslims.

Founders of the shura, or consultative, council said its establishment a week ago is unprecedented in the history of Iraq`s Sunnis, reflecting their dramatic reversal of fortune following Hussein`s ouster. By forming a body representing a cross-section of Sunnis, they said, they hope to offer the U.S. government a central interlocutor for discussing their future and that of Iraq.

So far, the Sunnis have mostly been sources of trouble for U.S. forces. Attacks against U.S. and allied forces have been centered in the largely Sunni region north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle, and U.S. commanders have described the insurgency as an exclusively Sunni endeavor.

Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the U.S.-led occupation authority was still learning about the Sunni body but would welcome a constructive dialogue. "If the shura council seeks to engage in a cooperative relationship with shared principles of promoting democracy and nonviolence, then the [occupation authority] will be ready to respond," Senor said.

But the formation of the Sunni council could also complicate U.S. plans for transition to Iraqi sovereignty by July 1, because the Sunnis would be in a stronger position to resist these efforts. The council, for instance, is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer.

The shura council was set up during a conference at Baghdad`s largest mosque, Umm al Qurra, a structure known before the U.S. invasion as the Mother of All Battles Mosque. Though the initiative for a national council emerged shortly after Baghdad`s fall in April, officials involved in its development said the project accelerated in recent months as fears mounted that the Sunnis` leadership role in Iraq was being eclipsed by the majority Shiites, especially on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

"After the war, there was a large political and social vacuum," said Mohammed Ahmed Rashid, an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is involved in forming the council. "We think the American military mistakenly believed that the Shiites constituted a large majority in Iraq, and for that reason gave the Shiites a bigger slice of control on the Governing Council and in the political life of the country."

Hussein`s capture last month also removed the focus of many Sunnis` political aspirations. It also eliminated the shadow the former president cast over many Sunni areas even after his ouster.

The shura council includes equal representation from each of the three main currents within the Sunni Muslim community: the politically oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the religious puritans of the Salafi movement and the adherents of the mystical Sufi tradition. Within each group, half the seats are allocated for ethnic Arabs and half are divided between ethnic Kurds and Turkmen. Dozens of other council members are drawn from professionals, intellectuals, tribal leaders and other civic groups.

The council does not plan to exclude former members of Hussein`s government unless they were involved in criminal activities, Rashid said. "Those who had leadership positions in the Baath Party will not have leading positions in our organization. But we can cooperate with them and make use of their efforts," he said.

Activists involved in the insurgency against U.S. occupation will also be eligible to join the council, though the council`s position on the uprising remains unclear, Rashid said. He explained that Iraqis retained the right to resist the occupation, adding that the council supported all peaceful means to oppose it. He said council members have reserved judgment on whether to back armed resistance.

The council`s primary goal, he said, is to play a role in drafting an Iraqi constitution and forming a new government, including the election of a president. By unifying their community, Sunni leaders would have more leverage with occupation officials and the Governing Council.

"We established the council to demand that the rights of Sunnis be equal to those of others, especially the Shiites, and to limit the outside interference in the political life of Iraq," Rashid said.

Despite sharp differences over other issues, Sunnis involved in the shura council said they agreed with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s leading Shiite cleric, about his demand that a new transitional government be chosen through direct elections, which would place power in the hands of the Shiites, according to many political observers. But Rashid said elections, monitored by international observers, would actually demonstrate that the U.S. administration had underestimated the Sunni population.

U.S. officials say about one-fifth of Iraq`s 24.7 million inhabitants are Sunni Arabs and three-fifths are Shiite Arabs. Sunni activists, however, claim the total Sunni population, including ethnic Kurds and Turkmen, is equivalent to that of the Shiites.

Bremer has been negotiating with Sistani for weeks over a plan that could accommodate the cleric`s call for elections while retaining a role for provincial caucuses. At the same time, in the absence of a recognized Sunni authority, U.S. officials have been trying to develop a strategy to win over local tribal leaders in predominantly Sunni areas, aiming to allay their fears that the transition plan is a recipe for Shiite domination.

U.S. efforts to engage Sunnis more broadly have been hamstrung by the absence of major political parties or religious authorities that could speak for the community. By contrast, Iraqi Shiites have long had political parties and religious scholars representing most of their adherents.

Shura council members said they were open to direct talks with Bremer, adding that they had already begun informal contacts with the provisional administration.

In pressing for a transitional government, however, shura council leaders said they did not intend to work through the ruling structure in Baghdad headed by the Governing Council, which they dismissed as a tool of U.S. occupation that substantially underrepresents Sunnis. The 25-member council includes five Sunni Arabs, whose credibility among their coreligionists is questioned by many.

If direct talks are to proceed between the shura council and the occupation authority, the two sides must overcome mutual suspicion. Last week, U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces arrested several shura council members during a raid on a major Baghdad mosque, according to Fakhri Kaisy, a council spokesman. He accused the U.S. military of seeking to thwart Sunni efforts to organize politically. "It looks as if the American people want to erase the Sunni people from the history of Iraq," he said.

U.S. military officials said the operation was based on intelligence that the mosque was a center of resistance activity, adding that they discovered a cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives. U.S. officials said they did not know whether commanders were aware that shura council members were meeting in the mosque at the time.

While keeping one eye on the United States, the shura council is also looking to limit the influence of the Shiites and their backers in neighboring Iran, which is largely Shiite. Rashid said the shura council would press for legal restrictions on the immigration of Shiites from Iran who he said had been passing themselves off as Iraqi citizens. Another priority would be to prevent Iraq from joining a security alliance with either Iran or Turkey. Rashid said Iraq must remain in the Arab League, which consists overwhelmingly of countries governed by Sunnis.

Rashid said the council was also determined to resist an agreement between U.S. and Iraqi officials to introduce a federal system that would grant enhanced autonomy to the Kurdish north, calling such an act the first step toward partition of Iraq.

Underpinning the formation of the shura council is a belated realization among many Sunnis that developments have turned against them and that, unlike the Shiites, they were not prepared for the overthrow of the Hussein government.

Over the centuries, Shiites have traditionally looked to their top clerics for leadership, creating a widely recognized authority apart from the state. But many Sunnis saw Hussein`s ruling Baath Party, which filled its upper ranks with Sunnis, as their primary political organization. That fit with the traditional Sunni view that even an unjust leader, as long as he is Muslim, deserves obedience because the alternative could be anarchy, according to Harith Dhari, a Sunni cleric.

"A political vacuum in the eyes of Sunnis is more despicable than an unjust ruler. The state we are in right now confirms the truth of that," said Dhari, who played a central role in establishing the shura council. "Before, we had a government that gave us law and order. After the American occupation, each group in Iraq is pursuing its own interest and trying to secure its own welfare."

The Sunnis have paid a high price, he said. U.S. forces, acting on what Dhari called misinformation supplied by the Sunnis` rivals, have been raiding Sunni homes in pursuit of insurgents and filling prisons with Sunni suspects. At the same time, he said, militias affiliated with Shiite political parties have assassinated scores of respected Sunnis. Shiite party leaders have denied their followers played any role in such killings.

"We never needed a body like the shura council before. But now we need it to look after our political, social and religious affairs," Dhari said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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etwas Musique zur Auflockerung...

Uncle Sam´s on Mars • Hawkwind (1977)

Shoals of dead fish float on the lakes,
But Uncle Sam`s on Mars
And science is making the same mistakes,
But Uncle Sam`s on Mars
No one down here knows how to work the brakes,
but Uncle Sam`s on Mars
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
He`s on Mars

Layers of smoke in the atmosphere
Have made the earth too hot to bear
The Earth might be a desert soon,
America has left the Moon
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
Uncle Sam`s on Mars,
He`s on Mars

He`s digging for dreams in the red sand
He`s got his bucket and spade in his left hand
He`s digging for dreams
He`s looking for life
What`s he doing out there?
He`s looking for life
Looking for life
There may be life out there

(Nixon to Armstrong - July 21st 1969):
"I`m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room in the White House. And this certainly must be the most exciting telephone call ever made here on Earth. I just can`t tell you how proud we all are. For every American this has to be the proudest day of their lives. And for people all over the world, I`m sure they too join with us in recognising what a tremendous achievement this is. For one priceless moment in the whole history of Man......"

MacDonalds Hamburger
Construction works
And he`s looking for life
Looking for life to wind u
He`s looking for life to stamp out
He`s looking for life to grind out
He`s looking for life, so mind out

I hope you brought your credit card with you,
and I hope you know how to drive on these long, lonely freeways and intersections we`ve got up here. We`ve got two cars in the garage, two cars in the garage, and
drum-majorettes in white ankle socks and baton twirling on Sundays.
We`ve got stripes and the stars,
And Uncle Sam`s on,
Uncle Sam`s on,
Uncle Sam`s on Mars....

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washingtonpost.com
Closing the Jobs Gap


By Marc Morial

Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17


This time of year all Americans look with anticipation and hope to the opportunities and challenges they will face in the new year. Judging by the many positive economic indicators in the final quarter of last year, there should be much to look forward to. The stock market has moved upward for several weeks, and consumer confidence is beginning to rebound, as a just-finished holiday buying season shows. But while there are solid grounds for optimism, millions of Americans were hoping that someone would put a job under their tree this holiday season.

While many numbers do look good, there are still signs we cannot ignore. A comparative study of economic recessions by the National Urban League`s Institute of Equality and Opportunity (IOE) shows that while many economic indicators are moving up, unemployment remains static and those hit hardest are the ones who can least afford it. In stark terms, when recession hits, African American unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment.

In October and November the nation`s unemployment rate held steady at 5.9 percent. But those numbers are skewed: The unemployment rate is 5.2 percent for whites, 7.4 percent for Latinos, and 10.2 percent for African Americans. This means that 8.7 million people are out of work, 2 million of whom have been jobless for at least six months -- the worst such ratio in 20 years. A jobless recovery, or one that produces lower earnings and therefore lower consumer spending, should be unacceptable to workers and businesses alike.

Unemployment insurance was never designed to be a long-term or lifelong program. It was intended as a kind of backstop to help displaced workers make the transition into new jobs. Through much of its history, that is exactly what unemployment has meant to millions of workers. But in this current recovery we are seeing a different, more troubling trend. According to the IOE`s report, some 70 percent of workers are dropping off the unemployment rolls because their time has elapsed, not because they are finding other jobs. This is particularly true with minority workers in urban areas.

As both President Bush and the Democrats running for president have indicated, we cannot realistically categorize the current economic conditions as a "recovery" if there are no new jobs. Simply put, there is no such thing as a "jobless recovery." We as a nation must do more.

In response to this problem, the National Urban League is doing three things. We will host a jobs summit this spring and invite the nation`s top business and labor leaders. The idea is not to have a partisan debate, which has become the norm in Washington, but to talk realistically about solutions to the job gap facing millions of American workers. Second, we are announcing the formation of a jobs commission to begin the work of putting people back to work. Finally, we will commission quarterly IOE reports on the status of the economic recovery to monitor our progress.

Often we are guilty of waiting for political leaders to come up with ideas and drive the debate. This jobs summit and commission will allow business, labor and community leaders to put our ideas into the political debate for the 2004 election cycle, instead of our reacting to political proposals. It is our challenge as leaders to make sure that as we celebrate the encouraging economic numbers, we do not forget the most important number for real economic recovery: the number of people working. Republican President Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Democratic President John F. Kennedy when describing the concept of economic recovery reaching every American: "A rising tide lifts all boats." It is in that spirit that we must begin looking for answers and challenging our leaders to put aside partisan differences and begin working together for the American worker.

The writer is president and CEO of the National Urban League.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Out of Their Anti-Tax Minds


By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17


This is the way things happen in my business. In October the extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist was interviewed by Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air." By December a portion of that interview was reprinted in Harper`s magazine, where, over the holidays, I happened to see it. I am writing about it today because, among other things, Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.

This remark, so bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking, sent me to the transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was confirmed. In it Norquist referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that`s the morality of the Holocaust. `Well, it`s only a small percentage,` you know. I mean, it`s not you. It`s somebody else."

From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn`t believe her ears. "Excuse me," she interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?"

Norquist explained himself. "No, the morality that says it`s okay to do something to a group because they`re a small percentage of the population is the morality that says the Holocaust is okay because they didn`t target everybody, just a small percentage." He went on to liken the estate tax to apartheid in the old South Africa and to the communist regime of the old East Germany. How he neglected Iraq under Saddam Hussein I will never know.

It`s hard to overstate Norquist`s importance in contemporary Washington. He is head of Americans for Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the president`s chief political aide, and has easy access to the White House. He presides over a weekly meeting of important Republican activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least Norquist`s -- is to ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the government is starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same, which is to say almost not at all.

The Bush administration has mindlessly applied this doctrine. It has three times reduced taxes -- mostly on the rich -- careening the federal budget from a surplus to a deficit without end. The rich, who can afford their schools or health care, will not suffer. But the poor and the middle class will hurt plenty -- and state and local taxes, often the most regressive, will go up.

To my mind, the Holocaust should be compared only to itself. I make some allowance for, say, Rwanda or the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica or the gulag of Stalin`s Soviet Union. But when it comes to legalized murder by a state, almost nothing can approach it -- not in its size, not in its breadth and not in its virtually incomprehensible bestiality. The morality of the Holocaust, I would argue, is somehow different from that of the estate tax.

For some time now, the estate tax has been a demagogue`s delight. Republicans, including George Bush, like to call it the "death tax." It is said to have produced the demise of the cherished family farm -- although the government can offer not a single example. It is, however, the tax most hated by those who hate taxes the most.

Inexplicably, Norquist`s "Holocaust" has somehow left quite a few survivors. Among the 10 richest Americans, for instance, are five Waltons -- heirs to the fortune left by the storied Sam, the founder of Wal-Mart. Forbes magazine says they are each worth $20.5 billion. The rest of Forbes`s list of the 400 richest Americans is peopled by other heirs, although some got only a billion or two.

In fact, the moral equivalency Norquist concocts is his own -- and it speaks volumes about the morality of anti-tax Republicans. To them, the rich owe nothing -- just like the poor, they would say. (The difference between rich and poor escapes them.) This is unbridled selfishness in the guise of ideology and makes wealth the moral equivalent of ethnicity or religion or even sexual preference. To Norquist, distinguishing between rich and poor is like making a selection at Auschwitz. It not only trivializes the Holocaust, it collapses all moral distinctions.

When Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist (and laundry room Lothario), he revealed a mentality that not even Senate Republicans could publicly support -- and Lott had to resign as majority leader. Norquist has gone even further, likening the morality of mass murder to the imposition of a tax on the rich. At his next meeting of GOP activists, someone ought to ask him if he`s out of his mind. If no one does, it`s because they all are.

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Schöne Theorie!

washingtonpost.com
The Asian Dollar Mystery


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17


The new year begins with a financial mystery: Why have China and Japan continued to accumulate large dollar surpluses -- financing the U.S. trade deficit in the process -- even as the value of those dollars has continued to plummet?

The Asian dollar hoard certainly looks like a stupid investment. The dollar, after all, fell about 20 percent against the euro last year because of worries about U.S. trade and fiscal imbalances. And many analysts (me included) have warned that a further sharp slide is likely this year as China and Japan begin to dump their surplus greenbacks.

Among the leading worriers is the International Monetary Fund, which warned in its latest "World Economic Outlook" in September that a further decline in the U.S. currency is likely and that "a disorderly adjustment -- or overshooting -- remains an important risk."

But let`s consider a contrarian answer to our New Year`s financial puzzle: Perhaps the Asian nations are pursuing an entirely rational strategy -- one that seeks to maximize domestic employment rather than financial return. If that`s so, then financial traders can stop fretting so much and applaud a dollar that`s playing much the same stabilizing role it did 50 years ago, during the golden days of Bretton Woods.

This counterargument was presented to an IMF forum two months ago by Deutsche Bank economist Peter Garber. If an abstruse economic theory can be said to be generating "buzz," that has happened with Garber`s work.

Garber argues that Asia`s seemingly irrational accumulation of surplus dollars is the inevitable consequence of its export-led development strategy. To increase domestic employment, the Asians keep their exchange rates artificially low and sell cheap goods to the United States -- in the process accumulating those ever-larger surpluses of dollars.

"The fundamental global imbalance is not in the exchange rate," Garber told the IMF forum in November. "The fundamental global imbalance is in the enormous excess supply of labor in Asia now waiting to enter the modern global economy."

Garber estimates that there are 200 million underemployed Chinese who must be integrated into the global economy over the next 20 years. "This is an entire continent worth of people, a new labor force equivalent to the labor force of the EU or North America," he explains. "The speed of employment of this group is what will in the end determine the real exchange rate."

Garber likens the global labor imbalance to the collision of two previously independent planets -- one capitalist and one socialist. "Suddenly they were pushed together to form one large market," he says. The best way to restore equilibrium is for the former socialist economies to pursue export-led growth -- and for the United States to act as a buffer and absorb the world`s exports.

If this all sounds a bit like the world after 1945, that`s the point. What`s really going on is a revival of the Bretton Woods financial system that created the IMF, Garber and two other economists noted in a paper that was published in September by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"In the Bretton Woods system of the 1950s, the U.S. was the center region with essentially uncontrolled capital and goods markets," they write. That, in effect, is the sort of world that has now returned, contend Garber and his fellow authors, Michael P. Dooley and David Folkerts-Landau.

Without realizing it, the authors argue, we have returned to a fixed-exchange-rate world, with China and other Asian developing countries keeping their currencies artificially low by pegging them to a falling dollar. The Asians today are like the Europeans after World War II -- using cheap exports to the United States to power their economic revival. And the wonder of it is that this neo-Bretton Woods system works as well as the old one did.

"In spite of the growing U.S. deficits, this system has been stable and sustainable," Garber and his co-authors argue. They cite the 1965 comment of French analyst Jacques Rueff about why the United States prospered under the old Bretton Woods regime despite its big trade deficits: "If I had an agreement with my tailor that whatever money I pay him returns to me the very same day as a loan, I would have no objection at all to ordering more suits from him."

To be sure, this perpetual motion machine can`t continue forever. At some point, those 200 million Chinese will find jobs, and China will graduate to parity with the United States. At that point, we`ll have a real dollar crisis.

Along the way, we`re sure to have more political protests from American workers who fear their jobs are being sacrificed in this neo-Bretton Woods world. But for now, perhaps Wall Street should be less gloomy about the dollar.

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THE WORLD



Big Bonus for Re-Upping With Uncle Sam
War-zone GIs get offer of cash if they reenlist, but can`t leave even if their stints are over.
By John Hendren
Times Staff Writer

January 6, 2004

WASHINGTON — Stretched thin and eager to keep soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army started 2004 with a new policy: $5,000 to $10,000 bonuses for soldiers in the two war zones who sign up for three more years.

The carrot comes with a stick. Having authorized unit recruiters to start handing out the bonuses when the new year began Thursday, Army officials said Monday they were extending a policy prohibiting soldiers from leaving the service, even if their contractual obligation was over, as long as their units were in a war zone. About 7,000 soldiers are affected.

The two-pronged approach marks the latest effort to ensure adequate personnel for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terror attacks dramatically expanded the commitment of U.S. forces across the globe. Although senior civilians in the Pentagon discussed shrinking the Army`s 10 divisions shortly before the attacks, many policymakers on Capitol Hill, in the Army and elsewhere have argued recently that the war on terrorism is likely to leave the service overburdened for years and in need of expansion.

"It`s kind of self-evident that the Army`s really stretched. The question for policymakers has to be: Is this just a temporary spike or is this something longer-term? My own view is this is longer-term, and part of what`s needed is an expansion of the Army," said Eliot Cohen, a military analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Until the Afghan war began in 2001, the prohibition on leaving the service, known as a "stop-loss" order, had not been used since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when nearly all soldiers were affected.

Under the policy announced Monday, if a soldier with two months remaining in his enlistment is in a unit being sent to a war zone, he will not be able to leave the service until 90 days after his unit returns home. This will effectively extend a soldier`s enlistment by almost a year, since units are now scheduled to spend 12 months in war zones.

The most recent stop-loss order, issued Nov. 13, affected more than 110,000 active-duty soldiers scheduled to leave for Iraq and Afghanistan by May. Because that order takes effect 90 days before the troops` 12-month deployments and lasts for 90 days after a return home, those soldiers could not leave the Army before spring 2005, even if their enlistments expired.

In the program outlined Monday, the Army has budgeted $63 million for bonuses in 2004, enough to pay 6,300 to 12,600 soldiers who agree to spend a few more years in the service. The amount of the bonus is based on a soldier`s rank. For those who collect their money before returning home, the bonus — like their paychecks — is tax-free.

The stop-loss order was designed to keep units intact and avert "turbulence in the force," said Col. Elton Manske, the Army`s deputy chief of staff for enlistment, who outlined the new policy to reporters. No Army unit to date has been depleted by more than about 6%, he said.

"Our sense from commanders and senior career counselors in and out of theater is that soldiers are ready, willing and able to enlist," Manske said. Nevertheless, he acknowledged, "I believe you`re all aware there are some stresses on the system."

The 101st Airborne Division, based at Ft. Campbell, Ky., will be among the first combat units to return from Iraq, followed later this year by the 1st Armored Division, the 4th Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the 2nd Light Cavalry Regiment, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and parts of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Gott hätte es Bush doch gleich selbst sagen können, denn Bush hört doch auch Stimmen. Immer diese Umwege!


COMMENTARY



Lord Knows What Robertson Wants
Robert Scheer

January 6, 2004

At first, before I saw the light, I didn`t believe that God actually told Pat Robertson that George W. Bush would sweep the November election. Why, for heaven`s sake, would a divine power described in Scripture as supremely wise and just employ a self-indulgent, partisan hack with a history of bigotry and greed as his spinmeister?

We all know that Robertson is a longtime supporter of Bush and that the president has adhered to the reverend`s right-wing agenda, but would Robertson dare use the Lord`s name in vain for partisan politics? Would he rip off God`s clout just to boost his candidate`s chances?

No, I don`t believe Robertson, fearing eternity in hell, would be so bold, so I take him at his word: "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe I`m hearing from the Lord that it`s going to be a blowout election in 2004," he told his television flock, citing several days of prayer at the end of 2003. "The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn`t make any difference what he does, good or bad; God picks him up because he`s a man of prayer, and God`s blessing him."

The Lord, it is said, works in mysterious ways, so Robertson`s report that God has picked a presidential winner before the first primary may not be altogether crazy. After all, one of the tenets of the Protestant revolution, which has devolved in some quarters into Robertson`s brand of cynical televangelism, was that we all were capable of hearing voices of the divine.

Divine or not, Robertson heard some voices. And the explanation for why God might have chosen to speak up in favor of a president who has made such a hash of our economy and foreign policy came to me in a dream. The Almighty, a booming voice told me, was using Robertson to warn the electorate, while there is still time, that a disaster was in the offing. Yes, he was saying the election could be a blowout, but he wasn`t saying that was a good thing.

Robertson missed the point, the voice said.

I couldn`t get it all, being half asleep, but what I heard was something about the Roman Empire and the sacrifice of his only son.

That`s it, I said, bolting awake. Of course, the Lord is aghast at the imperial ambitions of the neoconservatives. After all, hadn`t he sent Christ to warn about the greed, elitism, jingoism, commercial decadence and other indulgences that were endemic in a world distorted by the arrogance of the Roman Empire? A world in which the money-changers were worshiped and the poor were exploited, a world in which the military was lavished with resources while the peacemakers were scorned?

The Romans were arguably the most economically and militarily advanced force the world had ever known. But in their hubris as the world`s sole superpower, they came to believe that might made right in their fight to conquer the "barbarians" who surrounded them. Those who criticized the Romans` ultimate reliance on brute force and false argument were dismissed, with references to the exalted goals of the empire — to advance Roman civilization and impose a lasting peace — goals that now have an eerie echo.

That must be the essence of the warning that the Lord sent down through the admittedly imperfect vessel of Robertson. Perfect, however, for the purpose of alarming us to Robertson`s fawning enthusiasm for Bush, for no one has better exemplified betrayal of the Christian commitment to peace and free will.

It was Robertson, after all, who sought to turn the war against terrorism into a religious war against those he defined as infidels. Had he lived in Christ`s time, he probably would have been the Roman emperor`s groupie: "I see a blowout in the year 37 for Tiberius." He certainly would have been thrown out of the temple for cozying up to dictators, such as his dealings with former Liberian President Charles Taylor in his quest for riches in a gold-mining venture in that nation.

Fortunately, the citizens of our republic have not surrendered all of their rights to the needs of our burgeoning empire. But rest assured that a "blowout" victory for an administration that has stripped away so much of our liberty and saddled us with ever-expanding burdens of empire would only feed the monster of imperial ambition that has even God so worried.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

January 6, 2004
Iraq Police Fire on Protesting Ex - Soldiers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:46 a.m. ET

BASRA, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi police opened fire Tuesday on hundreds of stone-throwing former Iraqi soldiers demanding monthly stipends promised by the U.S.-led coalition, and reporters saw at least four protesters shot in the southern town of Basra.

Protesters marched on the Central Bank and then tried to force their way in to get money, pelting the building with stones and then turning on police who first tried to stop them by wielding batons. Police then opened fire.

British forces arrived on the scene and calmed the situation, using loudspeakers to say in Arabic ``You will get what you deserve, but not in this way.`` They did not fire, even after one was hit in the leg by a stone.

At the hospital, officials said one ex-soldier had been killed, and relatives said they had come to collect the body of 40-year-old Abbas Kadhim, a non-commissioned officer. Hospital officials said they were treating three wounded men.

A spokesman for the British force based in Basra said he had reports of gunshots at the scene of the protest but did not know the source of the fire.

Coalition spokesman Dominic d`Angelo said police and British forces based in Basra had been sent to try to calm demonstrators outside the Central Bank building. He said he had no more information.

The soldiers said they had not been paid a monthly stipend equivalent to $50 since September.

The Coalition Authority had been dogged by protests by ex-servicemen after it disbanded Iraq`s military in May, leaving more than 250,000 ex-soldiers destitute. In one incident in June, U.S. forces killed two demonstrators when a protest turned violent. Later, authorities agreed to pay monthly stipends of $50 to $150 to rank-and-file troops of the former Iraqi Army.



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

[Joerver]

JAMES CARROLL
But George McGovern was right
By James Carroll, 1/6/2004

THE DEMOCRATS see a hobgoblin under the bed, and his name is George McGovern. Low-grade panic is beginning to set in as pundits forecast a repeat of 1972: "As Massachusetts goes, so goes the District of Columbia." The prospect of "another McGovern" whets the appetite of Bush partisans while generating gloom and shame among Democrats. Howard Dean, for one, flees the association, while other candidates tar him with it.

Here`s the problem: In 1972, McGovern was right. If there is shame attached to that election, it is America`s for having so dramatically elected the wrong man. Apart from the rank dishonesty of Richard Nixon and his administration (a pattern of lies that would be exposed in Watergate), there were two world-historic issues that defined that election, and on both Nixon was wrong. 1972 was a fork in the road, and history shows that the United States made a turn into a moral wilderness from which it has yet to emerge.

Obviously, the first issue was the Vietnam War. Having been elected in 1968 promising "peace with honor," Nixon was well on the way to neither. Ground forces had been "Vietnamized" (the last US combat units would be withdrawn a few months after the election), but a savage air war was underway throughout Vietnam (Nixon had spread it into Cambodia, too, disastrously). After the traumas of 1968, Americans had willfully accepted Nixon`s sleight-of-hand on Vietnam, and the news media cooperated. As one NBC television producer recalled, news executives decided that after 1969, the "story" would be "the peace negotiations, not the fighting."

By 1972, Americans did not want to hear about Vietnam. They pretended that Nixon had ended the war. "And he has ended the war," the NBC producer said that year, "because you don`t see the war on the tube anymore. So the war has ended, though we are bombing the hell out of those poor people, more than ever." (On that media failure, see Godfrey Hodgson, "America In Our Time.") Five weeks after the election, Nixon would order the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the most ferocious air attack since the firebombing of Japan. Instead of peace with honor, there would be defeat with disgrace -- after yet two more years of carnage. George McGovern faced the American people with the unwanted truth of what their government was doing. That is a source of shame?

But there was an equally charged issue separating the two candidates in 1972. Nixon was the avatar of America`s tragic Cold War mistake. His entire career was informed by a paranoid assessment of the Soviet threat. "It`s a we/they world," Paul Nitze said when he served in the Nixon administration. "It`s us against the Soviets. Either we get them first, or they get us first." (Nitze was Nixon`s idea of an arms control negotiator.) This apocalyptic way of perceiving the enemy was already outmoded in the early `70s, but it would take American statesmen another two decades to see it. Nitze, Richard Perle, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Richard Cheney -- such apostles of the "we/they world" were empowered in 1972, and if their bipolar vision had not been undercut by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Cold War would still be on. Indeed, these men of 1972 are back, aiming to create another.

McGovern was an opponent of the "we/they" vision. A prophet of detente, he has since been vindicated by history. He offered America a way out of the trap that opposes "realist" and "idealist" perspectives. McGovern understood not only that the Vietnam War was wrong but that in the nuclear age, the realist is the one who sees that the structures of war itself must be systematically dismantled. One hears the complaint from today`s Democrats that McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, did not tout his war hero`s record, but that entirely misses his most important point -- that fear of war and glorification of war are simply not to be exploited for political purposes, whether at the personal level or the national. What McGovern the candidate refused to do is what American presidents should refuse to do.

George W. Bush obscenely exploits war for his own purposes. He sponsors a paranoid assessment of what threatens America now and draws political advantage from the resulting fear. The news media propagate that fear. Pundits continue the false opposition between "realist" and "idealist" visions, marginalizing anyone who dares question Garrison America. Meanwhile, the unnecessary Bush war rages, and not even the steady death toll of young GIs makes much news anymore. If a Democrat running for president dares to speak the truth about these things, it is the furthest thing from shame. And before feeling gloom about next November, ask what it means if the Democrat, to win, must do what Nixon did.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Bully goes to war – blames God

By Saul Landau

“Missed you at Bible study.” – Bush to White House speechwriter David Frum (Jack Beatty, “In the Name of God,” Atlantic March 5, 2003)

The bully on the block always had guys who did the fighting for him. He would falsely accuse a weaker kid of planning some horrible conspiracy and then unleash the tough guys – as a pre-emptive move, of course. On my block, the bullies had the same MO. But not one of them got into an actual fight with anyone who might inflict pain on them. They picked on kids who would not fight back.

When a possible retaliator appeared, the bully would summon his surrogates to administer the beating – in his name. I recall several Irish Catholic bullies, egged on by a bigoted parish priest, invoking God’s name to justify the beatings they inflicted on me and other Jewish victims. “We’re kicking your ass cause you killed our Lord.”

Now the born-again bully occupies the White House. He picks on weak targets, taunts them – “bring ‘em on – gets others to fight for him and then serves turkey to his proxy warriors on Thanksgiving. But worse than his addiction for playing dress up for photo ops, he has made bullying into official U.S. policy. As president, you have the forum to conjure up threats, report them as certainties and then order the armed forces to fight them.

Go back to January 29, 2002, when George W. Bush in his State of the Union address vowed, “We will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” No, Bush did not plan a pre-emptive strike against Russian, Chinese or even Israeli nuclear arsenals. He clarified his intentions by identifying North Korea, Iran and Iraq as “the axis of evil” – weak states. And he had no intention of doing the fighting himself. He never has.

Given his religious “forces of good and evil” fervor innuendo combined with the ignorance of the world – “I may not know where Bosnia is, but…” – that informs the President’s policy decisions, I think Bush might very well “hear” voices from above. He doesn’t feel compelled to read, or listen for long to those with knowledge in order to establish a firm basis for his judgments. He simply makes decisions. That’s what leaders do, he told biographer Bob Woodward (Bush at War).

Rather, the supposedly wise counselors whose jobs consist of imparting sound information and advice to the commander in chief simply twist information and analysis to suit his “religious” whims – like invading Iraq. Actually, some of the National Security Magi – Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his Department colleagues Richard Perle, Douglas Feith – thought that such a move would establish the basis for remaking the Middle East – maybe the whole world.

Some of them even have rather strong financial motives for such worldly renovation (I mention Vice President Cheney’s connections to Halliburton, National Security Adviser Rice’s links to Chevron and of course Perle’s multiple involvements with defense companies that allowed him to “do well by doing good”).

For Bush, the spiritual advisers may well have mattered more. The Rev. Billy Graham and the theocratic leaders of the Christian soldiers, Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell, take seriously the idea that God looks with special care at U.S. politics. After all, Falwell divined, He may have chosen Clinton to warn us against sin, just as he picked Bush to lead us out of temptation and into war in the Middle East.

Graham, one of the self-anointed celestial surveyors, as Eduardo Galeano calls him, understands that “paradise is none too roomy – no more than fifteen hundred square miles. The chosen will be few. Now guess which country has bought up all the entrance tickets?” (Galeano La Jornada, March 19, 2003).

God has made his entrance in U.S. politics on earlier occasions as well. In 1898, He allegedly told President William McKinley to seize the Philippines – in order to spread His religion there. McKinley told White House reporters that after spending a sleepless night pondering a decision over whether or not to invade the Philippines, God intervened and helped him make the decision to go to war.

Bush has intimated that God chose him to be President – whether or not he won the election. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence General William Boykin repeated that assertion and declared in June in an Oregon speech, “The enemy is a guy named Satan.”

If only the majority in the civilized world would understand that war in Iraq meant more than conquering a country with lots of oil, run by a serious black hat! Do good Christians around the world not recall – at least through reading – the story of the crusades, God’s unfinished business in converting Muslims to Christianity? The tens of millions who took to the streets to demonstrate against the war did not understand that Bush made war for God’s peace, not just for a piece of Iraq.

Only by appealing to the apocalyptic of Biblical prophecy could the Bushies have justified a pre-emptive war. One of the most ardent war hawks, Richard Perle, who resigned on March 27, 2003 as chair of the Defense Policy Board but remained a member, finally admitted in public that the Administration had no casus belli, no legal recourse to wage war, while dismissing legalities as inapplicable.

In the November 20 Guardian, Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger quoted Perle telling an Institute of Contemporary Arts audience in London: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.” Perle’s belated honesty flies in the face of official White House statements – prepared by the legal staff – that avers that existing UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq justified the intervention.

Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for an act of “individual or collective self-defense, if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” For Perle and his neo-conservative allies, such a formula under “international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone.”

Indeed, such a legalistic course would have proven “morally unacceptable,” according to Perle. The problems the Bushies faced in making war on Iraq, Perle insisted, came down to the non-existence of a “practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein.” Since international law proved defective as an excuse to invade Iraq, the old weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda ploys served the cause. Bush’s legal beagles resorted to the old “sovereign authority to use force” notion to “defend” the United States from the threat posed by mighty Iraq. Hitler and Tojo used preventive war as Germany and Japan’s justification to launch World War II. Prior to the start of the Nuremberg trials in the post war period, Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, speaking at the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945, underlined the fallacy of pre-emptive war.

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

Adding to such dicta about preventive war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 said that Hitler invented “preventive war.” Ike dismissively said: “Frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”

Iraq did disobey some UN resolutions. But the Bush-Blair war against Iraq literally shreds the international legal system. It amazes me how the media ignore the fact that Israel has disavowed more UN resolutions than any other country – with U.S. backing. The faithful do not look for consistency, for to do so would be to question God’s will. So, the fact that Israel has grabbed Palestinian land for the last thirty-six years and possesses a nuclear weapon stockpile does not concern those to whom God has instructed to dispatch the evil Saddam.

In the 21st Century, a President came to power – he was not really elected – with a mission that most literate political types thought had vanished in the volumes of law and experience. As the concept of imperialism became anachronistic, an imperial bully took advantage of the bully pulpit.

Bush told James Robinson, according to Paul Harris in the November 2, 2003 New York Observer: “I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.”

So, with God as Bush’s key adviser, where does that leave Karl Rove – and the rest of us?

[0Komma007]

Sie predigen Demokratie, und schaffen Diktatur.
Sie reden von Sicherheit, und wollen doch nur Kontrolle.
Sie reden von Deflation, und drucken so viele Dollars wie noch nie, was nur in Hyperinflation enden kann.
Sie täuschen Wachstum vor, in dem sie Schulden machen.
Sie wollen Frieden, in dem sie einen unbegrenzten und weltweiten Krieg führen.

[Joerver]

Tuesday, January 06, 2004
War News for January 6, 2004 Draft

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

Bring `em on: Iraqi policeman wounded in rocket attack in Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: One US contractor and five Iraqi civilians killed in convoy ambush near Mahmudiyah.

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers and Iraqi interpreter wounded in two bomb ambushes in Tikrit. US base in Tikrit also attacked by small arms fire.

Bring `em on: Two French contractors killed in drive-by shooting in Fallujah.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi killed, three wounded by roadside bomb in Kirkuk.

Iraqi police open fire on demonstrators in Basra.

US troops open fire on demonstrators in Baghdad.

Ambush activity in Iraq.

Iraqi Resistance Report for the period January 1 - 4, 2004. The language used in this report makes it clear that it was written from an intensely anti-US perspective. For this reason, I haven`t included this source in past updates because I have found some of their claims exaggerated. But since the US media has utterly failed to adequately report on events in Iraq, I will include this source in future updates.

Pentagon considers creating four-star unified command structure for Iraq. "Iraq military operations are now directed at the tactical level by a three-star officer, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. He, in turn, reports to Gen. John Abizaid, who, as U.S. Central Command chief, has responsibility for military operations not only in Iraq but throughout the region…The sources said a new four-star would bring added clout and focus to the strategic goals of integrating the emerging 220,000-person Iraq security force with the new local government scheduled to take power July 1. The commander would also coordinate military relations with whatever succeeds the current Coalition Provisional Authority now led by L. Paul Bremer."

Army "clears" Halliburton of price-gouging. "The head of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, said Halliburton`s Kellogg Brown & Root unit will not need to provide "any cost and pricing data" relating to a contract to deliver millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq, the paper said, citing a previously undisclosed Dec. 19 ruling."

Iraqi Sunnis form national council. "But the formation of the Sunni council could also complicate U.S. plans for transition to Iraqi sovereignty by July 1, because the Sunnis would be in a stronger position to resist these efforts. The council, for instance, is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer."

Pentagon changes contracting policy. "The Pentagon and White House denied publicly there was a shift in policy, but diplomatic sources and some officials said the United States was trying to adopt a more liberal definition of who belonged to the coalition, suggesting countries that agreed to restructure Iraq`s debt might be eligible."

US releases detained journalists.

New Stop-Loss rules put into effect.

Al Franken entertains the troops in Iraq.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Indiana soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Nebraska soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa soldier wounded in Iraq.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:03 AM
Comments (2)

[Joerver]

How the war machine is driving the US economy
Military Keynsianism might get Bush re-elected, but it is starting to worry economists
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
06 January 2004


What do the war in Iraq and the economic recovery in the United States have in common? More than one might expect, to judge from the last couple of rounds of US growth figures.

The war has been a large part of the justification for the Bush administration to run ever-widening budget deficits, and those deficits, predicated largely on military spending, have in turn pumped money into the economy and provided the stimulus that low interest rates and tax cuts, on their own, could never achieve.

The result, according to economists, is a variant on Keynesianism that has particular appeal for Republicans. Instead of growing the government in general - pumping resources into public works, health care and education, say, which would have an immediate knock-on effect on sorely needed job creation - the policy focuses on those areas that represent obvious conservative and business-friendly constituencies. Which is to say, the military and, even more specifically, the military contractors that tend to be big contributors to Republican Party funds.

"It may be very inefficient and obviously not fair, but it is nevertheless causing almost 5 per cent more money to be pumped into the economy than is being taken out in tax revenues," observed Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "At the same time, it fits into the broader ideological goals of the administration because they can paint it as part of a national emergency, the fight against terrorism, the fight against Saddam Hussein, and so on."

During the second quarter of 2003, when the war in Iraq was in full swing, some 60 per cent of the 3.3 per cent GDP growth rate was attributable to military spending. Expenditure on manpower and weaponry was relatively flat, according to Professor Pollin`s analysis, while the lion`s share of the stimulus came from the multi-billion dollar contracts handed out to Halliburton, Bechtel and other private contractors.

A smaller proportion of the roaring 8.2 per cent growth recorded for the third quarter was directly attributable to the military, but Professor Pollin and others argue that it is still the military that is driving the deficit, and the deficit - budgeted at about $500 billion (£270bn) for next year - that is driving the recovery.

Just last month, the Pentagon awarded a $4 billion contract to California company Northrop Grumman to work on the Star Wars missile defence programme. It is the sort of figure that can regenerate the economy of an entire region. California - the state where US economic booms have a tendency to begin and end - is also a beneficiary of the boom in security-related spending, since much modern security paraphernalia depends on Silicon Valley computer technology.

The Bush administration itself prefers to attribute the recovery to its tax cuts, targeted disproportionately towards the richest Americans. Many non-administration economists, however, say this is nonsense, and that the tax cuts are far more political than they are stimulative. A more significant role has been played by buoyant household spending, helped by low mortgage interest rates which have inspired many homeowners to borrow against the rising value of their properties. But there are signs that interest rates are now on their way back up and that the refinancing fad has ended.

"The administration is conducting a highly irresponsible fiscal policy, and there is no legitimate economist on the face of the earth who doesn`t say the tax cuts are just loony," said Kent Sims, a San Francisco economic consultant and public policy expert. "The chosen weapon for dragging the economy off the floor - now that an election is coming - is the deficit. Military expenditure is usually the least effective of short-run ways of spending money, because it doesn`t build infrastructure that give you returns over time. But it does create a short-term lift."

Military-fuelled growth, or military Keynesianism as it is now known in academic circles, was first theorised by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki in 1943. Kalecki argued that capitalists and their political champions tended to bridle against classic Keynesianism; achieving full employment through public spending made them nervous because it risked over-empowering the working class and the unions.

The military was a much more desirable investment from their point of view, although justifying such a diversion of public funds required a certain degree of political repression, best achieved through appeals to patriotism and fear-mongering about an enemy threat - and, inexorably, an actual war.

At the time, Kalecki`s best example of military Keynesianism was Nazi Germany. But the concept does not just operate under fascist dictatorships. Indeed, it has been taken up with enthusiasm by the neo-liberal right wing in the United States.

Ronald Reagan famously resorted to deficit spending, using talk of the Evil Empire and communist threats from Central America as his excuse to ratchet up the military budget. In 1984, the deficit rose to a whopping 6.2 per cent of GDP. Consequently, the economy grew by more than 7 per cent that year, and he was re-elected by a landslide.

The corollary of the Reagan military boom was a sharp cutback in social spending, something that was not reversed under Bill Clinton and is now back on the agenda with George Bush. State and local budgets are all in crisis because of the recession of the past two years. The fact that the White House is not using federal dollars to help them finance schools, hospitals and police forces hurts all the more because these things have now been underfunded for a generation.

The Bush deficit has not yet reached Reaganesque proportions (it stands at roughly 4.5 per cent of GDP). But Professor Pollin, for one, predicts that the resulting debt burden could rapidly rise to the levels seen in the 1980s, with interest repayments eating up as much as 18-19 per cent of the overall federal budget.

Professor Pollin does not share the Clinton administration view that deficits are always bad. In classic Keynesian fashion, he believes they are necessary and desirable to pull countries out of recession. But he, like the generation of economists who criticised Reagan`s policies, thinks the priorities are wrong - as well as overtly bellicose - and will have repercussions for years or even decades to come.

"The long-term effects of military Keynesianism are obviously negative on public infrastructure, health, education and so on, and there are limits on how long you can keep it up," he said. "What we borrow we will eventually have to pay back, with interest."
6 January 2004 20:54

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

The novelist who came in from the Cold War

He`s made a career spinning tales of East-West espionage. But as John le Carré tells ALAN FREEMAN, his newest novel reflects a brave new world of U.S. `hyperpower` -- and his fears about where it is leading us



By ALAN FREEMAN


UPDATED AT 5:19 PM EST Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004

LONDON -- He speaks slowly and calmly. He has the soft accent and intonation of an Oxford graduate and onetime teacher at Eton, and uses the language of a master wordsmith. But John le Carré is a very angry man.

At 72, David John Moore Cornwell is probably the world`s best-known spy writer, though his novels have a literary quality few others can match. Since writing his first novel more than 40 years ago as a young diplomat and intelligence officer in Germany, le Carré has published 19 titles, including such classics of the genre as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Russia House.

His latest book, Absolute Friends, combines le Carré`s fascination with the Cold War and his current bête noire: a burning conviction that the war against terror unleashed by the United States is a threat to world peace as great as the evil it`s supposed to be fighting.

The novel tells the story of a Briton named Ted Mundy and a German called Sasha, the son of a Lutheran pastor with a shady Nazi past, who become "absolute friends" in the near-revolutionary ferment of West Berlin in the late 1960s.

They end up as double agents for the British during the Cold War and resume their friendship years after the fall of the Berlin Wall when they resume their lives as spooks in the run-up to the war in Iraq, ending up as victims of what le Carré calls the "neoconservative junta" that now rules Washington.

The novel goes back to a familiar theme and old territory: Germany during the Cold War. And his descriptions of people and places are as evocative as ever. But le Carré denies suffering from a case of what contemporary Germans call Ostalgie, nostalgia for the old East Germany.

"I`m much more interested in the organic procession of history. I`m not wishing for the good old days of the Cold War," says the author. "The reverse: What I find extremely upsetting is the speed with which the one hyperpower has recreated an atmosphere of terror."

His views on the Iraq war are peppered throughout the novel, which was completed in June of 2003. "The war on Iraq was illegitimate . . . It was a criminal and moral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with al-Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America`s post-9/11 psychopathy."

Le Carré shares his time between his principal home in Cornwall and a lovely Victorian brick house on a private road near Hampstead Heath, an oasis of village-like gentility just a few blocks from London`s bustle.

The sitting room is filled with comfortable furniture -- nothing that indicates his immense success as a writer -- and le Carré himself is dressed in a simple sweater and comfortable trousers.

When le Carré offers a visitor a glass of water, a casually dressed, middle-aged man comes in with a large Evian bottle on a tray.

For a novelist who long eschewed interviews, le Carré can`t stop talking about Bush, Blair and the war on terror. "I don`t like the term `war on terror` because it presupposes that you turn an ideological, religious war into a territorial conflict."He blames the wave of terror in the Middle East "first and foremost on the creation of the state of Israel and the unceasing conflict that`s arisen there. If we could solve the Palestine-Israel problem, we`d be halfway to solving a whole lot of other problems. If you believe, as I do, that Israel must survive, that Jews deserve a homeland, it is now at least possible to say that they`re going about it the wrong way. But already, that makes me an anti-Semite. . . . When I wrote The Little Drummer Girl," his 1983 novel that focused on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, he notes, "I received the most disgusting letters from American-Jewish organizations. None was from Israel."

Le Carré believes the world is suffering from three forms of fundamentalism. He doesn`t talk much about Islamic fundamentalism, saving his harshest criticism for the alliance between Christian evangelism and what he calls Zionist fundamentalism. "Doesn`t anybody ever talk about Zionist fundamentalism, those American-Jewish settlers in the settlements? You hear the same racist junk and the same bloodthirsty talk and the same indifference to life and death."

Le Carré bristles at suggestions he may be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. "I`m not even an anti-Zionist. . . . I want Israel to survive. And I think that every step that [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon has taken compounds the situation."

When it`s recalled to him that Bush and Sharon were both elected and can be replaced by voters, while the likes of Saddam Hussein rule as despots for decades, le Carré shoots back: "Do you suppose that Bush was legally elected? Do you suppose that it is democratic to dismantle rights in America that the forefathers of the present politicians fought for bitterly? Do you suppose we`re offering a democratic example through Guantanamo? Do you think it democratic to lie, persistently and deliberately, to a population that has elected, or not elected, you?

"So don`t please fall into the trap of believing this is a battle between the civilized and the uncivilized world. That`s the first colonial misconception. This is a battle between hyperpower and non-hyperpower. It`s a battle between majorities and minorities. Never was there such an unequal war fought on such spurious grounds in my memory, except possibly if we go back to Suez."

Absolute Friends did not start off as a book about the war against terror. Le Carré started blocking out his plan for the book prior to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and planned to write a book about the emerging wave of anti-globalization protests. He thought a new generation of Baader-Meinhof-style terrorists might be emerging, which is why he decided to concentrate on the stories of Ted and Sasha, both of whom had their origins in the 1968 generation of revolutionaries.

But after Sept. 11, his focus switched to the U.S.-led war against terror. "I watched with horror how the American media and the American public was gulled into believing that Saddam had a part in the Twin Towers. . . . Where the hell were the Democrats then, where was the American press, how can you be proud of that, how can you call that the voice of democracy?"

He is disappointed with the decision of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead Britain into war alongside the United States. He recalls marking Blair`s victory in the 1997 general election with a giant party. "Everybody came and we wept and embraced each other that all those dreadful years of rot from the Conservative Party were over."

When it comes to Iraq, he is convinced that Blair did something "pragmatically, diplomatically nearly mad: He promised to go to war with Bush whether or not he could deliver Europe or the United Nations." He believes that Blair is shaped both by his love of acting and his abilities as a lawyer, which combine to create "an alarming conviction that his charm and his eloquence will overcome what a cooler head" would say should not be done.

As a writer, Le Carré describes himself as a Luddite in terms of technology, avoiding computers and admitting complete ignorance of the Web. But he still believes in first-hand research. Before writing The Tailor of Panama several years ago, he travelled to Val d`Or, the northern Quebec mining town, for about 10 days to get a feel for the kind of place where one of his characters escapes to. "I just hung out there. There was an old priest who told me about the stories of the old mining community. And he spoke beautifully about the responsibilities of the whores in the whore houses, because these guys were cut off . . . and the girls have to provide domestic comfort."

Le Carré admits having a soft spot for Canada. "You have a national temperament which I greatly enjoy, and it`s not just about differentiating yourselves from the United States."

For Absolute Friends, he returned to Berlin and to Bavaria, where he spent time following the guides at one of the chateaus built by Bavaria`s Mad King Ludwig. It`s where the reader finds Ted Mundy at the start of Absolute Friends, eking out a living shepherding tourists through Ludwig`s crazy folly.

Le Carré clearly senses the fact that in Absolute Friends he has crossed a line and written much more than a thriller. "One of the reasons I stick out is that nobody else is writing political novels. Some of my readers will walk away from it in disgust," he admits, though his publishers don`t seem overly worried. The first U.S. printing is a cool 310,000 copies.

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Iraqis Still Find Dead Soldiers From Old Wars

By Robert Fisk

06 January 2004: (The Independent) We were back in Marsh Arab country yesterday, Haidar and I, scouring the country west of the infamous Hawr al-Hawizah marshes where Saddam first used gas against his Iranian enemies.

We stopped on the ribbon of torn asphalt where, almost two decades ago, Iranian tanks crossed the main highway from Baghdad to Basra.

The Tigris was drifting past the small village of Al-Zahra and we`d followed a track in the hope of finding some Marsh Arabs still living in their reed huts. Instead, the track ran out at the edge of the river - you could see it restarting on the other bank - and two men came up to us in gowns and keffiyeh scarves, quite directly, to ask us what we were doing. We told them and they looked at us with hard eyes.

"We are Marsh Arabs," the younger man said. "We used to live in reed houses until Saddam dried out the land and now we live in Al-Zahra. It`s just made of concrete and mud."

And the track? Jabar Khaddam Malzum - the younger man had given his name in a very formal way - said that it had been built by the Iraqi army during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, that the river had long ago washed away the supports. "There was another bridge over there," he said. "It was the front line on the other side of the river. That`s where they used the gas."

So we looked across at the flat, dun-coloured landscape beneath the lowering winter clouds, much as I had done - almost 20 years ago - from the Iranian side of the line. "We still find the dead," Jabar said. "We found a group of dead soldiers the other day - Iraqis and Iranians all mixed up together ..."

So what did they do with them, Haidar asked? There`s no longer a Red Cross in Baghdad where you can report their identities. In Iraq, no one any longer cares about the war before the war before last. "We left the bodies where they were and pushed the earth over them again," Jabar said. "What else could we do?"

Iraq is haunted by its wars. Just up the road is a partially burnt power station, bombed by the Americans in the 1990-91 Gulf conflict and, a mile or so further up this grim highway, a cremated T-55 tank, victim of last March`s Anglo-American invasion - although some of these old behemoths have now been taken away on trucks. "Many are still here, even the Iranian tanks from the 1980s," Jabar said. Then the older man - he never introduced himself, but he looked like Jabar`s father - pointed to the gas-soaked fields of Hawizah. "We heard the guns every night," he said. "We heard them every night, every week and month, year after year."

A British Land Rover patrol, followed by a Warrior armoured vehicle, hummed down the dual carriageway behind us. Did those young soldiers know what had happened here around the time of their birth? Yet even this last war has not ended.

On the walls of the great, shabby, sewage-stinking city, someone has written in impeccable English a leading question. "Where are our requirements - petrol, medicine and other services?" I liked the "requirements" bit, it had a kind of official ring to it. The same wall-scribbler might have asked where all those old, blackened tanks are being taken. Many were hit by depleted uranium shells and are still contaminated.

Well, some are being taken to a huge steel plant in Basra where, so Basrans say, they are melted down into prefabricated bridges, litter bins, even pots and pans. It makes sense. Maybe Iraqi housewives who live through nights of power cuts can now spot their household utensils glowing quietly in the darkness of the kitchen.

Copyright: The Independent

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A birdsong that proves water is bringing Marsh Arabs` world back to life
By Robert Fisk, Salal river, southern Iraq - 05 January 2004

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5478.htm

Abbas Oweid stood next to what was left of Saddam`s dam and swept his hand across the grey desolation of sand, dust and broken homes to the north. "I knew all these villages" he said. "Take this down in your notebook; you should remember the names of these dead villages: Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal, Daoudi, Djezeran Nakbia, Zalal, Abu Talfa, Jdedah, Ghalivah, Um al-Hamadi, Al-Gufas, Al-Khor, Al-Hammsn ..."

It was too much. I couldn`t keep up with Mr Oweid. The sheer scope of Saddam`s destruction of the Marsh Arabs had outpaced the speed of my handwriting. But then, far across the rubble of bricks and broken doorframes and dried mud, there came the cry of a bird.

Mr Oweid`s face broke into a smile. "Where the birds are, there is the water," he said, and rested on his heels, a man ­ the Arabs like this ­ who had found the right aphorism for the right moment. But it was true. The birds are returning because the water is trickling back into the thousands of square miles that Saddam drained for 10 years.

You can hear it, gurgling, frothing, sucking its way into old ditches and dried-up streams and round the little dirt hills upon which the Shia Muslim Marsh Arabs built their homes before Saddam decided to destroy them.

I sat on a little boat here yesterday, puttering up the broad Salal river, and saw an old mud and concrete house with a new roof and new palm trees planted around it and a small, green boat pulled on to the dirt embankment. The bullrushes and reeds are gone and there is no tree higher than three feet. But one family has come back. Even Mohsen Bahedh, whose family fled to the safety of Iran during the long and terrible self-imposed drought that Saddam inflicted on his people, is thinking of returning.

He sat beside me in our little boat, his left hand holding a Kalashnikov rifle, his right resting on the head of his five-year-old son, Mehdi. "There were 12,000 families here and they all left," he said. "We had fish and fruit and vegetables and birds and water buffalo and our homes, and Saddam dried us out, took all our water away, left us with nothing."

Our boat slowed at one point because the water level rose six inches in front of us, a literal ridge of higher water that fell back to the river`s normal level on the other side. "Underneath us are the remains of a Saddam dam," Mohsen said. "It makes the water run over the top of it. So we can still see the dams, even when they are no longer here."

Saddam`s destruction of the Marsh Arabs was widely condemned outside Iraq, although you have to come here to appreciate his ruthlessness of purpose. After the Americans and British encouraged the Shia Muslims of Iraq to rise up against Saddam in 1991 ­ then betrayed them by doing nothing when he wiped out his opponents ­ deserting Iraqi soldiers and rebels who wanted to keep on fighting retreated into the swamps of Howeiza and Amarah and Hamar where the Marsh Arabs, deified in Wilfrid Thesiger`s great work so many decades ago, gave them sanctuary. Iraqi helicopters and tanks could not winkle them out.

So Saddam embarked on a strategy of anti-guerrilla warfare that puts Israel`s political assassinations and property destruction ­ and America`s Vietnam Agent Orange ­ into the shade. He constructed a set of dams, hundreds of them, to block the waters flowing into the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He diverted the water through new artificial waterways ­ one of them was called the Mother of All Battles river ­ which irrigated the towns and cities that remained loyal to him. The only water allowed into the marshes were the runoffs of fertilised fields, so the Marsh Arabs` cattle walked into the centre of the streams to find fresh water. In the end, there was no water left.

An entire Sumerian society, whose reed and wood homes were modelled on those of the ancient Sumerians, and whose brides were brought to their weddings in flower-covered boats, was destroyed. Almost.

When the Anglo-American invasion force crashed into Iraq in March last year, there were still hundreds of square miles of marshes left; and in the first hours after the British reached Basra, the people of Hamar dug through the earth and concrete dams that Saddam had erected to destroy them and breached his dams.

One old man in Nasiriyah told me his wife woke him after the first night of bombing to tell him she could hear water trickling in the old ditch behind their house. The man didn`t believe her. "Then I got up and in the moonlight," he said, "and I saw water."

It is a story of hope. Faisal Khayoun`s father was murdered by Saddam`s secret police in 1993 while driving on the Basra road. "They shot him in the forehead and neck," he said. "My cousin and my uncle were arrested in 1997 and hanged at Abu Ghoraib. The mukhabarat (intelligence service) used to come here on raids at four in the morning and I would always spend the nights on the roof, waiting in case they came. Now, for the first time in my life, I stay asleep in my home until the sun wakes me in the morning."

Mohsen Bahedh jumped ashore four miles north of the Hamar Bridge and we sloshed together through deep, black mud that sucked at our shoes, to the four broken walls of a house. "This was my home," he said. "I came back and knocked out some of the bricks and window-frames to build a new home south of Saddam`s dam. See, that`s where we kept the geese ­ and my cattle were where the dust is. And my boat was down there."

He and Mehdi padded through the wreckage. "Maybe we will come back now," he said. "Yes, we helped Saddam`s opponents. And when the soldiers deserted and came here, we fed them and gave them places to sleep and fuel to keep them warm. We are a kind people."

Many Marsh Arabs long ago exchanged the water buffalo for the Mercedes and became traders. Other tribes moved in and planted crops in newly irrigated land. But Thesiger`s people have survived and Saddam`s regime has not, and yesterday a small tide of dark-blue water was still seeping back into the desert, creeping around Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal and all the lost villages of the marshes.

Copyright: The Independent

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

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BUSH-FILMWETTBEWERB
Die ersten Fünf siehe #11188
Wütende Proteste gegen Hitler-Vergleich

Die Kampagne "Bush in 30 Seconds" wird in den USA heiß diskutiert. Republikaner übten schärfste Kritik an zwei umstrittenen Spots, in denen Hitler und der US-Präsident verglichen werden. Dennoch zeigten sie die Filme gestern auf einer Website. Bei den Organisatoren des Filmwettbewerbs waren die Clips längst offline.

Sie schafften es nicht einmal in die Endrunde der 15 besten Filme, aus denen eine Jury, besetzt unter anderem mit Micheal Moore und Moby, den Siegerclip auswählen wird. Das Gewinnervideo des Wettbewerbs "Bush in 30 Seconds" soll Ende Januar im US-Fernsehen laufen. Doch Amerika diskutiert nicht etwa über die kreative oder inhaltliche Qualität der Finalisten - vielmehr dreht sich alles um zwei Clips, in denen Bush mit Hitler beziehungsweise den deutschen Nazis verglichen wird.
Der eine Film zeigt marschierende Soldaten der Wehrmacht, rollende Panzer und Hitler, der seine rechte Hand zum Gruß erhebt. Schließlich wandelt sich das Bild Hitlers in das von Präsident Bush. Dazu der Text: "Was 1945 ein Kriegsverbrechen war, ist 2003 Außenpolitik."

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3662.…
"Imagine" von Mark Vicente



In einem anderen Spot hält Hitler eine Rede, während der Text eingeblendet wird: "Ich glaube, dass ich nach dem Willen des allmächtigen Schöpfer handle". Die Hitlerrede läuft weiter, es erscheinen dann jedoch Bilder von George W. Bush und der Text: "Gott befahl mir, al-Qaida anzugreifen und ich habe es getan. Er befahl mir, Saddam anzugreifen und ich habe es getan." Mit der Frage, "Kommt Ihnen das bekannt vor?", endet der Spot.

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3667.…
"Desktop" von David Haynes


Der Republikaner Ed Gillespie bezeichnete die beiden Filme als "schlimmste und abscheulichste Form politischer Hassrede". Auch von der "Anti-Defamation League" kam heftige Kritik an "MoveOn.org": "Ihr Mangel an Sensibilität lässt das Niveau des politischen Diskurses absinken", sagte ihr Leiter Abraham H. Foxman.

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3668.…
"Leave no Billionaire behind" von Andrew Boyd



Eli Pariser, Chef der Anti-Bush-Kampagne, verteidigte gegenüber der "Washington Post" die Entscheidung, beide Filme zu zeigen: "Jedermann konnte einen Film einreichen. Wir wollten nichts zensieren. Wenn wir keine großen juristischen Probleme gesehen haben, dann haben wir die Sachen durchgehen lassen, damit die Leute darüber abstimmen können."

Bis auf ein paar hundert Leuten hätte niemand diese Filme gesehen, wenn sie die Republikaner nicht auf eine ihrer Websites gestellt hätten, so Pariser. Letztlich seien die beiden Hitler-Spots bei der Abstimmung "unten durchgefallen". Für Pariser ein klares Indiz dafür, dass der Auswahlprozess funktioniert hat.

rtsp://realvideo.streaming.mediaways.net/spiegel/video/3669.…
"Bushs repair shop" von Eric Martin





Tim Whidden
Gefeuert: Der Präsident streicht Milliardenbeträge bei Polizei und Feuerwehr
Wes Boyd, Gründer der Initiative "MoveOn.org", bedauerte in einer späteren Stellungnahme, dass die beiden Spots überhaupt im Internet gezeigt wurden. Sie seien bei der Kontrolle "durchgerutscht" und "äußerst geschmacklos". "Das waren keine Clips von uns", betonte Boyd.
Insgesamt zählten die Organisatoren 1500 Clips. Seit dem 31. Dezember, dem Ende der Online-Wahl über die Endrundenteilnehmer, sind die Filme nicht mehr abrufbar. Gestern hat "MoveOn.org" die Finalisten bekannt gegeben und auf seine Website gestellt. Auf dieser Seite zeigt SPIEGEL ONLINE vier weitere der insgesamt 15 Filme.

Holger Dambeck

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NASA released this color image of the Martian horizon and terrain

[Joerver]

January 7, 2004
The Spy World Is `My Playpen`
By MEL GUSSOW

John le Carré has two homes, a country house on a cliff in Cornwall and an 1830`s town house just off Hampstead Heath in London, and he has had at least three lives. As David Cornwell, he was once a spy for M.I.5 and is now the paterfamilias of an extended family (4 sons, 11 grandchildren). Under his pseudonym he is the author of 19 novels, many of them international best sellers and nearly all of them about the plots and counterplots of international espionage.

His latest, "Absolute Friends," was recently published in London and is being published in the United States next week (by Little, Brown). It received some of his best reviews in London in a long time, although Michiko Kakutani takes a different view in The New York Times today. It deals with post-9/11 terrorism and the war in Iraq. As in other le Carré novels, disloyalty and amorality are endemic. "Absolute Friends" offers a portrait of a frightening future in which no one can be trusted, least of all those who seem to have common goals.

The writer uses the spy world — "my playpen" — to "make a political point." He has done this from "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1963) on, but with greater intensity since the end of the cold war. In a recent interview in his Hampstead home, the conversation kept coming around to politics, both in his fiction and in his own increasing activism.

Mr. le Carré, 72, is as affable as he is calmly resolute, a courtly gentleman who could pass for a diplomat. In the past he harbored two secrets, that he had been a British spy and that his father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man and felon (a character richly reimagined in "A Perfect Spy").

Were there any leftover secrets in his life? "I don`t think so," he said, adding, "I`ve had an untidy love life and am now settled," in his second marriage. One change is that he is more overt in speaking out about public issues. He is firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and never misses a peace march. "Marching you can`t pick your bedfellows," he said. "You go down there determined to stop the war, and you find yourself marching alongside Friends of Osama."

On request he traced his political awareness through several post-cold-war novels. "Our Game," he said, was "an attempt to show how the Soviet empire was becoming the Russian empire, and how the Muslims of the North Caucasus continued to be oppressed." In "The Tailor of Panama" he took "a satirical swipe at American military postures in Central America." "The Constant Gardener" was "a full-throated roar of indignation at the exploitation of the third world for our purposes," in that case by pharmaceutical companies. (Ralph Fiennes is to be in the film version, to be directed by Fernando Meirelles.)

"Absolute Friends" did not "just pop out of a box but came quite naturally from the other books," he said, continuing, "The source of my despair is that of somebody who was engaged in the cold war seeing everything coming round again." Fearing that he might sound overly polemical, he added, "I`m also terribly concerned with how to entertain and tell a story. The comedy in this — if there is a comedy — is that the lies that have been distributed are so many and so persistent that arguably fiction is the only way to tell the truth."

At the novel`s center are the title`s friends: Ted Mundy, an old-school Englishman, the misfit son of a disgraced British Army major and once a spy but now a tour guide at one of Mad King Ludwig`s Bavarian castles; and Sasha, a 1960`s German radical.

Mundy, he said, "is a loyal fellow at heart, very much in the pattern of the sort of man I`ve written about in the past." He is not, however, a new version of Smiley, the introspective spook — to use Mr. le Carré`s word — played by Alec Guinness on television. In "Absolute Friends" the substitute Smiley is a British operative named Amory.

Sasha, whose father was a Lutheran minister with Nazi ties, is a double and possibly a triple agent. He is, Mr. le Carré said, "a chaos addict who will probably never be satisfied with any social structure." Their lives as friends, secret agents and idealists have been intertwined for more than 40 years.

"The purpose of the story is to tell a fable, to illustrate the dangers of what we`re doing," he said. The United States and Britain are conducting "a virtual crusade in which we`re exporting democracy by military means."

When "Absolute Friends" was published in London in December, Robert McCrum wrote in a review in The Observer, "Few could fail to be thrilled by the unbridled rage that fuels his storytelling. If he was seething when he wrote `The Constant Gardener,` he is now incandescent."

The book was, in fact, almost jettisoned. As Mr. le Carré explained: "I started to write a story about a young Englishman who by accident and through his background and because of his natural naïveté had drifted into anarchism. When we meet him later in the story, 30 years on, he was going to be invited by his former colleagues to take part in terrorist acts."

Then came 9/11. Mr. le Carré and his wife, Jane, were in Hamburg. He was looking at television news scenes of Rudi Dutschke "and all those hotheads" of the 1960`s. Back at their hotel, they learned about the terrorist attack. "I went through the exact cycle," he said, "that many Europeans went through — an enormous inexpressible sympathy for the victims, for America. We were filled with a sense of tragedy and a recognition that nothing would ever be the same again. I didn`t know what to do — except that I knew my book was just dead in the water."

But after the invasion of Afghanistan, he decided that "in this so-called war on terror, a new kind of global concept was being enacted, and I was appalled by the misinformation that was becoming public property in the United States, so that 7 out of 10 Americans were ready to believe that Saddam had a hand in twin towers." Puzzling over what he considered to be "a terrible error," he thought his book had a renewed validity, and also that today`s terrorism might have a relationship to the radicalism of the 60`s.

Looking for witnesses to that earlier radicalism, he learned that many of the "key players at the time were now orthodox citizens in the professions," including Mr. le Carré`s German publisher, Lothar Menne, who fought alongside Che Guevara and was now "this enormously respectable gentleman at the pinnacle of a great publishing house."

For research he also went back to Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg, the scene of the novel`s most violent episode. He returned to his school in Dorset, which he quit at age 16 and now used as the model for Mundy`s school in the novel. He arrived in the evening and, "heavily disguised," walked around the playing fields, immersing himself in memories and atmosphere.

Two of the minor characters — Bernie Lugar, an artist, and Dr. Mandelbaum — are drawn more directly from life. Mandelbaum was based on an academic at Bern University in Switzerland who was, Mr. le Carré said, "a marvelous authority on Goethe, classicism and romanticism." Mr. le Carré studied with him, and as a result "quite often in my books there is a kind of Dr. Mandelbaum figure, as mentor and somebody who lifts me above the insularity of English cultural life." As for Lugar, he was a familiar figure during Mr. le Carré`s intelligence work: "someone who out of bravado pretends to have done things far more drastic than anything he has done."

This evocation of Germany of the period is coincident with the London success of Michael Frayn`s play "Democracy," about the fall of Willy Brandt as chancellor. Shadowing the play is the image of Markus Wolf, a master East German spy. When The Guardian reported that Markus Wolf was the model for Karla in Mr. le Carré`s Smiley novels, he denied it and said that the only Wolf he knew was a lawn mower. He said that the newspaper responded by running two pictures on the front page: of Markus Wolf and of the lawn mower.

He wrote the book swiftly, finishing it in June, then making changes on three sets of galleys. Between novels he writes occasional essays, including introductions to two favorite, disparate works: a Norwegian edition of Gabriel García Márquez`s "Love in the Time of Cholera" and a Sherlock Holmes collection. "I love Conan Doyle," he said. "The idea of setting the reader midway between a semi-buffoon, which is Watson, and an unfathomable genius, which is Holmes, is very, very clever." Mr. le Carré said that he borrowed the idea from Conan Doyle and did something similar in one of his Smiley novels.

As always, he refuses to have his novels submitted for the Booker and other prizes: "It`s not for reasons of insecurity or vanity or peckishness, but because writing is a one-man game, trying to beat your own talent, not someone else`s. It`s what Stefan Zweig called the battle with the demon."

He seemed like a man at one with his various selves. "I`m that dangerous animal, a happy writer," he said. "One of the sources of my present contentment is that I know I am all writer. I could not have survived without it. Surely I would have gone to the devil in some way."

He said: "I`ve always written about people trying to express their individuality under the huge burden of history, people who are fighting the wars they inherit, who are living out the chance encounters they make." The friends in "Absolute Friends" were "struggling to achieve what we all want to achieve, namely, that our origin should not be our destiny." Each wants "to break loose from his parentage, from the sullied cultural burdens they inherited." That, of course, could also be said about Mr. le Carré.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 7, 2004
The Spy World Is `My Playpen`
By MEL GUSSOW

John le Carré has two homes, a country house on a cliff in Cornwall and an 1830`s town house just off Hampstead Heath in London, and he has had at least three lives. As David Cornwell, he was once a spy for M.I.5 and is now the paterfamilias of an extended family (4 sons, 11 grandchildren). Under his pseudonym he is the author of 19 novels, many of them international best sellers and nearly all of them about the plots and counterplots of international espionage.

His latest, "Absolute Friends," was recently published in London and is being published in the United States next week (by Little, Brown). It received some of his best reviews in London in a long time, although Michiko Kakutani takes a different view in The New York Times today. It deals with post-9/11 terrorism and the war in Iraq. As in other le Carré novels, disloyalty and amorality are endemic. "Absolute Friends" offers a portrait of a frightening future in which no one can be trusted, least of all those who seem to have common goals.

The writer uses the spy world — "my playpen" — to "make a political point." He has done this from "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1963) on, but with greater intensity since the end of the cold war. In a recent interview in his Hampstead home, the conversation kept coming around to politics, both in his fiction and in his own increasing activism.

Mr. le Carré, 72, is as affable as he is calmly resolute, a courtly gentleman who could pass for a diplomat. In the past he harbored two secrets, that he had been a British spy and that his father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man and felon (a character richly reimagined in "A Perfect Spy").

Were there any leftover secrets in his life? "I don`t think so," he said, adding, "I`ve had an untidy love life and am now settled," in his second marriage. One change is that he is more overt in speaking out about public issues. He is firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and never misses a peace march. "Marching you can`t pick your bedfellows," he said. "You go down there determined to stop the war, and you find yourself marching alongside Friends of Osama."

On request he traced his political awareness through several post-cold-war novels. "Our Game," he said, was "an attempt to show how the Soviet empire was becoming the Russian empire, and how the Muslims of the North Caucasus continued to be oppressed." In "The Tailor of Panama" he took "a satirical swipe at American military postures in Central America." "The Constant Gardener" was "a full-throated roar of indignation at the exploitation of the third world for our purposes," in that case by pharmaceutical companies. (Ralph Fiennes is to be in the film version, to be directed by Fernando Meirelles.)

"Absolute Friends" did not "just pop out of a box but came quite naturally from the other books," he said, continuing, "The source of my despair is that of somebody who was engaged in the cold war seeing everything coming round again." Fearing that he might sound overly polemical, he added, "I`m also terribly concerned with how to entertain and tell a story. The comedy in this — if there is a comedy — is that the lies that have been distributed are so many and so persistent that arguably fiction is the only way to tell the truth."

At the novel`s center are the title`s friends: Ted Mundy, an old-school Englishman, the misfit son of a disgraced British Army major and once a spy but now a tour guide at one of Mad King Ludwig`s Bavarian castles; and Sasha, a 1960`s German radical.

Mundy, he said, "is a loyal fellow at heart, very much in the pattern of the sort of man I`ve written about in the past." He is not, however, a new version of Smiley, the introspective spook — to use Mr. le Carré`s word — played by Alec Guinness on television. In "Absolute Friends" the substitute Smiley is a British operative named Amory.

Sasha, whose father was a Lutheran minister with Nazi ties, is a double and possibly a triple agent. He is, Mr. le Carré said, "a chaos addict who will probably never be satisfied with any social structure." Their lives as friends, secret agents and idealists have been intertwined for more than 40 years.

"The purpose of the story is to tell a fable, to illustrate the dangers of what we`re doing," he said. The United States and Britain are conducting "a virtual crusade in which we`re exporting democracy by military means."

When "Absolute Friends" was published in London in December, Robert McCrum wrote in a review in The Observer, "Few could fail to be thrilled by the unbridled rage that fuels his storytelling. If he was seething when he wrote `The Constant Gardener,` he is now incandescent."

The book was, in fact, almost jettisoned. As Mr. le Carré explained: "I started to write a story about a young Englishman who by accident and through his background and because of his natural naïveté had drifted into anarchism. When we meet him later in the story, 30 years on, he was going to be invited by his former colleagues to take part in terrorist acts."

Then came 9/11. Mr. le Carré and his wife, Jane, were in Hamburg. He was looking at television news scenes of Rudi Dutschke "and all those hotheads" of the 1960`s. Back at their hotel, they learned about the terrorist attack. "I went through the exact cycle," he said, "that many Europeans went through — an enormous inexpressible sympathy for the victims, for America. We were filled with a sense of tragedy and a recognition that nothing would ever be the same again. I didn`t know what to do — except that I knew my book was just dead in the water."

But after the invasion of Afghanistan, he decided that "in this so-called war on terror, a new kind of global concept was being enacted, and I was appalled by the misinformation that was becoming public property in the United States, so that 7 out of 10 Americans were ready to believe that Saddam had a hand in twin towers." Puzzling over what he considered to be "a terrible error," he thought his book had a renewed validity, and also that today`s terrorism might have a relationship to the radicalism of the 60`s.

Looking for witnesses to that earlier radicalism, he learned that many of the "key players at the time were now orthodox citizens in the professions," including Mr. le Carré`s German publisher, Lothar Menne, who fought alongside Che Guevara and was now "this enormously respectable gentleman at the pinnacle of a great publishing house."

For research he also went back to Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg, the scene of the novel`s most violent episode. He returned to his school in Dorset, which he quit at age 16 and now used as the model for Mundy`s school in the novel. He arrived in the evening and, "heavily disguised," walked around the playing fields, immersing himself in memories and atmosphere.

Two of the minor characters — Bernie Lugar, an artist, and Dr. Mandelbaum — are drawn more directly from life. Mandelbaum was based on an academic at Bern University in Switzerland who was, Mr. le Carré said, "a marvelous authority on Goethe, classicism and romanticism." Mr. le Carré studied with him, and as a result "quite often in my books there is a kind of Dr. Mandelbaum figure, as mentor and somebody who lifts me above the insularity of English cultural life." As for Lugar, he was a familiar figure during Mr. le Carré`s intelligence work: "someone who out of bravado pretends to have done things far more drastic than anything he has done."

This evocation of Germany of the period is coincident with the London success of Michael Frayn`s play "Democracy," about the fall of Willy Brandt as chancellor. Shadowing the play is the image of Markus Wolf, a master East German spy. When The Guardian reported that Markus Wolf was the model for Karla in Mr. le Carré`s Smiley novels, he denied it and said that the only Wolf he knew was a lawn mower. He said that the newspaper responded by running two pictures on the front page: of Markus Wolf and of the lawn mower.

He wrote the book swiftly, finishing it in June, then making changes on three sets of galleys. Between novels he writes occasional essays, including introductions to two favorite, disparate works: a Norwegian edition of Gabriel García Márquez`s "Love in the Time of Cholera" and a Sherlock Holmes collection. "I love Conan Doyle," he said. "The idea of setting the reader midway between a semi-buffoon, which is Watson, and an unfathomable genius, which is Holmes, is very, very clever." Mr. le Carré said that he borrowed the idea from Conan Doyle and did something similar in one of his Smiley novels.

As always, he refuses to have his novels submitted for the Booker and other prizes: "It`s not for reasons of insecurity or vanity or peckishness, but because writing is a one-man game, trying to beat your own talent, not someone else`s. It`s what Stefan Zweig called the battle with the demon."

He seemed like a man at one with his various selves. "I`m that dangerous animal, a happy writer," he said. "One of the sources of my present contentment is that I know I am all writer. I could not have survived without it. Surely I would have gone to the devil in some way."

He said: "I`ve always written about people trying to express their individuality under the huge burden of history, people who are fighting the wars they inherit, who are living out the chance encounters they make." The friends in "Absolute Friends" were "struggling to achieve what we all want to achieve, namely, that our origin should not be our destiny." Each wants "to break loose from his parentage, from the sullied cultural burdens they inherited." That, of course, could also be said about Mr. le Carré.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Baghdad Blogger
Another day, another queue, and this one really is worth joining - even though there`s nothing at the end of it

Salam Pax
Wednesday January 7, 2004
The Guardian

I went to the Jelawy supermarket for some shopping only to find a long queue at the entrance. We have learned from the 80s always to stand in these queues, because the state central markets would be selling something cheaper than the price on the street. It might just be batteries or it could be an air-conditioner; it doesn`t matter. You join that queue.

So I waited my turn. But the people coming out were carrying nothing in their hands. Well, it might be something small but valuable, I thought, so I waited until I was actually in the shop and could see what we were queueing for. There was a sign: a white piece of cardboard with information on how to apply for a mobile phone - yes, haibis, we are finally getting mobile phones. After all the rumours and scandals, the network is up.

I don`t know whether you have any idea how strange this set-up is for us. Iraq is a place where the airwaves are still unpolluted by the blabbering voices of cellphone users. It is one huge untapped market. So what they did to keep all the vultures happy was to split Iraq into three parts (kind of like the political game) along ethnic and religious lines, and each part was handed over to a different network operator, which is strange when you think about it. If I am going to get a cellphone here in Baghdad (operated by Orascom), I will have to pay extra when I go to the south because I will be using a network operated by another company. It`s like travelling to a different country and paying roaming fees.

In addition, everybody seems to have quickly forgotten the allegations over the way Orascom got the deal for central Iraq in the first place. Kickbacks, baksheesh and nepotism. Eh, who cares? "Make your fingers play" is what they tell you, and for deals that big they may well have made huge trunks full of money play, not just their fingers. And in this part of the world no one was surprised when some subcontractors went to governing council members` relatives, or when ministers are too closely related to the GC member who elected them. Same-same; it is just too difficult to change social structures overnight. We have a saying: "Me and my brother against my cousin, and me and my cousin against a stranger." A cousin is anyone with the same family name. Who told you it was only the south of Iraq that was tribal?

Anyway, the first network is the one in central Iraq, and they are opening up 500,000 lines as a first run. The piece of cardboard at the Jelawy supermarket announced that we could start registering for cellphones, and listed the documents we need to bring along. They could have just said bring everything. The only thing they did not ask for was a certificate from my psychiatrist and my blood type.

After we are given the line, which will cost us $69 (£38) plus $70 for the crap phone they force upon us (you have to buy it with the line), we have to go to the communications ministry to sign the contract with a thumbprint. I don`t understand why things have to be so complicated. They might as well make us stand with our right hands raised and recite the cellphone oath: "I will use an annoying ringtone and never turn it off in cinemas."

While profane people like me are lining up to get their phones, more religious citizens are lining up at mosques trying to get application forms to go to Mecca. Yes, it is that time of the year when millions of Muslims try to figure out a way to bypass the restrictions and make their pilgrimage to Saudi. Because so many people want to go to Mecca during the same two weeks, the kingdom has country quotas. For Iraq, it turns out that one in every 1,000 people is allowed to go for hajj (the holy pilgrimage).

The Iraqi ministry for religious affairs has announced earlier that only 27,000 Iraqis will be allowed to go. Today we heard that everyone who applied and is over 65 will get a permit immediately. The rest have to go through a kind of lottery: they have given all the applicants numbers. Fatalistic as most Iraqis are, the general reaction was: "Oh, if Allah wants us to go, our number will be drawn." But if it is not drawn, does that mean he doesn`t want you to visit his house?

An old woman who had just returned from hajj once told me: "I know it is our duty to Allah and all and I am supposed to feel cleansed from all my sins, but I really can`t see the point behind the whole silly ordeal." Bless her; she was very old and very tired.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Time to talk to the Taliban
Supporters of the old regime can help end violence in Afghanistan

Jonathan Steele
Wednesday January 7, 2004
The Guardian

The latest atrocity in Afghanistan - a dozen children killed by a "bicycle bomb" in Kandahar yesterday - is a reminder that Iraq is not the only place where US-sponsored regime change has not produced peace. Along with the news that the UN may appoint a politically savvy British general to run its Afghan operations, it reinforces the view that postwar stabilisation requires a more sensitive linking of civilian and military initiatives than has yet been achieved in either country. Defeating insurgencies cannot be done by the iron fist alone.

In Afghanistan the problem has taken longer to surface than in Iraq. After the fall of the Taliban, the new government of Hamid Karzai initially faced minimal armed opposition. The warlords of the Northern Alliance, who had captured Kabul as the ground troops of the US air force, posed a political challenge to Karzai`s efforts to restore strong central rule over the north and west. But they largely kept their guns holstered. In the Pashtun south and east, where the Taliban had been strongest, the post-war situation was broadly, even surprisingly, calm.

Only in the past six months has insecurity in the Pashtun areas begun to worsen. Just how far is a matter of debate. The outward signs are certainly not good. The UN has pulled its international officials out of the region, as have most foreign aid agencies, because of murders and abductions. Voter registration for the presidential elections, which are due in June, has ground to a halt in Kandahar after the mullahs of two mosques where it was being held were threatened. The World Food Programme is supplying less than half its promised amount of grain to the needy because lorry drivers and others fear for their lives. The UN refugee agency has stopped helping Afghans return from Pakistan.

Some Afghan officials believe the international agencies are over-reacting to a relatively small number of incidents over a vast geographical area. They claim the trouble is caused by only a hundred or so people, infiltrating in tiny groups across the border from Pakistan, but determined to create chaos and terror. Southern Afghanistan`s problem, they say, is not widespread Pashtun alienation but a result of geography. Pakistan`s border provinces are under the control of hardline Islamists who work with elements of Pakistan`s secret agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, to keep Afghanistan weak.

Two facts seem incontrovertible. One is that the violence has increased in almost direct proportion to the efforts of the 11,000 American troops who are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, trying to "eliminate al-Qaida". Careless bombing and heavy-handed US tactics by ground troops when they search villages are making more enemies than friends.

The other is that, fairly or not, a large number of Pashtun still feel they lost out when the Taliban regime collapsed. This does not mean they all supported the Taliban`s extreme religious ideology but rather that they see the balance tipping against the Pashtun throughout Afghanistan since Mullah Omar and his cronies were driven from power. The tens of thousands of Pashtun who have been ethnically cleansed from the north are the most obvious human sign of that.

It is true that Karzai is a Pashtun, as are his finance and interior ministers (though the latter are overseas Afghans with US passports). But there is a sense that, both locally and centrally, the Pashtun are not benefiting properly. Neither development money for local projects nor officer positions in the new national army are going to them in fair doses.

Reversing this sense of discrimination can be done, especially after the recent constitutional convention endorsed Karzai`s powers as president. But he should also consider a more radical move. The time has come to bite the political bullet and open talks with the Taliban.

It is not a matter of sitting down with Mullah Omar or anyone else who claims to represent the Taliban as though it still exists as a single movement (if it ever did). But it does mean responding to overtures from individual former Taliban officials who fear arrest if they return openly from hiding or from abroad, or who are in US custody but have no proven records as torturers, such as the former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil.

Paradoxically, this ought to be easier for Karzai and the Americans than it is for the warlords of the north. Before the Taliban came to power and when they first conquered Kabul, Washington had links with them. Karzai himself helped them and was trusted enough to be invited in 1996 to be their UN representative (he refused). The northern warlords will try to veto this, but unless the message is put across, in deed as much as word, that not all who joined the Taliban are unwelcome, violence in the south will go on and on.

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MoD pays out for Iraqi civilian deaths
Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday January 7, 2004
The Guardian

The government has paid compensation believed to amount to thousands of pounds to three families of Iraqi civilians allegedly killed by British troops, it was disclosed yesterday.

A further 13 claims following the deaths of Iraqi civilians are being investigated, the Ministry of Defence said.

One of the payments has been made to the family of Baha Mousa, the son of a police colonel, who died allegedly after being assaulted with seven other young Iraqis by British soldiers in Basra last September.

A British army death certificate is reported to state that Mr Mousa died of "asphyxia".

One of the survivors of the alleged incident is reported to have suffered serious kidney failure.

The MoD yesterday declined to comment on a report that it had offered the Mousa family £4,500 in compensation.

However, it insisted that money given to Iraqi families was in the form of "ex gratia payments". That did not mean the MoD accepted liability for any of the deaths, it said. "We do not accept admission of guilt. That is the policy."

But a spokesman said that "several British soldiers" were assisting the special investigation branch of the military police who were undertaking criminal inquiries.

An investigation into Mr Mousa`s death was continuing, he added.

The compensation claims were revealed in a written parliamentary answer to the Plaid Cymru MP, Adam Price.

The MoD said 23 Iraqi families had made compensation claims following the deaths of civilians.

Seven of the claims have been rejected while another 13 are under investigation. A further 73 claims have been made by Iraqi civilians claiming to have been injured by British forces since May 1 last year.

Mr Price will today call on the government to hold an independent inquiry into the fatalities during a Commons debate on "postwar civilian deaths and military operations in Iraq".

He said yesterday: "In the majority of these cases we do not know the circumstances or even the names of the victims as proper public scrutiny has not been possible either in Iraq or in the UK."

He added: "It is simply not acceptable for the military to be investigating themselves and deciding on an ad hoc basis whether or not to award ex gratia payments to the families of the deceased.

"We need an independent and fully impartial investigation into all of these allegations of civilian deaths involving coalition forces so that justice is done and seen to be done by the long suffering people of Iraq."

He said Carl Conetta, director of Washington-based thinktank Project on Defence Alternatives, estimated there had been 200 civilian Iraqi deaths as a result of action by occupying forces between May and November last year.


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Blair: I`ll take Britain into euro by 2007
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
07 January 2004


Tony Blair has set a target of 2007 to take Britain into the euro, and wants the Government to agree to a public pledge to secure membership by that date.

The move suggests the Prime Minister intends to call a referendum soon after the general election, which is expected in May or June next year. Although he has insisted he would serve a full third term if Labour retains power, some ministers expect him to stand down after such a referendum.

A changeover plan drawn up by the Treasury envisages a four-month gap between the Cabinet`s decision to call a referendum and the plebiscite. If the public were to vote in favour, there would be a delay of between 24 and 30 months before euro notes and coins became legal tender. The pound would operate alongside the euro for six months while it was phased out. This plan means that Mr Blair could achieve his goal of membership in 2007 by holding a referendum in the autumn of next year.

Gordon Brown is opposed to the public announcement of a formal target and argues that Labour must not rush such a crucial decision. He also fears that naming a date could prejudge the Treasury`s five economic tests for single currency membership.

Under a compromise plan favoured by some Downing Street aides, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor might agree a target in private and gear the Government`s policies towards it. But they would stop short of a public declaration.

The Blair plan will surprise ministers, who thought the issue had been put on hold after the collapse in the Prime Minister`s trust ratings because of the Iraq war and the death of the government scientist David Kelly. One said: "I don`t think Gordon will buy a target date. He doesn`t want to make a big song and dance about the euro. But they could agree to work towards an informal target."

Allies of Mr Brown said a target might not be achievable because of factors beyond the Government`s control. "The biggest issue is the progress towards economic reform in Europe," said one.

The proposal shows Mr Blair has not given up hope of taking Britain into the euro, which he believes is the country`s destiny and was one of his two main goals - along with reforming public services - when he won power in 1997.

In his Budget in March, Mr Brown will close the door on a referendum before the next election by saying there is no case for re-running the five tests. Last June, he said only one of them had been passed.

Insiders said there was "no row" between Mr Blair and Mr Brown on the euro as they explored options before the Budget. Relations cooled in the autumn, when the Chancellor set out a traditional Labour agenda in his speech to the party conference, and his attempt to reclaim a seat on the national executive committee was vetoed by Mr Blair.

But their relationship has improved markedly since the election of Michael Howard as Tory leader. Allies say both men acknowledged that they could not afford the luxury of divisions in the face of a reinvigorated Opposition.

Their discussions about the Budget are bound to provoke fresh speculation about a deal for Mr Blair to agree to stand down and support Mr Brown as his successor in return for the Chancellor allowing a referendum to go ahead.

Mr Blair`s plan to set a target will be welcomed by supporters of euro entry, who have become disenchanted with Mr Blair`s failure to act. Writing in The Independent in May, the former foreign secretary Robin Cook said the Government would escape its "paralysis" on the euro only if it set a date to join the currency.
7 January 2004 11:06



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Assad concedes that `partly occupied` Syria has WMD
By Justin Huggler
07 January 2004


Every move by the Syrian President, Bashar Assad, was under close scrutiny as he arrived in Turkey for talks yesterday, after he appeared to concede that Syria possesses weapons of mass destruction.

Syria will renounce its WMD programme if Israel, which has a sizeable nuclear arsenal, does the same, Dr Assad said. "We are a country which is [partly] occupied," he told The Daily Telegraph,referring to the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967. "From time to time we are exposed to Israeli aggression. It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves." Syria is not believed to have nuclear capability, but Western intelligence agencies say Damascus has chemical weapons.

Last year, Damascus presented a motion at the UN Security Council calling for all WMD to be removed from the Middle East, including Israel`s weapons, only to have it rejected by the US and Britain.

His visit to neighbouring Turkey is the first ever by a Syrian head of state, and a sign of the warmest relations between the two countries in years.
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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After graduating yesterday as the Iraqi Second Battalion, soldiers danced in celebration. More than half the force served in Saddam Hussein`s army.
January 7, 2004
THE MILITARY
In Hussein`s Shadow, New Iraqi Army Strives to Be Both New and Iraqi
By JOHN F. BURNS

TAJI, Iraq, Jan. 6 — If moments in the new Iraq strain credulity for those who knew the country under Saddam Hussein, few have done so more than the scene on Tuesday at this old Iraqi barracks: recruits of the new Iraqi Army marched across the parade square, past rows of saluting American officers, to the strains of "Colonel Bogey March," the theme for the movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

When Mr. Hussein was still taunting President Bush over his threat to overthrow him, the huge base at Taji, 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, was synonomous with the dictator`s yearning for military power and conquest.

New tank battalions came here in the 1980`s before deploying in Iraq`s brutal war with Iran. At least until the mid-1990`s, a secret complex adjacent to the base was at the heart of Mr. Hussein`s drive to acquire chemical weapons and missiles.

The army base at Taji was a source of Mr. Hussein`s power.

At Taji, engineers built and tested the pilotless plane that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said was one of Iraq`s major threats when he addressed a crisis meeting of the United Nations Security Council in February.

Now, Mr. Hussein is an American detainee facing a probable war crimes trial, and here arrayed on the sun-beaten asphalt at Taji for their graduation parade stood 691 men of the Second Battalion of the new Iraqi Army, nearly 60 percent of them soldiers in Mr. Hussein`s army until the American invasion in March.

The new battalion made a creditable showing with a precision marchpast in camouflage uniforms self-consciously different from those of both Mr. Hussein`s army and the Americans`: British-style berets and badges of rank and other insignia that go back to the first Iraqi republic, which was established in 1958 by the military coup that overthrew and killed King Faisal II. The badges have been stripped of the Baathist tracery that slipped in under Mr. Hussein.

A poignant but somewhat inauthentic air echoed in the discordant strains of the new army`s marching band, especially when it played tunes borrowed from the country`s occupiers, like "Colonel Bogey" and "The British Grenadier," which harks back to Napoleonic wars.

But the Iraqis on hand cheered up when the band shifted to "The Army Is a Fence for the Country," a tune that originated under the first military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem, and remained in vogue under Mr. Hussein.

Through the parade and the soldiers` exuberant tribal dancing that followed, there was an air of expectancy, hesitant but still real, that Iraq can overcome the paralyzing insurgency of recent months and construct the Arab Middle East`s first, or at least fullest, democracy.

Just as palpable was the soldiers` unease at the shadow still cast by Mr. Hussein, in whose cause, or memory, many of the insurgent attacks have been made, and many threats have been leveled against any man joining the new army.

It was a moment for the politicians vying for power in the new Iraq, and for the British and American officers, to speak proudly, or at least hopefully, of the role the new army of 40,000 men can play in burying the grim memories of Mr. Hussein. They are to be deployed by September.

Among the hopeful was Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the government-in-waiting, the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

He is one of the leading candidates to be Iraq`s next president, after the United States returns sovereignty to Iraq. The scheduled date is June 30.

The new Iraqi Army, Mr. Pachachi said, would return all Iraqis to their lost days of "glory and pride." As well, he said, it would be the guarantor that nobody like Mr. Hussein could ever arise again.

"You, my friends, are the nucleus of our new army, the bastion of a new democracy and freedom in Iraq," he said.

As Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld reckons it, Iraqis are already bearing a major share of the burden in defending the post-Hussein state.

By the Pentagon`s count, the new battalion will join 160,000 armed Iraqis serving alongside the United States-led occupation forces — in the police, in a new civil defense force, in the border police, in a unit called the Facilities Protection Service, which guards important buildings and installations. The figure is greater than the total strength of the occupation forces, currently about 140,000 troops from 38 countries.

But the hard fact, admitted by American commanders, is that the new Iraq will depend on a steadying presence of tens of thousands of American troops for years, even if Iraqi politicians, Arabs and Kurds and Turkmens, Shiite and Sunni Muslims and the small minority of Christians, can settle their squabbles over power-sharing in a new constitution.

Some American officers said troops would be here three to five years; others say 10 to 15. Iraqis tend to the higher estimates, even as they say they wish the Americans could withdraw much sooner.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, told reporters at the parade that he believed that the American command had overcome a setback that developed when about 400 men from the first 700-man battalion to graduate, in October, quit within a month in protest over low pay. Other American officers said about 30 of those who deserted had been taken back, or are under review for readmission, after a decision to add a "hazardous duty allowance" of $72 to the basic monthly salaries of the new soldiers, which begin at $60 for a private first class and rise to about $150 for a lieutenant colonel.

Among the new soldiers, thoughts ran back to Mr. Hussein. After the parade, many told of abandoning their front-line units in the dictator`s army as American troops pushed north from Kuwait toward Baghdad.

Faris Islam, a 34-year-old native of Mosul, in Iraq`s northland, said he was based in Basra, in the south, as a captain, the rank to which he has been restored in the new army.

As the invasion began, Captain Islam said, he and his fellow officers broke years of silence born out of the fear of being arrested and executed for disloyalty.

"We talked about Saddam for the first time," he said, "and we discovered that we all thought the same: that he had tyrannized the entire country and driven all of us into poverty, and that there was nobody to blame for this but him."

So, Captain Islam said, he and the rest of the unit fled north. "I was not prepared to die for him," he said.

In a group of men gathered around Captain Islam, all said that joining with the Americans in constructing a new army put them and their families at risk of attack by the insurgents, who have vowed to kill any Iraqis in league with the Americans.

But one officer pushed forward and said, to mutters of approval, that the risk was worth it.

"Ignorant people don`t respect us," said the officer, Capt. Uday Najam, 28. "Former regime people, flunkies of Saddam, say we are serving the Americans. But we don`t pay them any attention. Iraq is our country, and we will serve it in any way we can until we can get the country back on its feet again."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2004
Q&A: The Afghan Constitution

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 6, 2003


What`s in the new Afghan constitution?

The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, approved January 4 by a 502-member assembly in Kabul, creates a nation that pledges to be both Islamic and democratic. It establishes a presidential system that roughly follows the U.S. model, dividing government power among executive, legislative, and judicial branches. While it does not include an explicit reference to sharia, or Islamic law, it states that no Afghan law "can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions" of Islam. Experts say the extent of Islam`s influence in practice will hinge on who controls Afghanistan`s government.

How was the constitution created?

A 35-member team that included Afghans and foreign legal experts spent a year working on the draft constitution. At a nationwide series of public meetings, nearly a half-million Afghans were asked what they thought should be included in the constitution. The draft was written in relative secrecy and, after several delays, the final version was released in November 2003. Beginning in mid-December, a constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, consisting of a diverse set of Afghan representatives appointed by provincial authorities and transitional government officials, began to debate the document. It was approved after three weeks of council sessions.

When will it go into effect?

The constitution became the official law of the land when it was approved. But until general elections are held, power will remain with Afghanistan`s transitional government, which has been in place since June 2002 and is headed by President Hamid Karzai. Presidential elections are scheduled for June 2004, but experts say that delays in voter registration caused by the nation`s dangerous security conditions will delay them. September is the earliest that elections can go forward, says Barnett Rubin, the director of studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University and a constitutional adviser to the Afghan government. Elections for the National Assembly will likely be delayed further--perhaps until mid-2005, Rubin says.

When will judicial reform take place?

Major judicial reform and the creation of the new Supreme Court will not get under way until the new government is seated, experts say. The transitional judicial system is beginning to function, but most of the judges are religiously trained mullahs, says Said Arjomand, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an adviser to Afghanistan`s constitutional loya jirga. The nation`s current chief justice, Fazl Hadi Shinwari, has outlawed cable television, opposes co-education, and is said to practice the strict form of Islam called Wahhabism. Arjomand says there is a government working group on judicial reform, but as of last month it hadn`t yet met.

What is the main barrier to implementing the constitution?

Widespread lawlessness, which has increased since the fall of the repressive Taliban regime in 2001, many experts say. Contributing to the problem are regional militias controlled by so-called warlords, widespread opium cultivation, and the weakness of the poorly funded national army, which has fewer than 10,000 soldiers. Outside of the capital, Kabul, the central government`s authority is weak. National acceptance of the constitution--and the success of the Afghan state--depend on a steady spread of the government`s writ.

How will the new executive branch be structured?

It will be headed by a president who will be directly elected to a five-year term. The president must be Muslim, an Afghan citizen born of Afghan parents, and may be re-elected only once. His responsibilities will include:

Serving as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Afghanistan
Determining the fundamental policies of the government with the approval of the National Assembly.
Appointing the nation`s ministers, the attorney general, the director of the central bank, and the justices of the Supreme Court with the approval of the main legislative body, the Wolesi Jirga.
Appointing the nation`s first and second vice presidents. The office of the second vice president was created as a compromise in the constitutional negotiations--originally, many delegates favored the creation of the office of a prime minister to dilute the president`s power.

How will the legislative branch be structured?

The National Assembly of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan will consist of two houses: the Wolesi Jirga, or House of the People, and the Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders. The Wolesi Jirga is the more powerful house. Its 250 delegates will be directly elected through a system of proportional representation. According to the constitution, at least 64 delegates--two from each province--must be women. It has the primary responsibility for making and ratifying laws and approving the actions of the president.

The Meshrano Jirga will consist of an unspecified number of local dignitaries and experts appointed by provincial councils, district councils, and the president. It must also ratify laws, but its decisions about the state`s budget and development programs can be overruled by the Wolesi Jirga.

How is the judicial branch structured?

The republic`s top court is the Stera Mahkama, or Supreme Court. Its members will be appointed by the president for 10-year terms. There are also High Courts, Appeals Courts, and local and district courts. Eligible judges can have training in either Islamic jurisprudence or secular law.

What laws will the court system apply?

It will base its judgments on existing Afghan law--much of which is rooted in Islamic law--and the new constitution. In cases in which no law covers a particular issue, the courts` decisions will be "within the limits of the constitution" and in accord with Islamic jurisprudence. On cases of possible discord between the constitution and Islam, the Supreme Court will have to arrive at a compromise. "A secular judge could overrule sharia, but a fundamentalist court could rule the other way around," says Arjomand. "It all depends on who will review the laws."

What are some areas of potential discord?

Women`s rights is one main area. The constitution states that "the citizens of Afghanistan--whether man or woman--have equal rights and duties before the law" and includes special provisions to encourage women`s access to education and government. But traditional Islamic law treats men and women differently in some cases, and existing law in Afghanistan maintains some of these distinctions. "I am not really satisfied because of the contradictions," said Ahmad Nadery, commissioner of Afghanistan`s independent human rights commission, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. "If a conflict arises between an international [human rights declaration] and the country`s law, it doesn`t say which has precedence. If we have a conservative judicial system--which we do--it will interpret the laws in a conservative way."

What other civil liberties are guaranteed in the constitution?

Among them:

Religious freedom. The "sacred religion of Islam" is the state religion of Afghanistan. However, followers of other religions are "free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites" within the limits of the law. There is no mention of freedom of conscience, however, and some experts say they are concerned that there is no protection for Muslims who may not wish to practice their faith.
Right to life and liberty.
Right to privacy.
Right of peaceful assembly.
Freedom of expression and speech.
If accused of a crime, the right to be informed of the charges, represented by an advocate, and presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Freedom from torture.
Other rights, as included in international agreements signed by Afghanistan, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What does the constitution say about Afghanistan`s many ethnic groups?

All people living in Afghanistan are to be considered Afghan, regardless of their ethnic background. However, the constitution does grant each of the nation`s 14-plus ethnic groups the right to speak its own language. The country`s official languages will be Pashto, spoken by Pashtuns, the nation`s largest ethnic group, and Dari, a form of Persian spoken predominately by Tajiks and Hazaras, who together are some 35 percent of the population. The national anthem will be sung in Pashto only. However, in a final-hour concession that saved the constitutional negotiations from failure, other languages will be recognized as third national languages in regions where they are spoken by a majority.

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



Copyright 2004 |

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Soon enough, a meeting to begin defrosting relations was set up between Mr. Bush and Mr. Schröder at the session last September of the United Nations General Assembly. " `I knew that was going to happen,` " Mr. Bush laughingly told Ms. Rice after the meeting was scheduled, the senior administration official said. Ms. Rice gently bantered back, the official said, but then concluded, " `Now, look, it`s the right time to do it.` "

Condoleezza Rice began her relationship with George W. Bush as the foreign policy tutor who educated the little-traveled 2000 presidential candidate in the complexities of a world more dangerous than either of them knew. Now, three years, two wars and countless crises later, the relationship between the president and Ms. Rice has evolved into a partnership that has shaped one of the most assertive foreign policies in recent American history.

Like a number of earlier relationships between national security advisers and their bosses, including Henry Kissinger`s association with Richard Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski`s work with Jimmy Carter, Ms. Rice`s interactions with Mr. Bush have developed into a fulcrum for the development of foreign policy. But even more than those earlier collaborations, Ms. Rice`s relationship with Mr. Bush has been closely guarded.

Now, as Ms. Rice heads into what she insists will be her last year of service in the White House, she and other top Bush advisers have begun to lift the veil of secrecy about her relationship with the president, with whom she spends an extraordinary amount of time — long days at the White House, summer walks at the president`s Texas ranch, weekends of gym workouts, football games on television and jigsaw puzzles with the president and first lady at Camp David. There, Ms. Rice has a cabin to herself on the wooded grounds.

"I sit with my reading and my cup of coffee, and especially if it`s winter, I make a fire," Ms. Rice said in one of two recent interviews in her spacious West Wing office. "It`s really not tough duty. But, of course, I look forward to having control of my life."

Ms. Rice is hardly the only important foreign policy adviser to Mr. Bush in a sometimes contentious inner circle that includes Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Cheney, who lunches alone with Mr. Bush once a week and maintains his own national security staff, has had an especially large role in policy making, including the decision to go to war with Iraq.

[IMG]http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/07/international/condi450.jpg" />
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, in November with Paul D. Wolfowitz, left, deputy secretary of defense; Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state; Joshua Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Andrew H. Card Jr., White House chief of staff.

Competing Viewpoints

In Washington, Ms. Rice has faced increasing criticism that while she has done a good job as the president`s friend and cheerleader, she has done a bad job of managing the president`s frequently warring foreign policy team.

Her inability to rein in other powerful advisers, critics say, has helped lead to little planning for the occupation in Baghdad, stalled negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, and no success in stopping North Korea from making nuclear weapons.

"She has a problem that I didn`t have," said Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to Mr. Bush`s father and a longtime mentor to Ms. Rice. "Everyone then was facing in the same direction, but she`s got people facing in opposite directions. And that`s really hard."

Ms. Rice discounts the criticism, and several senior advisers to Mr. Bush said it was in fact the president who demanded the open debate. "The president has never said, `I want only one opinion presented in the Oval Office,` " said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Ms. Rice, he said, "does not run around affixing muzzles to our faces."

Either way, no other adviser spends as much time with the president as Ms. Rice. "He takes Cheney seriously, obviously," said a senior administration official, "but she`s the last person to talk him through it."

In short, Ms. Rice has become a germination point for Bush foreign policy, from the war in Iraq to sidelining Yasir Arafat to the policy of pre-emption. As a Russia specialist and a former provost of Stanford University, she says she has melded her realism — the view that great powers act in their own self-interest — with what she calls Mr. Bush`s idealism, or what his critics say is his naïve belief in a "moral" American foreign policy that can spread democracy throughout the world.

In this equation, Ms. Rice is the unsentimental academic who focuses on facts and history, while Mr. Bush starts with a set of big-picture principles rooted in his Christian faith, along with a politician`s sense about other leaders and the pressures that drive them. Ms. Rice said that she saw her job as translating the president`s instincts into policy, and that he now influenced her as much as she influenced him.

"This president has a very strong anchor and compass about the direction of policy, about not just what`s right and what`s wrong, but what might work and what might not work," Ms. Rice said. The president likes to focus "on this issue of universal values and freedom," and after Sept. 11, she said, "I found myself seeing the value of that."

It is not, she added, "the orientation out of which I came."

Mr. Bush declined to be interviewed for this article, but as a presidential candidate in 2000 he gave a reporter a hint of his chemistry with Ms. Rice. "She`s fun to be with," Mr. Bush said. "I like lighthearted people, not people who take themselves so seriously." Besides, he said, "She`s really smart!"

To the Bushes, Ms. Rice, 49, is almost a surrogate daughter, a charming, reassuring and — in private — sardonic presence who can explain Middle East policy in five digestible bites. She is also, like the president`s mother and another influential adviser, Karen P. Hughes, a tough-minded woman brimming with self-confidence.

To Ms. Rice, an only child who has never married and whose parents have died, the Bushes are some of the closest friends she has. Just about the only time she spends away from her job, and the Bushes, is on Sunday afternoons, when Ms. Rice, who trained as a concert pianist, returns from Camp David and practices with a chamber music group.

"We are all in one way or another close to the family, but she is especially close to the family because of the time she spends with the president," said Mr. Powell, who was national security adviser to Ronald Reagan. "This is not unusual, but at the same time, a little unusual."

Ms. Rice, a former Democrat turned ardent, hawkish Republican, has no trouble making her views known to the president. Last summer, along with Mr. Powell, she urged Mr. Bush to intervene militarily in the civil war in Liberia, over the opposition of the Pentagon. Mr. Bush eventually approved sending a contingent of 200 marines.

"And what he would challenge me on is, `All right, if we send X number of marines, and they`re at the airport, and they are characterized in a particular way, what`s that going to do to our central premise that this is an African peacekeeping effort, not an American one?` " Ms. Rice said.

More recently, she told Mr. Bush she was concerned about developments in Russia, where the man Mr. Bush calls a trusted friend, President Vladimir V. Putin, has jailed the country`s richest businessman.

"Then, usually, there`s a conversation: `Well, how do we communicate that?` " Ms. Rice said. In this case, she said, the president raised his unease in a conversation with Mr. Putin, "in a broad sense of just saying," Ms. Rice said, " `O.K., everybody is concerned about this.` "

Making Arguments

Ms. Rice is the first to say that the president does not always take her advice, and that one of the biggest misperceptions about him is that he is captive to the competing views of his foreign policy advisers.

"I don`t talk the president into almost anything, all right?" Ms. Rice said. "I just want that understood. You can`t do that with the president. What you can do with the president is make your arguments."

In Northern Ireland this past April, Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice had a tense disagreement about a phrase that Mr. Bush planned to use in a joint news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. With American and British forces making quick gains in Iraq, Mr. Bush wanted to say that the United Nations would have a "vital role" in an American-led occupation. Mr. Blair and Mr. Powell agreed. But Ms. Rice, according to a senior administration official, was under pressure from officials in Mr. Cheney`s office who disliked the United Nations and thought "vital" was going too far.

The president used the word anyway — not once, but nine times. Afterward, the senior administration official said, Ms. Rice was "fussing about it a bit because she was afraid she might have some explaining to do back here in order to cover all of our various constituencies. And after a while, the president got annoyed about it."

The president, the official said, then cut off Ms. Rice, curtly telling her, the official recounted, "I did it, and that`s it." The two nearly made a scene, the official said. "They almost had to go off for a minute to sort it out," the official recounted. "And then it blew over."

But Ms. Rice worked hand in hand with Mr. Bush on translating into policy his belief that democracy has a chance in the Middle East — now a central goal of his administration. In the spring of 2002, when violence raged between the Israelis and Palestinians, Ms. Rice said the president began to question not whether we "were pushing this party hard enough or that party hard enough," but "Did we have some fundamental problems here?"

Mr. Bush concluded that they did, and that Mr. Arafat had to be marginalized so that a democratic Palestinian state might emerge.

"When you think about the way people had thought about the Middle East, it was just about land," Ms. Rice said. "And the innovation here, and it was the president`s innovation, was to take this sense that these values are universal, and that democratic states are different, and to apply that to the Middle East."

Since then, Ms. Rice has taken considerable control of the Middle East policy through Elliott Abrams, the fiercely pro-Israel director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, whom Ms. Rice hired a year ago. Although Mr. Powell has been the administration`s longtime point person on the negotiations, Ms. Rice traveled to the Middle East with Mr. Abrams last spring, and through him has enforced Mr. Bush`s insistence that the United States not deal with Mr. Arafat.

Taking Control in Policy

Ms. Rice was in similar lock step with Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, on going to war with Iraq, senior advisers to the president said, and served as an implementer of the president`s wishes. Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department who is now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recalls going to see Ms. Rice in July 2002, well before the president began making a public case for ousting Mr. Hussein, to discuss with Ms. Rice "the pros and cons" of making Iraq a priority.

"Basically she cut me off and said, `Save your breath — the president has already decided what he`s going to do on this,` " Mr. Haass said.

In the same way, Ms. Rice has worked to carry out Mr. Bush`s demand for six-party talks, rather than direct American negotiations, to try to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. She shows no patience with other agencies that wanted a different approach.

"I`m not going to spend time trying to manage what level four at State and Defense think about our North Korea policy," Ms. Rice said, referring to lower-level officials.

Similarly, Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush decided last August at the president`s ranch to bring the management of the administration`s Iraq policy to the White House, after the Pentagon managed the war, under the purview of Ms. Rice and a new Iraq Stabilization Group.

It is unclear what has changed in the administration of Iraq policy since then. Ms. Rice will only say that her group "is really kind of the traditional role for the N.S.C. adviser" — a point made more sharply by Mr. Rumsfeld, the perceived loser in the switch.

At the time, Mr. Rumsfeld said he had "no idea" why Ms. Rice sent him a memorandum on the subject — an unusual public breach in a relationship that some in the administration liken to that of a cantankerous uncle with a take-charge niece. Ms. Rice is intimidated, some critics say, by the combative Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Really?" Ms. Rice said, pointedly. "I wonder if Don Rumsfeld would think that. I don`t think so." Mr. Rumsfeld, she said, "has a kind of a bluntness that I actually like. We`re able to be direct with each other, but we`re friends, and have been for years."

She has managed men older than herself for years, she said. "I was the provost of Stanford University at 38, O.K.?" she said.

Ultimately, she added, she will look back on her job as that of a pianist in a chamber music group.

"The pianist is always facing the fact that this beast that is the grand piano can just overwhelm in sound and volume and drama any string, or all of the strings together," she said. "So you want your playing to have personality, but you don`t want it to be front and center, overwhelming. It has to be part of the team."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 7, 2004
Keeping Track of Visitors

s of this week, each foreign visitor to the United States traveling on a visa must have a picture taken digitally and a fingerprint scanned electronically when going through customs at airports and at 14 major seaports. This is only the first step in the nation`s struggle to keep better track of who arrives and who leaves the country, as Tom Ridge acknowledged in unveiling the program.

This page had many reservations about this new security program, but Mr. Ridge`s Homeland Security Department has gone a long way toward assuaging widespread concerns that the United States would excessively humiliate certain travelers, or treat them in an undignified manner. Despite earlier worries that visitors from the Middle East might be singled out for special scrutiny, the program applies to visitors from all over the world. It exempts only tourists from 28 nations whose citizens need not get visas to come to America, though citizens of those nations will be subject to the identification procedures if they are coming here for more than 90 days — to study, say, or to work. And the United States has required that passports from these countries include fingerprints.

The idea of using biometrics — a physical reading, like a fingerprint — in addition to a photograph to help verify someone`s identity is hardly novel, and should strengthen security at the border. The claim that checking visitors` fingerprints violates their privacy is misplaced. Flying a commercial airliner to another country always entails a surrender of some measure of privacy. Moreover, tamperproof identity checks should lessen the need for the cruder forms of profiling that have been used to screen for potential terrorists.

Under the new system, visitors are checked against various lists of wanted criminals and terrorists, and their photos and fingerprints are compared to those taken in their home countries when they applied for visas. The idea, obviously, is to make sure that the person getting on the plane is the same one who was granted the visa. When the program is fully operational, it will also be used at border crossings and at exit kiosks, which will essentially check people out when they leave the country.

This last piece of the program is critical. Some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, a problem the government has never done a good job of tracking. Indeed, the government has a poor record in fulfilling most Congressional mandates relating to information systems and immigration or border security. That has to change. The security benefits of the program begun this week will be lost if the task is left half-done.

Failing to provide all the equipment and personnel needed to do the job right could prove the biggest threat to the system and could deter foreign visitors. Overly long waiting times at customs or excessive delays in processing visa applications would make foreign visitors feel far more unwelcome than a quick scan of their index fingers.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 7, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The God Gulf
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Religion may preach peace and tolerance, yet it`s hard to think of anything that — because of human malpractice — has been more linked to violence and malice around the world. And now as we enter a new campaign year, it`s time to brace ourselves for a new round of religious warfare and hypocrisy at home.

America is riven today by a "God gulf" of distrust, dividing churchgoing Republicans from relatively secular Democrats. A new Great Awakening is sweeping the country, with Americans increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer and miracles, while only 28 percent say they believe in evolution. All this is good news for Bush Republicans, who are in tune with heartland religious values, and bad news for Dean Democrats who don`t know John from Job.

So expect Republicans to wage religious warfare by trotting out God as the new elephant in the race, and some Democrats to respond with hypocrisy, by affecting deep religious convictions. This campaign could end up as a tug of war over Jesus.

Over the holidays, Vice President Dick Cheney`s Christmas card symbolized all that troubles me about the way politicians treat faith — not as a source for spiritual improvement, but as a pedestal to strut upon. Mr. Cheney`s card is dominated by a quotation by Benjamin Franklin: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"

It`s hard not to see that as a boast that the U.S. has become the global superpower because God is on our side. And "empire" suggests Iraq: is Mr. Cheney contending that in the dispute over the latest gulf war, God was pulling for the White House and fulminating at Democrats and others in Beelzebub`s camp?

Moreover, Mr. Cheney`s card wrenches Ben Franklin`s quotation from its context and upends the humility that Franklin stood for. If you read the full speeches Franklin gave to the Constitutional Convention, including the one with the sparrow line, you see that Franklin is not bragging that God is behind him but rather the opposite — warning that the framers face so many difficulties they need all the help they can get, including prayer.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean is grasping for faith in a way that is just as tasteless as Mr. Cheney`s Christmas card. Dr. Dean bragged to reporters that he knows much about the Bible — and proceeded to say that his favorite New Testament book is Job. Anyone who cites Job as a New Testament book should be scolded not just for religious phoniness but also for appalling ignorance of Western civilization — on a par with Mr. Bush`s calling Greeks "Grecians."

After talking to Mr. Bush`s longtime acquaintances, I`m convinced that his religious convictions are deeply felt and fairly typical in the U.S. Mr. Bush says the jury is still out on evolution, but he has also said that he doesn`t take every word in the Bible as literally true. To me, nonetheless, it seems hypocritical of Mr. Bush to claim (as he did in the last campaign) that Jesus is his favorite philosopher and then to finance tax breaks for the rich by cutting services for the poor. If Dr. Dean should read up on Job, Mr. Bush should take a look at the Sermon on the Mount.

With Karl Rove`s help, Mr. Bush has managed a careful balance, maintaining good ties with the Christian right without doing so publicly enough to terrify other voters. For example, Mr. Bush doesn`t refer in his speeches to Jesus or Christ, but he sends reassuring messages to fellow evangelicals in code ("wonder-working power" in his State of the Union address last year alluded to a hymn).

Republicans are in trouble when the debate moves to the issues because their policies often favor a wealthy elite. But they have the advantage when voters choose based on values, for here Republicans are populists and Democrats more elitist.

As we move into the religious wars, I wish we could recall how Abe Lincoln achieved moral clarity without moral sanctimony. Though often criticized for not being religious enough, Lincoln managed both of the key kinds of morality — in personal behavior, which conservatives care about, and in seeking social justice, which liberals focus on. To me, each seems incomplete without the other.

Or there`s the real Ben Franklin — not the one counterfeited by Mr. Cheney — who warned each of the framers of the Constitution to "doubt a little of his own infallibility." That would be a useful text for Mr. Cheney`s Christmas card next year.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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These are some of Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi`s secret sketches for two illegal long-range missiles, one using two engines and one using five boosters.

washingtonpost.com

Iraq`s Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A01


BAGHDAD -- Of all Iraq`s rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.

An engineering PhD known for outsized energy and gifts, Tamimi, 47, designed and built a new short-range missile during Iraq`s four-year hiatus from United Nations arms inspections. Inspectors who returned in late 2002, enforcing Security Council limits, ruled that the Al Samoud missile`s range was not quite short enough. The U.N. team crushed the missiles, bulldozed them into a pit and entombed the wreckage in concrete. In one of three interviews last month, Tamimi said "it was as if they were killing my sons."

But Tamimi had other brainchildren, and these stayed secret. Concealed at some remove from his Karama Co. factory here were concept drawings and computations for a family of much more capable missiles, designed to share parts and features with the openly declared Al Samoud. The largest was meant to fly six times as far.

"This was hidden during the UNMOVIC visits," Tamimi said, referring to inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Over a leisurely meal of lamb and sweet tea, he sketched diagrams. "It was forbidden for us to reveal this information," he said.

Tamimi`s covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In March they fit in Tamimi`s pocket, on two digital compact discs.

The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less advanced. Iraq`s former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.

But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq`s biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.

Poxes and Professors


On Dec. 13, as a reporter waited to see the dean of Baghdad University`s College of Science, two poker-faced men strode into the anteroom. One was an ex-Marine named Dan, clad in civilian clothes, body armor, a checkered Arab scarf and a bandolier of eight spare magazines for his M-16 rifle. The other identified himself to the receptionist only as Barry.

He asked to see the dean, Abdel Mehdi Taleb, immediately. Dan preceded Barry into Taleb`s office, weapon ready, then stood sentry outside.

According to Taleb, Barry asked -- once again -- about the work of immunologist Alice Krikor Melconian. For months, Taleb said, the Americans had sent scientists and intelligence officers to investigate the compact, curly-haired chairman of the university`s biotechnology department.

Three Iraqi scientists said U.S. investigators asserted they have reason to believe Melconian ran a covert research facility, location unknown. In July, colleagues said, Melconian emerged from her office with a burly American on each arm and was placed into the back seat of a car with darkened windows. U.S. investigators held her for 10 days in an open-air cell and then released her.

Described by associates as shaken by her arrest, Melconian said she has done no weapons research and knows of no secret labs. "I have never left the university," she said. "I have nothing more to say about this. I do not want to make any more trouble."

Like others on campus, and at a few elite institutes elsewhere, Melconian remains under scrutiny in part because investigators deem her capable of doing dangerous biological research. Investigators said they are casting a wide net at Iraq`s "centers of scientific excellence" in an effort to confirm intelligence that is fragmentary and often lacks essential particulars.

Kay`s Iraq Survey Group, which has numbered up to 1,400 personnel from the Defense Department, Energy Department national laboratories and intelligence agencies, is looking for biological weapons far more dangerous than those of Iraq`s former arsenal. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, published in October 2002, said "chances are even" that Iraqi weaponeers were working with smallpox, one of history`s mass killers. It also said Iraq "probably has developed genetically engineered BW agents."

As the Associated Press first reported, a scientific assessment panel known as Team Pox returned home in late July without finding reason to believe Iraq possessed the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Even so, interviews with Iraqi scientists led to a redoubled search for work on animal poxes, harmless to humans but potentially useful as substitutes for smallpox in weapons research.

Rihab Taha, the British-educated biologist known in the west as Dr. Germ, has generally been described by U.S. officials as uncooperative in custody since May 12. But according to one well-informed account of her debriefing, she acknowledged receiving an order from superiors in 1990 to develop a biological weapon based on a virus. That same year, a virologist who worked for her, Hazem Ali, commenced research on camelpox.

If truthful and correctly recounted, Taha`s statement exposed a long-standing lie. Iraq`s government denied offensive viral research. One analyst familiar with the debriefing report, declining to be identified by name or nationality, said investigators believe that Taha`s remarks demonstrate an intent to use smallpox, since camelpox resembles no other human pathogen.

"Hearing that from the lips of the people involved is kind of like that MasterCard commercial: `Priceless,` " the analyst said.

There is no corresponding record, however, that Iraq had the capability or made the effort to carry out such an intent.

Taha, according to the same debriefing account, said Iraq had no access to smallpox. Ali`s research halted after 45 days, with the August 1990 outbreak of war in Kuwait, and did not resume. And Taha, like all those in custody, continues to assert that biowar programs ceased entirely the following year.

Chimeras, Science Fiction


More alarming even than Taha`s statement, investigators said, were highly classified indications that Iraq sought to produce a genetically altered virus. Australian scientists reported in 2001 that an apparently innocent change in mousepox DNA transformed the virus into a rampant killer of mice. Investigators spent months probing for evidence that Iraq sought to master the technique, then apply it to vaccinia -- a readily available virus used to inoculate against smallpox -- and finally to smallpox itself.

Survey group scientists discovered no sign of pox research save at the Baghdad College of Veterinary Medicine, which declared the work to U.N. inspectors in 2002. Researchers there were manipulating the viruses that cause goatpox and sheeppox, in well-documented efforts to develop vaccines. U.S. investigators arrested Antoine Banna, the Cornell-trained dean, but soon released him. Much the same result followed a probe of avian virus research at the Ghazi Institute.

"It was legitimate research, but if they wanted to swing the other way they had some of the wherewithal to do that," said an analyst apprised of the results.

When investigators paid a call on Noria Ali, a genetic engineer who wears the head cover and long robes of an observant Muslim, "they said they knew there was [genetic] research on these viruses, and we had secret labs for this work," Ali said.

Ali acknowledged a history that attracted suspicion. In 1990, she said, Rihab Taha ordered her to build a genetic engineering lab at Iraq`s principal bioweapons research center. The Special Security Organization warned her that "any person who talks about his work will be executed," Ali said. But Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait left the lab unfinished, an account confirmed by U.S. and European experts.

"We could have done a lot in this lab, but the fact is that this lab never existed," Ali said.

The survey group`s most exotic line of investigation sought evidence that Iraq tried to create a pathogen combining pox virus with cobra venom. A 1986 study in the Journal of Microbiology reported that fowlpox spread faster and killed more chickens in the presence of venom extract. Investigators received a secondhand report that Iraq sought to splice them together.

Such an artificial life form -- created by inserting genetic sequences from one organism into another -- is called a "chimera," after the fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology commingling lion, serpent and goat.

"They have asked about developing some kind of chimera, a pox with snake-venom gene," said Ali Zaag, dean of the university`s Institute for Biotechnology. "You have seen our labs. For us, these capabilities are science fiction."

Investigators also searched for what one of them termed "starter sets" of pathogens, laboratory samples that could be used for later production. For each suspected weapon, the investigators carried a supply of "labeled antibodies," a classified technology used in field kits that resemble home pregnancy tests. "We didn`t find anything, so certainly not anything engineered," a coalition scientist said.

Team Pox, as the group of investigators dubbed itself, eventually dropped the chimera investigation.

"You`ve got to learn to walk before you start running," said a European government scientist who studied Iraq`s biological programs last year. "The evidence we have about the virus program is they hadn`t started to walk yet."

Recently, Zaag said, the chimera hunt resumed. This time the investigators are intelligence officers. Their approach, Zaag said, is "We`ll give you a few more days to reveal something, and then we`ll have to take you." Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined requests for interviews.

What `the Traitor` Knew


Late last month, fresh evidence emerged on a very old question about Iraq`s illegal arms: Did the Baghdad government, as it said, rid itself of all the biological arms it produced before 1991? The answer matters, because the Bush administration`s most concrete prewar assertions about Iraqi germ weapons referred to stocks allegedly hidden from that old arsenal.

The new evidence appears to be a contemporary record, from inside the Iraqi government, of a pivotal moment in Baghdad`s long struggle to shield arms programs from outside scrutiny. The document, written just after the defection of Saddam Hussein`s son-in-law on Aug. 8, 1995, anticipates the collapse of cover stories for weapons that had yet to be disclosed. Read alongside subsequent discoveries made by U.N. inspectors, the document supports Iraq`s claim that it destroyed all production stocks of lethal pathogens before inspectors knew they existed.

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein`s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad`s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

The author is Hossam Amin, then -- and until his April 27 arrest -- the head of Iraq`s National Monitoring Directorate. As liaison to the inspectors he provided information and logistical support, but he also concealed the government`s remaining secrets.

Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud, who was private secretary to Amin in 1995, said in an interview that Amin flew into a rage when he learned Kamel had slipped across the border to Jordan. "It was as if he was hit with a hammer," Mahmoud said.

Five days later, Amin dispatched a six-page letter to the president`s son Qusay.

The person who provided a copy to The Washington Post had postwar access to the presidential office where he said he found the original. Iraqis who know Amin well and experienced government investigators from the United States and Europe, who analyzed the document for this article, said they believe it to be authentic. They cited handwriting, syntax, contemporary details and annotations that match those of previous samples. Markings on the letter say that Qusay read it, summarized it for his father and filed it with presidential secretary Abed Hamid Mahmoud.

Just before his "sudden and regrettable flight and surrender to the bosom of the enemy," Amin wrote, "the traitor Hussein Kamel" received a detailed briefing on "the points of weakness and the points of strength" in Iraq`s concealment efforts.

Amin then listed, in numbered points, "the matters that are known to the traitor and not declared" to U.N. inspectors.

Inspectors knew Iraq tried to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon, but not, Amin wrote, about the "crash program" to fabricate a bomb with French reactor fuel by 1991. They knew Iraq made biological toxins, but not that it put them in Scud missile warheads. There were major facilities -- Dawrah Foot and Mouth Disease Institute, a centrifuge factory in Rashdiya, and the Al Atheer bomb-fabrication plant -- whose true purposes were unacknowledged to inspectors.

Shortly after Amin sent the letter, Kamel`s debriefings and subsequent inspections exposed every item in Amin`s catalogue.

Until now, Kamel`s debriefers suspected that "maybe he decided to keep something for himself," said Ali Shukri, a Jordanian military officer who debriefed Kamel on behalf of the late King Hussein, speaking in an interview in Amman. After reading Amin`s letter in silence and then rereading it, Shukri looked up and said Kamel had held back nothing.

The most significant point in Amin`s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons. Amin reminded Qusay Hussein of the government`s claim that it possessed no such arms after 1990, then wrote that in truth "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991."

It was those weapons to which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred in the Security Council on Feb. 5 when he said, for example, that Iraq still had an estimated 8,500 to 25,000 liters of anthrax bacteria.

Some things Amin`s letter did not say may also be meaningful. If Iraq had succeeded in spray-drying anthrax spores to extend their life and lethality, that would have been among the most important secrets of its wide-ranging weapons program. The letter did not speak of it. The letter also enumerated Baghdad`s nuclear secrets, but mentioned nothing to suggest Iraq manufactured unknown parts of an "implosion device" to detonate uranium.

There was only one important thing, Amin said, that Hussein Kamel did not know: some of the locations where Iraq hid its library of arms research. That supports long-standing suspicions that Iraq held back portions of a knowledge base that could speed revival of development and production one day.

A U.S. intelligence official, who was provided with a copy of Amin`s letter for comment, said the government would not discuss it in detail. He said an initial check of records "suggests that we have not previously seen the letter." Without the original and an account of its origins, he said, government analysts "cannot verify the authenticity of the letter." He added, "It is plausible and, from a quick scan of it, presents no immediate surprises."

`The Stupid Army`


Thair Anwar Masraf, an affable project engineer, made an appointment last summer to see an investigator from David Kay`s survey group. He had information, he said in an interview, that might help the Americans interpret two trailer-mounted production plants found near Mosul in April and May.

"I waited more than one hour in the Palestine Hotel," Masraf said. "He did not show up."

Masraf watched with curiosity, in coming months, as the Bush administration touted its discovery of mobile germ-weapon factories.

A joint study released May 28 by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency called the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." Two days later, in Poland, President Bush announced: "For those who say we haven`t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they`re wrong. We found them."

When Iraqi engineers told investigators that the discovered trailers were meant for hydrogen, the CIA dismissed the "cover story."

By July, with contrary evidence piling up, Kay described the trailer episode as a "fiasco." He told BBC Television, which broadcast the tape Nov. 23: "I think it was premature and embarrassing."

Even so, Kay`s October report to Congress left the question unresolved. Kay said he could not corroborate a mobile germ factory, but he restated the CIA argument that the trailers were not "ideally suited" for hydrogen.

Had Masraf found Kay`s investigator at the Palestine Hotel, he said he would have explained that Iraq actually used such trailers to generate hydrogen during the eight-year war with Iran. Masraf and his former supervisor at the Saad Co. said Masraf managed a contract to refurbish some of the units beginning in 1997.

According to the two men, Iraq bought mobile hydrogen generators from Britain in 1982 and mounted them on trucks. The Republican Guard used one type, Iraq`s 2nd Army Corps another.

Iraqi artillery units relied on hydrogen-filled weather balloons to measure wind and temperature, which affect targeting. Munqith Qaisi, then a senior manager at Saad Co. and now its American-appointed director-general, said the trailers used a chemical -- not biological -- process to make hydrogen from methanol and demineralized water.

The feature that analysts found most suspicious in May -- the compression and recapture of exhaust gases -- is a necessity, Masraf said, when gas is the intended product.

In the late 1990s, the Republican Guard sent some of its trailers for refurbishment at the Kindi Co. The 2nd Army Corps signed a similar contract with Saad Co. Masraf said the first units were finished in 2001, including the two discovered by coalition forces around Mosul.

Qaisi`s account may also clear up an unexplained detail from the May 28 intelligence report: traces of urea in the reaction vessel aboard one of the trailers. Qaisi said the vessels corroded badly because Iraqi troops disregarded strict orders to use only demineralized water.

"The stupid army pissed in it, or used river water," he said.

Said`s Last Experiment


On Thursday, Dec. 11, a rumpled man with a high, balding crown arrived late for work at the University of Technology. In his unpainted office, about the size of a family sedan, electrical fixtures drooped from cement walls.

Sabah Abdul Noor once moved among the nation`s elites. He played a part in the most ambitious undertaking of Iraqi industrial science: creation from scratch, and largely in secret, of the wherewithal to design and manufacture an atomic bomb. When the 1991 Gulf War intervened, an Iraqi bomb was -- informed estimates vary -- six months to two years from completion.

Abdul Noor watched as that multibillion-dollar enterprise was reduced to slag under the cutting torches of U.N. inspectors, who arrived under Security Council mandate after Iraq`s defeat in Kuwait. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Abdul Noor said, U.S. forces have been questioning him for indications that the nuclear program was secretly revived.

"I have just come from such an interview," he said, apologizing for the hour. "They didn`t give names. They did not say where they were from. I am kept as long as they wish to keep me."

What the Americans want to talk about, almost always, is Khalid Ibrahim Said.

Until 1991, Said was going to be the man who built Iraq`s atomic bomb. Other leading figures were responsible for uranium enrichment. Said led the team -- "PC-3, Group 4," in Iraq`s cryptic organization chart -- that would form 40 pounds of uranium into a working nuclear device. Abdul Noor was Said`s powder metallurgist.

Said died on April 8 when Marines opened fire on his moving car near a newly established checkpoint. His loss grieved Kay`s nuclear investigators, who had many questions for him. When they came across Said`s last experiment, the late bomb designer moved to the center of their probe.

Said spent his final days in a warehouse filled with capacitors and powerful magnets. He and his team were building what they described -- in a mandatory disclosure to the International Atomic Energy Agency -- as a "linear engine." The purpose, Iraq declared, was air defense.

The machine in Said`s warehouse was more commonly known as a "rail gun." It used electromagnetic pulses to accelerate a small object to very high speed.

When U.S. investigators arrived, they found the gun had been "shooting an aluminum projectile at an aluminum target plate like the skin of an airplane," said an analyst who reviewed their report. But rail gun technology is thought to be decades from use in a practical weapon, and investigators believed Said might have something else in mind.

Impact of an extremely high-velocity projectile in a target chamber, they said, might be used to measure the behavior of materials under pressures that compare to a nuclear implosion. Such "equation of state" experiments, as physicists call them, could be applied to nuclear warhead design. When the U.S. nuclear team looked closely at that question, however, it "saw no evidence of equation of state work" with the rail gun, according to an authoritative summary of the team`s report.

A sad look crossed Abdul Noor`s face when he tried to explain his bafflement at suspicions that Iraq had secretly rebuilt -- "reconstituted," as the Bush administration put it in the summer and fall of 2002 -- a nuclear weapons program. He and his colleagues still know what they learned, Abdul Noor said, but their material condition is incomparably worse than it was when they began in 1987. "We would have had to start from less than zero," he said, with thousands of irreplaceable tools banned from import. "The country was cornered," he said. "We were boycotted. We were embargoed. The truth is, we disintegrated."

Of his late friend Said, Abdul Noor said: "I don`t know what was in his heart. Probably he wanted to return to [nuclear weapons work] one day. That is in the category of dreams."

A common view among investigators today is that Said had the motive but not the means. One Western physicist who knew Said well said the rail gun enabled Said to maintain his team and "hone their skills on diagnostics, flash X-ray cameras, measuring very high speeds, and measuring impacts of ramming things together." The physicist added, "It`s basic science. There`s no relation to actual [bomb] design and fabrication."

Some investigators have yet to be convinced. They continue to look for warhead research in the guise of the rail gun.

"Today they were asking me that again," Abdul Noor said. "I was not on the same wavelength. I could see they were not pleased with me."

Red on Red on Blue


There is another explanation for the rail gun, according to one man who worked on it and does not want to be named. It was, he said, a deception operation against Saddam Hussein.

Hussein resented U.S. air patrols over "no-fly zones" where Iraqi aircraft were forbidden in northern and southern Iraq. After trying for years to challenge the patrols, another Iraqi said, "we had yet to scratch the wing of one American F-15."

Said gave the president an answer involving futuristic technology. He was a good enough applied physicist to understand the long odds against success, Said`s anonymous colleague said, but the project earned him favor, prestige and a substantial budget.

In every field of special weaponry, Iraqi designers and foreign investigators said, such deceit was endemic. Program managers promised more than they could deliver, or things they could not deliver at all, to advance careers, preserve jobs or conduct intrigues against rivals. Sometimes they did so from ignorance, failing to grasp the challenges they took on.

Lying to an absolute ruler was hazardous, Iraqi weaponeers said, but less so in some cases than the alternatives. "No one will tell Saddam Hussein to his face, `I can`t do this,` " said an Iraqi brigadier general who supervised work on some of the technologies used in the rail gun.

David Kay`s survey group has turned up other such cases. Analysts are calling the phenomenon "red-on-red deception," after the U.S. practice of using red to stand for enemy forces and blue to stand for friendly ones. In some cases, they said, "red on red" amounted to "red on blue" -- because Western intelligence collected the same false reports that fooled Hussein.

Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud, who worked for Iraq`s National Monitoring Directorate throughout its 12 years, said spurious programs also led to needless conflict with U.N. arms inspectors.

"They couldn`t build anything," Mahmoud said of overpromising weaponeers, "but they had to hide the documents because they related to prohibited activities."

Secrecy and a procurement system based on smuggling, Iraqi scientists said, abetted those who inflated their reports.

George Healey, a Canadian nuclear physicist and longtime inspector in Iraq, said entire programs were devised, or their design choices distorted, in order to siphon funds.

"They had a system to graft money out of oil-for-food," he said, referring to the U.N. program that supervised Iraqi exports and imports after 1991. "What you had to have was a project -- the more expensive the better, because the more you can buy, the more you can graft out of it. You`d have difficulty believing how much that explains."

Intertwined with internal deception, many analysts now believe, was deception aimed overseas. Hussein plainly hid actual programs over the years, but Kay, among others, said it appears possible he also hinted at programs that did not exist.

Hans Blix, who was executive chairman of UNMOVIC, the U.N. arms inspection team, said in a telephone interview from Sweden that he has devoted much thought to why Hussein might have exaggerated his arsenal. One explanation that appeals to him: "You can put a sign on your door, `Beware of the dog,` without having a dog. They did not mind looking a little bit serious and a little bit dangerous."

Defectors who sold false or exaggerated stories in Washington, Iraqi and American experts said, layered on still another coat of deception.

"You end up with a Picasso-like drawing -- distorted," said Ali Zaag, the Baghdad University biotechnologist.

`Long Pole in the Tent`


One line of thought in the survey group now, as it constructs a narrative of the Iraqi threat, is that the Baghdad government set out to revive its nonconventional programs in sequence. Instead of beginning with "weapons of mass destruction" -- nuclear, biological or chemical -- Iraq began with the means to deliver them .

"Missiles are very significant to us because they`re the long pole in the tent," Kay told "BBC Panorama." "They`re the thing that takes the longest to produce. . . . The Iraqis had started in late `99, 2000, to produce a family of missiles that would have gotten to 1,000 kilometers [625 miles]."

Kay was referring to Tamimi`s work, though the designer and details have not been made public before. If reached, a 625-mile range would have menaced Tel Aviv, Tehran, Istanbul, Riyadh, the world`s richest oil fields and important U.S. military installations from Turkey to the Persian Gulf.

When that might have happened -- or whether -- is difficult to forecast. Of all Iraq`s nascent programs, Tamimi`s was among the most advanced. A closer look at its prospects helps answer a question common to all four fields of forbidden arms: Was the country capable of carrying out the presumed intentions of its leader?

Tamimi is a man of robust self-esteem, but he expressed no confidence about his long-range missile, which depended on clustering five engines in a single stage. (An intermediate version called for two engines.) Western missile experts, who suggested questions and reviewed answers from a reporter in multiple rounds of interviews with Tamimi, emerged uncertain of the timetable or outcome.

Their best estimate was that it would take six years -- if the missile worked at all -- to reach a successful flight test. Tamimi would need less time with major help from abroad, but considerably more if he had to conceal the work from U.N. monitoring that persisted until the United States invaded in March. U.S. government spokesmen declined to provide an estimate.

Tamimi "was the star" of Iraq`s three rival rocket establishments, said a French expert who has known him for years. Another European rocket scientist said of Tamimi: "In our country he would be a very good design engineer."

But Tamimi lacked access to the modern tools and technical literature of his profession. He left Czechoslovakia`s Antonin Zapotecky Military Academy in 1984 with a doctorate degree and a collection of Russian rocketry texts now entering their third decade in print. For the essential modeling of thrust, flight qualities, trajectory and range, he relied on unsophisticated software written in Baghdad. In an e-mail exchange, Tamimi expressed strong curiosity about what the "more accurate modeling programs" of overseas experts might show about his designs.

Tamimi faced challenges he had not encountered before, some of which he knew about and others he did not. He knew he would have difficulty lashing together multiple engines and igniting them at the same instant. "The main problem was synchronization, which we hadn`t solved yet," he said.

To fit multiple engines in an airframe based on the existing Al Samoud missile, Tamimi`s designs called for a flared missile that nearly doubled in diameter -- from 760mm (30 inches) to 1500mm (59 inches) -- from top to bottom. Foreign experts said the shape would produce enormous strains. "If it didn`t break up going up, it would most likely do so on reentry," said a Western expert who did not want to be named, after submitting Tamimi`s sketches and descriptions to an evaluation team. "To avoid that, they would have to develop some sort of separation system to abandon the wider bit, and also master terminal guidance after the separation."

Tamimi said "we did not consider the problem of separation." For terminal guidance, which steers a missile in its final approach to target, Tamimi pinned his hope on Russian technology he did not have in hand.

In test flights, the Al Samoud missile never landed -- literally -- within a mile of its target. In 2001, Tamimi obtained a small black-market supply of precision Russian gyroscopes. He hoped they would increase the missile`s accuracy from about 1.5 miles to 500 yards. To increase accuracy still further, he said "we were near success" in negotiating a contract -- he would not say with whom -- for a complete Russian-built inertial navigation system.

"He knew very well where he was going, especially in guidance and gyroscope equipment," a foreign expert said.

An enormous problem for Tamimi`s program, however, was that he designed it to allow procurement of parts under cover of the openly declared Al Samoud. When inspectors ruled the Al Samoud illegal and destroyed its production lines in March, Tamimi said, he began to doubt the project`s viability.

"Saddam Hussein ordered this work, but where would we get the materials?" said an Iraqi general who declined to be named and who kept close tabs on Tamimi`s missile designs. "This was the case in every field. People would prepare reports under the order of Saddam Hussein and the supervision of the people around Saddam Hussein. But it was not real."



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Senior Iraqi Urges U.N. to Enter Planning for Self-Rule


By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A12


UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 6 -- A senior member of Iraq`s interim authority appealed to the United Nations to play a direct role in planning Iraq`s transition to self-rule and negotiating the future role of U.S.-led forces in Iraq, U.S. and U.N. diplomats said Tuesday.

Abdel Aziz Hakim, a Shiite Muslim who was president of the U.S.-appointed Iraq Governing Council last month, asked U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in a confidential Dec. 29 letter to U.N. experts to Iraq to determine how to plan the transfer of power from the U.S.-led coalition.

Senior U.N. diplomats said the appeal was aimed at ending a political impasse between Iraq`s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who favors direct elections for a provisional government this summer, and other Iraqi political leaders who support U.S. plans to organize a series of regional representatives, or caucuses, to appoint new leadership by June 30.

"Everyone agrees that there should be a provisional government by June 30," said one U.N. diplomat who was familiar with the contents of the letter. "But when it comes to the question of how you establish that government, there are two camps. [Hakim] wants the United Nations to find a way out."

A senior council diplomat said Hakim`s appeal lacks the full backing of the 24-member governing council. It also faces opposition from L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, and other coalition officials, who are reluctant to reopen discussions on a Nov. 15 agreement with the Iraqi council that outlines a carefully choreographed plan leading to the establishment of a provisional Iraqi government by June 30.

Sistani has voiced concern that the arrangements for the establishment of a new government would place the country`s Shiite Muslims, who account for more than 60 percent of the population, at a disadvantage. And he has proposed that general elections be held to select the country`s transitional government.

Hakim`s political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI), had initially relayed a request last month from Sistani to the United Nations to determine whether elections could be organized before June 30. But Annan indicated last month that there would not be enough time to hold credible elections.

Hakim`s latest initiative appeared calculated to enlist Annan`s support in mediating a compromise. It also called on the United Nations to play a mediation role on a range of issues, including a request that the world body advise the Iraqis in their upcoming negotiations with the United States and its military allies on a security agreement that would determine the fate of the coalition`s military presence in the country.

Annan, who has yet to respond to Hakim`s request, said he wants to see the U.N.`s role during Iraq`s transition clarified at a Jan. 19 meeting with an Iraqi delegation headed by Adnan Pachachi, the current monthly president of the Iraq Governing Council; Hakim; and Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who will preside over the council in February. Annan said he expects that the United States and Britain will send senior officials to participate in the meeting.



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Bechtel Wins Iraq Contract For $1.8 Billion
Pentagon Plans to Spend More As Transfer of Power Nears

By Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page E01


Bechtel National Inc. yesterday was awarded a $1.8 billion contract for more reconstruction work in Iraq, while the Defense Department announced plans for seeking $5 billion more in rebuilding contracts.

The flurry of activity comes as agencies leading the rebuilding effort continue to adjust to shifting political and security conditions in Iraq, which already have caused a month-long delay in seeking proposals from contractors.

The White House decision to transfer sovereignty to Iraq by June 30 prompted adjustments in spending plans, Pentagon and State Department officials said. Contracts worth $4.6 billion for reconstruction will be deferred until after the transfer of power to give the Bush administration more "flexibility" in its responses to needs that Iraqi officials identify, said Larry DiRita, chief Pentagon spokesman.

A report the Bush administration sent to Congress on Monday detailed how officials have recast reconstruction priorities and shifted money to emphasize security issues. For example, the report said the administration proposes shifting $14 million from the new Iraqi army account to increase, to $81 million, funding for a 50,000-member force to protect government buildings and embassies throughout Iraq.

San Francisco-based Bechtel, which already had a $1 billion contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development, will work with Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., on the new deal. Bechtel was chosen over two competitors in open bidding and presented the lowest price and highest technical scores, according to USAID reviewers.

Timothy T. Beans, the agency`s procurement director, said the company`s presence in Iraq did not make it the presumed favorite for the new contract. "Bechtel had just as much chance to mess up as to do well," Beans said.

The USAID and upcoming Pentagon awards involve broad plans for the work to be done in rebuilding or rehabilitating major systems in Iraq, including the electrical grid, water and sewage systems, and airports. The final decisions on the projects and sites that will get priority will come through L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, officials said.

The Pentagon contracts could be awarded by March 1, said David J. Nash, who heads the Pentagon office managing contracts for Bremer. Nash previously estimated that the requests for bids would go out last month, but they were delayed by continuing security problems and the decision to transfer power sooner than originally thought. "We want to make sure it`s correct before we go forward," Nash said. "This is a lot of money."

Much of the Bechtel work and upcoming Pentagon work would continue after the government transition in Iraq. USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios said, "I can`t imagine all of this money would be spent by June."

The United States plans to spend about $12.6 billion this year on Iraqi reconstruction and $5.8 billion next year, according to the report to Congress. Congress approved $18.6 billion for reconstruction in a supplemental budget bill in November.

Both the process for disbursing the reconstruction funds and the procedures used under some emergency contracts awarded shortly after the U.S. invasion have been controversial.

In early December, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said countries that opposed the war with Iraq would be barred from competing for prime reconstruction contracts, effectively excluding companies from France, Germany, Russia and Canada.

Since then, France, Germany and Russia agreed to administration requests to grant some debt relief to Iraq. DiRita said yesterday that there has been no change in the policy regarding countries allowed to bid on the main contracts, though many contracting decisions remain under review. Asked if the offer to forgive Iraqi debt positions countries for a chance to bid on prime contracts, DiRita said there is no such "linkage."

Meanwhile, in Baghdad yesterday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that it determined that a Halliburton Co. subsidiary that has been importing oil into Iraq from a Kuwaiti company received a "fair and reasonable" price. A preliminary Defense Department audit found that the subsidiary, KBR Inc., may have overcharged the U.S. government by $61 million.

Richard Dowling, Corps of Engineers spokesman, said a waiver signed by the corps commander, Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, exempts the firm from providing "certified" price and cost information, which the Kuwaiti supplier does not give out. "The waiver recognizes that things are different here," Dowling said. "The prices are reasonable. KBR clearly has made the case that they sought the best prices they could get."

Flowers said in an interview in Kuwait on Sunday that KBR "got the best price." He said that even if the company paid a premium for the fuel, "we can`t afford to have the Iraqis rioting in the streets over a lack of fuel."

Staff writer Jackie Spinner in Baghdad contributed to this report.



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THE WORLD



In Iraq, an Army Day for No Army
A once proud national holiday is filled with bitter reminiscing for former soldiers of the dissolved military.
By Nicholas Riccardi
Times Staff Writer

January 7, 2004

BAGHDAD — Tuesday would have been Bashim Husham`s big day.

The 31-year-old had been waiting years for this Jan. 6, a national holiday commemorating the Iraqi army`s 1921 founding and the day officers traditionally were promoted. Husham would have moved up from major to lieutenant colonel. He had expected a day of singing military songs with his comrades in arms, followed by trips to a photo studio and a posh restaurant where he would have celebrated with his family.

Instead, Husham woke up about noon and slouched on his couch in an Adidas track suit, one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who became unemployed when the U.S.-led occupation dissolved their army.

Tuesday`s Army Day commemoration featured violent demonstrations by ex-soldiers and soul-searching by former officers about their role in a new society. For military men, it was a reminder of what they lost when the army was eliminated.

"This is the first time this day passes in sadness," Husham said. "We used to pass this day with joy, congratulating each other…. [Now] it`s a dull time. It`s just sitting around the house without doing anything."

Although Saddam Hussein regularly wore combat fatigues and liked to pose with missiles, Kalashnikovs and other military trappings, many Iraqis say the armed forces have long been identified with professionalism and national sovereignty rather than the deposed dictator. In a country shaken by foreign invasion, crime and suicide bombings, some say they long for an institution that represented stability and national pride — even though it violently quelled uprisings and used chemical weapons against its enemies, among them Iranians and Iraqi Kurds.

"Iraqis and Arabs in general are naturally nostalgic for old establishments," said former Capt. Khalid Sulayman, 34. "Now we feel nostalgia for the army. Now that we have lost that establishment, we are longing for it."

Sulayman and several other former military men contended that the army served the Iraqi people rather than Hussein.

The army was created 16 years before Hussein was born. Compulsory service meant most Iraqi men spent time in military barracks. The army bore the brunt of the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars, both disasters. Its poorly paid rank and file were both respected and pitied.

When the U.S.-led coalition eliminated the military in May, it threw 350,000 men out of work and sowed resentment among a wide swath of Iraqi society. Authorities say many ex-soldiers supported the insurgency. Some American military officials have acknowledged that the wholesale dismissal of the rank and file was a mistake.

The coalition-appointed Iraqi Governing Council gave a nod to the army`s place in Iraqi society when it issued a statement marking Tuesday`s holiday, the 83rd anniversary of the creation of the Iraqi armed forces. The council argued that Hussein`s government "worked on dismantling army traditions and bonds" and used it to sow oppression and commit massacres.

Under Hussein, the council added, the army was exploited to gain "absolute control" over the people and used to repress democracy. The council pledged that the new military "will not interfere in the nation`s political matters and its role will be limited to guarding and defending the Iraqi borders."

Tuesday`s celebration featured a graduation ceremony of the second battalion of 700 soldiers from an American-run academy. While a band played the Iraqi national anthem, the graduating class marched down the field using the same drill tradition as the old army.

To many ex-soldiers, the new Iraqi military represents a dismal copy of the storied Iraqi armed forces.

"We are not a proper army," said Hasam Aheem Rabbas, a former soldier in the old military who stood guard in central Baghdad on Tuesday as a corporal in the new civil defense force.

Former Brig. Gen. Basel Saleh recalled marching in student protests in 1956, during the reign of King Faisal II, when police beat students until the army came and held the cops at bay. For Saleh, Jan. 6 is a reminder of what he called "the glorious history of the Iraqi army."

Many former soldiers took advantage of the day`s symbolism to vent their frustration about the elimination of the armed forces and the regular paycheck the service brought. Former soldiers, who were promised monthly stipends of as much as $150, say they have yet to receive the money.

About 3,000 former soldiers demanding their pay marched through the southern city of Basra on Tuesday and tried to storm a bank, only to be turned back by private security and Iraqi police gunfire, according to the British military, which controls the city. Associated Press reported that one demonstrator was killed and four were injured. Jonathan Turner, a spokesman for the British military, said he could confirm one injury. He said the military would try to pay some ex-soldiers today.

Several hundred protesters also marched through the city of Baqubah, outside Baghdad, calling for back pay and the revival of the army.

Other military men went about their regular routines.

Ibrahim Ghranaim Dulaymi, who once slipped on the crisp uniform of an Iraqi air force lieutenant, made trips to Baghdad markets Tuesday to trade cookware and plastic cups. Dulaymi said he sometimes uses his family`s 25-year-old Fiat to hustle fares as a taxi driver.

"Military people know nothing of civilian life," he said Tuesday evening as he sat in the yard of his family home, listening to the echo of nearby gunfire, which he said could be either a wedding celebration or robbers. "I am a military man, but I have to do such work, for how else would I make a living?"

Mudhar Abdul-Baqi Bakri, a former lieutenant colonel in the army`s special forces, beams with pride when he tells of how American troops circled around the town he was charged with defending last year rather than risk a direct fight.

He spent Tuesday afternoon at a meeting between American commanders and retired Iraqi officers, where the Iraqis complained of irregular pensions and discussed the need for a national army. Bakri said the meeting went well, but the lack of the military has left a void in his life.

Bakri survives on money sent by his brother, a doctor in Michigan, but said he longs for work. Private firms have tried to recruit him as a bodyguard for $300 a month. That`s a good salary in Iraq, but he rejected the offers. "It is so remote from the honor of being an officer," Bakri said.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suheil Ahmed of The Times` Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-medi…
THE NATION



Dean Is Targeted by Ad Campaign
Conservative group calls the Democrat`s backers a `Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.`
By Nick Anderson and Janet Hook
Times Staff Writers

January 7, 2004

DES MOINES — Howard Dean`s economic policies — as well as his "latte-drinking, sushi-eating" supporters — will come under a round of withering fire starting today from a group that supports conservative Republican candidates.

The Club for Growth, an organization that is an advocate for tax cuts and other conservative causes, will begin airing in Iowa today a TV ad attacking the proposal by the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination to repeal all of the tax cuts enacted under President Bush.

The ad features a husband and wife and opens with an announcer asking, "What do you think about Howard Dean`s proposal to raise your taxes by $1,900 a year?"

The husband replies, `Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading … "

The wife jumps in: "Body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs."

Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, said of the ad: "What we`re trying to show is Dean is supported by the cultural elite and not by anyone with middle-American values and finances."

Dean`s campaign dismissed the ad as a fundraising ploy to stir up GOP activists. A spokesman for the campaign also asserted that there were far more sushi restaurants, Volvo dealerships and Starbucks outlets in northern Virginia, where Moore and many prominent Republicans live, than in all of Iowa.

Dean has said repeal of Bush`s tax cuts is needed to help reduce the federal deficit and to fund programs that are more helpful to the middle class than the money provided by the cuts.

Moore said his group spent $75,000 airtime in Iowa for the ad. He did not say how much time that amounted to, but added, "It`s not a token buy. This is going to run enough that people will see it over and over."

Meanwhile, a study found that despite Dean`s significant fundraising advantage among Democrats, he was outspent on TV advertising by three of his party rivals as 2003 ended and the New Year began.

From Dec. 29 to Jan. 4, Dean spent about $480,000 for ads on broadcast channels in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa. Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts spent $516,000 on TV advertising during the week; retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, $612,000; and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, $662,000.

The figures do not include ads on cable television and in small broadcast markets.

The figures, compiled for The Times by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, suggest that in the closing stretch of the campaigns in early-voting states, Dean`s top rivals for the nomination are in position to compete on television with the front-runner.

Their financial viability is something of a surprise, given the $40 million Dean raised in 2003, a one-year record for Democrats. Among the other major candidates, only Kerry collected more than $20 million.

Dean is buying more ads on prime time than his rivals, said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer for TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group, based in Arlington, Va. That tactic is expensive, but reaches more viewers. "Prime time is just that — prime real estate, prime rib," he said. "It`s the best of the best."

Behind the spending is a pattern that reflects Dean`s status as the candidate to beat in a nine-way contest. The former Vermont governor seeks to win in nominating contests from coast to coast, starting with the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses, while his eight rivals are trying to derail him in one state or another.

From June 1 through Sunday, a period during which Dean clearly established his fundraising dominance among the Democrats, he spent nearly $5.7 million on television ads, far more than any of his rivals. Kerry, his closest competitor in spending, bought $3.6 million worth of ads.

Dean also has spent large sums on organizing in states across the country — outside of New Hampshire, Iowa and the seven states voting Feb. 3. And he has spent heavily on rallies and other campaign events.

The Gephardt camp contends that Dean has run through much of his money and may soon find himself struggling to respond to fire from all sides.

On Sunday, during a driving snowstorm, the Dean campaign used three cranes to unfurl giant pro-Dean banners outside a public television station before a Democratic candidate debate in Johnston, Iowa. Most of the people who saw the signs were reporters and partisans coming in and out of the station.

Steve Murphy, Gephardt`s campaign manager, said of such spending, "It costs a lot of money to put on a rock tour, and that`s what [Dean] is doing."

During the week wrapped around New Year`s Day, Gephardt`s ads aired in Iowa; Oklahoma, which votes Feb. 3; and Michigan, which votes Feb. 7. Gephardt`s Michigan buy was significant: more than $300,000 in Flint, Detroit and Grand Rapids. Dean ran no ads in major Michigan markets in that time.

Clark spent more than $250,000 during the week on ads in Arizona, which holds its primary Feb. 3.

Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, spent most of his advertising money in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Two other Democratic candidates, Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina, spent considerably less last week on broadcast ads. Lieberman spent $76,000 on ads for New Hampshire`s major markets and Edwards $91,000 on ads for Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Lieberman advisor Mandy Grunwald said the estimate understated Lieberman`s actual spending, in part because it did not include ads on cable stations.

*

Anderson reported from Des Moines, Hook from Washington. Times staff writer Matea Gold in Des Moines contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cole7ja…
COMMENTARY


Fingerprinting: a Black Mark
By Simon A. Cole
Simon A. Cole is an assistant professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine and author of "Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification Techniques" (2001, Harva

January 7, 2004

This week, the Department of Homeland Security began using scanned fingerprints and digital photographs to track foreign visitors entering the United States by air or sea. But while this might appear on the surface to be the application of an old forensic technology — fingerprinting — to the modern problem of illegal immigration, it actually represents a return of fingerprinting to its earliest roots in this country. Though few people are aware of it today, the first serious proposal to use fingerprinting in the United States was for immigration control.

In the 1880s, the hot-button political issue in California was the influx of Chinese laborers who, nativists claimed, were undercutting wages. Politicians were elected on platforms based on racial hatred of Chinese immigrants. A system was developed to issue certificates that would facilitate the reentry of laborers who had established residence and left the country temporarily, but the certificates were vulnerable to theft, fraud and sale on the black market.

In an effort to develop stricter immigration controls over these Chinese immigrants, a number of Californians — including famed bandit hunter Harry Morse, landscape photographer Isaiah West Taber and the superintendent of the San Francisco Mint, Franklin Lawton — proposed to the U.S. Treasury Department to use "thumb-marks" to track the immigrants.

In those days, fingerprinting was a novel, largely untested technology. Lawton was inspired by a single use of fingerprinting for solving a crime in Albany, N.Y., in the late 1850s — the earliest known use of the process.

Crucial to the appeal of fingerprinting was the racist idea that, as California`s Rep. William Morrow put it at the time, "there is a remarkable similarity in the … general appearance of all Chinamen coming to this country." This supposedly made fingerprints more useful than photographs. "The thumb prints of a Chinese laundryman," a San Francisco newspaper commented, "are more recognizable than his face."

Fingerprinting is often thought of as an antidote to racism. After all, fingerprinting individualizes people, whereas racism casts them into stereotyped categories. But the 19th century story of fingerprinting and Chinese immigration shows that individualization and racism could go hand in hand. Fingerprinting would have individualized Chinese immigrants, but if they were the only ones who had to submit to it, it also facilitated their exclusion.

California`s story provides a cautionary tale for Washington`s current efforts at immigration control. Certainly, individualized identification is preferable to excluding immigrants based on racial or ethnic profiling, but that does not mean that it cannot be used in a racist manner.

In the end, the U.S. Treasury Department decided that it still preferred photography to the newfangled technology, fingerprinting, and the Chinese were never fingerprinted. The United States` flirtation with fingerprinting was forgotten. India and Argentina would later refine it and be the first to use it.

As for the Chinese in the U.S., the situation grew worse for a while. In 1888, Congress banned the reentry program altogether, stranding those who had temporarily left the country.

Then, in 1892, Congress mandated registration of all Chinese living in the United States.

Let`s hope that old idea is not revived as well.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/155523_thomas07.html

Remove arrows from Dean`s back
Wednesday, January 7, 2004

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean says he knows he`s the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination "because I keep picking buckshot out of my rear end all the time."

He referred to the relentless sniping by his eight rivals who presume he is the man to beat.

Personally, I have never seen so much antagonism directed at a candidate by other members of the same party. It seems to me his competitors would do better to toot their own horns instead of tearing down a colleague.

If they keep stomping on Dean, where will they be if he just happens to win the No. 1 spot on the ticket? Surely their words will come back to haunt them if they don`t cop the nomination themselves. President Bush and his chief political guru will be laughing all the way to the polls. They already have enough fodder now for their campaign stops for the next 10 months.

I`m not saying the other eight candidates should give up their bids for the Democratic presidential nomination. But some caution is advised.

The old pros would do better to accent their own solutions to the nation`s problems, and there are plenty.

For example, Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., has offered a universal health care plan and has spotlighted the fact that trade globalization has sent U.S. jobs fleeing overseas.

But in the heat of the battle, most of the Democratic wannabes are busy hanging the "can`t win against Bush" label on Dean and highlighting his perceived political gaffes.

Dean has staked out a strong position against the invasion of Iraq. The same is true of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, the only member of Congress among the pack who voted against giving Bush authority to go to war.

The other Democratic congressional presidential contenders voted for the war, including Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts; Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina.

Oddly, Kerry made a name for himself protesting the Vietnam War back in the 1970s.

Then there is retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who is all over the place on the war issue. He has said he probably would have voted to authorize the war, but he also has said it was an "unnecessary war" and he has rejected the Bush doctrine of preventive war.

Two others seeking to top the ticket are former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton of New York.

Dean, fed up with the personal pummeling, has taken Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to task for not stepping in and urging other Democrats to tone down their attacks.

Dean told reporters last month in Ames, Iowa, "If we had strong leadership in the Democratic Party, they would be calling those other candidates and saying, `Hey look, somebody`s going to have to win.` "

But a day later Dean telephoned McAuliffe, apparently to apologize or explain his remarks.

Lieberman, infected with the presidential bug when he ran for vice president in 2000, is not about to let up. He ridiculed Dean for his complaints about McAuliffe and derided his lack of "international experience."

Some of the challengers have attacked Dean for scoffing at Bush`s statement that the United States is safer now because Saddam Hussein has been captured.

Saying anyone would be better than Bush, Dean has promised to support whoever wins the nomination.

But he adds: "You can`t beat George Bush if you behave like the Democrats are behaving."

Kerry said that Dean embodied an "enormous contradiction" in his approach to government secrecy.

He referred to Dean`s criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney`s refusal to name his energy advisers and to Dean`s appointment of his own secret energy task force when he was governor of Vermont.

Dean`s reply: "Any comparison between my successful bipartisan efforts to solve an energy crisis in Vermont and Dick Cheney`s donor rewards program designed as a national energy policy is laughable."

All of this is, of course, red meat for Bush political strategists. The New York Times quoted one Bush adviser as saying: "Dr. Dean`s rivals are doing a great job for us" because of their attacks on him.

Ignoring the war in the campaign won`t be easy for Bush if the Iraqi resistance continues to takes the lives of two or three Americans a day. But he and his cohorts are having a field day watching the Democrats scrap for the job of running against him.

Dean`s rivals seem to have forgotten the maxim "divide and conquer." They should be guided by the maxim: "United we stand. Divided we fall."



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

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: [e-mail]. Copyright 2004 Hearst Newspapers.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Joerver]

Resolution #1: Oust BushCo
For 2004, it ain`t all just eating better and exercising. We`ve got some mandatory purging to do
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/07/notes010704.DTL



This is the year of the end of Bush. This is the year of the end of the end of the nasty hissing political Scylla that is CheneyRummyAshcroftRove. This is the year we say good-bye to the collective spiritual and intellectual gouge. This is the year we all wake the hell up.

Can we resolve? It is even possible? To end all the inane ultraviolent ultramacho oily penis-envy wars and end the faux-macho political preening and flagrant poisoning of the environment and the appalling gutting of the economy? What, too utopian? Oh well.

Is this the year when we elect a female vice president and feel the pulse of our collective breath and tens of thousands realize they were dead, dead wrong about the ostensible talent of Celine Dion? Maybe it is.

Maybe this is the year we stop buying so many pollutive obnoxious lug-nut SUVs, the year we finally eliminate McDonald`s from the face of the planet and shun the nightmare Wal-Mart dystopia and realize books and love and intense intellectual curiosity and hot frequent laughter and happy open-mouthed sex and self-defined divinity in the face of sneering GOP wanking is the only path to true progress. Right? Yes? Can we all agree?

All right, not quite. Maybe we must start small. Maybe our 2004 resolutions need to be tangible and real and tactile, covered in pocket lint and coffee stains. They need to be potent and affordable and ready to wear, with good seams and excellent visibility and lots of cool cupholders.

And, yes -- yes, indeed -- they must also reek, positively reek, of mystery, of quiet magic, and hope, lathered all over with that which we have lost. This is the only way.

So OK screw the eating less and exercising more and signing up for that pottery class and getting more fresh air and not screaming so much at slow drivers. These are the givens. These are the obvious and the pedestrian and the clearly-you-should-already-knows.

Besides, no one really likes making resolutions, and even fewer enjoy adhering to them, and hence we must smudge the lens, rearrange the furniture, kick the bee`s nest and then run screaming and naked into the ice-cold lake of imminent change.

Let us resolve differently. Let us resolve in ways we have yet to imagine. Small but insanely potent. Pinchable but wildly deep. Frugal but wonderfully expensive.

This is the year you make small but omnipotent differences. This is the year you pay for the person behind you at the toll booth, just for the hell of it, because you can, because you have no good reason not to, because, really, what cost genuine acts of sporadic kindness?


This is the year you celebrate the success of others and be happy for their happiness and work to reduce envy into a tiny shriveled green raisin stuffed way, way back in the corner of the pantry of your worldview. Possible?

This is the year you do one thing that absolutely that terrifies you but which you know, deep down, is good and vital for your soul. The year you vow to break your own traditions. When you swear to sin, deeply and profoundly, against your own preconceived sanctimony.

Maybe that means dissolving, like fog in the sun, a cold batch of your bitter religious training. Maybe that means jumping off the high cliff of your most naughty inhibitions. Maybe that means nothing more than no longer living for the sake of someone else`s perception of who you`re supposed to be. Maybe it`s cutting your hair. Joining a protest. Protesting a join. Winking instead of sneering. Swallowing instead of spitting.

This is the year you open your mind, just a little, broaden your media world, just a little, vary your sources and question the spoon-fed truths and the force-fed fabrications. It is the year we take more personal responsibility. For our actions. For our posturing. For our gluttony and violence and intolerances. Our god cannot beat their god. There is no superior race. We are all immigrants. The clenched fist is not the new American symbol.

After all, this is all any new year offers: an opportunity. It`s nothing more than a number on a calendar, and it is nothing more than a chance to review the recent past and preview the near future and see what we can tweak and reevaluate and hopefully explode into a million tiny glistening revelations.

Because this is the year of the follow through, the year you stop telling yourself you`re really and truly gonna do that thing you always said you were gonna do and instead stop thinking so much about it and just stand up and put on your pants and make the necessary calls and take a deep breath and get the hell off the couch of self-doubt and do it.

Because, hey, with only 11 more months until BushCo is happily and hastily voted out of our collective consciousness, there really is no better time to resolve to revolutionize your tired perspectives. Right?


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

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Subscribe to Mark`s deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

[ospower]

Bush will Ausländern ohne Papiere Arbeiten erlauben

US-Präsident George W. Bush will Millionen von illegalen Einwanderern eine befristete Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis erteilen. Das sehen Pläne für eine Reform des Immigrationsrechts vor, die Bush heute offiziell vorstellen will. Ohne Papiere in den USA arbeitende Ausländer sollen dort künftig legal beschäftigt werden können, wenn ihr Arbeitgeber für sie bürgt, wie aus Regierungskreisen verlautete. Zudem sollen sie sich um eine dauerhafte Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis bewerben können.

Offiziell sollen ihre Papiere nur Ausländer mit solchen Jobs bekommen, für die sich keine US-Arbeitnehmer finden lassen. Wenn ein Ausländer bereits in den USA beschäftigt ist, gelte dieses Kriterium aber praktisch als erfüllt, hieß es. Überdies sollen sich auch solche Ausländer um die Papiere bewerben können, die sich noch außerhalb des Landes befinden; sie müssen den Nachweis eines US-Arbeitnehmers erbringen, dass er sie einstellen will und keinen US-Bürger für den Job gefunden hat.

Wie hohe Regierungsvertreter sagten, sollen die Papiere für diese Gruppen maximal sechs Jahre gelten. Der ausländische Arbeitnehmer kann sich parallel jedoch um die Green Card, also einen unbefristeten Status, bewerben. Generell soll die Zahl der ausgestellen Green Cards erhöht werden. Derzeit stellen die USA nach Angaben der "Washington Post" jährlich rund eine Million Green Cards aus. Besitzer einer Green Card können sich nach fünf Jahren um die Einbürgerung bewerben.

Nach offiziellen Schätzungen gibt es derzeit acht bis 14 Millionen illegal in den USA lebende Ausländer, rund die Hälfte davon aus Mexiko. Es gehe darum, die "Rechte illegaler Arbeitnehmer zu schützen, die jetzt im Schatten leben und aus Furcht vor der Abschiebung nicht aus dem Schatten treten wollen", zitierten US-Zeitungen einen hohen Regierungsvertreter. Die Pläne bedürfen allerdings der Zustimmung des Kongresses, wo mit hartem Widerstand vor allem konservativer Gruppen in Bushs eigener Republikanischer Partei zu rechnen ist.

Bush hatte sein Amt mit der Zusage angetreten, das Einwanderungsrecht für illegal Beschäftigte zu liberalisieren. Mit dem mexikanischen Präsidenten Vicente Fox hatte er bereits Gespräche geführt, die Pläne dann aber nach den Anschlägen des 11. September 2001 auf Eis gelegt.

ein feiner zug, des herrn bush!

[Punk24]

Mittwoch, 7. Januar 2004
Brisanter Bush-Spot
Empörung über Hitler-Vergleich

Ein Kurzfilm, in dem US-Präsident George W. Bush mit Hitler verglichen wird, sorgt in den USA für Kontroversen. In dem 30-Sekunden-Spot auf der Web-Seite der liberalen Organisation MoveOn.Org verwandelt sich ein Porträt von Bush in das Gesicht Hitlers.

Der Vorsitzende des Nationalkomitees der Republikanischen Partei, Ed Gillespie, verurteilte den Film als "schlimmste und widerwärtigste Form politischer Hassrede". Jüdische US-Organisationen wie das Simon-Wiesenthal-Zentrum in Los Angeles erklärten, es sei "grotesk und moralisch abscheulich", Hitler in solchem Kontext zu gebrauchen.

MoveOn.Org hatte den Bush-Hitler-Vergleich als einen von rund 1.500 Einsendungen für einen Wettbewerb veröffentlicht, der das "wahre Gesicht" des US-Präsidenten enthüllen sollte. Der Film befindet sich aber nicht unter den 15 Finalbeiträgen. In der Jury befindet sich auch der Erfolgsautor und Bush-Kritiker Michael Moore.

Der Gründer von MoveOn.Org, Wes Boyd, räumte ein, dass der Spot von "schlechtem Geschmack" sei und er die Veröffentlichung bedauere.



http://www.bushin30seconds.org/

Quelle:www.n-tv.de

[Joerver]

Shot For A Mercedes And Left To Die:

Robert Fisk in Baghdad

07 January 2004: ( The Independent) Maybe my driver had a premonition. All the way back from Basra, he was nervous, anxious not to stop at villages - even petrol stations - for fear of thieves.

"Everywhere there are Ali Babas," he kept saying. And no sooner did we reach Baghdad than he went home to a house of tears and agony and mourning. His brother-in-law, Mohamed, had just become the latest victim of "New" Iraq, shot by car thieves and left to bleed to death for half an hour at a motorway intersection.

So yesterday afternoon, my driver and I met to pay our respects at the big tent the family of Mohamed Ali Nsaef al-Shimeri had erected in the street outside their tree-fronted villa. There was a photograph of Mohamed in gold-fringed tribal robes with a black tape over the top left corner, and a row of red-eyed men - father, uncles and cousins - sitting at the tent entrance, shaking my hand with both of theirs, inviting us to eat meat and rice and strawberries and drink smouldering coffee in honour of the businessman, construction engineer and father of three young children who had just been murdered.

His eight-year-old daughter, Nadeen, with long, plaited hair and wearing a brown calf-skin jacket, came to see the foreign reporter with an album of family photographs of her father: Mohamed with Nadeen and her brother Mustafa; Mohamed on holiday in the United Arab Emirates; Mohamed visiting the Chouf mountains in Lebanon. Nadeen said she wanted to be a pharmacist - her father had run a pharmaceuticals factory.

His cousin Qusai wanted to tell the story of Mohamed`s death. So did my driver and his father, whose 33-year-old daughter, Mona - my driver`s sister - married Mohamed 10 years ago. "He had come home to lunch here at the house," Qusai said. "He left after an hour in one of the company`s cars, a white Mercedes, and was close to the mosque when an old Brazilian-made car deliberately crashed into him." I noted the contempt with which he said "Brazilian" - Mohamed had been killed by thieves who drove a third-world VW Passat - and the location: the Mosque of the Mother of All Battles, named in person by Saddam.

"Four men got out of the car and they had guns and Mohamed was very suspicious of them and so he apologised for the accident as if it was his fault. But they beat him on the face and the back of the head with their guns and then, when he fell to the ground, they fired two shots into his chest. I think they thought he would identify them if he lived. And there he lay on the roadside for half an hour, bleeding while hundreds of people drove past him. They saw him dying and did nothing.

"This is Baghdad now. You see? In the end a woman came and pulled him into her car, but as she was driving him to hospital, he died," Qusai said.

Although they ignored - or did not see - Mohamed, neighbours arrived with weapons after they heard shooting and one of the four men was captured and taken to the nearest police station. He came from the Ghazalia corner of the city and confessed at once to killing nine other men for their cars. Yes, he was a car thief - the area of the Mother of All Battles Mosque was what he and his three fellow gunmen called "the place of hunting", or so police told the family later.

Mohamed, a self-made man of money who left school after second grade and went on to create construction companies in four countries, was killed for a 14-year-old company car.

The family learnt that the killer, and his three comrades-in-murder, were all freed by Saddam in his great "forgiveness" prison release last November. Qusai and my driver`s father and Mohamed`s brother all wanted to talk at the same time: "This happened because of the security vacuum, the vacuum in the law which now exists here - it is anarchy."

"It`s the occupation - the Americans could stop all this if they wanted."

"We prefer the previous regime comes back - this would never have happened then."

Revenge, they muttered, again and again. "They should bring back hanging," Mohamed`s father-in-law said. "The thieves and killers know if they are caught they will be sent to Abu Ghurayb prison where they will have food, clothes, new soap. It was Bremer who cancelled hanging."

The name of the US proconsul, Paul Bremer, comes up repeatedly these days, personally condemned for the growing anarchy in Iraq. And the stories of Abu Ghurayb`s prison facilities are - I can attest because I`ve seen them - all true.

Qusai spoke again: "This man won`t be taken to court. So we will have to kill him. We will take our revenge. Mohamed`s death cannot be allowed to pass like this. We will make these four men pay."

And all three men repeated the word revenge - "tha`ar", they hissed in Arabic - over and over again, as if its fulfilment would bring Mohamed al-Shimeri striding into the tent in his fine tribal robe, ready to resume his life on earth.

Copyright: The Independent

[Joerver]

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

[Joerver]

Wednesday, January 07, 2004
War News for January 7, 2004

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

Bring `em on: Iraqi policeman killed in ambush near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Iraqi policeman assassinated near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Three insurgents captured after firefight in Khalidiyah.

Bring ‘em on: US troops attacked in Fallujah.

Bring `em on: Kurdish political party office attacked with RPG fire in Kirkuk.

Numbers of US wounded remain high. "The figures illustrate the ongoing danger faced by US forces, even as the frequency of insurgent attacks appears to be declining and the number of soldiers killed has mostly held steady. `That`s a lot of pain,` said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense-focused think tank that compiled the figures. `It suggests that the level of intensity of operations over there is a lot higher than would be suggested by the `killed in action` numbers. . . . The `killed in action` numbers suggest that we`re winning the war and the wounded in action numbers suggest that we`re losing.`"

Army Day in Iraq. "When the U.S.-led coalition eliminated the military in May, it threw 350,000 men out of work and sowed resentment among a wide swath of Iraqi society. Authorities say many ex-soldiers threw their support behind the insurgency. Some U.S. military officials have acknowledged that the wholesale dismissal of the rank and file was a mistake. "

Bush cronies at Bechtel cash in on Iraq reconstruction contracts. "Bechtel executives gave thousands of dollars to President Bush`s 2000 election campaign and two of the company`s top executives serve on advisory boards to the White House and the Defense Department." And Parsons hit the jackpot, too. "Separately, Parsons has an $89 million contract with the U.S. military to oversee disposal of Iraqi munitions at three sites. The company also has teamed with Bechtel to build facilities for the Army to dispose of large portions of the U.S. chemical weapons arsenal. Last September, Parsons announced it had hired two former top Energy Department officials to help the company land Energy Department contracts. Parsons also hired a recently retired Air Force major general to work in its defense contracts operation."

More on Halliburton. "The U.S. Army says it has granted Halliburton a special waiver to bring fuel into Iraq under a no-bid deal with a Kuwaiti supplier despite a draft Pentagon audit that found evidence of overcharging for fuel."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Arizona soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Two Indiana soldiers wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa soldier wounded in Iraq.






# posted by yankeedoodle : 4:15 AM
Comments (5)

[Joerver]

#11247
Bush hat auch allen Grund den Zuwanderern dankbar zu sein, denn die wachsende Bevölkerung bringt gegenüber dem `Alten Europa` ein um 1% höheres Wachstum und wenn man das annualisiert da sind das schon deftige 4% mehr alleine aus dem Unterschied von einer wachsenden Bevölkerung zu einer schrumpfenden.
Anderseits braucht er 3-4% Jahreswachstum um die wachsende Zahl der Arbeitsuchenden auf dem US-Markt unterzubringen.
Alles hat seine zwei Seiten.

[Joerver]

punk
danke für den Link, hatte noch keine Möglichkeit gefunden auf die Seite zu kommen.
Kannte nur die Clips von Spiegel-Online.

[Joerver]

ROBERT KUTTNER
This business cycle could get vicious
By Robert Kuttner, 1/7/2004

IN 1975, POLITICAL scientist Edward Tufte and economist William Nordhaus put forth a theory of the political business cycle. Usually, "business cycle" refers to the normal ups and downs of the economy. Their insight was that the business cycle is influenced by politics.

These scholars documented that incumbent presidents often used their influence with Congress and the Federal Reserve to artificially pump up the economy for their reelections and dealt with the resulting damage once they were safely returned to office. Richard Nixon`s 1972 landslide nicely fit the pattern. So did Lyndon Johnson`s "guns and butter" economic program of 1967-68 (except that the Democrats were undone by the Vietnam War).

The theory later fell into disfavor. Neither Jimmy Carter (defeated in 1980) nor George H.W. Bush (defeated in 1992) could manipulate the economy well enough to save their jobs. Carter fell to stagflation and Bush I to recession and a jobless recovery.

But the political business cycle is back with a vengeance, and this time the morning after will be a corker. The only question is whether the damage will be visible before or after Election Day.

President Bush has unleashed the most massive fiscal stimulus program since World War II, with immense deficits that only grow after 2004 as the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest kick in. He has timed the relatively meager breaks for the middle class for this (election) year.

Meanwhile, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (up for reappointment in June) is doing his part to fuel the election-year boom. Despite his own misgivings about immense deficits -- he was far from shy about this during the 1990s -- Greenspan has loyally kept mostly silent when it comes to Bush`s deficits. More important, Greenspan is pumping up the recovery with low interest rates notwithstanding his earlier concerns about the danger of economic bubbles.

Thanks to this short-term hyperstimulation, Bush might well have his election year recovery. For now, corporate profits are up, the stock market is booming, and there is even a trickle of job growth.

But there is not a reputable economist -- left, right, or center -- who thinks this act can continue beyond a year or two. Bush`s own treasury secretary, John Snow, and his chief economist, Greg Mankiw, both warned about this danger in their previous lives.

As the deficits spin out of control, interest rates will rise. If Bush is reelected, the deficits would also be used as justification for a round of cuts in social outlays that would make Bush`s program cuts to date look like mere tinkering.

Meanwhile, serious social challenges like the retirement of the baby boomers and the spiraling of health care costs would be shifted from society back to the individual through proposed privatization of Social Security and health plans that made the subscriber pay ever more of the costs out of pocket (or go without). The larger fiscal and economic mess would be left for Bush`s successor after Bush was safely in his presidential library.

Not only has Bush taken short-term political manipulation of the economy, in Tufte`s sense, to new and cynical extremes; he has invented a wholly new kind of political business cycle in the form of programs and policies that look impressive only in the short run and turn out to be disasters later on.

Exhibit A is the recently enacted Medicare drug benefit program. Consumers won`t experience the fraud firsthand this year since the program doesn`t become available until 2006. Nice touch, that. As the law is written, less than half of actual drug costs for most participants will be covered. And seniors will get only one chance to decide whether to opt for the (inadequate) Medicare program or to stay with (increasingly unregulated) private drug insurance coverage that could deteriorate over time.

No Child Left Behind, Bush`s big education program, is even worse. It creates perverse incentives for districts to dumb down tests and "lose" dropouts in order to make schools look better. It adds impossible mandates that states and districts have to finance locally. By 2005 the program is likely to collapse of its own weight, but in 2004 Bush is parading as an education president.

Iraq fits the pattern. We have Saddam`s head on a platter this year -- and the likelihood of greater regional instability, nuclear proliferation, and anti-Americanism afterwards.

Some of Bush`s time bombs may be delayed until after the election. Some could explode prematurely before the election. But all of them could, and should, backfire on Bush now -- if voters are paying attention.

Robert Kuttner`s is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ospower]

#52,

und wann sind unsere "liberalen" mal dankbar und wann bringen diese überhaupt ein wirtschaftswachstum zu stande?

aber immer schön weiter an bush rum mäkeln, was tut das schon zur sache, wenn der voran kommt und hier alles in die grütze geht.

[Joerver]

West Side Codpiece

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
ST. LOUIS, MO (IWR News Parody) At a fundraiser today in Missouri, President Bush performed his college party piece by singing I`m So Pretty from the musical West Side Story.
Mr. Bush told supporters later that he was sure glad that his old Skull and Bones buddies from Yale don`t kick his ass anymore after he sings that song.

[Joerver]

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U.S. Economic Growth to Accelerate to 4.4 Percent This Year, Survey Finds
Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy is growing faster than economists forecast a month ago and will expand 4.4 percent in 2004, according to a Bloomberg News monthly survey.

The economy grew at an estimated 4.2 percent annual rate in last year`s final quarter, according to the median estimate of 59 economists, up 0.2 percentage points from the previous survey. The forecast for this quarter rose 0.1 points to 4.3 percent, while the full 2004 forecast held steady.

``The overall economy should do pretty well this year,`` John Devine, chief financial officer of General Motors Corp., said in an interview. Executives at the world`s largest automaker are ``feeling reasonably optimistic, better than a year ago,`` and predict economic growth of 4.5 percent this year.

Gross domestic product will have expanded 3.1 percent in 2003, the most since 2000, if the fourth-quarter forecasts prove accurate when the Commerce Department issues the initial report Jan. 30. Among the surprises to economists since the last survey was an increase in the Institute for Supply Management`s factory index in December to the highest in 20 years.

Accelerating growth in the U.S. economy, the world`s largest, is key to sustaining a global recovery. The economies of Japan and the dozen nations sharing the euro are lagging the U.S., with mainly exports driving growth. The 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in November it expects both economic regions to grow 1.8 percent this year compared with 4.2 percent in the U.S.

``The fundamentals look good,`` said Treasury Secretary John Snow in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Low inflation means ``that monetary policy can be patient and let the recovery move forward.``

Jobs, Inflation

The growth will prompt the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark overnight lending rate to 1.5 percent from 1 percent in the third quarter, based on the median estimate that`s unchanged from the previous survey.

The U.S. unemployment rate may drop to 5.7 percent this year, lower than the 5.8 percent economists were forecasting a month ago, the survey showed. While the forecast for 2004 consumer spending held steady at 3.7 percent, economists boosted their estimates for 2003`s fourth quarter by 0.4 points to 2.5 percent.

Inflation will remain tame, rising at an average of 1.8 percent through the year after gaining 1.9 percent in the final quarter of 2004, the poll found. The Fed`s policy of holding rates low is ``appropriate`` given the low inflation and lackluster job growth, Governor Ben S. Bernanke said Sunday.

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note will average 4.8 percent through the year after 4.5 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the survey.

An increase in interest rates by the Fed would be the first since May 2000 and would come after 13 reductions starting in January 2001.

``The economy gained a lot of momentum in the latter part of last year, and it feels like things are going to be strong this year,`` said Stephen Stanley, an economist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut, whose forecast of 5.3 percent for 2004 is among the highest in the survey.

The Bloomberg News survey was conducted from Dec. 23 to yesterday. The forecasts for GDP growth in 2004 ranged from 3.2 percent to 5.3 percent.

Last Updated: January 7, 2004 12:50 EST

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Published on Wednesday, January 7, 2004 by Arianna Huffington
Dean, Bobby and the Ghost of Landslides Past
by Arianna Huffington

I swear, if I hear one more Democratic honcho say that Howard Dean is not electable, I`m going to do something crazy (maybe that`s what happened to Britney in Vegas this weekend).

The contention is nothing short of idiotic.

Consider the source: the folks besmirching the Good Doctor`s Election Day viability are the very people who have driven the Democratic Party into irrelevance. Who spearheaded the Party`s resounding 2002 mid-term defeats. Who kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts, and an unprecedented deficit.

Dean is electable precisely because he`s making a decisive break with the spinelessness and pussyfooting that have become the hallmark of the Democratic Party.

So, please, no more hand-wringing about Dean being "another Dukakis". And no more weepy flashbacks about having had your heart broken by George McGovern, whose 1972 annihilation haunts the 2004 Democratic primaries like a political Jacob Marley, shaking his chains and warning about the Ghost of Landslides Past.

There is a historical parallel to Dean`s candidacy. But it`s not McGovern in 1972, as the DLC-paranoiacs would like us to believe -- it`s Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Like Kennedy, Dean`s campaign was initially fueled by his anti-war outrage. Like Kennedy, Dean has found himself fighting not just to represent the Democratic Party but to remake it. Like Kennedy, Dean is offering an alternative moral vision for America, not just an alternative political platform.

And like Kennedy, Dean has come under withering attack from his critics for the very attributes that his supporters find most attractive.

"He could be intemperate and impulsive. the image of wrath -- his forefinger pointing, his fist pounding his palm, his eyes ablaze". Sean Hannity on Howard Dean? No, Theodore White on Bobby Kennedy in "The Making of the President 1968".

It`s the same ludicrous charge of being "too angry" that`s constantly leveled at Dean. Have his Democratic opponents -- and the notoriously decorous Washington press corps -- suddenly morphed into Miss Manners? Personally, I could never trust a man who does not occasionally get hot under the collar.

Of course Dean is angry. Take a look at what`s happening in Iraq, with another 236 American soldiers killed or wounded since Saddam was dragged out of his spider hole. And take a look closer to home, where we have 12 million children living in poverty, 43 million people without health insurance, 6 out of 7 working poor families unable to afford quality child care, record levels of personal debt, and more and more U.S. jobs being "outsourced" overseas. If you still have a pulse -- are you listening Joe Lieberman? -- you should be royally pissed.

"I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation," Kennedy said during his announcement speech, "and felt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit."

And young people have been the spark that has lit the fuse of the Dean campaign. As he pointed out this weekend in Iowa: "One-quarter of all the people who gave us money between June and September were under 30 years old." So while the Democratic establishment is once again dusting off its tried-and-untrue swing voter strategy, Dean is running, as he put it, "a campaign based on addition, not subtraction. We want to add new people to the Democratic Party so that we can beat George Bush. It`s the only way we can beat him."

Kennedy was drawn into the `68 race by his indignation over the direction of America`s foreign policy. "This nation," he said, "must adopt a foreign policy which says, clearly and distinctly, `no more Vietnams`." Dean has been saying, clearly and distinctly, no more Iraqs, even when 70 percent of the public said they approved of Bush`s policy. That`s leadership -- and the kind of boldness the Democratic Party has been sorely lacking.

Far from Dean not being able to "compete" with Bush on foreign policy, he`s the one viable Democrat who isn`t trying to compete on the playing field that Bush and Karl Rove have laid out. No Democrat can win by playing "Whose swagger is swaggier?" or "Whose flight suit is tighter?" Instead Dean unambiguously asserts that "we are in danger of losing the war on terror because we are fighting it with the strategies of the past. The Iraq war diverted critical intelligence and military resources, undermined diplomatic support for our fight against terror, and created a new rallying cry for terrorist recruits."

In the same way that Kennedy was able to take his outrage over Vietnam and expand it to include the outrages perpetrated at home, Dean has gone from railing against the war to offering a New Social Contract for America`s Working Families that harkens back to the core message of FDR: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

It`s a message which Bobby Kennedy made central to his campaign but which the Democratic Party has since abandoned.

Howard Dean has resurrected it and made it his own because, as he says, 2004 "is not just about electing a president -- it`s about changing America."

That is a big vision. But anything smaller guarantees the reelection of George Bush.

Copyright 2004 Arianna Huffington

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Bechtel tied to bin Ladens
Osama bin Laden family members invested $10M in an equity fund run by former Bechtel unit.
May 5, 2003: 2:17 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Bush administration launched a war on terror because of the alleged acts of Osama bin Laden. Ironically, one of the companies the administration has picked to rebuild Iraq after the latest phase of that war has ties to bin Laden`s family, according to a published report.

Bechtel Corp., a private construction firm based in San Francisco, recently was awarded a State Department contract, potentially worth more than $600 million, to help rebuild Iraq`s infrastructure after the recent U.S.-led war there.

The Bush administration pushed for that war, in part, because it said the regime of Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq, had ties to the al Qaeda terror network, headed by bin Laden, the group allegedly responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

According to an article in the May 5 issue of New Yorker magazine, several bin Laden family members -- part of a large, Saudi Arabian family that made a fortune in the construction business -- invested about $10 million in a private equity fund operated by former subsidiary of Bechtel before Sept. 11.

Fremont Group, a San Francisco-based private investment firm, once was a unit of Bechtel, and its board still includes Bechtel CEO Riley P. Bechtel and former U.S. Secretary of State and former Bechtel President George P. Shultz, along with several current Bechtel directors.

Bechtel could not be reached for comment.

Fremont spokeswoman Pat Harden confirmed bin Laden`s family had invested $10 million in a Fremont fund, but she said the family had no ownership stake in Fremont and its investment was made "well before the events of Sept. 11."

"Our concern is that it be clear they`re investors, like many, in one of our many private equity funds," Harden said, noting that the Patriot Act of 2001 requires such investors to be screened for connections to terrorism. "This is all totally legal and above-board."

Harden didn`t know exactly when bin Laden`s family invested in the equity fund. Fremont general counsel Rick Kopf told the New Yorker bin Laden`s family had invested nothing in Fremont since Sept. 11.

None of bin Laden`s family members has been charged with any crimes, and the family denounced Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. Some family members also have publicly denounced the Sept. 11 attacks.

Saying they feared for their safety, about two dozen family members living in the United States left the country as soon as airports re-opened after Sept. 11.


Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2003/05/05/news/companies/war_bechtel

[Joerver]

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Generous new tax break for Bechtel and Halliburton?
Edmund L. Andrews NYT
Wednesday, October 29, 2003



WASHINGTON Bechtel, which hired a former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to lobby on its behalf, has won support from Republicans in the House for what could be a generous new tax break.

The break, which was to be taken up Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee, was originally intended to help shore up U.S. factory jobs by reducing the tax rate for domestic manufacturers to 32 percent from 35 percent.

But the bill now includes a provision sought by Bechtel, an engineering conglomerate that is one of the biggest recipients of government contracts for Iraqi reconstruction, that would reduce taxes on "architectural and engineering services."

The new provision would also benefit Halliburton, whose previous chief executive was Vice President Dick Cheney and which now has a Pentagon contract to repair Iraqi oil facilities. Another company, Fluor, which recently won a $102 million contract to work on Iraq`s electrical system, would receive a tax reduction as well.

The value of the tax break remains unclear, and there was confusion on Monday over whether it would apply to profits earned on the billions of dollars of work that the companies do outside the United States.

But the provision is merely one example of many special-interest items that have been attached to what Republican and Democratic lawmakers both consider a vital tax bill. The general purpose of the legislation is to replace a longstanding tax break for U.S. exporters that the World Trade Organization has declared an illegal trade subsidy. The bill would repeal the existing tax break, which is valued at about $55 billion over the next 10 years, with new tax breaks totaling about $142 billion over the same period.

House and Senate leaders both want to pass a bill quickly because the European Union has threatened to impose $4 billion in taxes on U.S. products if the old tax break is not repealed.The issue has become a bonanza for corporate tax lobbyists, and the bill`s potential beneficiaries now include Hollywood movie studios, oil and gas pipeline companies, logging companies and big agricultural cooperatives.

Donald Alexander, a former IRS commissioner who is lobbying for Bechtel, said the provision to help his client merely preserved a tax break that the company otherwise would have lost.

"We`re not asking for relief greater than what we are being denied," Alexander said in an interview on Monday, adding that the World Trade Organization estimated the old tax break was worth $22 million a year to architectural and engineering companies. But the new provision could be far more valuable than that. Bechtel, a privately held company that does not disclose its full financial results, had revenue of $11.6 billion last year. About $9 billion of that was in the United States.

The tax break that lawmakers want to repeal affected only Bechtel`s foreign projects. As now written, the new law would reduce the company`s tax rate for both U.S. and foreign work.

Republican staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee said the bill`s purpose was to reduce taxes on work only in the United States. That in itself could prove more generous than what the big construction contractors had before.

But Alexander said his own impression was that Bechtel would receive a smaller tax break on its foreign projects, as under current tax law.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bill would cost the Treasury about $61 billion over the next 10 years. It would raise $55 billion by repealing the old tax break and $26 billion more by tightening rules on tax shelters and raising customs duties, only partly offsetting the $142 billion in new corporate tax relief.

The New York Times

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune

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Silicon Valley falls to Bangalore
SATYA PRAKASH SINGH

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ MONDAY, JANUARY 05, 2004 11:05:18 PM ]


BANGALORE: The inevitable has happened. Bangalore , which grew under the shadow of America`s Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent.

Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers.

Bangalore, which commenced its R&D activities in 1986 when Texas Instruments set up its product engineering centre here, is currently home to the who`s who of the global tech fraternity.


The recent recession in the US also forced most corporates there to move thousands of jobs to India in addition to tech giants such as Cisco, Intel , IBM, Oracle and i2 relocating some of their Indian-origin employees from the US centres to Bangalore.

Indian tech workers also returned home in large numbers as jobs dried up in the US.

Said Kanwal Rekhi, Silicon Valley icon and serial entrepreneur, "Bangalore happened at lightning speed because of the Y2K problem, where America chose to depend on India as it was thought to be a one-off situation. And, Indians learned a lot about the applications they were helping to fix."

He added that the American recession was a heavensent opportunity to the Indians as the corporations trying to save money on IT found India , having used it`s services with good results during the Y2K crisis.


According to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, the IT sector which employs around two lakh professionals (including ITES) in Karnataka alone, would grow to five lakh people by 2007, while software exports from the state would cross the $10-billion mark.


As India moves through the tornado of a hiring binge, the unemployment rate among the US software engineers has more than doubled to 4.6 per cent in three years. As per reports, the rate is 6.7 per cent for electrical engineers and 7.7 per cent for network administrators.


The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US reports that 2.34 lakh IT professionals are unemployed.


Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.

The India side story: India produces 3.1 million college graduates a year, which is expected to be doubled by 2010. The number of engineering colleges is slated to grow 50 per cent, to nearly 1,600, over the next four years.

[Joerver]

German Intelligence: CIA Planted Fake Terror Alert

Av Geir Selvik , Carin Pettersson og Ole Dag Kvamme

01/06/04: (TV2: Norway) Sources at the German intelligence bureau claim that CIA misinformed them about the alleged planned terror action in Hamburg December 30. Ansar al-Islam was accused of being behind the attempt.

According to information provided TV 2 Nettavisen by German intelligence, they are convinced that the CIA information is wrong, and they allegedly fear that American authorities planted the information.

German police have started an investigation after the terror alarm at the hospital in Hamburg December 30. So far, no evidence has been located that indicates that the terror alarm was genuine.

Also German police who were tipped off by the CIA, doubt that the terror alarm was real.

Might be fake
«We have not found any proof that the terror alarm was genuine, but we haven’t found any evidence that states it was not,» said Vahldiecker, officer at Landesamt fûr Varfassungsschutz in Hamburg to TV 2 Nettavisen. «It is of course possible that it was fake, but we do not know that for certain yet.»

Vahldiecker confirms that they received information regarding the planned terror attack from American sources, but he said that he did not believe they provided fake information on purpose, if this might be the case.

«It is possible that they gave us the wrong information, but it is not likely that they did it on purpose,» Vahldiecker said.

However, that notion is not supported by German intelligence. According to our sources, they are surprised both by the way the case has been handled and by the large leaks to the press.

Lots of mistakes
Only a couple of hours after CIA had given the tip to German police, the case was reported on Der Speigel Online. Ansar al-Islam was named as the most likely organization behind the terror attempt.

In addition, sources at German intelligence points out that there are several factual mistakes in the terror tip given to Verfassungsschutz in Hamburg.

According to information given by Norwegian intelligence, Norwegian authorities were also informed of the terror alarm in Hamburg due to Mullah Krakars former position as leader of Ansar al-Islam, in addition to Mullah Krekars activity on the Internet.

Økokrim informed
Erling Grimstad, assistant director at Økokrim, the central unit for investigations of economic and environmental crime, stated to the Norwegian daily Aftenposten that he did not want to confirm or disprove that Norwegian authorities were contacted in connection with the terror alarm.

Grimstad confirms that Økokrim is working with several foreign police authorities, but he does not wish to name what nations.

According to information provided TV 2 Nettavisen, the information regarding the terror alarm in Hamburg was one of the main reasons why Mullah Krekar was arrested Friday January 3. The police allegedly feared that Mullah Krekar gave orders of suicide missions over the Internet.

Not surprised
«I’m not surprised by this information,» said Brynjar Meling. Mullah Krekar’s lawyer, to TV 2 Nettavisen. «I have all along claimed that the terror alarm in Hamburg was the trigger for Økokrim’s arrest of Krekar . What other reason would it be for Økokrim to make the arrest at this time after such a long time since the charge was filed October 30.»

He stated that he wished to present the information provided TV 2 Nettavisen in court.

«This is important for us,» Mekling stated. «This indicates the type game Norwegian authorities have been exposed to in this case.»

Copyright © 2003 TV2

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January 7, 2004
35 U.S. Soldiers Wounded in Mortar Attack in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Anti-American insurgents fired mortar rounds at a U.S. military camp Wednesday night, wounding 35 U.S. soldiers, the U.S. command said.

Six mortar rounds exploded about 6:45 p.m. at Logistical Base Seitz west of Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said in a statement. The camp is located in the so-called Sunni Muslim triangle that is a stronghold of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

"The wounded soldiers were given first aid and have been evacuated from the site for further medical treatment," the statement said. The Pentagon added that the soldiers were from the Army`s 541st Maintenance Battalion, based in Fort Riley, Kan., and part of the 3rd Corps Support Command.

The mortars hit "a living area where they have their sleeping quarters," the spokesman said.

A Pentagon spokesman said that some of those wounded returned to duty shortly after the attack, while others were hospitalized. The spokesman, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said he did not know how many were seriously or lightly wounded.

Earlier Wednesday, U.S. troops said they destroyed a home in Fallujah, the center of the anti-American insurgency west of Baghdad, where enraged neighbors said a married couple was killed and their five children were orphaned.

The neighbors insisted the couple was innocent in an attack on the troops that led them to shell the house.

"This is democracy? These corpses?" Raad Majeed asked at the hospital, gesturing at the remains of the couple, on gurneys covered with bloody sheets. "It`s a crime against humanity."

The 82nd Airborne Division said its paratroopers acted after receiving "two rounds of indirect fire" around 9 p.m. Tuesday.

"Paratroopers from our Task Force engaged the point of origin with a grenade launcher and small arms, causing two personnel to flee into a nearby building, which was also engaged and destroyed," division spokeswoman Capt. Tammy Galloway said in a statement.

"The building was searched and no weapons or personnel were found. Upon questioning, civilians in the area reported two dead personnel were taken to a nearby hospital," the statement said.

Civilian deaths in the counterinsurgency campaign have enraged many Iraqis at a time when the U.S.-led coalition is trying to win popular support. On Wednesday, the coalition announced it was freeing 506 of 12,800 prisoners in a goodwill gesture also aimed at encouraging more Iraqis to come forward with intelligence against anti-American guerrillas.

Officials offered rewards for the capture or information confirming the deaths of 30 more wanted Iraqis, putting bounties of $50,000 to $200,000 on their heads. That is in addition to bounties for the 13 remaining fugitives at large from the original 55 most wanted Iraqis whose pictures appeared on a deck of cards.

There`s a bounty of $10 million on the head of the most wanted man since Saddam Hussein`s capture, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of the ousted dictator`s chief lieutenants.

In Fallujah, neighbors said U.S. soldiers were on a routine search for suspects and arms when they were fired on. The paratroopers then fired at the house of Ahmed Hassan Faroud.

Associated Press Television News film showed a wall of the house collapsed into a rubble of concrete bricks and two walls splattered with blood that neighbors said belonged to Hassan, 37, and his wife Suham Omar, 28. They said the couple`s five children were in bed in an adjoining room and survived Tuesday night`s attack uninjured. Fallujah is about 30 miles west of Baghdad, the capital.

"They just brought in their tank and fired at their house from 200 meters (220 yards) away," Majeed said. "What did these people do wrong?"

Tuesday`s attack came as coalition officials said they would become "increasingly aggressive with the die-hards," while simultaneously making conciliatory gestures to moderates or fence-sitters.

Elsewhere in Iraq, a British soldier died in a training accident in southern Basra, bringing the toll for British troops to 53, a British military spokesman said.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, insurgents struck an Iraqi police vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade Tuesday night. One officer was killed and two were wounded in that attack, one seriously, police said. Rebels regularly target police and other Iraqis who cooperate with the U.S.-led occupation authorities, as well as the oil installations that victims of the attack were assigned to protect.

Also in Kirkuk, a grenade hit the office of the Kurdistan Socialist Party, wounding one person and causing slight damage, police said.

Kurdish party offices in Kirkuk have come under attack several times recently as fears mount amid demands from Kurds that the oil-rich city become part of the autonomous state that they have controlled in northern Iraq under British and U.S. aerial protection since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

Syria`s vice president on Wednesday accused Israel of trying to divide Iraq. Syria, Turkey and Iran all are concerned that Kurds may start demanding an independent state to include parts of their countries that hold Kurdish populations.

"The most dangerous thing that threatens Iraq is that some foreign forces, particularly Israel, are seeking to break up (Iraqi) national unity," Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam told reporters after meeting with an Iraqi tribal delegation.

The Iraqi delegation, from the large Jbour tribe, called on all international forces to work to "rid Iraq of the (U.S.-led) occupation and prevent partition, sectarianism and racism in the country."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 7, 2004
I.M.F. Report Says U.S. Deficits Threaten World Economy
By ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report made public today bythe International Monetary Fund.

In nearly 60 pages of carefully worded analysis, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration`s tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits posed "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.

The report warned that the net financial obligations of the United States to the rest of the world could equal 40 percent of its total economy within a few years — "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country" that it said could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.

The dangers, according to the report, are that the United States` voracious appetite for borrowing could push up global interest rates and thus slow down global investment and economic growth.

"Higher borrowing costs abroad would mean that the adverse effects of U.S. fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output," the report said.

White House officials dismissed the report as alarmist, saying President Bush had already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years. The deficit reached $374 billion last year, a record in dollar terms but not as a share of the total economy, and it is expected to exceed $400 billion this year.

Administration officials have made it clear they are not worried about the the United States` burgeoning external debt or the declining value of the dollar, which has lost nearly one-fifth of its value against the euro in 18 months and which hit new lows earlier this week.

Though the International Monetary Fund has repeatedly criticized the United States on its budget and trade deficits in the last few years, this report was unusually lengthy and pointed.

Fund officials said the new report reflected the views of the authors and not the institution as a whole, whose largest shareholder is in fact the United States. But fund officials also seemed intent on getting American attention.

"It`s encouraging that these are issues at play in the presidential campaign now under way," said Charles Collins, deputy director of the I.M.F.`s Western Hemisphere Department and a principle author of the report. "We`re trying to contribute to persuading public opinion that this is an important issue that has to be dealt with."

Fund officials warned that the long-term fiscal outlook was far grimmer, predicting that underfinancing of Social Security and Medicare would lead to shortages as high as $47 trillion over the next several decades, or nearly 500 percent of the current gross domestic product in the coming decades.

Many outside economists remain sanguine, noting that the United States is hardly the only country to run big budget deficits and that the nation`s underlying economic conditions continue to be robust.

"Is the U.S. fiscal position unique? Probably not," Kermit L. Schoenholtz, chief economist at Citigroup Global Markets, said. Japan`s budget deficit is much higher than that of the United States, Mr. Schoenholtz said, and those of Germany and France are climbing rapidly.

The dollar has lost nearly one-fifth of its value against the euro in the past 18 months, and the dollar hit new lows against the euro this week.

Many economists predict that the dollar will continue to decline for some time, and that the declining dollar will help boost American industry by making American products cheaper in countries with strengthening currencies. "In the short term, it is probably helping the United States," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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I would quit if I lied, Blair tells MPs
Nicholas Watt, Richard Norton-Taylor and David Hencke
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

Tony Blair was forced on to the defensive yesterday when he admitted that he would have to resign as prime minister if he lied to parliament over his role in the outing of the government scientist, Dr David Kelly.

As Lord Hutton warned Britain`s political classes against jumping to conclusions ahead of the publication of his report, the prime minister said he "of course" accepted that ministers who misled MPs had to quit.

Mr Blair`s remarks came after Michael Howard all but accused the prime minister of lying days after the death of Dr Kelly. In their first Commons clash of the new year, Mr Howard asked Mr Blair whether he stood by his statement of July 22, made on board a flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong, that he had "emphatically" not leaked the name of Dr Kelly.

Mr Howard believes the prime minister`s declaration may be highly damaging after Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, told the inquiry in October that Mr Blair chaired the key meetings during the "naming strategy" - the convoluted process which led to the confirmation of the scientist`s name. "Either the permanent secretary or the prime minister is not telling the truth," Mr Howard said.

His hopes of coaxing the prime minister to repeat his inflight remarks in the Commons - potentially endangering Mr Blair`s position if Lord Hutton rules against him - were thwarted when the prime minister gave a careful reply: "I stand by the totality of what I said at that time - but in relation to this issue and all the other issues, the Hutton inquiry is going to report shortly. I suggest you wait for that."

This gave the prime minister the confidence to say that he would resign if he was proved to have lied to the Commons.

Mr Howard challenged him: "You have said that ministers in a government you lead should resign if they have lied to parliament. Does that apply to you, yourself?" Mr Blair replied: "Of course it applies to me, as it applies to all ministers."

The angry exchanges came hours before Lord Hutton signalled his determination to avoid being used as a political football by quashing speculation about a government decision to make a late submisson to his inquiry, the issue that prompted the new row. "There was nothing surprising or unexpected or of special significance in the making of these written submissions," Lord Hutton said.

He attempted to calm the atmosphere by saying that all the main players - the government, the BBC and the Kelly family - had accepted an invitation from the inquiry to submit further evidence.

"Contrary to the suggestions in some of the press reports today, there was nothing surprising or unexpected or of special significance in the making of these written submissions," Lord Hutton said.

His intervention came as a relief to Downing Street which had been struggling to dampen speculation about its decision to submit evidence after Lord Hutton concluded his hearings.

But Lord Hutton, who is due to retire next week before he publishes his report, underlined his independence when he made clear that the evidence was being withheld at the request of the government.

Yesterday`s statement pointed out that he wanted to publish the documents but changed his mind after representations from the government. Lord Hutton`s statement also left it unclear whether No 10`s final written submission refers to Sir Kevin`s evidence.


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US frees Iraqis after British protest
506 prisoners to be allowed home in gesture of `reconciliation` amid claims of human rights violations

Luke Harding in Baghdad and Richard Norton Taylor
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

The most senior US official in Iraq, Paul Bremer, announced that more than 500 Iraqi prisoners held without charge would be released from prison today in what he described as a gesture of goodwill.

The move follows pressure behind the scenes from British officials in Baghdad who have been alarmed at the large numbers of Iraqis scooped up by the American military during routine operations.

In a move apparently designed to deflect growing criticism of America`s human rights record in Iraq, Mr Bremer said today`s release of prisoners was in the interests of "reconciliation".

"It is time for Iraqis to make common cause in building the new Iraq," he said.

Meanwhile yesterday a British soldier died following what the Ministry of Defence called a "tragic incident" on a training range near Basra and 35 American soldiers were wounded in a mortar attack on a US base west of Baghdad, the US military said.

Officials at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad have recently reviewed the issue of detainees after numerous complaints from Iraqis that their relatives have simply disappeared.

"There needs to be a process which is conciliatory to the degree that those who are not involved in gross crimes are released back to their communities as soon as possible, in the spirit of broader reconciliation," one British official said.

"All they do is put a bag on their heads, bind their hands behind them with plastic handcuffs and take them away. Families don`t know where they go," Malek Dohan al-Hassan, the head of the Baghdad lawyers` syndicate complained last month. "They violate human rights up to their ears."

The 506 detainees to be freed represent about 4% of the 12,800 prisoners in US custody in Iraq, a figure that includes 4,000 members of an anti-Iranian militia. None of the detainees has been charged. Some have been in jail for nine months. The US military has refused to allow them to see a lawyer. There have also been consistent complaints from former detainees that US soldiers have beaten them up or forced them to stand for hours with their hands in the air.

Officials said the first 100 prisoners would be released today from Abu Ghraib, the infamous prison west of Baghdad, once used by Saddam. Mr Bremer promised that the families of those still being held in US prisons would be given more access to their relatives. He added that those released would have to sign a statement renouncing violence and ask a tribal leader to take responsibility for them.

The US also announced it was quadrupling the amount of money to be spent on political transition in Iraq ahead of the handover of power in July to a provisional Iraqi assembly. At the same time, new rewards were offered for information leading to the killing or capture of 30 Iraqis suspected of directing the insurgency against US occupation, he said.

US officials said the coalition intended to take an "increasingly aggressive" attitude to Iraq`s resistance while offering a "carrot" to those prepared to collaborate with US rule.

The US military has so far detained or killed 43 of the 55 Iraqis on its original "most wanted list". But Saddam`s arrest last month appears to have had little impact on the insurgency.

The Bush administration has already announced a $10m (£5.5m) reward for Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam`s Ba`ath party deputy and Iraq`s most wanted man, together with $1m bounties for 12 other senior Ba`athists.

Yesterday`s amnesty coincided with another day of unrest across Iraq. In Falluja, US troops killed an Iraqi couple after firing a shell at their house. The couple - Ahmed Hassan Farhoud, 37, and his wife Suham Omar, 28 - had been sitting at home, neighbours said. Neighbours said US troops had mistakenly thought they had been shot at from the Hassan house. "They brought in their tank and fired from 200 metres away," one neighbour, Raad Majeed, said.

· The government confirmed that six Iraqis had died in the custody of British forces and that it had paid £8,125 in compensation to the families of three Iraqi civilians allegedly killed by British troops.

The incidents were raised in the Commons yesterday by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price, who disclosed this week that the MoD had admitted that 23 Iraqi families had claimed compensation after the deaths of civilians and that it had made "ex gratia" payments to three of them.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US set to back state control of Iraqi oil
David Teather in New York
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

Officials are likely to recommend the creation of a state-run company to own and manage the Iraqi oil industry, shutting out foreign investment and countering, in part, allegations that the US-led invasion of the country was merely an oil grab.

But as one door closed on foreign investment another opened yesterday when the Pentagon invited bids for contracts worth $5bn (£2.75bn) to rebuild Iraq, the first in a string of deals funded by $18.6bn allocated for the reconstruction effort.

Both American and Iraqi oil officials are proposing a state-owned business model based on similar arrangements in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

This approach differs markedly from America`s desire to liberalise other parts of the Iraqi economy, where policy makers are investigating wide-scale privatisation of state-owned enterprises.

Advisers believe the politically charged oil industry, where there are fears of inflaming nationalist anger, is a special case.

They suggest a professional management team be installed to run the national oil company, which should be protected from political interference on a day-to-day basis but answer to a government oil minister.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Robert McKee, the senior oil adviser to the occupying coalition provisional authority, said: "Our preference is definitely in that direction. It is just pragmatism." A report being prepared for the interim oil minister would be highlighting "best practice" from other state-run oil firms, he said.

Both the Americans and the Iraqis say a state-run oil company could still attract massive foreign investment. In practice, however, the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti examples suggest there is unlikely to be much opportunity for US, British and other international oil companies.

One British oil industry executive said: "There is no indication that the Iraqis will behave any differently from the rest of the Middle East, which steadfastly refuses to offer any investment opportunities with a real return to foreign investors."

But the gas-guzzling Americans know the creation of a stable state-run oil industry would still be in their best interests. Iraq has proven oil reserves of 112bn barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia. With the Saudi kingdom displaying signs ofincreasing instability, the US needs an effective replacement on hand.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon invited tenders for 17 construction projects yesterday, promising an open and transparent bidding process. There are 63 eligible countries, excluding those that did not support the US invasion of Iraq such as France, Russia, Germany and Canada.

The expected flood of western companies entering the Iraqi market began yesterday when PepsiCo signed a deal to bottle and distribute its products. The move is expected to create 2,000 local jobs.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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The domination effect
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the US has sought not just to influence but to control all information, from both friend and foe

David Miller
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

"Information dominance" came of age during the conflict in Iraq. It is a little discussed but highly significant part of the US government strategy of "full spectrum dominance", integrating propaganda and news media into the military command structure more fundamentally than ever before.

In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of "weaponized information" to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq "will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war".

Nor is information dominance something dreamt up by the Bush White House. It is a mainstream US military doctrine that is also embraced in the UK. According to US army intelligence there are already 15 information dominance centres in the US, Kuwait and Baghdad.

Both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in this country have staff assigned to "information operations". In future conflicts, according to the MoD, "maintaining morale as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection".

Achieving information dominance according to American military experts, involves two components: first, "building up and protecting friendly information; and degrading information received by your adversary". Seen in this context, embedding journalists in Iraq was a clear means of building up "friendly" information. An MoD-commissioned commercial analysis of the print output produced by embeds shows that 90% of their reporting was either "positive or neutral".

The second component is "the ability to deny, degrade, destroy and/or effectively blind enemy capabilities". "Unfriendly" information must be targeted. This is perhaps best illustrated by the attack on al-Jazeera`s office in Kabul in 2001, which the Pentagon justified by claiming al-Qaida activity in the al-Jazeera office. As it turned out, this referred to broadcast interviews with Taliban officials. The various attacks on al-Jazeera in Kabul, Basra and Baghdad should also be seen in this context.

The evidence is that targeting of independent media and critics of the US is widening. The Pentagon is reportedly coordinating an "information operations road map", drafted by the Information Operations Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Captain Gerald Mauer, the road map notes that information operations would be directed against an "adversary".

But when the paper got to the office of the undersecretary of defence for policy, it was changed to say that information operations would attempt to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp" adversarial decision-making. "In other words," notes retired US army colonel Sam Gardiner, "we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do."

In the UK, according to Major Nigel Smith of the 15 Psychological Operations Group, staffing is to be expanded and strategic information operations "will take on a new importance" as a result of Iraq. Targeting unfriendly information is central to the post-conflict phase of reconstruction too. The collapse of distinctions between independent news media and psychological operations is striking.

The new TV service for Iraq was paid for by the Pentagon. In keeping with the philosophy of information dominance it was supplied, not by an independent news organisation, but by a defence contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation (Saic). Its expertise in the area - according to its website - is in "information operations" and "information dominance".

The Saic effort ran into trouble. The Iraqi exile journalists it employed for the Iraq Media Network (at a cost $20m over three months) were too independent for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Within weeks, occupying authority chief Paul Bremer introduced controls on the IMN. He also closed down some Iraqi-run newspapers and radio and TV stations. According to Index on Censorship, IMN managers were told to drop the readings from the Koran, the vox-pops (usually critical of the US invasion) and even to run their content past the wife of a US-friendly Iraqi Kurdish leader for a pre-broadcast check. The station rejected the demands.

But this did not stop Bremer, and further incidents culminated in a nine-point list of "prohibited activity" issued in June 2003. Bremer would reserve the power to advise the IMN on any aspect of its performance, including matters of content and the power to hire and fire staff. Thus, as Index on Censorship notes: "The man in absolute authority over the country`s largest, richest and best-equipped media network is also his own regulator and regulator of his rivals, with recourse to the US Army to enforce his rulings."

Attacks on al-Jazeera continue. In September 2003 the Iraq governing council voted to ban reports from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya on the grounds that they incite violence. As evidence of this, one member of the Iraqi National Congress who voted for the ban, noted that the TV stations describe the opposition to the occupation as the resistance. "They`re not the resistance, they are thugs and criminals," he said.

But the Iraqi people appear not to share this view of al-Jazeera. Those with satellite access to al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are more likely to trust them over IMN. As the experience of IMN shows, achieving dominance is not always a straightforward matter. This is precisely why the strategy for "unfriendly information" is to "deny, degrade and destroy".

· David Miller is editor of Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq

staff.stir.ac.uk


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Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD
Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.

The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls for acommission to look into the government`s pre-war intelligence claims.

According to the report, the absence of any imminent threat from Saddam Hussein`s chemical or nuclear programmes was "knowable" before the war. There was greater uncertainty over biological weapons but no evidence strong enough to justify war.

The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq`s capabilities grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of dissenting views by intelligence officials.

The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers` views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq.

The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq`s WMD and ballistic missile programmes".

Last night aWhite House official responded by pointing to Mr Bush`s comment on December 15 when he was pressed on the absence of Iraqi WMD. He claimed evidence had been found that contravened UN resolution 1441 calling for Saddam to disarm, a possible reference to signs that Iraq had been trying to extend the range of its missiles beyond UN limits.

Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees intelligence assessments, also defended the 2002 NIE. "We did not, in any area, hype our judgments. We made our calls based on the evidence we had. We never used the word `imminent` in the ... estimate."

But Joseph Cirincione, lead author of the Carnegie report, said: "This is the first thorough review of the intelligence threat assessments, administration statements, findings of UN inspectors and nine months of US searches in Iraq. It shows the threat assessment process is broken. The NIE was wildly off the mark."


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He won the battles, but lost the wars
Colin Powell accepted policies on Iraq that he believed were calamitous. He is diminished as a result

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

Shortly before the holidays, just before he underwent surgery for prostate cancer, US secretary of state Colin Powell gave a forlorn and illuminating interview to the Washington Post, published only in one brief excerpt. In it he explained that there was no matter of principle over which he would resign and depicted tenure as a long mission of retreat and loss.

Powell`s elegiac tone is in striking contrast to the reigning triumphalism of official Washington. Bush`s popularity has spiked to one of its high points with Saddam Hussein`s capture. His campaign operation is ginning up his national security doctrine of "pre-emptive self-defence" (as a Republican TV ad has put it) to pose against the supposedly soft Democrats. And, meanwhile, Powell presents himself as bereft, tragic and noble.

In the full transcript of his interview, posted without fanfare on the state department`s website, Powell chooses to identify with two of his predecessors: Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state; and George C Marshall, like Powell an army general. He observed that the "single trait that always comes to me when I think about these two guys is selfless service". When Marshall was passed over as commander of the D-Day invasion for Dwight Eisenhower, Powell said that "whatever disappointment he felt over that, he simply ate it". When Marshall argued against President Truman`s recognition of the state of Israel, he took his loss in silence, and Powell quoted him: "No, gentlemen, you don`t take a post of this sort, and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don`t like."

Powell said he raised these incidents because he wanted to illustrate his "personal code". Without prompting, he spoke about Jefferson: "... he said something along the lines, `I go now to the task that you have put before me, in the certain knowledge that I will come out of it diminished`."

Powell`s valedictory note suggests that the Bush administration`s most prestigious and popular figure is almost certainly preparing his retirement. For many in Congress and among traditional allies, including Tony Blair, Powell has been seen as the voice of reason, the indispensable partner. His absence as a countervailing force in a second Bush term is hardly imaginable, which will only ensure that his lame duck status will have consequences in a campaign centred on national security and in the conduct of foreign policy.

Powell`s loyalty to those who have shepherded his career, from the Nixon administration to the present, has taken precedent over all else. He has won battles but lost the wars. His efforts, along with Blair`s, to pursue the UN route on Iraq is now revealed by the former director of state department policy planning, Richard Haass, to have been largely a matter of PR. Haass says national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told him in June 2003: "Save your breath - the president has already decided what he`s going to do on this."

Recently, Powell has made grand gestures and statements without anyone else in the administration lending him even face-saving rhetorical support. He is more isolated than ever. This week, for example, he praised a group of private citizens who travelled to North Korea and won apparent concessions from the regime that would open the way for successful negotiations on its nuclear weaponry and proliferation. But Powell`s words on North Korea fall weightless.

The leader of that private delegation, Charles Pritchard, is not just some errant do-gooder. He is the former chief state department negotiator for North Korea, and Powell`s own man. He abruptly quit last August because he was stymied by one of Powell`s many internal nemeses, the rightwing undersecretary of state, John Bolton (despised, incidentally, in the upper reaches of the British government). Powell may favour a policy on North Korea, but the US has none.

There has been nothing with which Powell has disagreed that he has felt has been worth fighting to the end. He has given his best advice, husbanded his inherent power, and accepted policies - which he`s privately told senators have been calamitous - on the diplomatic run-up to the Iraq war and the reconstruction, the Middle East peace process and North Korea. His presence has lent the appearance there could have been another course, when on the important issues that has been proved an illusion.

In Errol Morris`s documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, the former secretary of defence of the Vietnam war era justifies his refusal to take a stand against a disastrous policy he believed could never succeed as selfless service to President Johnson. Powell has now offered his case for failing to resign in the same terms, but making no argument for principle. His pathos begs the questions of whether he ever believed in anything greater than his sterling career, how complicit he has been in his own plight and whether he has been the good soldier as enabler. Now the fate of the "diminished" Powell will inevitably be raised as a contentious issue in the harsh arena of campaign politics. In the final frame, Powell is about to lose all control.

· Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars

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Revealed: how global warming will cause extinction of a million species
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
08 January 2004


A quarter of known land animals and plants, more than a million species, will eventually die out because of the global warming that will take place over the next 50 years, the most important study of its kind has concluded.

International scientists from eight countries have warned that, based even on the most conservative estimates, rising temperatures will trigger a global mass extinction of unprecedented proportions.

They said global warming will set in train a far bigger threat to terrestrial species than previously realised, at least on a par with the already well-documented destruction of natural habitats around the world.

It is the first time such a powerful assessment has been made and its conclusions will shock even those environmentalists accustomed to "worst-case" scenarios.

Professor Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist from Leeds University who led the research team, said only the "immediate" switch to green technologies and the active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could avert ecological disaster. "It will be a surprise to a lot of people," he said. "For some years scientists have said climate change may lead to some extinctions but until now there`s been no numerical analysis of how big this is likely to be. We had no idea of whether it would lead to the extinction of a few species or a really substantial number. This study suggests the latter and it`s extremely worrying.

"If the projections can be extrapolated globally, and to other groups of land animals and plants, our analyses suggest that much more than a million species could be threatened with extinction as a result of climate change."

The study, in the journal Nature, investigated 1,103 species of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, butterflies and other insects living in six areas - Europe, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Costa Rica.

The scientists calculated the effect of rising temperatures on each species using the three future scenarios proposed by the UN`s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) which has predicted minimum, mid-range and maximum global average temperature increases of between 0.5C to 3C by 2050.

Based on the knowledge of the relatively gradual onset and aftermath of an ice age - and of the past 30 years of dramatically rising temperatures - the scientists were able to assess whether the expected climate change would result in a species shifting to a cooler region, or not.

A warmer world would push most species towards the poles or higher up mountains but for many this would be impossible. The home territories of those that could move might be so reduced as to make a breeding population unviable.

The study found:

* Of Australia`s more than 400 butterfly species, of which nearly 200 are unique to the continent, all but three might not survive in the present home ranges. More than half could be wiped out.

* Brazil`s unique savannah grassland the Cerrado faces disaster with some 45 per cent of the endemic plants - some 2,000 species - facing extinction.

* In Europe, the study predicts a 25 per cent extinction rate for birds under the maximum temperature scenario of the IPCC.

* In Mexico`s Chihuahuan desert, extinction would be particularly high because threatened species would have to travel long distances to reach cooler climates.

* In South Africa`s Cape Floristic region, the scientists believe between 30 and 40 per cent of the Proteaceae, a family of flowering plants that includes South Africa`s national flower, the king protea, will die.

* In Costa Rica`s Monteverde cloud forests, warmer temperatures would increase the altitude at which clouds form and even prevent their formation.

Lee Hannah, a senior fellow at the Centre for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International in Washington DC, said the combination of habitat loss and global warming would mean that there would be no safe havens even for some of the most-protected species.

"This study makes it clear that climate change is the most significant new threat for extinctions this century," Dr Hannah said. "The combination of increasing habitat loss, already recognised as the largest single threat to species, and climate change, is likely to devastate the ability of species to move and survive."
8 January 2004 09:53



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Men sought day work Wednesday at an area in Dallas where illegal immigrants regularly congregate to wait for potential employers. Similar gatherings occur every day in cities across the country.
January 8, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Border Politics as Bush Woos 2 Key Groups With Proposal
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

News Analysis WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — President Bush`s sweeping proposal on Wednesday to give legal status to millions of illegal workers was a political document as well as an immigration policy and sought to re-establish his credentials as a compassionate conservative at the starting gate of an election year.

White House political advisers have long talked of the critical importance of Hispanics to Mr. Bush`s re-election. But political analysts said that his latest proposal was also designed to appeal to a much larger political prize, suburban swing voters, who might see the plan as evidence of a gentler Republican Party.

"For a party that`s trying to look more inclusive and welcoming, the proposal has broader thematics that show an openness to America`s new immigrants," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster.

Mr. Bush`s speech carefully hit the emotional notes about opening the United States` borders at a time when the administration has spent more energy securing them. "Many of you here today are Americans by choice, and you have followed in the paths of millions," the president told the crowd. Every generation of immigrants, he added, "has reaffirmed the wisdom of remaining open to the talents and dreams of the world."

Behind the poetic language, analysts said, lay a prosaic White House calculation: That it was more important to reach toward the political middle than to worry about placating Mr. Bush`s conservative base. Many conservative Republicans called Mr. Bush`s plan nothing more than amnesty for lawbreakers but moderate Republicans said the White House had enough political capital with the conservatives to make it worth risking their ire.

Certainly Mr. Bush`s speech announcing the proposal, in the East Room of the White House, came with the kind of political noise not normally heard in the formal splendor of the executive mansion`s state floor.

Hispanic leaders invited by the White House jammed the room, cheering and chanting. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, had a front-row seat.

The real political risk to the White House, moderate Republicans said, was whether the proposals would be as welcomed by Hispanics as Mr. Bush and his political advisers expected. Many Hispanic leaders quickly heaped criticism on an immigration plan that they said did not go far enough, and asserted that the White House was cynically chasing their votes with an empty plan that would do them no good in the end.

"The notion that there is a green card at the end of this process is an illusion, and that`s the crux of the matter," said Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization. "The headlines today suggest that he`s providing legal status. But the bottom line is when people learn the details of this proposal and what it does and doesn`t do, it`s likely to seem less appealing."

The White House left many details of the proposal vague, including a critical one at the heart of the plan. Under Mr. Bush`s proposal, an illegal worker with a job in the United States could apply to be a three-year guest worker, a status that would provide full employee benefits, the ability to move freely in and out of the United States and the right to apply for a green card. In his speech, Mr. Bush said that an immigrant could renew participation in the guest worker program — but he did not say for how long, leaving it up for Congress to decide.

The tactic is one Mr. Bush has used before, most recently on the Medicare bill, which allows him, Democrats say, to take credit for proposing reforms while leaving Congress to work out the details.

For now, analysts of Hispanic voting trends said it was too early to tell how much the proposal would help Mr. Bush. His advisers have said the president needs 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win. Mr. Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000, a significant showing for a Republican. For the past three years, the White House has been aggressively trying to encroach on a traditionally Democratic and rapidly growing voting group.

"The plan is still too vague to say how it will fare among Latino organizations and the Latino community," said John A. Garcia, a political professor at the University of Arizona and the author of the book "Latino Politics in America." But at the least, Mr. Garcia said that it "puts the spotlight back on Bush and the Latinos" and gets Latinos re-engaged in a national conversation with the president and his policies.

But pollsters and political strategists said that Mr. Bush did not have to persuade every Hispanic voter of the value of his plan, and that just improving his standing on the margins could make a difference in the 2004 election.

Andrew Kohut, the director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, noted that Republicans have been gaining significant ground with Hispanic voters in the last decade, and that Mr. Bush`s immigration proposals could exploit those gains. Pew surveys in Florida in the late 1990`s, Mr. Kohut said, showed that 36 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 24 percent were Republicans. But surveys in more recent years showed that 30 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 32 percent were Republicans.

"So think about the advantage that could be for Bush in a close election, and it gives you some indication of the potential for this proposal to help him politically," Mr. Kohut said.

John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster and a partner in Opiniones Latinas, a firm in Alexandria, Va., that conducts national surveys among Spanish-speaking adults, said that many legal Hispanics were interested in overhauling immigration laws for national security reasons, and also to make it easier for them to travel to and from the United States.

"Their family and friends, even in the legal immigration system, are running into increased barriers," Mr. McLaughlin said.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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U.S. Fiscal Policies and Priorities for
Long-Run Sustainability

Martin Mühleisen and Christopher Towe, Editors

©2004 International Monetary Fund
January 7, 2004

http://www.imf.org/external/Pubs/NFT/Op/227/index.htm
Bezieht sich auf den Text:
I.M.F. Says Rise in U.S. Debts Is Threat to World`s Economy
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January 8, 2004
ARMS SEARCH
U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.

The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish — all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.

Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews, they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.

"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline." "Theories abound as to what may have happened."

The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.

David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take.

"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.

Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances."

American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to disarm Iraq."

In the television interview, Mr. Cohen, who as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council led the team that formally concluded in October 2002 that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons, insisted that "it is too soon to close the books on this case."

A report to be released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that American officials claimed were present "without the United States detecting some sign of this activity."

Through their spokesmen, Dr. Kay and General Dayton have declined repeated requests for interviews.

The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by senior government officials.

The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials said.

The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done."

"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.

In an interim report in October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said they had discovered evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to develop such weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.

Dr. Kay has not said when he intended to issue his next report, and that remains a subject of debate within the administration, government officials said.

American intelligence officials, including Mr. Cohen, have vigorously defended their estimates of Iraq`s weapons program, saying the evidence was strong, credible and backed up by a number of sources. But staff members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons.

Ms. Harman said in a telephone interview that she expected that Dr. Kay, appointed last June 11 as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was probably stepping down, a development that she said would be "very disappointing."

"I have to believe that if they were about to pounce on a large stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, he would be there for the announcement," Ms. Harman said.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 8, 2004
U.S. Presses Iraqi Kurds to Compromise on Issue of Autonomy
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration, increasingly fearful of Iraq`s breaking up along ethnic lines after the American occupation ends, is urging Kurdish leaders to compromise in their demand for a fully autonomous state in the north, administration officials said Wednesday.

The officials said that L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, met Friday with top Kurdish leaders to convey the concerns of senior members of the administration that a Kurdish state with all its current powers, plus some authority that it does not have now, posed a threat to the future unity of Iraq.

American officials said the Kurdish reaction was not conveyed back to Washington by Mr. Bremer.

But a Kurdish representative said the Kurdish leaders were adamant in rejecting Mr. Bremer`s request. Kurds, the spokesman said, will continue to demand nothing less than the autonomy that the Kurdish area has had since 1991, when the United States decided to protect it as a breakaway part of Iraq.

" It was totally rejected," said the Kurdish representative. " Bremer`s proposal didn`t even meet the minimal things that the Kurds have been fighting for all these years."

The official said that Mr. Bremer held a second meeting with Kurdish leaders on Wednesday and backed off considerably on his own demand for a less than autonomous Kurdish state. " It was a real turnaround," the Kurdish official said.

The varying comments about American negotiations reflected what administration officials said was a fast-moving and fluid situation among aides to President Bush, and between Mr. Bremer and Iraqi leaders.

Rather suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, administration officials say that the issue of Kurdish autonomy has risen to the top of the list of difficulties that the United States is struggling to resolve as it returns Iraq to self-rule under a tight deadline. The target for Iraq regaining sovereignty is June 30.

Last week, administration officials said there was a growing recognition in the administration that some form of Kurdish autonomy was inevitable, if only because it was impractical to devise a new law to change the status quo in the next two months, the deadline for writing a new interim constitution for Iraq.

That view, reported in an article in The New York Times on Monday, has been modified, with at least some in the administration saying that the Kurds needed to be advised that their demands for the greatest possible autonomy had gone much too far.

Kurds wish to retain not only their own armed forces, the pesh merga, but also control over taxing power and oil revenues in Kirkuk and Khanakin, two oil-producing centers that the American occupation does not view as part of the traditional Kurdish region.

In a memo to top administration officials, Mr. Bremer recently advised that fighting the Kurds over their demand for the greatest possible autonomy might infuriate them and upset political stability in the north. But in Washington, officials reacted by insisting that the Kurds be told of American opposition to a separate Kurdish state in Iraq.

" Bremer really lowered the boom on them," an American official said of Mr. Bremer`s first meeting with the Kurds. " He told them they`re going to have to be flexible, and to recognize the existence of a federal state of Iraq and to disband their militias."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Rowiya Makhmoud, 27, studies in the light of a kerosene lamp because electricity remains erratic in Baghdad. Smuggling, bureaucracy and sabotage contribute to the problem, which is most acute in the capital.
January 8, 2004
ENERGY
In an Oil-Rich Land, Power Shortages Defy Solution
By NEELA BANERJEE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 7 — Nine months after the American-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, frequent breakdowns in supplies of fuel and electricity, especially in Baghdad, are defying attempts by both Iraqis and foreign occupiers to stitch together something resembling normalcy here.

Increased fuel smuggling — a phenomenon that stretches back at least a quarter century — has now added to the already familiar litany of problems including sabotage by insurgents and an infrastructure weakened by decades of war and sanctions. Three influential Shiite ayatollahs recently went so far as to issue fatwas, or religious decrees, prohibiting followers from smuggling and oil profiteering.

In addition, the American bureaucracy for awarding contracts and releasing funds, pilloried by Congress for giving away money too easily, nevertheless moves too slowly to satisfy Iraqis, whose impatience is fertile ground for more acts of rebellion.

"There`s a large set of people who are neutral and their patience is wearing thin, and they can join those against us," said Col. Kurt Fuller, commander of the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, which has responsibility for much of south Baghdad. Back in August, the colonel saw a direct link between the lack of electricity and increased attacks on his soldiers, he said, when power went out in an area called Abu Desheer.

"We went to the neighborhood council and said, `You were totally peaceful. What happened?` " he recalled. "They said, `No power.` Saddam used to cut off power to punish them. So they thought the coalition was punishing them." Anxious to prove that untrue, soldiers went to the Electricity Ministry and got replacements for a burned-out transformer at the local power station installed within a month. Attacks dropped off, the colonel said.

Like the gasoline supply, power to Baghdad improved through the autumn. But a blackout engulfed the city for two days in mid-November and the lights darken for long stretches now.

For weeks, Adel Makhmoud, 25, has folded his blocky, 5-foot 10-inch frame into the back seat of his Volkswagen Beetle and slept there. "We`re an oil rich country, we have the second highest oil reserves in the world," he said one recent night near the front of a mile-long line of cars outside a gas station. "Who can improve this?"

Mr. Makhmoud slept in line in the summer, too. Now he and other Baghdadis have grown convinced that things will not get better. At home the power usually vanishes for four hours a day. Mr. Makhmoud lives in the affluent Zayouna neighborhood, where generators power homes for about an hour most nights when power fails. The rest of the time, Mr. Makhmoud and his brother and sister study by kerosene lamp. Baghdadis also heat homes with kerosene, which has contributed to long lines and shortages of that fuel.

While security remains the overriding concern, these burdens take their toll. At the gas line the other evening, Mr. Makhmoud concluded that "despite all this tragedy, it`s okay as long as Saddam is gone."

Uday Jihad Kazem, a 30-year-old businessman also waiting for gasoline, demurred. "I think it was better under Saddam. I know he was a dictator. He executed people. But he didn`t kill my father, or brothers, or do anything to me."

In general, Iraqis find it hard to believe that the superpower which occupied their country in weeks cannot fix the energy problem in months.

"Expectations have been tragically hyped by political events in Iraq and at home, our normal American short term view and the real needs of the Iraqis who find themselves in a desperate situation after 30 really bad years," said Cliff Mumm, director of a program to rebuild infrastructure for Bechtel Corporation.

"Maybe if the planning had been more comprehensive, the situation would now be a little better, but I don`t think prewar planning would have stood up confronted with the reality of how deteriorated the infrastructure of Iraq actually was," Mr. Mumm said.

Only a few Iraqis appreciate the sheer size of the reconstruction problem, or recognize that a relatively cautious occupation can hardly undo the effects of long economic neglect.

"You had Sept. 11 in your country, and did people do things the normal way after that?" said Falah al-Khawaja, an adviser to the chief executive of the Oil Ministry. "No, they did things completely differently, from firemen to the president. And here, we had our whole country destroyed."

Baghdad, for all its troubles, has a verve missing just months ago. More people are out on the streets, including women, who feared abduction and rape during the lawless summer. Stores bustle with customers. Police officers have cars, flak jackets and guns. Along the road north from Basra to Baghdad, new high-voltage power towers have replaced those damaged by sabotage and are protected by armed guards.

But sabotage continues to throttle a steady flow of oil. The pipelines of north and central Iraq that feed oil from the Kirkuk fields to the country`s largest refineries have been attacked at least 85 times since the end of the war, according to the Oil Ministry. Although the ministry maintains that sabotage has decreased, just two weeks ago a rocket propelled grenade attack destroyed a fuel depot south of Baghdad.

Iraq imports gasoline and cooking gas from nearly all its neighbors. But for a month now, gasoline lines in Baghdad have grown and ebbed. Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, attributed the gasoline shortages to an enormous influx of cars. "There are now something like a quarter of a million cars since the end of major combat operations have come into Iraq," he said last month during a Baghdad news conference. He also blamed hoarding for some of the shortages.

But others say the shortages stem in great part from the resurrection of the widespread smuggling of fuel out of the country that was prevalent under the rule of Mr. Hussein.

"It`s very profitable," Mr. Khawaja said. "The price of petrol at government stations in Iraq is about one cent per liter versus 21 cents in Kuwait, and that is the cheapest in the region."

Imported gasoline, Mr. Khawaja said, is often smuggled back out of Iraq. "What you need is monitoring from the border to the filling station," he said.

American soldiers and Iraqi police recently arrested smugglers who were trying to bribe officials at a fuel depot with $1,500 to stamp documents that would have let them take gasoline from Iraq to Jordan, said Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the oil ministry.

Money from smuggling, in turn, feeds the attacks on the occupation forces, Oil Ministry and American military officials contend.

On Dec. 20, Colonel Fuller`s soldiers found 28 trucks unloading gasoline and kerosene into tanks in a field.

His soldiers have taken to escorting fuel trucks from the nearby Doura refinery to local gas stations, just as they did in August, he said.

Because of the war, Iraqi power plants did not undergo routine annual maintenance in the spring. Maintenance was scheduled to restart in October, Mr. Hassan said. Through the summer and fall, Mr. Hassan and others at the Electricity Ministry said, the power plants gave Bechtel a list of needed spare parts. So far, "we`ve gotten absolutely nothing," he added, and engineers are jury-rigging equipment just as they did under Mr. Hussein.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Jobless Count Skips Millions
The Rate Hits 9.7% When the Underemployed and Those Who Have Quit Looking are Added

by David Streitfeld
December 29, 2003
Los Angeles Times


SAN FRANCISCO — Lisa Gluskin has had a tough three years. She works almost as hard as she did during the dot-com boom, for about 20% of the income.

When Gluskin`s writing and editing business cratered in 2001, she slashed her rates, began studying for a graduate degree and started teaching part time at a Lake Tahoe community college for a meager wage.

It`s been a fragmented, hand-to-mouth life, one that she sees mirrored by friends and colleagues who are waiting tables or delivering packages. In the late `90s, the 35-year-old Gluskin says, "we had careers. We had trajectories. Now we have complicated lives. We`re not unemployed, but we`re underemployed."

The nation`s official jobless rate is 5.9%, a relatively benign level by historical standards. But economists say that figure paints only a partial — and artificially rosy — picture of the labor market.

To begin with, there are the 8.7 million unemployed, defined as those without a job who are actively looking for work. But lurking behind that group are 4.9 million part-time workers such as Gluskin who say they would rather be working full time — the highest number in a decade.

There are also the 1.5 million people who want a job but didn`t look for one in the last month. Nearly a third of this group say they stopped the search because they were too depressed about the prospect of finding anything. Officially termed "discouraged," their number has surged 20% in a year.

Add these three groups together and the jobless total for the U.S. hits 9.7%, up from 9.4% a year ago.

No wonder the Democratic presidential candidates have seized on jobs as a potentially powerful weapon.

Howard Dean criticized President Bush for "the worst job creation record in over 60 years." Richard Gephardt said that "I have three goals for my presidency: jobs, jobs, jobs." John Kerry said "the first thing" he`d do as president would be to fight his "heart out" to bring back the jobs that have disappeared in recent years.

Bush, meanwhile, is quick to seize credit where he can. When the unemployment rate for November fell one-tenth of a point, he went out immediately to give a speech at a Home Depot in Maryland.

"More workers are going to work, over 380,000 have joined the workforce in the last couple of months," Bush said. "We`ve overcome a lot."

A number of economists say it`s a mistake to evaluate the job market solely by talking about the official unemployment rate. It`s a blunt instrument for assessing a condition that is growing ever more vague.

"There`s certainly an arbitrariness to the official rate," says Princeton University economics professor Alan Krueger. "It irks me that it`s not put in proper perspective."

On Jan. 9, when the rate for December is announced, both Republicans and Democrats will assuredly again maneuver for advantage — precisely because the number isn`t expected to change much.

"At this point, where we don`t know which way it`s going but it isn`t likely to be going far, both sides will try to use it," says Michael Lewis-Beck, a political scientist at the University of Iowa.

In every election since 1960, the party in the White House lost when the unemployment rate deteriorated during the first half of the year. If the rate improved, the party in the White House won.

That`s not a coincidence, says Lewis-Beck, who has edited several volumes on how economic conditions determine elections. "People see the president as the chief executive of the economy," he says. "They punish him if things are deteriorating and reward him if things are improving."

By any normal standard, things should have been improving on the employment front long before this point. More than 2 million jobs have been lost in the last three years, a period that encompassed a brief, nasty recession and a recovery that was anemic until recently. Even in the best-case scenario, Bush will end this term with a net job loss. That hasn`t happened to a president since Herbert Hoover at the beginning of the Depression.

Many economists are mystified about why a suddenly booming economy is producing so few jobs.

"We`re all sitting there and saying, `When are they going to return?` " says Richard B. Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "It`s looking a little better, but we don`t understand why it isn`t looking a lot better. Why shouldn`t Bush be sitting there saying, `Man, I`m sitting pretty. This is a great boom`?"

One statistic proving particularly perplexing is the percentage of the adult population that is employed. This number rises during good times, as people are lured into the workforce, and falls during recessions as companies falter.

True to form, the percentage of adult Americans with jobs dropped from a high of 64.8% in April 2000, just as the stock market was cresting, to 62% in September — the lowest level in a decade. If past recessions are any guide, those 5 million people who found themselves jobless should have driven the unemployment rate up to about 8%.

Instead, the rate never went much above 6%.

"More than half of the additional people who would have reported themselves as unemployed in a previous big recessionary period … aren`t," a puzzled UC Berkeley economist, Brad DeLong, wrote on his website. "They`re reporting themselves as out of the labor force instead."

"Out of the labor force" means you`re not working for even one hour a week and don`t want to, either. It`s the traditional category for students, married women with young children, flush retirees and idle millionaires.

A new way that people seem to be joining this category is by getting themselves declared disabled. This designation makes them eligible for government payments while removing them from the unemployment rolls.

From 1983 to 2000, economists David Autor and Mark Duggan wrote in a recent study, the number of non-elderly adults receiving government disability payments doubled from 3.8 million to 7.7 million.

The scholars present a case that the sharp increase isn`t because the workplace suddenly became more dangerous. Instead, it has been prompted by liberalized screening policies, which make it possible to claim disabled status for, say, several small impairments as opposed to one big injury. Government examinations also have been downplayed in favor of the disabled`s own medical records and the pain he or she claims to be experiencing.

At the same time, benefits have been sweetened. As a result, millions of individuals who lost jobs now have an attractive — and permanent — alternative to searching for work.

Autor and Duggan concluded that if disability payments weren`t so appealing, many more people would be unemployed, boosting the jobless rate two-thirds of a point.

Another way in which people forgo an appearance on the unemployment rolls is if they decide to go into business for themselves. There are 9.6 million people who say they are self-employed full time, a number that rose 118,000 last month. Without the recent increase in self-employed, the jobless number would look much worse.

Many others may be working for themselves part time, temporarily, as a way to get food on the table in the absence of better options.

Take Steve Fahringer, who until recently was working for a Bay Area marketing agency that cut 20% of its employees and trimmed the wages of the remainder by 20%. Fahringer didn`t particularly like his job. Because the recession supposedly was history, he thought he could find a new position. The 34-year-old didn`t think it would be easy, but he thought it possible. So he quit.

"I left July 1," he says. "I haven`t found a new job yet."

It`s a common problem. The segment of the labor force that has been jobless for more than 15 weeks has risen nearly 150% since 2000. The current level is the highest since the recession of the early 1990s. Nearly one-quarter of the jobless have been unemployed for longer than six months.

In Fahringer`s case, he spent some time aggressively looking for a job, which made him part of the official July unemployment rate of 6.2%. Then he stopped looking, which meant that he was one small reason the rate started going down.

Instead of unemployed, Fahringer was classified as "discouraged." A little more than 8% of the people who want a job in the Bay Area are estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be discouraged, slightly higher than Los Angeles/Long Beach but lower than the battered technology center of San Jose.

Discouraged workers have never been included in unemployment rates, although they came close the last time a commission met to reform the system, a quarter of a century ago. "It was a very hot issue," remembers Glen Cain, a retired economist who was a commission member. He says the conservatives on the panel, who felt that anyone who really wanted a job should be out there hustling no matter what, prevailed.

Fahringer found an alternative way to earn a bit of money. He did some acrylic paintings, which he sold for a total of $1,000. He calls himself "a hobbyist," which means for a while he moved out of the labor force entirely.

Now he`s a temp, assigned by his agency to a nonprofit office. For the first time in six months, he`s working 40 hours a week. By the government`s accounting, he has once again joined the ranks of the employed. But from the standpoint of his wallet, Fahringer is worse off: He`s earning less money, with no paid holidays, no sick leave, no pension plan, no health insurance, no future.

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank, says Fahringer`s situation is in many ways typical. The industries that were expanding in the late `90s, including computer and professional services, paid well.

Those industries are in retreat. So is manufacturing, a traditional source of high wages. On the rise, meanwhile, are lower-paying service jobs.

During the boom, it was easy to trade up. Now it`s just as easy to trade down.

Fahringer`s solution: Opt out.

"I`m thinking of going back to school," he says. "I`d take out a loan." That would put him out of the labor force again.

In some eyes, a nation of burger flippers, temps and Wal-Mart clerks isn`t the worst scenario for the economy. The worst is that companies continue to eliminate jobs faster than they create them, setting up a game of musical chairs for the labor force.

That prospect alarms Erica Groshen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "If you plot job losses versus gains on a chart, it`s shocking," she says.

Losses are running at about the same rate they were in 1997 and 1998, two good years for the economy. But job creation in the first quarter of 2003 — the most recent period available — was only 7.4 million, the lowest since 1993.

"If this goes on too long, you`d have to worry there`s something fundamentally wrong," Groshen says. Although the economy has picked up since March, "so far I haven`t seen anything that suggests job creation is picking up."

That bodes poorly for Ian Golder. His last full-time job was with a start-up publication that wrote about venture capital.

Two years ago, Golder was laid off. It was the first time since he graduated from UC Berkeley 14 years earlier that he didn`t have steady work.

Golder looked for a while, gave up for a while, then landed a contracting gig with no benefits proofreading for a chip maker. When that ran out, he worked 20 hours a month on a financial services newsletter.

His wife, Heather, a recent graduate in English from UC Davis, also was without a job. They thought about selling their house in Sacramento and moving, but prospects didn`t look any better anywhere else. To make ends meet, they took in two boarders.

At the beginning of December, things seemed to improve a bit. Golder got a job in the document-control department of a medical devices company. The department, he was told, used to have 20 full-time people. Now it has five, plus four temps.

The job will last two months. After that, who knows?

"Optimists say things will be better then," Golder says. "But a full-time position with benefits seems pretty remote."

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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January 8, 2004
A Vital Immigration Debate

resident Bush has now waded into one of the most turbulent and emotional issues of our day: immigration reform. He had barely thrown out the first hints of a new guest worker program yesterday when it came under a noisy assault from both conservatives and advocates for immigrants. For simply reopening what has always been a torturous debate in this country, the president deserves applause. He has recognized that the nation`s immigration system is, as he put it, "broken."

At first glance, it is not clear exactly how the Bush plan would clear up a border policy that has become steadily less rational, humane and secure, as the number of illegal immigrants here grows by 350,000 each year. But the president started at the right place by addressing one of the basic conflicts in America`s immigration policy, that persistent tug of war between keeping the borders secure and enticing needed low-paid workers to sneak past the immigration agents. Essentially, the White House wants to create a guest worker program, this one mostly for lower-skilled jobs. Yet for this proposal to be anything more than a bow to Hispanic voters or a convenient prelude to meetings with the Mexican government, Mr. Bush and his party have a lot of work to do.

The president says he wants to set up a job registry to list positions that no American will take. Employers could hire immigrant workers for these posts — either from abroad or from among those already working illegally in this country. The workers accepting these new visas would have them for only a few years. How many workers would be allowed into the program and what would happen to them when the visas expired loom as large unanswered questions in this proposal.

Despite the lack of details, the president`s guidelines clearly do not constitute a sweeping amnesty, as some anti-immigrant groups are labeling it. It is a long way from that. In fact, there is reason to worry that if participants in this guest program have no hope of eventually qualifying for permanent legal residence, they may well slip back into the shadows when the visas come to an end.

The president`s outline seems to mirror a bill offered by three Arizona Republicans: Senator John McCain and Representatives Jeff Flake and Jim Kolbe. But that bill has the advantage of offering a real, if slower, path to a green card for those among the nation`s 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants who come forward to join the new visa system.

The president spoke emotionally and well about the nation`s long dependency on immigration, and he recalled the many hard-working immigrants he knew in Texas. But he made it clear that his top priority was not ensuring the welfare of illegal immigrants, but securing the nation`s borders and meeting the economic needs of this country. Even with that conservative pitch, any real improvement in the immigration quagmire will still be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Still, Mr. Bush has begun the selling.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 8, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
One Nation, Under Secularism
By SUSAN JACOBY

In Campaign 2004, secularism has become a dirty word. Democrats, particularly Howard Dean, are being warned that they do not have a chance of winning the presidential election unless they adopt a posture of religious "me-tooism" in an effort to convince voters that their politics are grounded in values just as sacred as those proclaimed by President Bush.

On one level, the impulse to capitalize on the religiosity of Americans can be seen as transparently, and at times comically, opportunistic. Late last year, Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, earnestly advised his party`s candidates to invoke "God`s green earth" in supporting stronger environmental laws. Mr. Dean, the candidate stuck with the label (or libel) of being the most secularist Democratic aspirant, seems to be heeding the advice to get religion. He recently informed an Iowa audience that he prays daily, and in New Hampshire last week, he demonstrated his ecumenism by using the Muslim expression "inshallah," which means God willing.

On a deeper level, the notion that elected officials should employ a religious rationale for policy decisions is rooted in the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason. When I lecture on college campuses, students frequently express surprise at being told that the framers of the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God in order to assign supreme governmental power to "We the People."

Dismissing this inconvenient fact, some on the religious right have suggested that divine omnipotence was considered a given in the 1780`s — that the framers had no need to acknowledge God in the Constitution because his dominion was as self-evident as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet isn`t it absurd to suppose that men as precise in their use of language as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison would absentmindedly have failed to insert God into the nation`s founding document? In fact, they represented a majority of citizens who wished not only to free religion from government interference but government from religious interference.

This deep sentiment was expressed in letters to newspapers during the debate over ratification of the Constitution. One Massachusetts correspondent, signing himself "Elihu," summed up the secular case by praising the authors of the Constitution as men who "come to us in the plain language of common sense, and propose to our understanding a system of government, as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, nor even a God in a dream to propose any part of it."

The 18th-century public`s understanding of the Constitution as a secular document can perhaps best be gauged by the reaction of religious conservatives at the time. For example, the Rev. John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York City minister, denounced the absence of God in the preamble as "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate." He warned that "we will have every reason to tremble, lest the governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than individuals, overturn from its foundations the fabric we have been rearing and crush us to atoms in the wreck." But unlike many conservatives today, Mason acknowledged — even as he deplored — the Constitution`s uncompromising secularism.

Americans tend to minimize not only the secular convictions of the founders, but also the secularist contribution to later social reform movements. One of the most common misconceptions is that organized religion deserves nearly all of the credit for 19th-century abolitionism and the 20th-century civil rights movement. While religion certainly played a role in both, many people fail to distinguish between personal faith and religious institutions.

Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, and the Quaker Lucretia Mott, also a women`s rights crusader, denounced the many mainstream Northern religious leaders who, in the 1830`s and 40`s, refused to condemn slavery.

In return, Garrison and Mott were castigated as infidels and sometimes as atheists — a common tactic used by those who do not recognize any form of faith but their own. Garrison, strongly influenced by his freethinking predecessor Thomas Paine, observed that one need only be a decent human being — not a believer in the Bible or any creed — to discern the evil of slavery.

During the 20th-century civil rights struggle, the movement`s strongest moral leaders emerged from Southern black churches. But the moral message of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. obviously ran counter to the religious rationales for segregation preached in many white churches in the south.

In addition, Dr. King welcomed the help of nonreligious allies like Stanley Levison, his friend and lawyer, and the outspoken labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, were nonobservant Jews who died not in the name of religion but because of their secular humanist commitment to racial justice.

Many politicians today, including President Bush, use the civil rights leadership of African-American ministers as an argument in favor of "faith-based" government financing. But those ministers were free to pursue their moral vision within American society precisely because they were independent of both government money and government control. Government officials, by contrast, have a very different constitutionally mandated obligation — to devise public policies based not on religious interests but on a secular concept of public good.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and declared, in his memorable Texas twang, "We shall overcome," he was articulating a moral position that could and did command the respect of citizens of any or no religion.

That is real leadership. Not a scintilla of bravery is required for a candidate, whether Democratic or Republican, to take refuge in religion. But it would take genuine courage to stand up and tell voters that elected officials cannot and should not depend on divine instructions to reconcile the competing interests and passions of human beings.

Abraham Lincoln, whose spiritual beliefs were so elusive that both atheists and the devoutly religious have tried to claim him as their own, spoke eloquently on this point during his long period of deliberation before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

"I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will," he told a group of ministers in September 1862. "I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me. . . . These are not, however, the days of miracles. . . . I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right."

Today, many voters, of many religious beliefs, might well be receptive to a candidate who forthrightly declares that his vision of social justice will be determined by the "plain, physical facts of the case" on humanity`s green and fragile earth. But that would take an inspirational leader who glories in the nation`s secular heritage and is not afraid to say so.


Susan Jacoby, author of the forthcoming "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," is director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Eine fundamentalistische Bewegung wird immer vergessen.

January 8, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
War of Ideas, Part 1
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Airline flights into the U.S. are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of 5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National Guardsmen are posted at key bridges and tunnels.

Happy New Year.

What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam.

O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here`s how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization.

With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life — an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe — you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust.

Trust is built into every aspect, every building and every interaction in our increasingly hyperconnected world. We trust that when we board a plane, the person next to us isn`t going to blow up his shoes. Without trust, there`s no open society because there aren`t enough police to guard every opening in an open society.

Which is why suicidal Islamist militants have the potential to erode our lifestyle. Because the only way to deter a suicidal enemy ready to use the instruments of daily life to kill us is by gradually taking away trust. We start by stripping airline passengers, then we go to fingerprinting all visitors, and we will end up removing cherished civil liberties.

So what to do? There are only three things we can do: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their own, and only they can really restrain their extremists.

As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The cold war ended the way it did because at some bedrock level we and the Soviets "agreed on what is shameful." And shame, more than any laws or police, is how a village, a society or a culture expresses approval and disapproval and applies restraints.

But today, alas, there is no bedrock agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized world. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamist terrorists are neither a state subject to conventional deterrence or international rules, nor individuals deterred by the fear of death. And their home societies, in too many cases, have not stigmatized their acts as "shameful." In too many cases, their spiritual leaders have provided them with religious cover, and their local charities have provided them with money. That is why suicide bombing is spreading.

We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can`t just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II.

This column is the first in a five-part series on how we can do that.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 8, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Tizzy Over Lezzies
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — I bet President Bush is more worried about putting on weight, now that his knees hurt too much for him to run, than getting re-elected.

I bet he made a New Year`s resolution to give up desserts because he`s more scared of facing his "inner fat boy," as one Bush pal calls the earlier, beefier beer-drinking incarnation of W., than Howard Dean.

After all, the Democrats seem puny wandering around Iowa. And more Americans are pronouncing themselves pleased with Mr. Bush.

They like him even though Osama and Al Qaeda are still lurking and frothing, even though we couldn`t get through the holidays without an orange alert and flights being canceled, and even though Iraq is still a free-fire zone after a war to get rid of weapons that may not have existed.

A top Iraqi rocket scientist, Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi, told The Washington Post that he had hidden his designs for nine-ton missiles from U.N. inspectors, but that the weapons themselves did not exist.

Karl Rove has the `04 effort well in hand, despite the distraction of Nosy Parkers from Justice trying to out the official who outed an undercover C.I.A. officer.

The president and vice president have raised $130.8 million, and are showing a brutal willingness to do whatever it takes to secure key bases. The president courted Hispanics by saying he would try to extend more legal rights to illegal immigrants by offering a new temporary worker status. He courted the religious right by saying he would not try to extend more legal rights to gays by offering a new marital status.

Mr. Bush has decided to offer legitimacy only to those dispossessed groups in American society who may be politically useful to him.

The president said making illegal immigrants legal would "honor our values," while conservatives went on TV to howl that Mr. Bush was rewarding criminal behavior. The president probably figures that the Republican-led Congress will never pass it anyway, so he can get the credit in states like Florida without having to deal with the results.

Mr. Rove presumably thinks that he could actually corral California by going soft on illegal immigrants, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger won there after getting tough on illegal immigrants on the hot-button issue of whether they could have driver`s licenses.

While Republican strategists argue about whether to turn some poor gay couple who got married in Vermont into Willie and Willie Horton, or just use the issue in targeted spots in bluenosed red states so the president doesn`t seem bigoted, the culture is racing ahead.

Women kissing women, often as a way of turning on men, has become such a staple of entertainment that by the time Madonna and Britney did it on stage, it seemed more stale than shocking.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that lesbian love had swept high schools here: "You can see this new trend on Friday nights outside Union Station, sweethearts from high schools around the Washington area, some locking lips. . . . These girls pack Ani DiFranco concerts and know Tatu lyrics by heart. Their attention is usually directed exclusively at each other, but not always: a group of girls at a private school in Northwest Washington charge boys $10 to watch the girls make out in front of them."

Long regarded as the least glamorous of all minority groups, lesbians are now cover girls.

Showtime has a vampy new program about lesbians in L.A. called "The L Word." That landed Jennifer Beals and its other sexy female stars seminude on the cover of this week`s New York magazine, with the headline "Not Your Mother`s Lesbians." (I didn`t know my mother had lesbians.)

A cross between "Sex and the City" and a Budweiser ad, "The L Word" features women sitting around the table at a restaurant, tartly dishing about dating, grooming and getting pregnant. But with these very unflannel "lezzies," the search for "fresh meat" and "new blood" is confined to one sex, babies come through sperm-in-a-cup, the waxing discussions are even raunchier, and the weary, worldly bon mots are along the lines of "Lesbians think friendship`s another word for foreplay."

It`s hard to figure, but America seems ready to embrace W. and the L word at the same time. The new L word, that is.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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PIPE DREAMS

An Update on the Real Reason We Invaded Afghanistan
NEW YORK--So where`s the pipeline?

In 2001 common sense, expert opinion and extensive research convinced me and other Central Asia watchers that the United States didn`t have much interest in saving Buddha statues or Afghan women when it went to war against the Taliban. After we turned down their offer to extradite Osama, it became obvious that we weren`t interested in capturing the alleged mastermind of 9/11 either. Logic and evidence indicated that the Bush Administration`s focused on Afghanistan to make it secure for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas from the landlocked Caspian Sea.

Here`s the story in a nutshell. The former Soviet republics surrounding the Caspian Sea--particularly Kazakhstan--have the potential to become the biggest oil-producing nations on earth. "By 2050," reports the Asia Times, "the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea will account for more than 80 percent of world oil and natural gas production. Together, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian may have something like 800 billion barrels of oil and an energy equivalent amount in natural gas. Compare this figure with oil reserves in the Americas and in Europe: less than 160 billion barrels. And they will be exhausted before 2030." Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan want to build a pipeline to carry their oil and gas out to deep-sea ports. The shortest possible route would go through Iran, which the U.S. has declared part of an Axis of Evil. Second shortest is via Afghanistan, a dangerous proposition that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have nonetheless encouraged during and after Taliban rule. Top Bushies last met with Taliban officials in July 2001, two months before 9/11. Negotiations broke down over transit fees, but top-level discussions between the U.S., Turkmenistan and Pakistan resumed in October, while American bombs were still raining on Kabul. That led people like me to speculate that the invasion--which made little effort to catch Osama--was a transparent excuse to gain control over newly emerging energy resources.

Yet here we are two years later, some war supporters point out, and still no pipeline.

Well, not exactly.

It`s not the sort of thing the U.S. media cares to report, but there has in fact been movement on the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP). The Asian Development Bank, which hopes to finance a consortium of oil companies to finance the $3.5 billion (originally $2 billion) project, has already spent millions of dollars on feasibility studies and surveys along the proposed route from Herat, a city near Afghanistan`s northwest border with Turkmenistan, to Kandahar, the former Taliban spiritual capital close to the southeastern frontier with Pakistan. The U.S.-led occupation coalition has promised to make paving the future TAP service highway the nation`s top rebuilding priority. The ADB has hosted meetings between officials of Afghanistan and the two nations on each end of the thousand-mile-long conduit: Turkmenistan, which would ship Kazakh crude oil and its own natural gas from its Daultebad refineries, and Pakistan, which hopes to export the energy resources to deep-sea tankers via its Multan port on the Arabian Sea.

Turkmen prime minister Yolly Gurganmuradov, Afghan minister of mines and industry Mehfooz Nedai and Pakistani petroleum minister Nouraiz Shakoor held their seventh TAP meeting in Islamabad on December 10, 2003, where they decided on a 2010 target date for completion. Official groundbreaking for TAP, predicted to occur last year during a rash of post-Mullah Omar optimism, now awaits ADB verification that Pakistan can handle the anticipated volume of Turkmen gas. That study won`t be completed until at least September 2004.

Far more worrisome is the Afghan government`s dubious assurance that it "will provide complete security to the project," according to Pakistan`s official news agency. The TAP route cuts through territory controlled by Herati warlord Ishmael Khan and several ex-Taliban commanders who would almost certainly threaten to blow it up unless they receive ad hoc "transit fees." The Karzai government in Kabul--headed by a former consultant to Unocal, the oil company that originally pitched TAP to the Taliban in 1995--can`t possibly make good on its assurance.

The challenges are virtually insurmountable, yet the three nations see reasons to justify working to meet a March 2004 financing deadline. A recent diplomatic thaw with India has opened up the possibility of extending the pipeline across Pakistan. "If Pakistan can find within itself the strength and wisdom to change its current approach towards India, there are immense benefits that it can derive as a transit route for the movement of energy, goods and people," Indian foreign minister Yashwant Sinha said January 3. Even better, the star of TAP`s biggest promoter--U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan--is rising. "Bush`s pet Afghan" Zalmay Khalilzad, Karzai`s ex-colleague at Unocal, is receiving kudos from grateful top Bushies. Last week the ubiquitous Khalilzad strong-armed delegates to the loya jirga into accepting a new constitution that ratifies Karzai`s role as a U.S.-backed puppet dictator. TAP proponents hope Khalilzad`s increased influence will convince Unocal and other U.S. companies to join the consortium.

I wrote about TAP as a motivation for the Afghan invasion in my book "Gas War." The Bushies invaded Afghanistan to build a pipeline that would never be feasible, I argued. "Afghanistan remains a disaster zone," writes the Kyrgyz-based Times of Central Asia after the latest Islamabad confab. "All transnational projects somehow involving this war-weary country seem to be doomed with troubles. [TAP] is no exception."

Delays and overruns are typical for big construction projects, but based on the news so far there`s no reason to change my 2001 assessment. Until we inevitably withdraw our forces a few years from now, once again abandoning the Afghans to a cycle of death and horror we helped perpetuate, Bush and his Asian allies will keep trying to build their doomed pipeline.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America`s best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2004 TED RALL

RALL 1/6/04

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[Deep Thought]

@ joerver

Glueckwunsch zu diesem Thread!

[Joerver]

Director Ahmed Abbas oversees al-Iraqiya`s 8 p.m. newscast. Despite criticism of the station, a top official says, "We are independent in our editorial policy."

washingtonpost.com
For Many Iraqis, U.S.-Backed TV Echoes the Voice Of Its Sponsor
Station Staffers Acknowledge Their Reluctance to Criticize

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A15


BAGHDAD -- In gasoline lines stretching up to half a mile and coffeehouses darkened by power outages, the questions flow steadily:

When will there be enough electricity for hot water to shave?

Who`s to blame for a fuel shortage in a country with some of the world`s richest oil reserves?

Will it ever be safe enough to send our children to school?

Yet when the current president of Iraq`s Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, went on national television last weekend to face reporters, those were not the questions posed by the staff at the station, al-Iraqiya. They asked about the trip by an Iraqi delegation to the United Nations and plans to train some police outside the country.

Nine months after U.S. forces closed Iraq`s state-run television stations and subsequently launched the new channel with promises of a democratic dawn for the country`s news media, the Pentagon-sponsored station has not won the trust of many Iraqis. By seeking to cast the U.S. occupation in the most favorable light, al-Iraqiya may actually be losing the war for viewers` hearts and minds.

"Al-Iraqiya is failing," said Jaafar Saddiq, assistant dean at Baghdad`s College of Media. "It`s technically backward. Its message is not convincing. It can`t compete with other stations."

Executives and journalists at al-Iraqiya say there are few taboos in their coverage and that they are free to address the everyday concerns of Iraqis. But many Iraqis say that those assertions have no more credibility than al-Iraqiya`s nightly newscasts, which fuel the widespread conviction that al-Iraqiya is the mouthpiece for the U.S.-led military alliance and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi leadership.

"We`re concerned about the difficulties of the people, about the promises that the coalition made that they haven`t fulfilled. We don`t see much about that," said Basseem Sattar, 31, a Baghdad taxi driver sipping sweet tea in a spartan cafe.

Mehdi Sawawi, 45, a retired government employee, put aside his newspaper and agreed. "Up until now, we`re not sure who is running al-Iraqiya. Is the coalition or the Governing Council or somebody else?"

The station operates under the authority of the U.S. provisional administration in Iraq and has been managed by Science Applications International Corp., a California-based defense and technology contractor picked by the Pentagon to run Iraqi Media Network, which also includes two radio stations and a newspaper.

Al-Iraqiya`s employees are paid by the Iraqi Finance Ministry according to wage scales set for civil servants across the government, station officials said.

But Shameem Rassam, the station`s general director, said ties with the government end with the paycheck. "We are independent in our editorial policy. Nobody dictates to us about what to do," said Rassam, who hosted programs on Iraqi state television before emigrating to the United States 13 years ago and ultimately settling in Arlington County.

Al-Iraqiya is one element in the occupation authority`s public relations campaign, which includes frequent news conferences by U.S. and allied officials, usually covered live on al-Iraqiya with Arabic translation, and private briefings for groups of Iraqi journalists. From the back of military trucks rolling slowly through traffic, troops distribute copies of Baghdad Now, a biweekly tabloid in Arabic and English covering the activities of the U.S. Army`s 1st Armored Division. Other U.S. soldiers walk the streets in full combat gear, handing out pamphlets calling on residents to oppose terrorism and provide information about insurgents.

Independent sources of news in Iraq remain limited. Of the six daily newspapers, the most widely read is Zaman, an independent publication that prints separate editions for Baghdad and the south and the north of the country.

Four of the other daily papers are issued by political parties and openly promote their interests. The sixth, Sabah, a publication of the U.S.-led provisional authority, offers a wider range of news coverage than its sister television station, al-Iraqiya. Several other television stations broadcast in Iraq, but they are clearly identified with political parties or neighboring countries, particularly Iran.

Arabic-language satellite channels based outside Iraq are winning an ever-widening audience as satellite dishes, banned under the government of deposed president Saddam Hussein, proliferate. But U.S. officials have repeatedly accused them of anti-American bias, and some Iraqis agree that the stations are unduly critical of U.S.-led forces.

During its first eight months of operation, al-Iraqiya has had a stream of managers and news directors. Rassam herself joined only two months ago after working at one of the affiliated radio stations.

Rassam supervises a staff of about 300 employees, many of them energetic but green journalists. They have taken up quarters in cramped, windowless rooms behind the razor wire and sandbags of the Baghdad Convention Center, a heavily guarded building that the Governing Council calls home. The carpets are tattered and the clocks on the walls stopped long ago. Employees say they are short of cameras, editing equipment and computers, but much of what they do have is brand-new, compliments of the U.S. government.

Current and former employees of al-Iraqiya, including several who are highly critical of its operations, echoed Rassam`s assertion that there has been no interference by U.S. officials in daily decisions about news programming. But some said they were reluctant to air reports that could antagonize U.S. officials. In part, they said, they have yet to shake the media culture of the Hussein era.

"For those of us who were working in the previous Iraqi media, there is some kind of fear about whether the Americans will agree or not agree with what we do. The longer you worked in the previous state media, the more fear you have," said Abdel Salam Dhari, 43, the station`s news director, who had been a translator at the official Jumhuriyah newspaper.

For months, al-Iraqiya declined to broadcast reports about attacks by Iraqi insurgents on U.S.-led forces, Dhari said. He noted that the station in recent weeks had begun to cover such violence. But the reports are often less detailed and more sporadic than those in the Western news media and on the Arabic satellite television channels.

The station has also refrained from airing some dispatches because of concerns they could incite anti-American feelings, current and former employees said. Rassam said Iraqis, after years of dictatorship, are not ready for the freewheeling media prevalent the West. "Iraq is going through a phase, opening its eyes for the first time," she said.

Al-Iraqiya`s management has banned newscasters from using the word "occupation" to describe the presence of U.S.-led forces in the country, though the term is common in the Western media and acknowledged by U.S. officials to accurately describe the current situation. Station employees said the term casts U.S. forces in a negative light.

"For us Iraqis, we have to cool down the passions," said Ali Karim Shamari, 24, a reporter at the station.

But some Iraqis said they resented what they called a dumbed-down version of the news prepared by outsiders, including exiles returning to Iraq for the first time in years.

"The people of Iraq are not as simple-minded as they believe," said Ahmed Abdul Majid, chief editor of Zaman. "They don`t give us an accurate picture. It`s not complete, and they`re still too cautious."

Media critics and many ordinary Iraqis agree that the station has yet to seriously tackle many problems now bedeviling everyday life, such as gas lines, electricity shortages and street crime. Alaa Juburi, a correspondent and producer who recently left al-Iraqiya to work for a U.S. television network in Baghdad, said local reporters should be grilling Iraqi ministers about these problems but are reluctant to challenge them.

Instead, the station provides an open forum for U.S. and Iraqi officials. In a program that aired several times last week, two spokesmen from the U.S. provisional administration and the Governing Council were shown over coffee at a local restaurant, talking for a half-hour about U.S. plans to transfer political control this year. Station officials said this was part of al-Iraqiya`s mission to inform the public.

Coupled with a flat, drab presentation that Iraqis say is reminiscent of the grim newscasts of the Hussein era, al-Iraqiya`s staid news judgment is costing it viewers. An October survey conducted for the State Department in seven cities found that 63 percent of Iraqis with satellite dishes preferred getting their news from either al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya -- the leading Arabic satellite channels -- while only 12 percent chose al-Iraqiya.




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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A South African protea flower. Many flowers of the Proteaceae family are at risk of extinction from global warming.
washingtonpost.com
Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050


By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A01


In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.

Dismayed by their results, the researchers called for "rapid implementation of technologies" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.

"The midrange estimate is that 24 percent of plants and animals will be committed to extinction by 2050," said ecologist Chris Thomas of Britain`s University of Leeds. "We`re not talking about the occasional extinction -- we`re talking about 1.25 million species. It`s a massive number."

The study marks the first time scientists have produced a global analysis with concrete estimates of the effect of climate change on habitat. Previous work -- much of it by the same researchers -- focused on smaller regions or limited numbers of species.

Thomas led a 19-member international team that surveyed habitat decline for 1,103 plant and animal species in five regions: Europe; Queensland, Australia; Mexico`s Chihuahuan Desert; the Brazilian Amazon; and the Cape Floristic Region at South Africa`s southern tip. The study is being published today in the journal Nature.

The five regions encompass 20 percent of Earth`s surface and "include a fair range of terrestrial environments," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Leeds. "Obviously, it would be valuable to expand the scope, but there`s no reason to think that doing so would change our results tremendously."

Researchers said the wide geographical scope also overcame outside factors that might affect a single region only. "A prolonged drought might cause one instance of a dieback" but be offset by changes elsewhere, acknowledged climate change biologist Lee Hannah, who worked in South Africa. "When you see the broader context, the regional blips drop out."

Although there is little dispute that Earth`s temperature is rising, debate over the reasons and speed of change remains contentious. Still, most scientists accept that much of the warming is caused by the cumulative effects of human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" -- from power plants and other industries -- that trap and hold heat in the atmosphere.

One skeptic, William O`Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research "ignored species` ability to adapt to higher temperatures" and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.

Climatologists have developed models that describe the temperature changes that specific regions have undergone over periods of as long as 30,000 years. The Nature study used U.N. projections that world average temperatures will rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

The trick for the study, Thomas said, was to marry the maps of projected climate change in particular regions with maps describing the habitat -- especially the climate needs -- of plants and animals in the same area.

For this, "we needed to get the people together who knew where the species lived," Thomas said. These were the conservationists on the research team -- ecological experts who study extinctions by looking at traditional culprits: destruction of habitat through agriculture, industry or human settlement; invasive species shoving aside native plants and animals; and hunting and extermination of pests.

"Obviously, plants and animals depend on climate for survival, but we figured that if we protect them in place, they would be all right," Hannah said in a telephone interview from his home in California. "But now we realize that we have to take care of them not only where they are now, but where they might have to go."

The team calculated the effects of climate change on extinctions by using what ecologists J. Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, in an article accompanying the study, called "one of ecology`s few ironclad laws" -- that shrinking habitat supports fewer species.

The study considered a range of possibilities based on the ability of each species to move to a more congenial habitat to escape warming. If all species were able to move, or "disperse," the study said, only 15 percent would be irrevocably headed for extinction by 2050. If no species were able to disperse, the extinction rate could rise as high as 37 percent.

"Reality, of course, will fall somewhere in between," Thomas said.

As an example, he cited Britain`s comma butterfly, a robust flier that hopscotched 160 miles north from 1982 to 1997, feeding all the way -- in its caterpillar phase -- on stinging nettles. By contrast, the silver-studded blue butterfly needs to move north but cannot, because it needs lowland heath to survive, and the gaps between patches of habitat are too large for this weak-winged flier to overcome. As a result, "it has continued to decline," Thomas said.

Pounds, speaking by telephone from his office in Costa Rica`s Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, called the study`s results "ironclad" and "if anything, too conservative." The adverse effects of natural roadblocks would be compounded by "interaction with other changes" such as agriculture, human settlement or invasive species, he said.

"There are different ways you can lose area," Pounds said. "One is to have the habitat directly destroyed. Climate change does the same thing."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Middle East

Kurds start to rock the boat
By Charles Recknagel

PRAGUE - Tensions over Iraqi Kurd demands for substantial autonomy within a future sovereign Iraq are causing unrest in northern Iraq and growing unease among Iraq`s neighbors. In the latest of a string of violent incidents in the northern city of Kirkuk, unidentified attackers fired a rocket at the headquarters of one of the two main Kurdish factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

The attack comes after some 2,000 Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkomans last week surrounded the PUK`s head office to protest Kurdish calls for autonomy and demand that Kirkuk remain under the control of the central government in Baghdad.

At the time, one of the protest leaders, Ali Abdullah of the Democratic Turkoman Unity Party, said the demonstration was to reject any move to turn Iraq into a federal state with autonomous entities. "We have gathered today for this demonstration to proclaim that the Iraqi city of Kirkuk is a city of peace that belongs to all ethnic groups and to say `no` to suggestions of federalism and to say `yes` to the unity and integrity of Iraq," Abdullah said.

Several bursts of gunfire during the protest left at least five people dead and debate is still raging in the city over who fired first - Kurdish police or protesters. Another person was later killed as rival groups clashed in the city center.

Emotions have run high in Kirkuk ever since the collapse of Saddam Hussein`s regime in April brought a dramatic change in its status.

After decades of a Saddam-era "Arabization" program that forced out much of its Kurdish population and replaced it with Arab settlers from elsewhere in the country, Kirkuk is now firmly under Kurdish control. The city has a Kurdish mayor brought to power when Kurdish fighters swept in on the heels of Saddam`s retreating army, and former Kurdish refugees are returning home. Many Arabs and Turkomans accuse the Kurds of grabbing power, while the Kurds say that they are regaining lost rights.

Now, tensions could be ratcheted even higher as Kurdish representatives on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) press for adopting a federal system in which Kurdish-controlled areas would have a large degree of authority over security, taxes and revenues from local oil fields. They hope to see that authority framed within the "transitional law" the IGC is drafting to serve as a temporary constitution paving the way for a sovereign Iraqi government to take power at the end of June.

The Kurdish initiative is politically sensitive not only because it affects the fate of Kirkuk and the rich Kirkuk oil fields. It also could force Iraqi leaders to begin deciding now the future shape of the Iraqi state: whether it will be divided into ethnic and religious-based regions or be tightly knit under a central government.

That speeds up a debate which, before the March/April war, saw Iraqi exiles agree Iraq should have a federal system but since then has seen many in Iraq and in neighboring states worry the formula could lead to the country`s disintegration.

Mike Amitay of the Washington Kurdish Institute in Washington DC, says there are several reasons Kurdish leaders have decided to press their autonomy demands now, rather than wait until Iraq forms a sovereign government and begins working on a permanent constitution.

One reason is Kurdish unhappiness with the economic and political upheavals in much of the country. Amitay says many Kurds feel they need autonomy to protect the relative stability and economic prosperity they have enjoyed since breaking away from Saddam-controlled Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.

"I think the Kurds have determined at this point that they need to essentially function or promote their political agenda separate from the wider agenda - that is quite confused - being considered for the whole of Iraq," Amitay said.

Amitay also says that the Kurds feel they must act now, while the Coalition Provisional Authority still retains political control over the country. He says some Kurdish leaders feel they can win backing from the US because of Washington`s interest in rapidly and smoothly turning over power and because of the aid the Kurdish factions have given US forces.

"They see the timetable [for rapidly handing over power] as being motivated only by the [US] administration`s concerns about Iraq in the headlines in November [2004, when US presidential elections will be held]. So, they feel that they have an advantage in that the coalition owes them, perhaps, for their alliance, for not having to station combat troops in their area, for maintaining their own affairs, for running the different sectors of their society in a fairly painless fashion," Amitay said.

At the same time, the Kurds are determined to ensure they retain a future share of Iraq`s oil income. Prior to the UN-administered oil-for-food program, which allocated 13 percent of Iraq`s oil earnings to the Kurdish areas, the Kurds had to depend on Baghdad`s goodwill for any share of revenues.

Amitay says the Kurds see control of the Kirkuk oil fields as the best guarantee they will get the money they need to keep their economy going. "The bottom line is the distribution of Kirkuk`s oil resources," he said. "In order for the [Kurdish parties] to continue running their administrations and maintaining their sort of patronage systems, there needs to be a guaranteed stream of revenue. And we have seen in the past when that stream dries up, when hostile neighbors cut the flow of goods and materials into Kurdistan, the parties get edgy and even begin to fight each other for the crumbs."

So far, there is no sign that either the Iraqi Governing Council or Washington will resolve the complicated issue of the Kurds` autonomy demands quickly.

"The New York Times" on Tuesday quoted a senior legal adviser to the chairman of the IGC committee drafting the "transitional law" as saying the board is trying to reconcile the differences between its own draft and that proposed by the Kurds.

Feisal Istrabadi said: "There is substantial agreement that the status quo in the Kurdish region would be maintained during the transitional period." But he said no one is ready to accept building a federal Iraq made up of states defined by ethnic or religious identities. He gave no details of any discussion on the future of Kirkuk or its oil fields.

Washington has said that it will not step into the debate but will leave the matter for the Iraqis to decide. US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said: "We have always supported and will continue to support Iraq`s political unity and territorial integrity. The Kurds are members of the Governing Council, and have themselves expressed commitment to a unified Iraq. The structure of a future Iraqi state, including federalist elements, is a constitutional issue for Iraq to decide."

As tensions over the autonomy demands grow, several neighboring states are watching with increasing unease. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned Iraq against creating any Kurdish or other ethnic entity. He said in an interview with CNN Turk television: "This is a red line and should be [seen as such] by all countries in the region, especially Iraq`s neighbors."

Turkey, too, has repeatedly warned in the past against substantial autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan, calling it a step toward independence. Both Syria and Turkey reportedly fear that creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq would inspire their own Kurdish minorities to seek greater freedoms. Ankara recently quashed a 15-year rebellion seeking Kurdish-self rule in southern Turkey that claimed more than 36,000 lives.

Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

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THE WORLD



Iraqis Are Bitter Over U.S.-Held Prisoners
Coalition prepares to free 506 men as anger grows. Many detainees have yet to be charged.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

January 8, 2004

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq — Visitors hold scraps of paper bearing identification numbers as they pass coils of razor wire and walk across a muddy field toward the prison, where sons, husbands, cousins and other suspected insurgents have been held for months by U.S. forces.

Fathers fidget with prayer beads and curse the soldiers who snatched their boys. Mothers pull their abayas tight against the wind, checking lists of names posted on plywood. Imams come with Korans. Those who can afford to, bring lawyers. Brothers carry food and plastic bags of clothing and wait amid the roar of Humvees.

Iraqis resent many things about the U.S. occupation, but the detention of roughly 13,000 prisoners — most of whom have not been formally charged — has triggered intense disgust. The U.S. contends that the detainees have links to the Saddam Hussein loyalists and insurgents attacking coalition forces. Families say many prisoners are innocent and were unjustly handcuffed, blindfolded and led from their villages in humiliation.

"We got rid of Saddam, and the Americans told us we`d enjoy liberty," said Basim Mohammed Rashid as he waited here at Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad to visit his brother Yasser. "But this is not liberty. If my brother has committed a crime, then we can get a lawyer. But we know nothing about my brother`s case…. This is not democracy, no matter what the Americans claim."

The U.S. will attempt to ease such anger this week as it begins releasing 506 detainees, including 28 juveniles, in a new program to free nonviolent suspects and generate goodwill among the public. The move comes after months of criticism from religious leaders and human rights groups over the treatment and length of prisoners` stays in coalition custody. The move also reflects the complex legal and emotional terrain the U.S. faces in battling an insurgency while trying not to lose credibility with the Iraqi people.

For many families waiting beneath the guardhouse towers here, that credibility has long vanished. The disenchantment was visible on the face of a woman who held a crumpled paper listing the names of her three sons. She had not seen them since their arrest July 29, and was told Wednesday that she had mixed up visitation days and would not be allowed in the prison. She held up the paper and walked away.

Others stepped into the line.

*

Unkept Promises

"We keep receiving promises that they`ll be released, but they never are," said Abu Adnan, whose two brothers, one a former army officer, the other a merchant, were seized in Mosul in July. "The Americans lie to us. They raid our houses. They confiscate our money. Why are they not sending these detainees to court? Is this logical? These men are human beings with children and families."

Many in Abu Ghraib prison are suspected of being guerrillas or of collaborating with the insurgents who have killed hundreds of Iraqis and coalition troops. U.S. officials say each detainee`s case is periodically reviewed and that prisoners are held in accordance with the rules of the Geneva Convention governing occupied territories.

Most suspects are held for 72 hours after arrest, they say; those deemed nonthreatening are released, but those considered security risks may be held for an unspecified length of time.

Concern over the fate of prisoners has intensified in recent months as U.S. forces have conducted raids throughout Iraq and locked up hundreds of suspects in a string of detention camps. These more aggressive tactics and Hussein`s arrest in December, according to coalition officials, are weakening the guerrilla movement. Troops have been focusing most intensely on the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad, an area that is home to many of the detainees.

Scores of people from this region travel the highway to Abu Ghraib each day to visit relatives. The prison of beige walls and low buildings housed hundreds of criminals and political prisoners during Hussein`s rule. It was the nation`s largest and most notorious prison, a place known for its deplorable living conditions, overcrowding, torture and executions.

Now, after a dramatic shift in power and politics, the prison is filled with suspected enemies of the coalition. It stands, for many Iraqis, as an emblem of past — and continuing — injustice.

Mahmoud Shukur Mahmoud is inmate No. 151064.

His father, Shukur, arrived at the prison Wednesday with a folded paper from the Red Cross. It said his son was captured by U.S. forces on Sept. 25. Mahmoud had written a letter on the back: "I am in good health in this camp with brothers and relatives. My regards to Mother and Grandmother. We are good in general. The people with us are good people. All of them are suspected by mistake. We are waiting to be released with God`s will. I miss you."

*

Searching for Answers

Wearing a kaffiyeh and a blue jacket, Shukur stood with other fathers around a plywood shelter. None had heard that the coalition planned to release hundreds of prisoners in coming days. They read posted regulations forbidding visitors from bringing cigarettes, pencils and medication.

Tribal leaders gathered and searched for names of missing family members. Some accused the U.S. soldiers of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from their homes — apparently not understanding that they were given receipts for money confiscated during raids.

Shukur listened. He said he didn`t understand what had brought him to these prison walls.

He said Mahmoud and his friends were in a minibus heading to a picnic when U.S. soldiers stopped them in Mosul about 7 a.m. There had been an explosion hours earlier and the streets were tense.

Shukur said his son and six others, including the minibus driver, an engineering student, were arrested.

"They were going on a picnic," Shukur said. "Now I`d like to know what`s going on. We went to many lawyers, but they tell us they can do nothing because the Americans have them. I came to see my son today. I wasn`t allowed in. We didn`t expect this of the Americans, but now we`re expecting far worse."

Mohammed Hussein checked the lists in the plywood shelter and then the number in his hand. He was at the right place. His brother, a shopkeeper from Balad whose name he would not give, was inside.

"I have my brother`s identification number now," Hussein said. "I hope they will let me see him. What can I say? I`m sure that more than half the people inside have done nothing. It`s the informants. They`re using personal vendettas to make up fictitious charges."

Wafa Salman Majeed waited near Hussein in the mud. Her sons — Atheer, Lahib and Umar — were sleeping in their home in Diala in August when soldiers entered the house at 4 a.m. and handcuffed them. Their father was a Baath Party official who has since vanished. Majeed said her sons were not politically active and had no ties to insurgents. "Why can`t they release at least one of my sons?" she said. "They were polite boys, and now all the village feels sad."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY


When Did We Become the Land of the Fearful?
By David L. Ulin

January 8, 2004



I spent my winter vacation feeling victimized, terrorized. In other words, I traveled by air. As the Homeland Security alert level rose to orange, the fear level went right up with it — ratcheted by the powers that be, fueled by vague public information, hyped by an apocalypse-loving media. What astonished me was the extent to which I bought into the hysteria, the extent to which I betrayed myself.

It didn`t start that way. The morning I left Los Angeles, I watched security officials swab my baggage, less scared than angry at how I was being manipulated: lined up, ordered about like a suspect, reminded again and again to report suspicious behavior. "Don`t talk back or they`ll arrest you as a terrorist," muttered one of my fellow passengers as we stood first in one line, then another, avoiding eye contact, behaving like scared rabbits and potential snitches.

Then came a week of flight cancellations, endless conjecture on cable news shows, administration officials claiming an attack was imminent. By the time I flew again, this time to New York City, a good part of my anger had catalyzed to fear. When Air France aborted six flights between Paris and Los Angeles, I began to wonder if I would get back to LAX and home. Toward the end of the New York flight, as the pilot flew up the Hudson, providing a vivid view of Manhattan, all I could think was how vulnerable we were. I pointed out the Empire State Building and Central Park to my children, but I only saw targets, imagining the whine of overloaded engines, the plane knifing from the sky.

New York was grimly — perhaps inevitably — Orange Alert observant, attentive to the free-floating anxiety that terror provokes in us. But it hardly consoled me to be herded behind yellow lines while my bags were scrutinized, to have museum guards go through dozens of camera cases, as if each person in line were plotting some catastrophic event.

"Better safe than sorry," said a woman behind me in a long security line one afternoon at New York`s Museum of Natural History. But it`s impossible to gauge what "safe" means anymore. Surely the next attack won`t be triggered by terrorists waiting patiently in line, not when they can choose the wide-open park across the street, the restaurant on the corner, the sidewalk 10 yards outside the door.

That hit home when I led my kids into Grand Central Station, headed for the subway. We were greeted by uniformed National Guard troops, their M-16s angled toward the ground. I began to think about escape routes and then, all of a sudden, amid the crowds surging beneath the vaulted constellation ceiling of the station, I understood how ridiculous it was, how paralyzing, and how useless in the end.

Of course, terror is the wild card we live with, the new baseline for reality. We must acknowledge it, prepare as best we can, but to suppose that with enough surveillance and checkpoints we might truly secure ourselves is a pernicious fantasy. If you doubt this, consider Israel. The more we queue up — docile, frightened — the more we let the real terrorists win.

This is, in part, a matter of civic identity. I come down on the side of Benjamin Franklin, who once said, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." Yet even more, it`s an issue of how we live every day, of whether we give in or stand up to hysteria. Terror alerts don`t make us much safer, they make us more scared. They make us turn our public spaces into no man`s lands, where we are always peering over shoulders, staring at one another with suspicion, searching for the next act of devastation even as it unfolds within our hearts.

Is there an alternative? I spent some time on New Year`s Day talking to a friend who works in Times Square, which is surely a prime target for anyone seeking a symbol to destroy. Yes, she said, she worries, but not on an Orange Alert timeline. "You should understand," she said, laughing. "You`re a Californian. It`s like living with earthquakes."

And she`s right. Danger, after all, is always with us, just below the surface of the everyday. As individuals we can`t keep it from occasionally exploding; we can only keep it from taking over our lives. Fear does not protect us, it only generates more fear.

I tried to keep that in mind as I flew home, through skies full of undiverted airplanes, flying over cities that, alerts and rumors notwithstanding, would make it through the holidays intact.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David L. Ulin edited "Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology" (Library of America, 2002). His book "The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith" will be published by Viking Penguin in July.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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U.S. helicopter goes down near Fallujah, eight killed including four soldiers

Thursday, January 8, 2004
©2004 Associated Press

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/01/08/international0738EST0493.DTL


(01-08) 04:38 PST BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --

A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter went down in Iraq on Thursday, and all eight people on board were killed, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

The military said it was an "emergency landing" but gave no further details. At least four of the victims were soldiers, she said.

The helicopter went down near Fallujah, the spokeswoman said. The area, west of Baghdad, is a hotbed of the insurgency against the U.S. occupation.

A U.S. helicopter was shot down Jan. 3 in the same area, killing one soldier. Military officials said it almost certainly was shot down by rebels.

In the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces since the Iraq invasion began in March, 17 soldiers were killed on Nov. 15 when two Black Hawk helicopters collided above Mosul in what the military called a likely grenade attack.

On Nov. 2, a Chinook helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, killing 16 American soldiers and injuring 26. The military believes a SA-7 shoulder-fired missile slammed into one of the chopper`s rear-mounted engines.

©2004 Associated Press

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We`re all survivors seeking meaning in Iraq
Robert Jay Lifton
Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGB3410FH1.DTL


American leaders are seeking something extra from the capture of Saddam Hussein: a recasting of the invasion of Iraq into a justified war. Working against this triumphalism is the continuing drumbeat of American deaths.

While the impact of these deaths may be temporarily diminished by Hussein`s capture, they are still tallied one at a time by the media and have already had an erosive effect on the American psyche.

The most searing forms of grief are naturally experienced by immediate family members of the dead, but Americans in general become survivors who experience pain and loss, share in the various forms of death anxiety such news brings on, and so are forced to wrestle with increasingly awkward questions about the situation within which these deaths take place.

It is in the nature of all survivors to desperately seek meaning in death, and that meaning, once discovered, can become the basis for an overriding survivor mission -- a sustained and passionate advocacy that, by giving significance to a death, asserts new power over life. How that survivor mission is defined, even by relatively small groups of people, may profoundly affect the Bush administration`s ability to act in Iraq.

Americans experienced such survivor emotions in connection with the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and the resulting 3,000 deaths. Feeling ourselves victimized by attacks condemned by most of the world and readily viewed as crimes against humanity, we quickly found various meanings for that event, virtually all of which included the right to some use of force to bring those responsible to justice.

The administration went further, embarking on a survivor mission of a vast war on terrorism, which in turn became part of a larger strategic doctrine of global military dominance. This increasingly indiscriminate survivor mission came to encompass the invasion of Iraq, a country ruled by a vicious dictator with no known connection to Sept. 11.

Still, people inevitably rallied around the flag, and for many Americans, the deaths of our soldiers in Iraq initially called forth a traditional response to soldiers killed in war: a commitment to a survivor mission of completing the task of the fallen by achieving final "victory."

Certainly, that survivor mission is still strong, fueled by the understandable need to believe that such deaths were not in vain. But an alternative survivor response -- one that certainly brings Vietnam memories to mind -- has begun to appear. It finds its meaning in an angry condemnation of wasted lives and in a survivor mission of ending the killing and replacing the government that brought it about.

This more critical expression of survivor meaning has probably been experienced in connection with every war in history. It is certainly present in the writing of Homer, although frequently drowned out by more traditional assertions of glory and purpose.

In the case of World War I, such alternative expressions of survivor meaning created a vast body of postwar literature, infused not only with condemnations of those who sent young men into pointless carnage but also with painful self-recrimination. Who can forget Wilfred Owen`s lines: "Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were./ I am the enemy you killed, my friend./ I knew you in this dark. ...?

A significant minority of Vietnam veterans seized upon this version of survivor meaning to reject their own war even while it was in progress. By doing so, they played an important role in bringing that war to an end. In brilliantly staged public theater, hundreds of them cast their medals onto the steps of the Capitol building, bitterly invoking the names of dead comrades. Their message was that meaning could be found only in the meaninglessness of those deaths.

Americans seem to be entering an in-between stage in relation to deaths from our ever-more-costly war in Iraq. Pained and angry statements by family members of soldiers killed suggest considerable conflict over what survivor meaning to give the deaths of their sons or daughters or spouses. A mother recently quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution declared: "My son`s death was senseless. Whatever the leadership of our country said we`d find, they`ve not come up with."

For many, it is increasingly difficult to stifle the feeling that these deaths were needless sacrifices in a misguided war. Indeed, Americans are experiencing what can be called a conflict of interpretation.

The capture of Saddam Hussein has given a bump in the polls to the war glorifiers and to the administration-encouraged falsehood that Hussein was involved in Sept. 11. But the opposite interpretation of the war as a dubious venture leading to an untenable occupation continues to be fed by sustained Iraqi resistance and the American deaths it causes, as well as by continuing revelations of official contradictions and deceptions. That shift in meaning can only greatly diminish our capacity to tolerate further casualties, rendering each death a new trauma.

Psychological outcomes are no more predictable than political ones, but there are indications that this critical, war-condemning survivor mission has its own momentum. Painful doubts and angers concerning the legitimacy of our cause in Iraq have taken hold in the American psyche.

Such feelings are primal, involving as they do a sense of responsibility to the dead. They cannot be stilled by the image of Hussein under medical examination or in the dock.

Robert Jay Lifton is a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of "Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima."

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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SPIEGEL ONLINE - 08. Januar 2004, 12:25
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,280978,00.html


Milliarden-Defizit

IWF attackiert US-Regierung

In ungewöhnlicher Schärfe greift der Internationale Währungsfonds die Finanzpolitik von US-Präsident Bush an: Das horrende Haushaltsdefizit der USA, so die Ökonomen, sei eine ernste Gefahr für das weltwirtschaftliche Gleichgewicht. Der IWF fordert den US-Kongress auf, die Schulden so schnell wie möglich abzubauen.

Washington - In einem am Mittwoch in Washington veröffentlichten Bericht warnen IWF-Ökonomen davor, dass die Nettoschulden der USA in wenigen Jahren auf bis zu 40 Prozent ihrer gesamten Wirtschaftsleistung anwachsen könnten. Noch vor wenigen Jahren habe die Regierung den Abbau sämtlicher Staatsschulden im Blick gehabt. "Seitdem hat eine Kombination aus zyklischen, geopolitischen und politischen Faktoren die Errungenschaften fiskalischer Konsolidierung eines ganzen Jahrzehnts ausradiert, und das kurz vor der Pensionierung der geburtenstarken Jahrgänge", hält der IWF fest.



US-Präsident Bush: Rüffel von den Experten des IWF

Das "beispiellose Schuldenniveau für eine große Industrienation" führe zu Verwerfungen an den Devisenmärkten, steigenden Zinsen und schade somit der internationalen Konjunktur. Den derzeitigen Zustand der US-Staatsfinanzen bezeichneten die IWF-Forscher als langfristig gefährlich.
Die Attacke kommt zu einer politisch heiklen Zeit, dem Beginn des US-Wahlkampfes. Ungewöhnlich ist die Schärfe der Attacke: In den vergangenen Jahren galt der IWF eher als US-freundlich, folgte während vergangener Währungskrisen eher amerikanischen Vorgaben. Seit knapp vier Jahren wird der in Washington ansässige Fonds von dem Deutschen Horst Köhler geleitet.

Unterstützung bekommt der IWF von prominenter Seite: Die Warnung sei "richtig", erklärte Fred Bergsten, Direktor des ebenfalls in Washington beheimateten Instituts für Internationale Wirtschaft.

Hauptrisiko Dollarabsturz

Als Hauptrisiko sehen die Washingtoner Experten die Gefahr, dass die bisherige Abwertung des US-Dollars vor allem gegenüber dem Euro und dem Yen zunehmend ungeordnet verlaufen könnte. "Bislang verlief die Abwärtsbewegung des Dollar in recht geordneten Bahnen", sagte Charles Collyns, verantwortlicher IWF-Mitarbeiter für die US-Wirtschaft. "Aber bereits jetzt hat diese geordnete Bewegung in anderen Ländern, wie der Euro-Zone und Japan, makroökonomische Entscheidungen kompliziert." Er fügte hinzu: "Die Hebel, die sie haben, um auf ein weiteres Steigen ihrer Wechselkurse zu reagieren, sind durchaus begrenzt." Der IWF sei besorgt, dass sich das Problem verschärfen könnte, wenn die USA nicht tätig würden.

Collyns verwies zudem in einer Pressekonferenz auf die wachsenden Risiken für ausländische Investoren, sich in US-Titeln zu engagieren. Dies sei einer der wesentlichen Gründe für die aktuelle Dollar-Schwäche, sagte er.

US-Finanzminister John Snow verkündete unterdessen, dass die Regierung dazu stehe, den Fehlbetrag in den kommenden fünf Jahren zu halbieren. Gleichzeitig sollten aber die von der Bush-Administration beschlossenen Steuersenkungen dauerhafte Gültigkeit haben, sagte der Finanzminister am Mittwoch in Washington. Snow warnte davor, dass der Kongress die wirtschaftliche Erholung in den USA gefährden würde, wenn er die Steuererleichterungen rückgängig machen würde.

Derzeit geht das Weiße Haus davon aus, dass das Haushaltsdefizit im Fiskaljahr 2004 auf den Rekordbetrag von 475 Milliarden Dollar steigen wird. Snow bezeichnete dieses Niveau als handhabbar. Der IWF verwies in seinem Bericht allerdings darauf, dass es nicht reichen werde, den Fehlbetrag in den kommenden Jahren nur zu halbieren.





Zum Thema:

In SPIEGEL ONLINE: · Konjunktur zu anfällig: EZB lässt Leitzins unverändert (08.01.2004)
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,280998,00.html

· Irak: US-Kampfhubschrauber abgestürzt - acht Tote (08.01.2004)
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,280989,00.html

· Irak: USA ziehen Teil der Waffensucher ab (08.01.2004)
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,281000,00.html




Im Internet: · Euro-Rallye: Das riskante Spiel der Vereinigten Staaten
http://www.manager-magazin.de/geld/artikel/0,2828,280755,00.…

[Joerver]

Thursday, January 08, 2004
War News for January 8, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, 34 wounded in mortar attack near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: US Black Hawk crashes near Fallujah. Eight soldiers killed.

Bring ‘em on: Pipeline destroyed near Kirkuk.

British soldier killed in training accident near Basra.

WMD team withdrawn from Iraq.

Bushies “misrepresented” WMD threat in Iraq.

Troops unimpressed with Rummy’s re-up bonus plan.

Local militias pose threat to internal security.

Power failures continue in Iraq.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:52 AM
Comments (11)

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White House Issues Iraq WMD Correction
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WASHINGTON, DC (IWR News Parody) Scott McClellan confirmed today that all WMD references have been corrected on the White House web server to make the president look less like the moron that he really is.
"We decided, after it was revealed in yesterdays newspapers papers that Iraq`s Arsenal Was Only on Paper and that the White House `distorted` Iraq threat, that we needed to take some preemptive action to make the president seem to know what he was talking about in his old speeches.

You know, its the same sort of revision that we did for that Mission Accomplished gaff.

Wherever the president or vice president mentioned WMD, nuclear weapons, thousands of tons of chemical weapons, etc., we just inserted `Iraq has some silly drawings`, said McClellan.

[Joerver]

An American Black Hawk helicopter crashed in a field in the village of Jumayla, south of Fallujah, Iraq.
January 8, 2004
U.S. Helicopter Crashes in Iraq, Killing at Least 9
By NEELA BANERJEE
and KIRK SEMPLE

JUMAYLA, Iraq, Jan. 8 — An American military helicopter crashed in farmland here today killing all nine people on board, the American military said.

The helicopter, a UH-60 Black Hawk, came down in a patchwork of potato fields in this tiny village about 6 miles south of Falluja, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of heavy resistance to the American-led occupation.

"We do not have any information on the cause of the crash at this time," Specialist Nicci Trent, a military spokeswoman in Baghdad, said.

The helicopter was on a medical evacuation mission when it crashed, Specialist Trent said, though she provided no further details about the mission.

Several villagers in Jumayla said they saw the aircraft catch fire in the air and fall to the ground. At least two witnesses said they saw some sort of projectile hit the helicopter, igniting the fire.

American troops immediately cordoned off the area and did not allow reporters to get near the wreckage.

The military originally reported this morning that the helicopter was carrying eight people — four crew members and four passengers — but later amended the number to nine, all of whom died. Military officials said they did not know how many of the nine were crew members or whether the helicopter was heading toward or returning from the medical evacuation.

Insurgents have shot down several American military helicopters, most recently on Jan. 2, when they downed an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior observation copter, also near Falluja, killing one crewman. In November, four helicopters were downed, killing more than 40 soldiers.

Helicopters are a frequent sight above Jumayla and its environs as they fly from a nearby military base to Baghdad.

Also today, a United States Air Force cargo plane carrying 63 passengers and crew members was apparently hit by a surface-to-air missile as it departed from the Baghdad international aiport, but it managed to land safely, news services reported.

The helicopter crash came a day after insurgents fired six mortar rounds at an American military camp about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding 33 in an area used for living quarters, the military said.

The military originally announced 35 casualties in the attack, but lowered that number to 34 today. The Associated Press reported that a civilian was also wounded in the barrage, which would account for the 35th casualty.

A Pentagon spokesman quoted by The Associated Press, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said overnight that some of the wounded returned to duty shortly after the attack, while others remained in the hospital. The military provided no further details on the severity of the injuries.

There was also confusion today surrounding an American plan to free several hundred Iraqis held in American camps in Iraq. On Wednesday, the chief United States administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, formally announced the plan, which involves about 500 of the 9,000 Iraqis held in American camps in Iraq, beginning with an initial release of about 100 today.

About 60 prisoners today were freed from Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, and some news reports linked the release to Mr. Bremer`s statement on Wednesday.

But while a spokesman for Mr. Bremer said this afternoon that the release program was under way, he would not confirm whether the Abu Ghraib inmates seen leaving the prison in the back of military trucks were part of the program.

"Over the next couple of weeks, we`ll be releasing up to about 500 prisoners," said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

The A.P. quoted another American official saying that the prisoner release at Abu Ghraib "had nothing to do with Bremer`s announcement."

Separately, American plans to formally return sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 were jarred by a statement on Wednesday from the country`s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Mr. Sistani said the plan to install a transitional government by June, to be followed by indirect elections next year to choose delegates to a constitutional convention, would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people."

The reclusive cleric said he preferred that elections be held before the transfer of sovereignty in June. But he said that he had been told by the Americans that this was not feasible — a stand that Mr. Bremer has explained by saying there is not time to prepare accurate and comprehensive voter rolls in Iraq, which has 25 million people and no history of free elections.

There had to be "another solution that is honest to the Iraqi people`s demands," the cleric said.

Mr. Sistani`s statements have been closely watched by Americans for signs of whether Iraq`s Shiite majority, about 60 percent of the population, will accept the longer political process favored by the Bush administration, which endeavors to win wide assent to a constitution that guarantees minority rights.

The Americans` fear is that Shiite clerics will push for a quick transition to majority rule, heightening the risk of violent clashes, even a civil war, between Shiite militants and the Sunni Muslim minority, to which Saddam Hussein and many in his former inner circle belong.

The United States command in Iraq said the mortar attack Wednesday night occurred at Logistical Base Seitz, near Balad. The city is the site of an Iraqi air base that has been converted into the largest American air base in Iraq.

The attack appeared to be similar to one on Saturday at another American camp near Balad, in which an American soldier standing at the door of his living quarters was struck and killed by a mortar shell fired from outside the base.

Such attacks reflect a changing pattern in the war, senior American officers say. In mid-November, the United States command began major offensives using much of the powerful weaponry at its disposal — sustained artillery barrages, aerial bombing and airborne assaults with large numbers of helicopters. That, in turn, has led the insurgents to shift tactics and an increasing tendency to attack "soft" targets, American commanders say.

Mortars have been an increasingly favored weapon, commanders say, because they allow the attackers to remain miles from the targets. Shrapnel from exploding mortar shells can inflict severe injuries, often to the lower part of the body.

Nearly 500 American soldiers have died from war wounds or accidents since United States forces invaded Iraq in March, and several thousand have been wounded, many severely, according to Pentagon statistics.

Nonetheless, American commanders have over all begun to sound far more upbeat about the conflict since the capture of Mr. Hussein near Tikrit on Dec. 13.

Neela Banerjee contributed reporting for this article from Jumayla, John F. Burns from Baghdad and Kirk Semple from New York.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Deep Thought]

The helicopter was on a medical evacuation mission when it crashed, Specialist Trent said, though she provided no further details about the mission.

Klar, deswegen hat der ja auch keine roten Kreuze, nicht wahr?

Hollywood laesst gruessen... schlechtes Drehbuch, wuerde ich sagen....

[Deep Thought]

GI beim grosszuegigen Verteilen von Mullbinden...

[Joerver]

Published on Thursday, January 8, 2004 by the Christian Science Monitor
The Myth of the Populist Stock Market
by David Callahan

Wall Street analysts are predicting another great year for the stock market in 2004, and Americans are again pouring their savings into stocks. Tens of billions of dollars have flowed back into equities since last summer. As the Dow and Nasdaq soar, more money is likely to follow. There are also signs of a revival of the `90s myth of the populist stock market -a myth in which Wall Street gives everyone on Main Street a shot at a better life.

Can Americans possibly fall once more for this nonsense? Maybe. The scandals of recent years, most lately in the mutual-fund industry, have done little to debunk the notion that Wall Street is geared toward ordinary investors and that stocks offer a universal path to wealth creation. At the height of the boom, however, the bottom three-quarters of American households owned less than 15 percent of all stock. Barely a third of households hold more than $ 5,000 in stock. Most Americans have more debt on their credit cards than money in their mutual funds.

Stock-market gains have reflected the top-heavy ownership patterns. Between 1989 and 1997, the most recent year for which there is good data, 86 percent of stock market gains went to just the top 10 percent of households. Yet when the market tanked, it was often ordinary investors who felt the sharpest pain - pain that many will cope with well into retirement. According to a March survey by Greenwich Associates, major retirement pension plans lost $ 1 trillion from the beginning of 2000 through beginning of 2003.

Apart from getting burned by the vast scams in tech stocks, those ordinary Americans who did try to benefit from the last bull market got mauled in myriad smaller ways. Thousands of Americans are suing financial firms over things like hidden fees and inflated commissions, dishonest investing advice, and reckless trading practices. In the past two years, investors have filed more than 2,000 cases alleging "churning" by their brokers - that is, unnecessary trading to rack up commission fees.

Today, as middle-class investors go back into the water, the sharks are still there. While many investors will make gains if the market continues to rise - and stocks are probably a better place to put your money than under a mattress - the crackdown so far on Wall Street abuses is not very reassuring. Big firms like Merrill Lynch got only a slap on the wrist for misleading investors and admitted no wrongdoing. In 2002, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer helped to extract a $ 1.4 billion settlement from America`s top 10 brokerage firms, but not a single individual in those firms faced criminal charges or admitted personal responsibility.

Although it`s too early to predict the final outcomes of the mutual-fund investigations - which revealed yet more unfair practices that hurt ordinary investors - it appears that the accused in these cases are also headed for a soft landing, given the lax laws governing the fund industry until recently. In all, it`s hard to see why future wrongdoers on Wall Street will be deterred by any of the punishments that authorities have meted out so far.

Meanwhile, self-regulation, the first line of defense against bad behavior by brokerage firms, remains something of a joke. The National Association of Securities Dealers is notorious for its lax discipline of miscreant brokers who prey on investors. NASD remains ill-equipped to police more than 600,000 securities dealers in the US or to dutifully investigate the 5,000 or so consumer complaints it receives every year.

And the biggest cop on the Wall Street beat, the SEC, still lacks the muscle to really do its job, despite all the lessons learned during the past few years about the costs of weak regulation.

The SEC`s weakness has been driven home anew by the mutual-fund scandals. The SEC failed to prevent - or even notice - these scandals, not only because it lacked the staff and expertise to adequately police the nation`s 13,000 mutual funds, but also because special-interest money blocked stronger reform efforts in Washington. Indeed, in the wake of the corporate scandals that began with Enron, the financial-services industry has stepped up its efforts to influence lawmakers.

In the 2002 election cycle, securities and investment firms gave $ 59 million in campaign donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These firms have already contributed more than $ 20 million toward the 2004 election. That money comes on top of the $ 30 million-plus a year the industry spends on direct lobbying.

Investors on Main Street think good times are here again. Yet amid signs of a returning bull market, there is plenty of evidence that Wall Street has not fully mended its ways.

In this climate, the most important asset for any smart investor is a long memory.

David Callahan is research director at Demos, a public policy group in New York. His new book is `The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.` Visit www.cheatingculture.com to learn more.

Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor.

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Military Fatalities:

*US**UK**Other**Total

496**56****40****592

The Wounded:

Hostile**Non Hostile**Total

*2431*******383*******2814

Latest Military Fatality Date: 1/8/2004
01/08/04 Reuters: Missile May Have Hit Plane Over Baghdad
A big U.S. military cargo jet may have been hit by a missile before it made an emergency safe return to Baghdad airport with 63 passengers and crew on Thursday, a U.S. military official said.
01/08/04 CENTCOM Confirms 9 Killed in Crash
Nine soldiers were killed when the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter they were in crashed at approximately 2:20 p.m. Jan. 8 south of Fallujah.
01/08/04 AP: UPDATE- Copter Goes Down in Iraq, Killing 9
A U.S. Black Hawk medivac helicopter crashed Thursday near a stronghold of the anti-American insurgency, killing all nine soldiers aboard, the U.S. military said
01/08/04 Reuters: Eight die in Black Hawk crash
A U.S. Black Hawk military helicopter has come down near the volatile town of Falluja west of Baghdad, killing all eight people on board, the U.S. military says.
01/08/04 MOD: British Fatality Identified
Ministry of Defence has to confirm that Lance Corporal Andrew Jason Craw, 1st Battalion Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, died following a tragic incident on a training range near Basrah
01/08/04 Centcom: Update 1 Killed - 33 Wounded
One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed, thirty-three soldiers were wounded and one civilian was wounded as a result of the mortar attack at Logistical Base Seitz
01/07/04 Centcom: 35 Wounded at Logistical Base Seitz
For more information, please contact Maj. Scott Slaten, 3rd COSCOM Public Affairs Office, located at the Media Operations Center, Camp Anaconda, Balad, Iraq, or by email at: [e-mail]
01/07/04 AP: 35 U.S. Soldiers Wounded In Mortar Attack
Thirty-five U.S. soldiers were wounded Wednesday in a mortar attack on a U.S. base west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
01/07/04 BBC: British soldier killed in Iraq
A Scottish soldier has died after a "tragic incident" on a training range in Iraq, the Ministry of Defence said.
01/07/04 AP: Sniper Attacks Punctuate Eerie Calm
Sniper attacks and driveby shootings are the new hit-and-run tactics confronting the U.S. occupiers of Saddam Hussein`s birthplace, punctuating an eerie calm that has settled on this tense town since the dictator`s capture.
01/07/04 ABC: Saboteurs destroy Kirkuk oil pipeline
Northern Oil Company director general Adel Kazzaz says an explosion tore up a line connecting oil fields to a pumping station in the area around Hassiba, 135 kilometres west of Kirkuk.
01/06/04 DOD: Fatality Confirmed
Spc. Luke P. Frist, 20, of West Lafayette, Ind., died of wounds on Jan. 5 at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
01/06/04 itv: British troops attacked in Basra
British troops have come under attack by an angry crowd of former Iraqi soldiers in the southern city of Basra during a protest over unpaid wages
01/06/04 Skynews: Two French nationals killed
Two French nationals have been killed and a third wounded in a drive-by shooting in the Iraqi town of Fallujah.

[Joerver]

Iraq report undermines Bush doctrine

By Stephen Fidler in London

January 7 2004: (Financial Times) Intelligence failures in the run-up to war with Iraq and evidence that US intelligence bowed to political pressures in assessing the threat posed by Iraq undermine a critical element of the Bush administration`s national security doctrine, according to a report to be published on Thursday by a Washington think-tank.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests that the US intelligence structure cannot sustain the doctrine of pre-emptive war as outlined in the administration`s 2002 National Security Strategy document.

The doctrine places heavy reliance on strong intelligence that a future threat exists. But in the case of Iraq, US intelligence was clearly unable to provide accurate information necessary for reliably acting in the absence of an obvious imminent threat.

The Carnegie report recommends that the doctrine that attempts to justify the US going to war unilaterally in the absence of an immediate threat should be eliminated.

It calls for a top-level bipartisan committee to be convened to examine the intelligence record. If it confirmed the politicisation of intelligence suggested by the Carnegie study, Congress should consider professionalising the post of Director of Central Intelligence, perhaps along the lines of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who, once nominated and confirmed by the Senate, cannot be removed from office by the administration during his fixed term.

The report says that the National Security Strategy`s dismissal of the suggestion that "rogue states" can be influenced by deterrence should be re-examined in the light of the evidence from Iraq. On the contrary, it said the evidence showed that the constraints provided by the pre-war policy of sanctions, weapons inspectors and military action did work to stop the effective development of Iraqi weapons programmes.

An article in yesterday`s Washington Post provides some support of this position.

It describes nascent efforts to develop long-range missiles and to develop viruses, but neither of these appear to have left the drawing board. The evidence suggests there was no reconstituted nuclear programme, as alleged by vice-president Dick Cheney in August 2002, when he said: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

It provides new evidence to support the theory that western intelligence and United Nations inspectors were told the real extent of Iraq`s programmes of weapons of mass destruction back in 1995 by the most senior defector from Iraq during the 1990s - General Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein`s son-in-law. Gen Kamel defected in 1995 and was killed when he returned to Iraq.

Intelligence agencies assumed Gen Kamel had held information back when speaking to his debriefers. But a six-page letter found since the war - from the head of Iraq`s National Monitoring Directorate, Hossam Amin, to the president`s son, Qusay - suggest he told all, the Post said. Moreover, the letter says that Iraq destroyed its entire stock of biological weapons in 1991.

The article also suggests a possible explanation of why, despite a lack of success with weapons programmes, Saddam Hussein refused to yield to weapons inspectors and why western intelligence agencies continued to believe Iraq harboured such weapons. Defectors arriving in the west in the late 1990s may have distorted the picture significantly, but the article suggests the Iraqi leader was also being deceived by his scientists about the state of the programmes.

At the same time there were efforts to deceive Iraq`s neighbours. "My operating hypothesis has been that Saddam Hussein was focused on the region and on how he would look to his regional rivals," said Joseph Cirincione, head of the Carnegie`s non-proliferation project.

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004.

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Deal for Camp Delta Britons
Final hurdle to return of seven of the nine Guantanamo detainees removed as US softens its stance

Clare Dyer, legal correspondent
Friday January 9, 2004
The Guardian

Some of the British detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba could be sent back to Britain without a guarantee they will face trial, it emerged yesterday.

Seven of the nine detainees - those deemed medium-risk by the US authorities - could be repatriated if the US is satisfied they would be managed in such a way that the Americans could be certain they posed no threat, Pierre Prosper, the US ambassador at large on war crimes issues said.

US officials suggested that this could include constant monitoring or surveillance by law enforcement agencies.

The softening of the US line could remove what was perceived to be the main stum bling block to repatriation - the inability of the British government to promise that the Guantanamo Britons would be prosecuted on their return to this country. The independent Crown Prosecution Service cannot be ordered to take on a case, while even if it did, equally independent judges have the power to throw cases out on human rights grounds.

Louise Christian, who acts for Feroz Abassi, deemed high-risk by the US authorities, and other detainees, said: "That`s encouraging." Ms Christian said she had quizzed the foreign office minister, Baroness Symons, after the minister indicated at a meeting that the US might require an undertaking from Britain to prosecute any returned detainees.

"When I questioned her, she changed the form of wording. The worry had been that it was not the US government, but David Blunkett, who didn`t want the responsibility of having them back here."

However, Mr Prosper made clear in a briefing that there were no plans to send back Moazzam Begg or Mr Abassi, the two Britons categorised as high risk and designated for trial at Guantanamo Bay by military commissions.

He outlined the system by which the prisoners are categorised according to risk, and the way the authorities plan to deal with the three categories. Mr Begg and Mr Abassi are in category one, high threat, "where we feel the need to detain and/or prosecute".

The other seven Britons are in category two - medium risk. In those cases, the US authorities were prepared to work on some arrangement to transfer detainees back to their home countries for detention, prosecution, or some other form of managing the threat.

There are no Britons in the bottom, low risk category, where detainees are being released without conditions.

Mr Prosper said the US and Britain had hoped to reach agreement in time for US president George Bush`s recent visit, but it had been decided that the two countries should not rush into making what might be the wrong decision.

"Our primary objective is that a person is not released and then on a plane and into the nearest tall building anywhere in the world," he said. "We`re satisfied that the British government has the political will to do what it can to manage the threat." British officials expect an announcement within weeks on the fate of the detainees.

Mr Prosper added that the categories were still fluid and some detainees had moved from one to another. "I can tell you for sure that one or more of the British detainees pose a significant threat."

The development came as Amnesty International delivered a letter to Downing Street in advance of the second anniversary on Sunday of detention without charge or trial in Guantanamo for 650 prisoners.

The letter demanded greater efforts by the prime minister on behalf of the detainees in Camp Delta, the prison built to replace the smaller Camp X- Ray last year.

The supreme court is to decide whether non-US nationals at Guantanamo Bay are within the jurisdiction of the US courts, which could pre-empt any trials by military commission. A decision is expected by the end of June.

Mr Prosper, who is also closely involved with setting up the Iraqi tribunal to try Saddam Hussein and his former henchmen, said the US had earmarked $75m for the investigations and trials.

The US was supporting the Iraqis` current desire to staff the tribunal solely with Iraqi judges, with assistance from international advisers.

He said no trial was expected this year and investigations were likely to take at least until the end of June.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

Military team seeking WMD pulled out of Iraq
Julian Borger in Washington and Luke Harding in Baghdad
Friday January 9, 2004
The Guardian

The Pentagon has pulled out a 400-strong military team which was searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, but US officers insisted yesterday that the hunt would go on.

The disbanded multinational team was known as the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group (JCMEG) and its job, according to a Pentagon official who confirmed its withdrawal, had been to "scavenge the battlefield for military equipment".

It was an important element of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which has spent seven months hunting for the arsenal that was the justification for the invasion.

Over the past few months the ISG has been stripped of translators, special forces troops and other specialists.

The continuing questions about the justification of the Iraq war are President George Bush`s principal weakness as he faces re-election in November against the backdrop of a steadily rising death toll of US troops there.

Yesterday nine soldiers were killed when a US Black Hawk crashed near the town of Falluja. It was not initially clear whether it had been shot down.

A US military spokeswoman said that the crashed Black Hawk helicopter had made an emergency landing south of Falluja, a stronghold of the anti-American insurgency.

A US C-5 transport plane was later forced to make an emergency landing at Baghdad airport after it was hit by hostile fire. No injuries were reported among the 63 passengers and crew.

The ISG, according to some weapons experts in Washington, has been reduced to a remnant of a few hundred specialists from its peak strength of 1,400.

Its leader, David Kay, is said to be on the point of resignation. A colleague in Washington said: "His family is worried about his safety and he is disenchanted, both by the failure to find weapons he was sure were there and because his team has been cut in half."

The withdrawal of JCMEG became known only yesterday, but a defence official said its members had been sent back to their home countries in October, and called its disbanding "old news".

The official denied that the ISG had been reduced to a rump and said that although its number fluctuated new team members had joined to replace at least some of the departing troops.

Many of the remaining ISG investigators are slowly sifting their way through a moun tain of captured documents.

The group includes a specialist unit trained to dispose of chemical and biological weapons, but the New York Times quoted an ISG member as saying that the team was "still waiting for something to dispose of".

Joseph Cirincione, chief proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), said: "This is a body blow to the ISG. It has got to be demoralising to see your workforce cut in half. And it`s an indication that at senior levels there is a realisation that it`s over."

The CEIP produced a report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq yesterday, co-authored by Mr Cirincione, comparing prewar claims by US officials and postwar findings that concluded that the administration had "systematically misrepresented" the Iraqi threat.

Yesterday, the US secretary of State, Colin Powell, acknowledged that he saw no "smoking gun, concrete evidence" of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida terror network, but insisted that Iraq had dangerous weapons and needed to be disarmed by force.

The Qatar satellite TV station al-Jazeera reported that the Black Hawk that crashed near Falluja had been hit by a rocket. Last week rebels shot down a US helicopter in the same area, killing one soldier and injuring another.

Speaking last night in Baghdad, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said troops had secured the site of the crash and an investigation was under way. The helicopter had plunged into Zob`a, a small village four miles south-west of Falluja, at about 2.30pm in the afternoon.

The area, 30 miles west of Baghdad, is one of the most dangerous for coalition forces and is at the heart of Iraq`s restive Sunni triangle.

US forces have rounded up hundreds of suspects from Falluja, but the tactic appears to have incensed those left behind. Three US helicopters have been shot down in as many months. In November US troops were killed and 21 others on board injured after their Chinook was shot down in the same place.

Since the capture of Saddam Hussein the Iraqi resistance has carried out a series of spectacular attacks, including an assault on coalition forces in the town of Karbala, and a New Year`s Eve suicide bombing in the heart of Baghdad, which killed eight people.

The latest incident came a day after rebels fired six mortar shells into a US camp, killing one soldier and wounding 33 soldiers and a civilian.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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[Joerver]

Why wait for Hutton?
We already have all the facts we need to pronounce on the prime minister`s judgment

David Clark
Friday January 9, 2004
The Guardian

This week`s pre-emptive strike by Michael Howard over the long-awaited Hutton report has raised expectations of what was already shaping up to be the biggest political event of the year. In truth, far too much significance is being attached to Lord Hutton`s report into the death of Dr David Kelly. The inquiry was not set up to make what must necessarily be political judgments about the conduct of those involved in the affair; nor is Hutton likely to interpret his mandate in that way. It is up to all of us to determine the importance of what he has unearthed, and for that we have no need to await his conclusions. The relevant facts are already in the public domain.

For similar reasons there is little point in pressing the case for a judicial inquiry into the wider issues raised by the Iraq war, however much we may sympathise with the motives of those intent on doing so. Many Labour MPs who opposed military action last March feel trapped between the desire to establish the truth and the certain knowledge of where it would lead. They want others to reach the conclusions that they themselves find too troubling to acknowledge. In a healthy democracy, the responsibility to decide cannot be delegated away like that. Hutton may not pronounce on the integrity of the government`s Iraq policy, but he has provided us with enough evidence to form our own judgments. It`s time we did so.

There is certainly no shortage of blame to be allocated on the basis of what we have learned. In its own hearings the foreign affairs select committee failed in its responsibility to hold the executive to account and instead engaged in what amounted to the politically motivated show trial of a BBC journalist. The intelligence services have been exposed both for the paucity of their knowledge about the true state of Iraq`s military capabilities and their willingness to allow their already inaccurate assessments to be embellished for political effect. Both have a lot to do to restore public confidence.

The BBC does not emerge unscathed either. Andrew Gilligan was wrong to suggest that the government knew the 45-minute claim to be false, or at least he had no basis to make that claim at the time. And the BBC should not have described Dr Kelly as an "intelligence source". But let`s keep these errors in perspective. The first was an unscripted slip that formed no part of the government`s initial complaint. The second does not alter the fact that Dr Kelly was an important source who provided a truthful account of concerns within the intelligence community.

Gilligan and the BBC will continue to be targeted by those determined either to deflect criticism from the government or to undermine public service broadcasting. But it is worth remembering that they have done more to uncover the truth about the Iraq war than all of their critics put together. That is why they have been so viciously assailed. Besides, the BBC, alone among the parties to this saga, has been willing to own up to its failings.

There can be no moral equivalence when it comes to judging the prime minister and his government, despite the best efforts of some to spread the blame. Those charged with making life-or-death decisions on behalf of the nation must be expected to meet a higher standard of propriety than the journalists who report on their activities. It is here that the main burden of accountability must fall.

By any standard, the government`s treatment of Dr Kelly was callous and cynical. Having promised to protect him from the glare of publicity, his employers cut him adrift, dropping a series of hints about his identity and inviting journalists to guess his name on the promise that it would be confirmed. As we were reminded this week by Michael Howard during prime minister`s question time, this process was initiated on the direct instructions of the prime minister. His suggestion that this game of nudge-nudge, wink-wink did not amount to a deliberate strategy to name Dr Kelly is pure sophistry.

There is no defence, either, in the much-repeated claim that his naming was inevitable. It became inevitable only once No 10 decided to use him as a stick with which to beat the BBC. This might have been forgivable had it been the only way for the government to defend itself against a malicious smear. But we now know that there was no smear. The BBC`s report was correct in essence, if not in every detail.

Gilligan claimed that the government`s Iraq dossier had been "sexed up". A senior defence intelligence official told Hutton it had been "over-egged". The difference is one of taste rather than substance. The same official said there was no solid evidence of continued Iraqi production of chemical weapons after 1998. Yet Tony Blair`s foreword to the dossier claimed that such production had been "established beyond doubt". There was a progressive hardening of the language used to describe Iraq`s capabilities, a process that started after Alastair Campbell rejected the joint intelligence committee`s original draft and called for something "new" and "revelatory".

All caveats and facts that might have revealed just how sketchy the real intelligence picture was were systematically filtered out and replaced with words of resounding certainty. Most damaging of all is the revelation that Blair`s own chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, acknowledged that "the document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam". He said the final draft would need to make this clear, and yet the prime minister did the opposite, claiming in his foreword that the threat from Iraq was "serious and current".

The plain truth is that, had we known then what we know now (and, more to the point, what the government has known all along), the dossier would have been laughed out of town. But no attempt was ever made to explain that the notorious 45-minute claim referred to battlefield munitions only, and came from a single, uncorroborated source. If the attempt had been made, the Sun would not have declared: "Brits 45 minutes from doom." That was one media inaccuracy Blair wanted on the record.

Hutton has revealed a pattern of misrepresentation and selective disclosure that could only have had one purpose. Blair will continue to deny that he lied to the British people, but New Labour`s media strategy is based on the post-modern dictum that perception creates reality. In this case, the perception, skilfully encouraged by Downing Street, of an Iraqi regime armed to the teeth and ready to strike, created the reality of a very big lie indeed.

Many people find it hard to separate these issues from their own opinions about whether it was right or wrong to go to war in Iraq, yet it is important that they do. Even those who think that it was, on balance, a good thing cannot afford to be indifferent to the integrity of their government and the ability of their prime minister to recognise the truth. Blair wants us to "move on", but continues to assert against all known fact that everything he said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was right. Whether he believes this or not is no longer the issue. Fantasist or liar, Blair is unfit to govern.

· David Clark is a former Labour government adviser

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`US climate policy bigger threat to world than terrorism`
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
09 January 2004


Tony Blair`s chief scientist has launched a withering attack on President George Bush for failing to tackle climate change, which he says is more serious than terrorism.

Sir David King, the Government`s chief scientific adviser, says in an article today in the journal Science that America, the world`s greatest polluter, must take the threat of global warming more seriously.

"In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism," Sir David says.

The Bush administration was wrong to pull out of the Kyoto protocol, the international effort to limit the emission of greenhouse gases, and wrong to imply the protocol could adversely affect the US economy, Sir David says. "As the world`s only remaining superpower, the United States is accustomed to leading internationally co-ordinated action. But the US government is failing to take up the challenge of global warming.

"The Bush administration`s strategy relies largely on market-based incentives and voluntary action ... But the market cannot decide that mitigation is necessary, nor can it establish the basic international framework in which all actors can take their place."

Results of a major study showed yesterday that more than a million species will become extinct as a result of global warming over the next 50 years. Sir David says the Bush administration is wrong to dispute the reality of global warming. The 10 hottest years on record started in 1991 and, worldwide, average temperatures had risen by 0.6C in the past century.

Sea levels were rising, ice caps were melting and flooding had become more frequent. The Thames barrier was used about once a year in the 1980s to protect London but now it was used more than six times a year.

"If we could stabilise the atmosphere`s carbon dioxide concentration at some realistically achievable and relatively low level, there is still a good chance of mitigating the worst effects of climate change."

But countries such as Britain could not solve the problem of global warming in isolation, particularly when the US was by far the biggest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet. "The United Kingdom is responsible for only 2 per cent of the world`s emissions, the United States for more than 20 per cent (although it contains only 4 per cent of the world`s population)," Sir David says.

"The United States is already in the forefront of the science and technology of global change, and the next step is surely to tackle emissions control too. We can overcome this challenge only by facing it together, shoulder to shoulder. We in the rest of the world are now looking to the US to play its leading part."

Advisers to President Bush have suggested climate change is a natural phenomenon and criticised climate researchers for suggesting that rises in global temperatures are the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

But Sir David says the "causal link" between man-made emissions and global warming is well-established and scientists cannot explain the general warming trend over the past century without invoking human-induced effects.

The Cambridge academic, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to Britain, implies that the US has a moral obligation to follow the UK`s lead in trying to limit the damage resulting from rising world temperatures and climate change.

"As a consequence of continued warming, millions more people around the world may in future be exposed to the risk of hunger, drought, flooding, and debilitating diseases such as malaria," Sir David says.

"Poor people in developing countries are likely to be most vulnerable. For instance, by 2080, if we assume continuing growth rates in consumption of fossil fuels, the numbers of additional people exposed to frequent flooding in the river delta areas of the world would be counted in hundreds of millions assuming no adaptation measures were implemented."

President Bush has said more research on global warming is needed before the US will consider the sort of action needed to comply with the Kyoto protocol, but Sir David says that by then it could be too late. "Delaying action for decades, or even just years, is not a serious option. I am firmly convinced that if we do not begin now, more substantial, more disruptive, and more expensive change will be needed later on."

Britain is committed to cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases by 60 per cent from 1990 levels by around 2050 and believes other developed countries, such as the US, should follow suit. Bush officials say that would damage their economy and provide an unfair advantage to the country`s international competitors. But Sir David says that it is a "myth" that reducing greenhouse gas emissions makes us poorer. "Taking action to tackle climate change can create economic opportunities and higher living standards," he says.

A spokeswoman for the US State Department said that she was unable to comment directly on Sir David`s article.
9 January 2004 08:17



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January 9, 2004
DIPLOMACY
Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Mr. Powell`s remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.

Mr. Powell offered a vigorous defense of his Feb. 5 presentation before the Security Council, in which he voiced the administration`s most detailed case to date for war with Iraq. After studying intelligence data, he said that a "sinister nexus" existed "between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."

Without any additional qualifiers, Mr. Powell continued, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."

He added, "Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible."

On Thursday, Mr. Powell dismissed second-guessing and said that Mr. Bush had acted after giving Mr. Hussein 12 years to come into compliance with the international community.

"The president decided he had to act because he believed that whatever the size of the stockpile, whatever one might think about it, he believed that the region was in danger, America was in danger and he would act," he said. "And he did act."

In a rare, wide-ranging meeting with reporters, Mr. Powell voiced some optimism on several other issues that have bedeviled the administration, including North Korea and Sudan, while expressing dismay about the Middle East and Haiti.

But mostly, the secretary, appearing vigorous and in good spirits three weeks after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer, defended his justification for the war in Iraq. He said he had been fully aware that "the whole world would be watching," as he painstakingly made the case that the government of Saddam Hussein presented an imminent threat to the United States and its interests.

The immediacy of the danger was at the core of debates in the United Nations over how to proceed against Mr. Hussein. A report released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan Washington research center, concluded that Iraq`s weapons programs constituted a long-term threat that should not have been ignored. But it also said the programs did not "pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security."

Mr. Powell`s United Nations presentation — complete with audiotapes and satellite photographs — asserted that "leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option." The secretary said he had spent time with experts at the Central Intelligence Agency studying reports. "Anything that we did not feel was solid and multisourced, we did not use in that speech," he said Thursday.

He said that Mr. Hussein had used prohibited weapons in the past — including nerve gas attacks against Iran and Iraqi Kurds — and said that even if there were no actual weapons at hand, there was every indication he would reconstitute them once the international community lost interest.

"In terms of intention, he always had it," Mr. Powell said. "What he was waiting to do is see if he could break the will of the international community, get rid of any potential future inspections, and get back to his intentions, which were to have weapons of mass destruction."

The administration has quietly withdrawn a 400-member team of American weapons inspectors who were charged with finding chemical or biological weapons stockpiles or laboratories, officials said this week. The team was part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has not turned up such weapons or active programs, the officials said.

The Carnegie report challenged the possibility that Mr. Hussein could have destroyed the weapons, hidden them or shipped them out of the country. Officials had alleged that Iraq held amounts so huge — hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles — that such moves would have been detected by the United States, the report said.

The Washington Post this week reported that Iraq had apparently preserved its ability to produce missiles, biological agents and other illicit weapons through the decade-long period of international sanctions after the Persian Gulf war, but that their development had apparently been limited to the planning stage.

On North Korea, he said he had received "encouraging signals" from his Asian counterparts that the North might be close to agreeing to another round of six-party talks. But he said the administration would not yield on its insistence that the North first state its willingness to bring its nuclear program to a verifiable end.

Mr. Powell was equally hopeful about a peace agreement to end a grueling civil war in Sudan. "The key here is that after 20 years of most terrible war, Sudanese leaders have come together and are just one or two steps short of having a comprehensive peace agreement," he said.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said the United States and the three other nations promoting peace talks had expected more movement ending hostilities and establishing a Palestinian state. "They are as disturbed as I am that we haven`t seen the kind of progress that we had hoped for," he said.

Turning to Haiti, where a decade ago Mr. Powell took part in a delegation that sought to persuade plotters in a military coup to step down, he voiced frustration at the failure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to reach agreement with his political foes. Violence has flared in recent days as anti-Aristide protesters demanded an end to a political deadlock that has paralyzed the government. The country`s Catholic Bishops Conference has tried to broker a new agreement.



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January 9, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS: OCCUPATION
The Shape of a Future Iraq: U.S. Entangled in Disputes
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — After insisting for months that Iraqis must determine their future under a kind of passive American supervision, the Bush administration is being forced to take sides in several Iraqi disputes and running into friction with groups long friendly to Washington.

How these new confrontations are resolved will probably determine the staying power and effectiveness of Iraq`s future government and, ultimately, even its territorial integrity after the United States transfers sovereignty to Baghdad.

Among the difficulties are the American efforts, so far unsuccessful, to convince a leading Shiite cleric of the legitimacy of the administration`s plan to transfer sovereignty to Iraq on June 30, and American wrangling with Islamic groups over the role of Islam in Iraq`s laws and constitution.

In addition, the United States has had to dash the hopes of several Iraqi exile leaders who had worked with Washington to plan the Iraq war and now want to stay in power even if they are not selected as part of the government in a future Iraq.

But the biggest dispute, which has become public only in the last few days, is with the Kurds in the north, whose regional state has been democratically run, largely autonomous and protected by the American military since the end of the first Persian Gulf war in 1991.

For years, the United States has stated as a matter of policy that even though it encouraged the existence of an autonomous Kurdish regional government under Saddam Hussein, a post-Hussein Iraq should be divided into provinces based on geography rather than ethnic identity.

The American fear is that an ethnically divided Iraq would stir instability in the region, especially in Turkey, which has a large and restive Kurdish population. Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim country, also fears that a Kurdish withdrawal from Iraq would give too much power to the nation`s remaining Shiites, who the Saudis fear would be sympathetic to largely Shiite Iran.

It was not until last Friday, however, that the Kurds got word from L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, that the United States wanted them to give up their powers over security, oil resources and other matters and accede to the authority of the new Iraqi state that is about to be born.

"It was not a happy meeting from our point of view," said a Kurdish official. "It was totally contradictory to the spirit of the relationship we have had with the United States as allies in the war against Saddam."

Kurdish spokesmen say that Mr. Bremer was rebuffed and that he came back for another meeting with Kurdish leaders on Wednesday, expressing flexibility on the idea of autonomy.

Evidently aware that his maximalist approach had simply provoked an angry counterreaction, Mr. Bremer was more conciliatory the second time around, while still insisting that the Kurds back down on at least some of their demands for full powers.

"He didn`t go through the laundry list of all the requirements he laid down earlier," said an administration official. "Essentially, he said to the Kurds, `What I need from you is flexibility.` He went to the bigger picture."

Some in the Bush administration speculate that the United States, in the end, will have no choice but to accept Kurdish autonomy. There is not enough time to change the status quo, they say, given the timetable for a new "transitional" Iraqi government to take full sovereignty after June 30.

Concern about angering the Kurds is also prevalent at the Pentagon, where officials remain grateful for the role Kurds played in the war.

In a recent memo to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, Mr. Bremer warned that American opposition to "ethnic federalism" espoused by the Kurds would "create political problems where none currently exists."

Forcing the Kurds to back down, he wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, "will likely require the expenditure of significant political capital on our part" and "also surely upset the political stability we have enjoyed thus far in northern Iraq."

Some Kurds, expecting the United States to back down, wonder if Mr. Bremer was not pressing a tough line with the Kurds only to be able to tell Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other nations that he tried as hard as he could before giving in to the creation of a Kurdish state.

Meanwhile, a senior Turkish official, watching the situation closely, said it seemed that the United States had already gone too far in letting the Kurds "hijack" the process of drafting a federal setup for Iraq.

"We find these events very disturbing," said the Turkish official. "The United States cannot let the Kurds abuse their current privileged status in Iraq." He explained that he was referring not only to their leverage within Iraq but also to their ties to the Pentagon.

Part of the American problem is that the Kurds have actually won support for retaining their autonomy from other members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the American-created body that now manages Iraqi affairs and is planning for the transition to self-rule.

Though the Kurds have only five votes on the 25-member council, they have a unique status because they actually can claim a mandate from the Kurdish population, under elections held in 1992.

The Kurds also can use their five votes to get support from non-Kurds by promising to support what other groups want.

Thus the United States may actually have to oppose the wishes of the council, a body that is essentially its own creation.

Given the difficulties of standing up to the Kurds and to other Iraqis who are America`s allies, many experts say the United States may have no choice, in the end, but to accept Kurdish demands.

"This will get resolved one way or another," said a Western diplomat involved in the situation. "I won`t be surprised to see it resolved in the Kurds` favor."



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January 9, 2004
Kurdish Autonomy in Iraq

By promising to hand over political authority in Iraq to Iraqis on June 30, the United States sent a useful message about its desire to lower its profile there and forced Iraqis to get to work on a constitutional structure and an electoral system. Unfortunately, the door is now open to radical forces, which in volatile situations and in the face of short timetables tend to be the best organized, with the clearest agendas. Washington needs to do all it can to block the radicals` path — and postpone the handover if certain conditions are not met.

A central challenge is the extent of Kurdish power and independence. Since 1991, the Kurds have lived in an autonomous zone in the north. Some had hoped that once Saddam Hussein`s regime had been toppled, the Kurds would give up autonomy to ease the concerns of other Iraqi groups and of neighbors, like Turkey, with their own Kurdish populations. That shift would have been hard to pull off in the best of circumstances. The shortened timetable makes it impossible. The Kurds dream of a separate state. Maintaining autonomy is their minimal demand.

That should be accepted, but with conditions. The Kurds consider the oil fields of Kirkuk to be theirs. They are not. They are part of the national patrimony, and the so-called basic law that is due at the end of February has to make clear that oil will be under federal control, with Kurds getting their share of the revenue. The 50,000 Kurds under arms should be turned into a branch of a federally commanded national guard. The rights of the Turkmen and Chaldean minorities who live among the Kurds must be protected in the basic law from both federal and regional governments.

How can Kurdish autonomy be accepted without inviting separatism from the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the country? One possibility is to plan for provincial governments in each of Iraq`s existing 18 provinces. The provinces could be permitted to group together. The three Kurdish areas would doubtless do so. Others could as well, but since their populations are more mixed, this would favor geographic over simple ethnic autonomy.

Two other factors need to be ensured for the June 30 handover date to stand. First, an electoral system that is recognized by all groups as legitimate must be constructed. That is especially a concern for the Shiite religious leaders, who fear that Shiite strength will be diluted, but it is also a serious issue for the Sunni minority. Second, the country must have a modicum of physical safety.

If Washington had involved the United Nations or in some other way internationalized the rebuilding of Iraq, it would not have such a desperate need to telescope this initial, vital period of institution-building. Having failed to do that, the Bush administration should keep in mind a major lesson from previous efforts of this kind. Systems established early in nation-building are unlikely to change drastically. That is why June 30 should be seen less as a deadline than as a guideline. Extremists must not be permitted to set the agenda.



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January 9, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
American Jobs but Not the American Dream
By DAVID ABRAHAM

President Bush`s immigration reform proposal, unveiled on Wednesday, is a classic guest worker program on the European model. As such, it may be doomed from the start: Europe`s guest worker programs created as many problems as they solved, and to this day they remain unpopular.

Guest worker programs were widely used in Europe from the 1950`s through the 1970`s during a period of extreme labor shortages. Most of the several million Turks and Yugoslavs in Germany, for example, are there today because of Germany`s substantial guest-worker program of that period. Lesser but substantial numbers of guest workers are also to be found among the Muslim populations of Central and Northern Europe.

Germany`s guest worker program was ended more than two decades ago. Yet Germans still have not resolved the question of what to do with the millions of immigrants living in their midst. Although these immigrant workers get some benefits of citizenship — health care, for example, and unemployment insurance — they are not citizens. They are not allowed full membership in German society, yet neither are they forced to return home. It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Germany today who would favor re-establishment of its guest worker program.

The details of the program announced by President Bush have yet to be worked out. But its outlines are clear. At the invitation of employers, workers will be permitted to stay in the United States for a limited time without having to wait in its long immigration lines. They would also secure many of the benefits and protections of American-born workers.

The chief virtue of the program, as the president made clear, is that the guest workers would be allowed to move relatively freely between their country of citizenship — overwhelmingly Mexico — and the country in which they are "guests." Such movement could reduce the disturbing smuggling and illegal border crossings so common along America`s frontiers.

But the drawbacks of guest worker programs far outweigh their advantages. To begin with, experience shows that guest workers are not good guests: they rarely want to leave. In Germany today there are more than two million people of Muslim Turkish origin, many of whose families came as guest workers four decades ago. Guest workers marry locals; they have children; they encourage their kin and friends to join them in the host country, legally or illegally.

After all, guest workers are not just labor, they are people. Where will these people live, and how will they be treated? Can we look forward to new urban ghettos or rural guest-worker "villages"? Fifty years after the civil rights movement, will we now have a new caste of subordinated foreign workers? Once the economic need for guest workers abates (assuming, in fact, that there is such a need) what happens to them?

It is true that America has more experience with assimilation than Europe. But that does not mean finding answers to these questions will be any less difficult.

And in some respects, the dangers of a guest worker program in the United States are graver than they were in Europe. Germany, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and other European host countries had and still have very strong labor unions. Those strong unions were able to make certain that guest workers were not used by employers to depress wages. By contrast, American labor unions are weak to nonexistent in most segments of the labor market.

In addition, President Bush has clearly expressed his intention to put employers in charge: guest workers will be selected by employers and will be able to remain in the United States only so long as they stay with the employer who brought them. This is a sure recipe not only for the exploitation of these "guests" but also for the depression of American wages generally, especially among those who can least afford it — many of them immigrants.

The United States has always been a "welcoming country," as the president said, "open to the talents and dreams of the world." But this plan is an abandonment of America`s ideals, not an expression of them. It values immigrants` talents over their dreams. Instead of hope, it offers them simply a job.


David Abraham, a visiting fellow in European history at Princeton, is a professor of immigration law at the University of Miami.



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January 9, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Sick State Budgets, Sick Kids
By BOB HERBERT

hile headlines continue to tell us how great the economy is doing, states across the U.S. are pulling the plug on desperately needed health coverage for low-income Americans, including about a half-million children.

Even as the Bush administration continues its bizarre quest for ever more tax cuts, the states, which by law have to balance their budgets, are cutting vital social programs so deeply that tragic consequences are inevitable.

The cruel reality is that Americans at the top are thriving at the expense of the well-being of those at the bottom and, increasingly, in the middle.

A new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that 34 states have made potentially devastating cuts over the past two years in public health insurance programs, including Medicaid and the very successful children`s health insurance programs known as CHIPS. More cuts are expected this year.

"Almost half of those losing health coverage (490,000 to 650,000 people) are children," the report said. "Substantial numbers of low-income parents, seniors, people with disabilities, childless adults and immigrants are also losing coverage. Cutbacks of this depth in health insurance coverage for low-income families and individuals are unprecedented."

The worst of the cuts are in Texas. "The Lone Star State has adopted deep cutbacks in its State Children`s Health Insurance Program that will cause about 160,000 children — one-third of its SCHIP caseload — to lose coverage," the report said.

Texas is also making Medicaid available to fewer pregnant women, a dangerous move that increases the number of women without coverage for prenatal care and the actual deliveries. "All told," the report said, "Texas is eliminating coverage for between 344,000 and 494,000 children and adults. Census data showed that, even before these changes, the percentage of people who were uninsured was higher in Texas than in any other state."

A loss of health coverage frequently leads to a reluctance to seek needed care. "In poor or low-income families, where there is not a lot of disposable income, people will avoid going to the doctor or getting a prescription," said Leighton Ku, one of the authors of the report. "Certain diseases can then become much more severe. With children, it`s likely that they won`t get treatment for ear infections, asthma, diabetes — conditions that can ultimately lead to hospitalization."

When treatment can no longer be avoided, the financial consequences can be ruinous. Medical expenses are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the U.S.

Officials at the center noted the case of a woman in St. Louis who works but whose annual income is below the poverty line. Under eligibility rules in effect until 18 months ago, she would have qualified for Medicaid. Under the new rules, she does not.

The woman became ill and was told upon her release from the hospital to seek follow-up care. But without any health insurance, her medical bills have been overwhelming. According to the center, "[The woman] has occasional abdominal pain but is not getting any treatment. She intends to declare bankruptcy because she cannot pay the $47,000 she owes in medical bills, but so far has been unable to save the funds needed to pay for a bankruptcy filing."

People caught in this kind of squeeze often find themselves "sicker, much poorer, or both," said Robert Greenstein, the center`s director.

It seems extremely strange that in the United States of America, the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world, we are going backward in the 21st century in our ability to provide the most fundamental kinds of health care to ordinary people, including children.

The health insurance cutbacks would have been even worse if not for the $20 billion in emergency state aid that was reluctantly approved by the Bush administration and the Republican-led Congress last year. Despite the economic upturn, states are still struggling. They face a collective budget deficit of $40 billion to $50 billion for the coming fiscal year, and there is little sentiment among Republican leaders in Washington for another round of fiscal relief.

Maybe the nation itself needs a doctor. Shoving low-income people, including children, off the health care rolls at a time when the economy is allegedly booming is a sure sign of some kind of sickness in the society.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 9, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Enron and the System
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Two years after Enron, then one of America`s most admired companies, was revealed as a fraud, prosecutors finally seem to be getting somewhere. Andrew Fastow, the company`s former chief financial officer, and his wife, Lea, are reported to be engaged in plea-bargaining. Mr. Fastow`s testimony will probably lead to charges against other former Enron executives.

But it would be a big mistake to conclude that the system is working. It isn`t.

For one thing, the progress in the Enron case is something of a fluke — sort of like convicting Al Capone for income tax evasion. The charges against Mrs. Fastow don`t focus on dubious corporate deals; they focus on her failure to report the personal kickbacks she received from participants in those deals. And it`s still unclear whether the company`s top executives will ever face charges.

More important, in political terms the statute of limitations may already have run out. The political figures with the most direct ties to the Enron scandal, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White and former Senator Phil Gramm, are no longer in office. War and a rising market have, at least for the time being, diverted attention from the role of other political figures whose deference to corporate demands aided and abetted Enron and other corporate malefactors.

And that`s unfortunate. The wave of scandal was made possible, if not caused, by a political climate in which corporate insiders got pretty much whatever they wanted. Since the politicians who did their bidding haven`t paid any price, that climate hasn`t changed.

A November profile of Lea Fastow in Business Week was, among other things, a reminder of just how important a permissive political environment was to the company`s growing sense that it could get away with just about anything. One of Mrs. Fastow`s earliest high-profile deals involved the creation of an elaborate tax shelter. It was obvious from the beginning that this type of shelter was a scam, and the Treasury Department tried to get this maneuver banned in 1994 — but Congress refused to act. In 1998 Treasury tried a different tack, getting the I.R.S. to disallow Enron`s tax deduction, but the agency backed down in the face of an intense lobbying campaign.

So have things changed? No. In October the I.R.S. backed off its challenge to another transparent scam, the synfuel tax credit. The agency denies that it was buckling under political pressure. Uh-huh.

Meanwhile, what about stock options? Just about every analysis of the emergence of widespread accounting fraud stresses the distorting role of huge options grants to top executives, which gave insiders a strong incentive to do whatever it took to push up stock prices. (A fixation on the stock price was central to the Enron scandal.) Companies might have issued fewer options, and accounting fraud might have been less of a problem, if accounting rules had required companies to count the issue of stock options as a cost, rather than pretending that they were somehow free.

But in 1994, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board tried to issue a rule to that effect, companies that issued lots of options mounted a lobbying campaign. And politicians rushed — in a fully bipartisan manner — to be of service. Senator Joseph Lieberman took the lead: he introduced a resolution opposing the change, the resolution was approved 88 to 9, and the board backed down.

So now it`s clear that options were a big motivator for corporate fraud, has Congress moved to require that issuing them be counted against profits? No. In fact, the politicians who led the charge against reform back in 1994 haven`t budged.

"The best comparison I can think of is the one the N.R.A. uses about guns — which is that guns don`t kill people, criminals do," Senator Lieberman said on "Frontline" on PBS. "Options were not the problem with Enron; it was the way in which the executives at Enron sold their options."

Yesterday Gen. Wesley Clark made an appearance with Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistle-blower, and promised to crack down on corporate tax shelters. Howard Dean has also made a crackdown on tax shelters a central plank of his campaign. If these or other candidates actually succeed in making corporate abuse into a successful campaign issue, we may finally see some real reform. But right now, two years after Enron imploded, we have to say that the system is still broken.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Bush geht WMD`s suchen!

washingtonpost.com
Bush Plans To Call for Settlement On Moon
Manned Mars Mission Is Longer-Term Goal

By Mike Allen and Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 9, 2004; Page A01


President Bush will announce plans next week to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon and to set a goal of eventually sending Americans to Mars, administration sources said last night.

The sources said Bush will announce a new "human exploration" agenda in Washington on Wednesday, six days ahead of the final State of the Union address of his term and just as his reelection campaign moves from the planning stage to its public phase.

The plans grew out of a White House group that was assigned to examine the mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on Feb. 1, throwing the future of the space program into doubt.

Officials were unwilling to provide costs or details and would say only that Bush will direct the government to immediately begin research and development to establish a human colony or space station on the moon, with the goal of having that lead to a manned mission to Mars. That endeavor could be a decade or more away, the officials said.

Even advocates within the administration said the project is sure to be a difficult sell on Capitol Hill because of the huge costs at a time when the administration is projecting mammoth deficits for years to come, and had promised to cut the shortfall in half over the next five years.

Another objection is likely to be that the shuttle program is grounded until at least September and the shuttle is needed to resupply the U.S.-led international space station, which is currently relying on Russian vehicles and flying with a caretaker crew of two instead of the usual three.

NASA`s budget this year is about $15 billion, and officials there have been told to expect an increase in the budget the president will send to Congress in February.

Bush`s father, President George H.W. Bush, proposed a sustained commitment to human exploration of the solar system -- with a return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars -- in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. NASA came up with a budget-busting cost estimate of $400 million, which sank the project.

The United States lacks the scientific and technical foundation required to send humans to Mars, and scientists still find it daunting just to land a robot there safely, as the events of the past week have shown.

Advocates of a return to the moon, already successfully conquered once, have argued that a lunar initiative would be useful scientifically and envision the moon as a base for developing technologies and for rehearsing the dispatch of humans to a much more distant and isolated landing zone on Mars.

The moon can be reached in three days, while a trip to Mars would take at least six months.

Sources involved in the discussions said Bush and his advisers view the new plans for human space travel as a way to unify the country behind a gigantic common purpose at a time when relations between the parties are venomous and polls show that Americans are closely divided on many issues.

"It`s going back to being a uniter, not a divider," a presidential adviser said, echoing language from Bush`s previous campaign, "and trying to rally people emotionally around a great national purpose."

Another official involved in the discussions used similar language, saying that some of Bush`s aides wants him to have a "Kennedy moment" -- a reference to President John F. Kennedy`s call in 1961 for the nation to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

"It`s a national unifying thing, it`s a world unifying thing," this official said.

The sources said Bush aides also view the plan as a huge jobs program, and one that will stimulate business in the many parts of the country where space and military contractors are located.

"This is a boon for business and a boon for Texas," one official said, referring to the state where Bush was governor and the location of the Johnson Space Center, which is the mission control and nerve center for human flight.

The decision was controversial within the White House, with some aides arguing that it would make more sense to focus immediately on Mars, since man has already landed on the moon and a Mars mission would build cleanly on the success of Spirit, the U.S. rover that landed safely on Mars last weekend. Bush himself settled the divisions, according to the sources, working from options that had been narrowed down by his senior adviser, Karl Rove.

One presidential adviser, who asked not to be identified, said, after discussing the plan with administration officials, that the idea is "crazy" and mocked it as the "mission to Pluto."

"It costs a lot of money and we don`t have money," the official said. "This is destructive of any sort of budget restraint." The official added that the plan makes any rhetoric by Bush about fiscal restraint "look like a feint."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. Army trucks unload men released from Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison. It was unclear whether the 66 prisoners were freed under a new amnesty program.
washingtonpost.com
Confusion Marks Prisoner Release Outside Baghdad
U.S. Amnesty Pledge Inspires High Hopes

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 9, 2004; Page A12


BAGHDAD, Jan. 8 -- Two U.S. military trucks rumbled out of Baghdad`s central prison Thursday afternoon, with dozens of waving hands visible above the sides of the truck beds. A mile down the highway, they suddenly halted. Military police lowered the tailgates, and 66 men tumbled out to the pavement, disheveled and bewildered.

The prisoners` release came after U.S. officials announced they would begin freeing as many as 500 nonviolent detainees as part of an amnesty program designed to encourage public support, thus arousing hopes among families of an estimated 9,000 prisoners currently in military custody.

Within moments, the men were surrounded by camera crews and mobbed by Iraqis who had waited all day outside the Abu Ghraib prison for news of their detained relatives. But there were no shrieks of recognition or tearful embraces. Instead, strangers thrust snapshots into the men`s faces, demanding to know if the freed prisoners had seen their sons or brothers.

"Do you know my son Mansour? He has long hair. This is his picture," a stout, perspiring man in a business suit kept asking. "Have you seen Abdul Latif? He`s from Tilafa," a younger man murmured, holding up a tiny photo.

The newly released prisoners peered at the photos and shook their heads. "No, I`m sorry, I haven`t seen him," they replied again and again, glancing at the military police with assault rifles standing guard. Within a few minutes, most of the freed Iraqis had been offered rides and vanished into the traffic.

It was a bizarre and inconclusive ending to a day that had begun with intense anticipation among prisoners` families following the announcement Tuesday of the conditional amnesty program by U.S. officials, who said they would begin by releasing the first 100 detainees on Thursday.

L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which supervises the U.S.-led occupation, called the program an effort to "promote reconciliation" and to offer "a new chance" for Iraqis who had "made a mistake" by supporting ousted president Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party but did not have "bloodstained hands."

Bremer said the prisoners would be released on the personal guarantee of their community leaders, and other U.S. officials said they were trying to build on Iraqi public support that followed the capture of Hussein last month.

Hundreds of families began gathering outside the vast prison west of Baghdad early Thursday morning. They said they had heard about the planned releases, and even those uncertain whether their relatives were inside expressed hope that they would miraculously be freed. By midday, cars crammed the dusty visitors` lot and lined both sides of the highway.

All day they waited -- women veiled in black clutching white "detainee information" forms, robed tribal chiefs inquiring after village youths, fathers looking for their sons and wives looking for their husbands. Repeatedly they pressed closer, spilling through scrolls of barbed wire. Repeatedly the burly military policemen pushed them back, waving their rifles and shouting.

Meanwhile, the people told their stories, each protesting the innocence of their detained relatives. A man said U.S. forces found helium for filling children`s balloons in his shop and arrested his sons on suspicion of making bombs. A woman said her family had been camping in a vacant lot next to the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist and her husband was arrested as a suspected associate.

"I have been here so many times, trying to find out about my son, and they still won`t let me inside," said Fakhria Najhi, 55, whose son, a computer student, was arrested three months ago. "He was never in the army, he was never a Baathist. He is innocent," she insisted. "I hope they will release him today, but mostly I just want to know if he is alive."

Jalib Jabar Ikal, 30, said his uncle, a former army intelligence officer, had turned himself in to U.S. authorities last spring, then was freed and cooperated with them for months, only to be detained suddenly in October.

"We are frustrated because the Americans don`t keep their promises," he said, asserting that his uncle had been ostracized by the Hussein government for being too lenient with Shiite Muslims and had welcomed the U.S. invasion. "Our whole tribe wanted to help them, but now we have lost our trust," he said bitterly.

At one point, an open truck full of new prisoners pulled in, their heads covered with yellow hoods. A short while later, a woman emerged from the prison entrance and collapsed in the parking lot, shouting hysterically that the Americans had refused to let her inside even though she had a visitor`s permit for Thursday.

"They are all liars and thieves," she screamed, sobbing. "They say they will release people today and instead they bring them in with sacks over their heads. My son has been captured for three months. Who will tend the sheep? Who will feed the children?"

Just after 3:30 p.m., military policemen blocked the highway and waved two trucks out of the compound, escorted by troops in armored vehicles. People gasped, cheered and raced for their cars, following the convoy as it sped toward nowhere.

Suddenly, the trucks stopped and the prisoners stepped down, milling in confusion on the road, clutching plastic bags of belongings. As the families reached them and searched their faces, their hopeful expressions changed.

It was not clear whether these prisoners were part of the new program or whether they had been freed as part of a different, more routine release -- the kind that occurs regularly with prisoners whom occupation authorities no longer deem threatening or useful. The prisoners said they had not been given notice they were going to be freed, were not expecting to be met and had not heard about the amnesty program.

At a news conference later Thursday, Bremer`s chief spokesman said the process of releasing the special prisoners was underway and that the 100 promised beneficiaries were "ready to be released today." He would not say whether the group freed Thursday was part of that program, however, and he suggested that some prisoners might have to wait until community leaders "come forward" to vouch for and receive them.

Among the 66 set free on the road, most said they had not been physically abused in prison, but some complained of being held in cold and crowded conditions, and others muttered vaguely about seeking revenge against occupation forces. One man said he had been put inside a metal trash container while bars were pounded loudly on the outside as a form of punishment.

"I just thank God I am all right," said Kamal Khalid Aziz, 30, who said he had been detained in October during a raid in Tikrit, the city that was Hussein`s stronghold, while visiting cousins on their farm. "We did not believe we were getting out. We thought they were just transferring us," he said. " I still like the Americans, but the raids they do are wrong."

Another detainee, moving away from the clusters of people on the highway, knelt down alone on the sandy shoulder and began to pray.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Huge Movement of Troops Is Underway


By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 9, 2004; Page A13


The Pentagon has begun a shift of troops into and out of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan that promises to be the most challenging movement of U.S. forces in more than half a century, military officials announced yesterday.

In the past week, ships loaded with equipment from the 1st Cavalry Division in Texas and the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii have departed for the Persian Gulf. The first 200 members of the 101st Airborne Division returned from Iraq earlier this week to their home base at Fort Campbell, Ky. And Wednesday saw the departure from Fort Bragg, N.C., of paratroopers of the 504th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division.

An advance team from the Army`s III Corps -- whose commander, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, is due to take operational control of the new force -- has also gone to Baghdad.

The turnover of troops, intended to substitute fresh U.S. forces for the battle-tested ones that have spent up to a year at war, poses enormous logistical burdens. Scheduled to last between now and May, the operation is unusual not only for its large scope and compressed timetable but also for its need to transport sizable numbers of troops into and out of combat zones at the same time.

"It`s the biggest one we`ve ever had in some respects," Lt. Gen. Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, chief of Army personnel, said in an interview. He predicted "hiccups along the way" but added: "It`s going to work."

In addition to the sheer difficulty of coordinating transportation, housing and other needs for so many troops, the mass transition also heightens the security risks for U.S. service members in Iraq, who continue to face daily attacks from insurgents.

Plans call for ferrying many troops into and out of Iraq by plane to lessen the possibility of enemy assaults on long ground convoys. But the reported attack yesterday on a U.S. Air Force C-5 cargo jet, suspected of being hit by ground fire as it took off from Baghdad International Airport, underscored the danger of relying on air transport.

Top U.S. military authorities have confessed to being worried about the huge rotation. But they have also said the operation has received extensive high-level reviews and will be bolstered by extra security measures.

Disclosing one such measure in a briefing to a group of reporters yesterday, a senior Army officer said a military team has gone to Iraq to explore ways of coping better with the makeshift, roadway bombs that have become a prime cause of U.S. military casualties. Made up of explosives experts, the team plans to perform forensic studies of actual attacks and to help develop tactics and improved technical means of detecting and defeating the improvised devices.

"The enemy gets a vote," the officer said, referring to the prospect that attacks by insurgents could disrupt the rotation schedule. "We owe it to all these soldiers not to rush through this thing. We have to do this thing right because it`s still a dangerous place."

But he also acknowledged, in response to a question, that the rotation could offer an opportunity for greater U.S. offensive action, as incoming forces overlap with those due to exit, swelling the total number of U.S. troops in the country.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the region, is "going to have a very, very large force in there, and a very capable force. And our plan is to keep the pressure on the enemy," the officer said.

Although the military has handled other sizable flows of troops, the movement has tended to be essentially in one direction. This time, the traffic will be going both ways, with more than 100,000 troops pouring into Iraq and about the same number -- and their dusty, worn equipment -- pulling out. Another 20,000 troops in Kuwait are due to be replaced, along with about 10,000 Army soldiers in Afghanistan.

In all, the shift will involve "the better part of 81/2 of the Army`s 10 active-duty divisions," the senior officer said.

The operation also includes a division of Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif. The Marines are slated to take over from the 82nd Airborne Division and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and to move into an area west of Baghdad that includes Ramadi, Fallujah and other centers of insurgent activity.

Two brigades of the 1st Infantry Division, along with a brigade of the 25th Infantry Division and the 30th Infantry Brigade of the North Carolina National Guard, will operate in the region north of Baghdad -- around Tikrit and Kirkuk -- which has also seen much enemy action, replacing the 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Originally, U.S. officials had hoped some of the military burden in this area would be assumed by another division of non-U.S. foreign troops -- in addition to the two already operating south of Baghdad. But when the foreign division failed to materialize, the 25th Infantry`s brigade, due to go to Afghanistan, was redirected to Iraq.

In Baghdad, the 1st Cavalry Division and the 39th Infantry Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard will replace the 1st Armored Division. And responsibility for northwestern Iraq, which has belonged to the 101st Airborne Division, will go to an Army Stryker Brigade that has been in the country for several months, but operating farther south.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.

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washingtonpost.com
Kurds` Wariness Frustrates U.S. Efforts
Reluctance to Yield Autonomy Brings Prospect of Two Governments in Iraq

By Robin Wright and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 9, 2004; Page A12


The United States faces the prospect of two governments inside Iraq -- one for Kurds and one for Arabs -- after so far failing to win a compromise from the Kurds on a formula to distribute political power when the U.S. occupation ends, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, twice met with the two main Kurdish leaders over the past week to urge them to back down from their demands to retain autonomy, according to U.S. officials.

But in a new setback for U.S. plans in Iraq, the Kurds have not budged. They insist on holding on to the basic political, economic and security rights they have achieved during a dozen years of being cut off from the rest of Iraq during Saddam Hussein`s rule.

"They have a strong hand and they`re playing it," a senior administration official said.

Creation of an autonomous Kurdish region, with its own militia, represents one of the biggest fears about the ethnically diverse nation -- a problem that Washington thought had been averted before U.S. intervention.

But the two Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, are resisting U.S. pressure, in large part out of fear that the vulnerable Kurdish minority could once again be persecuted by a strong central government, as it was repeatedly by Arab regimes.

The new crisis over Kurdistan is the latest flap in the increasingly troubled process of working out a transition to Iraqi rule. The drama is playing out as the United States rushes to help create a Transitional Administration Law to govern the country after June 30.

To the surprise of many U.S. and Iraqi officials, the hottest flashpoint is proving to be the formula for federalism. Iraqis generally agree that Iraq`s 18 provinces, possibly redrawn into a smaller number of states, should have a federal government, but the details have been divisive.

One possible compromise is deferring decisions on the final status of the Kurdish north, and its claim on regional oil fields, until the United States hands over power to a provisional Iraqi government. The Iraqis would then be left to sort it out. If this fallback option is adopted, U.S. officials say, they hope that a strong central government in Baghdad emerges, wins international backing and leads the Kurdish minority and Arab majority to come to a mutually accepted arrangement.

But Kurds are opposed to creating a set of basic laws for Iraq that doesn`t address those issues. "If you leave everything out, no details, it`s like a time bomb," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "The sooner one tries to find a solution and some consensus, the better."

The danger in trying now to make major decisions on Kurdish autonomy, U.S. officials say, is that the Kurds may be reluctant to alter those terms later when Iraqis write a constitution after the U.S. political role ends.

"The more time that passes, the more attached the Kurds may become to keeping the reins of power," a U.S. official said.

Turkey would also oppose autonomy for the Kurdish region, both because of its own large restive Kurdish community and because of the large Turkmen minority in northern Iraq.

Other Arab governments are already warning of a dangerous spillover if ethnicity becomes a central factor in Iraqi government.

"Regimes founded on a confessional or ethnic basis do not help bring stability and territorial integrity to a country," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Faisal said Wednesday. "The danger of starting on the confessional and ethnic road will consequently partition Iraq, threatening our own security."

The often feisty debates underway in Iraq are reminiscent of arguments among America`s founding fathers about federation, U.S. officials say. Like New York, Virginia and Massachusetts in the late 18th century, Kurdistan does not want to cede full authority to a strong central government.

The United States is trying to allow Iraqis to make the critical decisions. "It was the position of the United States from the very beginning of this crisis that [Iraq] had to remain one single integrated country. How it organizes itself, recognizing the major constituencies in the nation, remains to be determined," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters this week.

The Bush administration is sympathetic to the Kurds` concerns, but unwilling to concede to their demands.

"Clearly the Kurds wish, in some way, to preserve their historic identity and to link it in some way to geography. But I think it`s absolutely clear that that part of Iraq must remain part of Iraq," Powell added.

Bremer intends to hold further talks with the Kurds to warn of the potential dangers.

"The transitional law must not lead to secession or create conditions where secession might be likely or possible," a State Department official said. "The new central government must have central authority, which means demobilization of private militias and control over borders, national finance and foreign policy, including trade and financial policy and ownership of national resources."

Several key Arab leaders on the Governing Council are expected to meet soon with Barzani and Talabani to press for compromise. But Kurdish leaders say they are not convinced of the need to accommodate the United States or other Iraqis.

"Bremer is committed to a non-ethnic Iraq. But the way the United States is framing it is not workable or practical here," a senior Kurdish politician said. "Iraq is not the United States. To make it such requires time. You can`t impose voluntary integration."

The question of the Kurds` role comes on top of an ongoing crisis with Iraq`s leading Shiite leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He demands that the United States hold direct elections for a provisional government, rather than selecting a new national assembly through a complicated process based on provincial caucuses.

The one bit of good news for the United States is that Iraq appears to have averted a crisis over the role of Islam in its new government. The Iraqi council has come up with a formula declaring that Iraq is a state with a majority Muslim community committed to the protection of minorities. Islamic law, or the Sharia, will be a source of legislation, but not the only source, Iraqis and U.S. officials say.

In a move pivotal to defining the state, "the Islamic bloc on the Governing Council agreed to separate religion from the state," said Yonadam Kanna, the lone Christian on the 25-member council.

Sipress reported from Baghdad.

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The Bush Hitler Thing
t r u t h o u t | Reader Submission

Friday 09 January 2004

Dear Sir,

My family was one of Hitler`s victims. We lost a lot under the Nazi occupation, including an uncle who died in the camps and a cousin killed by a booby trap. I was terrified when my father went ballistic after finding my brother and me playing with a hand grenade. (I was only 12 at the time, and my brother insisted the grenade was safe.) I remember the rubble and the hardships of `austerity` - and the bomb craters from Allied bombs. As late as the 1980s, I had to take detours while bombs were being removed - they litter the countryside, buried under parking lots,buildings, and in the canals and rivers to this day. Believe me, I learned a lot about Hitler while I was growing up, both in Europe and here in the US - both my parents were in the war and talked about it constantly, unlike most American families. I spent my earliest years with the second-hand fear that trickled down from their PTSD - undiagnosed and untreated in those days.

I`m no expert on WWII - but I learned a lot about what happened in Germany - and Europe - back in those days. I always wondered how the wonderful German people - so honest, decent, hard-working, friendly, and generous - could ever allow such a thing to happen. (There were camps near my family`s home - they still talk about them only in hushed conspiratorial whispers.) I asked a lot of questions - we were only a few kilometers from the German border - and no one ever denied me. My relatives had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the war - they still haven`t forgotten - I don`t think anyone can forget such a horrible nightmare. Among the questions I asked:

Why didn`t you do anything about the people in the camps?

Everyone was terrified. People `disappeared` into those camps. Sometimes the Nazis came and lined everyone up, walking behind them - even school children - with a cocked pistol. You never knew when they would just shoot someone in the back of the head. Everyone was terrified. Everyone was disarmed - guns were registered, so all the Nazis had to do was go from house to house and demand the guns.

Didn`t you see what was happening?

We saw. There was nothing we could do. Our military had no modern weapons. The Nazis had technology and resources - they just invaded and took over - we were overwhelmed by their air power. They had spies everywhere - people spying on each other, just to have an `ace in the hole` in case they were accused - and anyone who had a grudge against you could accuse you of something - just an accusation meant you`d disappear. Nobody dared ask where you had gone - anyone who returned was considered suspicious - what had they said, and who did they implicate? It was a climate of fear - there`s nothing anyone can do when the government uses fear and imprisonment to intimidate people. The government was above the law - even in Germany, it became `every man for himself`. Advancement was possible by exposing `traitors` - anyone who questioned the government. It didn`t matter if the people you accused were guilty or not - just the accusation was enough.

Did anyone know what was going on?

We all knew. We imagined the worst because the Nazis made `examples` of a few people in every town and village. Public torture and execution. The most unspeakable atrocities were committed in full view of everyone. If this is what happened in public, can you imagine what might be going on in the camps? Nobody wanted to know.

Why didn`t the German people stop the Nazis?

Life was better, at first, under the Nazis. The war machine invigorated the economy - men had jobs again, and enough money to take care of their family. New building projects were everywhere. The shops were full again - and people could afford good food, culture, and luxuries. Women could stay home in comfort. Crime was reduced. Health care improved. It was a rosy scenario - Hitler brought order and prosperity. His policies won widespread approval because life was better for most Germans, after the misery of reparations and inflation. The people liked the idea of removing the worst elements of society - the gypsies, the homosexuals, the petty criminals - it was easy to elicit support for prosecuting the corrupt `evil`people poisoning society. Every family was proud of their hometown heroes - the sharply-dressed soldiers they contributed to his program - they were, after all,defending the Fatherland. Continuing a proud tradition that had been defeated and shamed after WWI, the soldiers gave the feeling of power and success to the proud families that showered them with praise and support. Their early victories were reason to celebrate - in spite of the fact that they faced poorly armed inferior forces - further proof that what they were doing was right, and the best thing for the country. The news was full of stories about their bravery and accomplishments against a vile enemy. They were `liberating` these countries from their corrupt governments.

These are some of the answers I gleaned over the years. As a child, I was fascinated with the Nazis. I thought the German soldiers were really something - that`s how strong an impression they made, even after the war. After all, they weren`t the ones committing war crimes - they were the pride of their families and communities. It was just the SS and Gestapo that were `bad`. Now I know better -but that pride in the military was a strong factor for many years, only adding to the mystique of military power - after all, my father had been a soldier too, but in the American army. It took a while to figure out the truth.

Every time I`ve gone back to Europe, someone has taken me to the `gardens of stone` - the Allied cemeteries that dot the countryside. With great sadness, my relatives would stand in abject misery, remembering the nightmare, and asking `Why?`. Maybe that`s why they wouldn`t support the US invasion of Iraq. They knew war. They knew occupation. And they knew resistance. I saw the building where British flyers hid on their way back to England - smuggled out by brave families that risked the lives of everyone to help the Allies. As a child, I had played in a basement, where the cow lived under the house, as is common there. The same place those flyers hid.

So why, now, when I hear GWB`s speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase `Never forget`. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.

So far, I`ve seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I`ve seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of `preventive war`. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of `undesirable` aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one`s neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to `fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed `enemies`. The establishment of `Homeland Security`. The dehumanization of `foreigners`. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of `goodness` and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.

There isn`t much doubt in my mind - anyone who compares the history of Hitler`s rise to power and the progression of recent events in the US cannot avoid the parallels. It`s incontrovertible. Is Bush another Hitler? Maybe not, but with each incriminating event, the parallel grows -it certainly cannot be dismissed. There`s too much evidence already. Just as Hitler used American tactics to plan and execute his reign, it looks as if Karl Rove is reading Hitler`s playbook to plan world domination - and that is the stated intent of both. From the Reichstag fire to the landing at Nuremberg to the motto of "Gott Mit Uns" to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to the insistence that peace was the ultimate goal, the line is unbroken and unwavering.

I`m afraid now, that what may still come to pass is a reign far more savage and barbaric than that of the Nazis. Already, appeasement has been fruitless - it only encourages the brazen to escalate their arrogance and braggadocio. Americans support Bush - by a generous majority - and mass media sings his praises while indicting his detractors - or silencing their opinions completely. The American people seem to care only about the domestic economic situation - and even in that, they are in complete denial. They don`t want to hear about Iraq, and Afghanistan is already forgotten. Even the Democratic opposition supports the occupation of Iraq. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Hussein deserves to be executed -with or without a trial. `Visitors` are fingerprinted. Guilty until proven innocent. Snipers are on New York City rooftops. When do the Stryker teams start appearing on American streets? They`re perfectly suited for `Homeland Security` - and they`ve had a trial run in Iraq. The Constitution has been suspended - until further notice. Dick Cheney just mentioned it may be for decades - even a generation, as Rice asserts as well. Is this the start of the 1000 year reign of this new collection of thugs? So it would seem.

I can only hope that in the coming year there will be some sign - some hint - that we are not becoming that which we abhor. The Theory of the Grotesque fares all too well these days. It may not be Nazi Germany - it might be a lot worse.

SL | Wisconsin

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Cargo plane hit by missile
From correspondents in Washington
09Jan04

A US Air Force C-5 cargo plane carrying 63 passengers and crew members apparently hit by a surface-to-air missile today as it took off from Baghdad international airport managed to land safely, a senior US defence official said.

"It looks like its number four engine was hit by a surface-to-air missile, but it was able to turn around, come back and land," the official said.
An investigation into the incident was under way.

Earlier, the air force said in a statement that the C-5 declared an inflight emergency "because of excessive engine vibrations in their number four engine".

"The aircraft had just departed the airport when the problem occurred. The crew was able to land safely. There were 63 passengers and crewmembers on board the aircraft. No injuries were reported," it said.

It would be the third time since May 1, when major combat operations were declared over, that a plane has been hit by a surface-to-air missile while flying out of Baghdad international airport.

On December 10, a defence official in Washington said an Air Force C-17 cargo and troop transport plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile after takeoff from Baghdad with a crew of three and 13 passengers.

On November 22, a DHL cargo plane was hit by a shoulder-fired SA-14 surface-to-air missile as it took off from Baghdad airport. DHL temporarily suspended flights into Iraq after the incident.

This report appears on NEWS.com.au.


http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8356490^1702…

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-un9j…
THE WORLD



Iraqis Want Annan to Mediate With U.S., Ease Transition Pangs
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

January 9, 2004

UNITED NATIONS — Iraqi leaders have been urging U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to oversee parts of the country`s political transition and even help override U.S. plans for transferring power to Iraqis.

During the last 10 days, an Iraqi Governing Council president and the country`s most influential religious leader have asked for U.N. help in negotiating a security agreement to keep U.S. forces in Iraq, and for an alternative plan to the U.S. blueprint for transferring power.

Their requests reflect division within Iraq about the country`s next steps and a lack of confidence in the U.S.-led coalition authority.

"They don`t trust the U.S., but they don`t trust each other," a U.N. diplomat said. "That doesn`t bode well."

The requests place Annan in an awkward position, between the Iraqis and the Americans — a spot he has been trying to avoid. The Bush administration has made it clear that it doesn`t want Annan or the U.N. to be involved in the security agreement.

"I can`t imagine what place the U.N. would have negotiating a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq," a State Department official said.

On Wednesday, Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani said in a statement in Najaf that Washington`s plans to create a transitional government would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people."

U.N. officials and diplomats said Thursday that Sistani`s repeated request for direct elections may be a strategy to increase pressure on Washington before a Jan. 19 meeting of Governing Council members, Annan and representatives from the U.S.-led authority.

Jeremy Greenstock, the top British representative to Iraq, said in Baghdad this week that Sistani seemed to understand the time constraints but wanted to "just have [his opinion] out there that elections are the right way to do this."

Greenstock is to attend the Jan. 19 meeting to discuss the U.N.`s role; the U.S. has not yet decided who, if anyone, will represent it at the meeting.

Senior U.S. officials canceled their plans to meet with Annan today, leaving it to the U.S. and British ambassadors to discuss the Jan. 19 meeting. They didn`t offer a specific reason, and it was seen by some at the U.N. as a snub. Washington has been reluctant to participate in the talks, saying it doesn`t want the meeting to be politicized.

"There are a lot of different groups with a lot of different agendas, each trying to advance their own," the State Department official said. "The challenge is to get enough moving in the same direction so they bring everybody else along with them."

A November agreement between Washington and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council requires regional caucuses to select an Iraqi national assembly by the end of May. Under the agreement, the assembly will pick a transitional government by June 30.

Sistani, who has a large following among mainstream Shiites, has said that direct elections would be more democratic. A popular ballot would favor the Shiite majority — who make up 60% of Iraq`s population — over rival Shiite sects and the Sunni Muslim minority that ruled the country under Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials in Iraq have insisted that there is not enough time to register eligible voters. Sistani has countered that Iraqi citizens could use food ration cards as voter IDs.

The occupation authority, led by U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, has had trouble persuading Sistani that its transfer process will be transparent and fair.

Sistani, who said there had to be "another solution that is honest to the Iraqi people`s demands," has refused to meet with coalition representatives, communicating through letters, statements and intermediaries.

The U.N.`s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, began a dialogue with Sistani before he was killed in a bombing of the U.N.`s headquarters in Baghdad in August. U.N. diplomats have maintained contact with the cleric and his associates.

Sistani`s statement seemed to correspond with a Dec. 29 letter to Annan from Abdelaziz Hakim, a Shiite who served as president of the Governing Council that month.

Hakim asked for U.N. experts to come to Iraq to help guide the political transition, an apparent appeal to solve the stalemate between Sistani and the council. Hakim`s political group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had conveyed an earlier appeal from Sistani for the U.N. to decide whether elections could be held by June 30.

Annan said in a news conference last month that he agreed with the Coalition Provisional Authority that direct elections were not feasible by June but would be later. He aimed to assure Sistani that the Shiite majority would not be disregarded.

*


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Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman and researcher Raheem Salman in The Times` Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ellis9j…
COMMENTARY



Today It`s the War on Terror, Stupid
National security will be the main election issue.
By John Ellis
John Ellis, a partner in a venture capital firm in New York City, is a contributing columnist for Techcentralstation.com. He is a first cousin of President Bush.

January 9, 2004

Presidential politics in the United States is largely an argument about three issues: national security, the economy and culture.

In different years, these issues dominate or recede, depending on what`s happening around the world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, for instance, national security receded as a voter concern, paving the way for two relatively inexperienced governors to win the presidency in 1992 (Bill Clinton) and 2000 (George W. Bush).

It was in 1992 that Democratic strategist James Carville famously proclaimed, "It`s the economy, stupid," and indeed it was, but only because the Soviet threat had expired.

The elections of 1996 and 2000, by contrast, revolved largely around cultural issues, not least of which was the culture of President Clinton`s White House, which proved to be Vice President Al Gore`s undoing — despite the tailwind of extraordinary economic growth. Almost no one cared that Gore was more experienced than then-Gov. George W. Bush in matters of national security.

This year, the Democrats would have you believe the election will focus on the economy. "The biggest issue in this election is jobs and economic security," Howard Dean said recently in Iowa.

But that`s unlikely.

The simple fact is that Sept. 11 returned national security to the forefront of voter concerns. And President Bush upped the ante when, in a speech to the graduating class at West Point in 2002, he changed U.S. national security policy from one of containment and deterrence to one of "preemption," if need be.

"The war on terror will not be won on the defensive," Bush said. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act."

And so it did.

The president expanded the nation`s counterterrorism strategy ambitiously. The war in Afghanistan sent the message that there was no haven for Al Qaeda. The war in Iraq sent an equally forceful message to the world that providing terrorists with the technological means (such as a tactical nuclear weapon) or the intellectual property (like a new design for genetically altered smallpox) to cause catastrophe might lead to "regime change," as it was politely called. The postwar reconstruction of Iraq sent another message: The U.S. was determined to change the dead-end dynamics of Middle Eastern politics.

The response of the Democratic Party`s leading lights to this dramatic shift in national security policy and its execution has been myopic.

Democrats ranging from Bill Clinton to Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry have expressed regret that the president had acted "unilaterally" and thus had made the United States unpopular at the United Nations and in various world capitals.

And Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, most weirdly of all, has entertained the notion that Bush had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks but chose to let it happen because … well, never mind.

Whatever one thinks of Bush`s counterterrorism strategy, it does have the advantage of being grounded in reality.

The fact is that at the intersection of terror and advanced technology lies the distinct possibility of catastrophic destruction.

A catastrophic event in the United States would do terrible damage not only to its victims but to the national and the global economy, shattering investor confidence, which is the lifeblood of the capitalist system. Without a vital economy, there can be no expanded health-care coverage, job creation or yet more money for seniors.

So everything rides on preventing a catastrophic event from occurring in New York or Washington or Los Angeles. Counterterrorism policy isn`t an issue in this campaign. It`s the only issue.

The Democrats may believe that they can win on economic issues. But the reality is that until the Democrats convince vast swaths of the electorate that they are every bit as serious about fighting terrorism on as many fronts as is required, until they articulate a plan that is every bit as aggressive and ambitious and steadfast as Bush has been, until they make clear to the country that they will not falter or fail in this struggle, they will remain outside the circle of majority consideration.

The road back to the White House goes through this issue. It does not go left.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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U.S. December Payrolls Rise 1,000; Jobless Rate Falls (Update2)
Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy gained 1,000 jobs in December, fewer than the 150,000 that economists had forecast, as companies relied on productivity gains to meet increased demand, a government report showed.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.7 percent last month from 5.9 percent, the Labor Department said in Washington. In November, companies added 43,000 jobs, fewer than the 57,000 estimated last month. Factory employment in December fell for a 41st straight month and retailers cut jobs even as holiday sales accelerated.

Companies with limited ability to raise prices have been reluctant to hire and instead are squeezing more out of existing workers. The Federal Reserve has cited a weak job market as one reason it can hold interest rates at a 45-year low for a ``considerable period.``

``This is a productivity story,`` said Bill Quan, director of research at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. in Hoboken, New Jersey. A lack of job creation means ``the Fed can be on hold for a while.``

The Treasury`s 10-year note rose 31/32 point, pushing down the yield 12 basis points to 4.13 percent at 8:49 a.m. in New York.

The labor market has emerged as a major issue in this year`s Democratic Party campaign to replace President George W. Bush in the White House in November.

Economists had expected payrolls to rise by 150,000 last month after a previously reported increase of 57,000 in November, based on the median of 58 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. Forecasts ranged from 75,000 to 250,000 jobs added. Economists had projected the unemployment rate would hold at 5.9 percent.

Retail Jobs

Employment in service-producing industries, which include retailers, banks and government agencies, rose by 13,000 last month after gaining 55,000 the previous month. Retail employment declined 38,000 after a 28,000 decrease. Factory employment, which the median forecast predicted would show no change in December, instead declined by 26,000 in December.

Average weekly hours worked for all employees fell to 33.7 hours in December from 33.9 the prior month. Economists had expected hours would hold at 33.9 hours, according to the Bloomberg News survey. A longer workweek is considered a precursor to future hiring, economists said.

The rise in service jobs was led by a 45,000 increase in professional and business services, which include temporary employment agencies. Temporary-help service companies added 30,000 jobs in December.

Education and health services employment rose 21,000.

Construction employment increased 14,000 for second straight month.

Workweek

The manufacturing workweek fell to 40.7 hours in December from 40.8. Overtime rose to 4.6 hours from 4.5 hours. Workers` average hourly earnings rose 0.2 percent, or 3 cents, after rising 0.1 percent the previous month. Economists had expected a 0.2 percent increase in hourly wages. Average weekly earnings fell to $522.35 last month from $524.43 in November.

Productivity, in the gauge of work performed by one employee in an hour, grew in the third quarter at the fastest pace in two decades, the Labor Department said last month. Businesses that relied on gains in productivity to keep payrolls lean and boost earnings during the quarter may need to hire as demand accelerates, economists said.

The economy may expand 4.4 percent this year, the fastest since 1999, based on a Bloomberg survey of 59 economists last month. Gross domestic product may have grown at a 4.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, according to the survey. From July through September, the economy expanded at an 8.2 percent rate, the fastest in almost 20 years, led by consumer spending and business investment in software and equipment.

Profits

Standard & Poor`s 500 Index members will report that profits grew by 22 percent on average in the fourth quarter, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

A unit of Danfoss A/S, Denmark`s biggest manufacturer, is boosting production of electronic drives for air conditioners at its Rockford, Illinois, plant by 40 percent and adding a second shift. San Jose, California-based Cypress Semiconductor Corp. is expanding its workforce by 15 percent.

``You don`t make this kind of investment if you don`t think you`re going to grow into it,`` said Charles Manz, president of Danfoss`s North American motion controls business, during a tour of the factory floor.

Job-cut announcements last month dropped 6.5 percent from November, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago-based placement firm. The total number of planned payroll reductions fell 16 percent in 2003 from a year earlier, the survey found.

Factory Hiring

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Jack Guynn told the Rotary Club of Atlanta on Monday that he expects business investment spending to rise at double-digit rates this year, and that he`d be ``surprised and disappointed if we don`t get that.`` At the same time, job creation will have to quicken to help make up for the loss of more than a million jobs since the recession ended in November 2001, Guynn said.

John Devine, General Motors Corp.`s vice chairman and chief financial officer, said the pace of hiring in the auto industry probably won`t pick up significantly.

``The mistake we made in years past is we did it in peaks and valleys on people. You can`t run the business that way, you have to run it as flat as you can,`` Devine said in an interview. ``We do it carefully and selectively, but we don`t see massive ups or massive downs`` on employment in the auto industry, Devine said.

Last Updated: January 9, 2004 08:52 EST

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Scenes From A Sad Airport
Welcome to America. Please give us the finger. Smile for the camera. Now get the hell out
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 9, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/09/notes010904.DTL



Look at those eyes. Perturbed and bemused and just a little furious.

Look at those eyes as the baffled woman from east Texas stares down at the table as the security agent rifles through her luggage and pulls out the contents for all to see.

And out pops the skimpy latex thong and the anal beads and the Astroglide and the smallish travel dildo that isn`t really a dildo at all but is really a "sexual-education device," because, as everyone knows, dildos are completely illegal in Texas. But not guns. Guns are mandatory.

Note how she notes the irony. Note how she considers suing for embarrassment and humiliation and for the sheer idiocy of it all. Note how the security agent mumbles something snide and derogatory.

Note how we, as a paranoid nation, are just confused and sad and how our airports have become these comical circus sideshows, invasive and racist and draconian and pornographic all in the name of, what was it again? Protection? For our own good? Is that it?

And look there, look how that conservative Christian U.S. congressman is just so red faced and enraged when they search through his manly black Samsonite carry-on and find, well, not just a nice new Bible and clean white Jockey underwear and assorted envelopes of cash from the director of Destroy Gay Marriage Now! of Colorado Springs, Colo.

Look there, just under the argyle sweaters and the signed head shot from Pat Robertson, at the stash of sticky Honcho magazines and some Hello Kitty Speedos and, lo and behold, the metal in the congressman`s boots induces an unfortunate backroom strip search, where what do we see but the assorted bright red welts of spankdom as incurred from Mistress Carlita`s Pleasure Bunker in downtown Phoenix, from the night before. Oh, Congressman.

Do you hear that? That screaming? Of course you do. Just another outraged mother of three, her appalled shouts echoing all the way to the food court as LAX security gropes the living hell out of her stunned 2-year-old daughter after the tot`s teddy bear appeared to have some odd-looking wiring in its cute fuzzy little arms.

And the mother up and slaps the scowling groping security agent and alarms are sounded and guns are drawn and children are screaming and Spongebob backpacks tumble to the ground and spill their bright happy contents all over the stained tiles in terrible slow motion, like a bad Tarantino outtake.

And thus were lines held up and 16 flights from Dulles and O`Hare and JFK delayed for nine hours, causing a domino-effect 27-hour backup systemwide and thusly pumping yet another enormous and savage dose of frustrated rage and angst and sighing ennui into another artery of the cultural bloodstream.

Look. Look there. See the hobbled, 86-year-old man forced to put down his cane and remove his threadbare belt to pass through the metal detector. Terrorists are everywhere! Bush said so! We can`t be too sure! Do you have metal pins in your hip, sir? Can you please remove them or something?

Let us watch in humiliated shame as he struggles to keep his pants from falling down as it looks, to all appearances, like he`s being led though a scanner to some horrific prison cell where he will be fed old oatmeal and dangerous drugs in harsh fluorescent concrete rooms, when all he`s trying to do is fly to Poughkeepsie for his granddaughter`s third wedding.

Because God knows you just can`t tell who might be a terrorist these days, and you can`t be too careful, because they could indeed be anyone at all from anywhere at all, including but not at all limited to white Lutheran octogenarians from the Shady Pines retirement-condo complex in Butte, Mont. Not to mention them dang furriners.

Let us now welcome the overwhelmed visitor from China, or Latvia, or Johannesburg, or Brazil, or India, or (heaven forefend) Turkey. It`s OK, come on out of that plane. Ignore the stun guns and the growling dogs. America loves you.

Let us now note how our fair visitor walks into the American security miasma feeling like she is entering one big draconian maze of weird overlit American racism and paranoia, as all visitors from all "suspicious" countries have their photos taken and their fingers imprinted and their self-respect jolted and their identities filed for 20 years by the FBI, just in case.

Welcome to America, foreign traveler. Please hold still and place your finger here and smile for the camera and enjoy your first taste of our trademark, wickedly ironic and hypocritical joke about America being the land of the free. Is that weird necklace a religious symbol or something? Are those beads filled with white-hot hate for our glorious freedoms and our 24-hour Safeways and our love of low-rise jeans on teenage girls? Are you in some sort of cult?

Repeat after us: Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to have their spirits snapped like chicken bones and be made to feel as if they are all, by default, criminals and thieves and Bush`s "gol-dang guilty durty heathen furriners." Thank you. Please proceed like mad cow-infested cattle to the next airport screening agent.

Just a couple questions at this point. Do you have any nasty homemade bombs or lethal biotoxic intentions or rampant simmering hatreds of George W. Bush on your person at this time? Damn right you don`t. Now please proceed to the painful urine-sample room to have your dignity forcibly removed. Souvenir?

Look closer. Look domestic. See how so many Americans standing in all the various airport lines for 2.7 hours seem to just sigh and suck it up.

See how they all cast their eyes down and tolerate the multiple driver`s-license checks and the general insanity and the obvious government-sponsored invasions of privacy and the happy perky assaults on our civil liberties because, well, it`s for our own good, right?

All in the name of inducing a bogus feeling of protection and safety and never you mind America`s hilarious gaping arcade of exploitable opportunities for terrorism, from our huge wide-open shipping ports to the intricately distributed unprotected food supply to our antiquated water systems to a thousand other ridiculously obvious apertures.

And never mind that even tiny raging splinter-cell terrorists aren`t so stupid as to try the same vile hijack stunt twice. And never you mind that none of this would`ve stopped any of the 9/11 thugs. But oh yes, let`s fingerprint old ladies from Latvia. That oughta do it.

Wait, you`re from Andorra? Wonderful! You`re perfectly OK and we need no fingerprints. Come on in. Ditto Australia. And Austria. And Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Portugal and Singapore.

Hey, you couldn`t possibly hate America enough to wish us harm. Could you? Besides, we stop only swarthy Third World types and guys with scary-looking beards and unpronounceable names that sound like rare kidney diseases.

Welcome, all, to the new-millennium American airport. Observe the perfectly imperfect microcosm of new American ideals and values, all about isolationism and quiet cancerous paranoia and a huge increase in government employment and expenditure and bureaucracy and very sorry but you can`t bring that coffee into the boarding area.

Welcome to the all-American fear of the Other, coupled with a sad acceptance that this is the way it is and the way it will be for years and years to come. Please remove your shoes. And your belt. And your watch. And your self-respect. Bush forever. More war in `04. Enjoy your flight.


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Subscribe to Mark`s deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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Bush to announce plan to send men to Mars / Huge new space initiative could take decades, cost billions
This image taken by the Mars rover Spirit was released by NASA on Thursday. A dust-coated airbag, prominent in the foreground, is blocking the rover`s path to the surface of Mars. Photo courtesy of NASA

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Peter Lee: `The evil that men do`
Posted on Friday, January 09 @ 10:08:30 EST
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Peter Lee

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. - Shakespeare

Error, haste, and indifference guarantee that benevolent ephemera such as democracy, justice, and security will not survive our prematurely aborted conquest of Iraq.

Our lasting monuments will be chaos, cruelty -- and concrete.

The State Department is planning our largest embassy in the world in Baghdad. It represents a transparent attempt to will into existence the intensive American engagement with Iraq that logic, prudence, and Bush`s fortuitous incompetence are conspiring to deny it.

Bureaucracy abhors a vacuum, and the Bush administration obviously hopes that succeeding administrations will be compelled to find ways and excuses to occupy the vast spaces of our embassy and fill the bloody hole our conquest and occupation have ripped in Iraq.



However, our embassy will not serve as America`s triumphal dark tower looming over the Middle East, nor will Iraq be the jewel in the crown of 21st century American empire.

The embassy can serve as the mausoleum for Colin Powell`s diminished reputation as the ineffectual, conflicted enabler of the Iraq war.

Our puppet regime will be little more than an immense, vulgar, and unpopular cubic zirconia implanted in the steaming turd of disorder we have deposited in the Middle East.

Chaos is guaranteed, as the Bush administration`s hasty withdrawal demands that disproportionate independence and power be given to the Kurds -- our only eager and able abettors in this sorry land.

Political authority will be flung to the new Iraq government over the tailgates of our departing trucks as our troops retreat to their well-fortified barracks, only to emerge if the brutal facts of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk and communal violence throughout defacto-partioned Iraq degenerate into politically embarrassing genocide.

Cruelty, however, may be our most lasting legacy. In a desperate, last-ditch attempt to prevent a conspicuous collapse of our abandoned regime in Iraq -- and rescue their reputations and place in history -- Cheney and the neocons have seized upon a measure so desperate, odious, and contemptible...

...that the US media will probably ignore it.

As The American Prospect reported, tucked in the black portion of the $87 billion Iraq appropriation is $3 billion earmarked for creation of a network of Iraqi death squads, meant to ensure that the new Iraqi government will have a reliable, well-funded, and scruple-free instrument of state terror and oppression after we cut and run (Phoenix Rising, Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, Jan. 4, 2004).

As is usually the case, the Bush numbers seem rather squirrelly. $3 billion might buy a lot of school lunches in America, but in the Halliburtonized world of Iraq economics, there is the usual disconnect between the ocean of money we`re pouring into Iraq and the dribble of results that even the administration`s own numbers lead us to expect.

We are to assume that Iraq, a country of 25 million people, has about 120,000 or so actual or perceived impediments to government authority demanding the tender attention of our new Phoenix program.

We`re going to spend $25,000 US per person to terminate these people, in a country where vengeful families hand out retribution pro bono and criminals happily murder in return for a fistful of dollars.

(Taxpayer) money may be no object when it comes to protecting the reputations and interests of our stumblebum imperialists, but we`re supposed to be killing these people -- not gold-plating them.

But as the velvet glove is shredded away, revealing the iron fist, and the cloven hoof peeks out from beneath the surplices of our supposedly virtuous crusaders for democracy, the mainstream press displays little interest in the gruesome absurdity of offering the brown folks of Iraq discount democracy in its most bastardized and caucusized form, but propped up with the most expensive, deluxe military and terror apparatus US money can buy.

Just the opposite, in fact. Big media has always pretended there was a compelling moral dimension to our invasion. Now they owe it to the empire (and themselves) to provide political cover to the increasingly isolated and discredited band of opportunists who took America to war, so we can depart Iraq with our illusions -- if nothing else -- intact.

The campaign to excuse the war -- and indeed, to excuse this administration and win the upcoming election -- demands that Chomsky be turned on his head. America is to be judged not by what it did, but what it says it intended. As we withdraw from Iraq and our transitory conquests and purported achievements dwindle into nothingness, all we are left with is our increasingly empty, ever inflating rhetoric.

Instead of a cold, clear-eyed look at what imperialism -- even worse, inept imperialism -- is doing not only to Iraq but to America and its political discourse, we get increasingly blatant and ineffective attempts to apply a unique, freedom-loving, homeland-defending, red, white, and blue gloss to the ugly realities of invasion and occupation -- realities that have persisted since time and war began.

The closest thing you`ll get to pornography in a mainstream paper was the NY Times` fawning profile of our dedicated snipers. Take it away, Eric Schmitt! (In Iraq`s Murky Battle, Snipers Offer U.S. a Precision Weapon, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2004).

"I shot one guy in the head, and his head exploded," said Sgt. Randy Davis, one of about 40 snipers in the Army`s new 3,600-soldier Stryker Brigade, from Fort Lewis, Wash. "Usually, though, you just see a dust cloud pop up off their clothes, and see a little blood splatter come out the front."...He and his partner, Specialist Chris Wilson, who has one confirmed kill, do not brag about their feats. Their words reflect a certain icy professionalism instilled in men who say they take no pleasure in killing, and try not to see their Iraqi foes as men with families and children...There are not many targets these men dread, but in the shifting battlefield of Iraq, where seemingly everyone is armed, one candidate emerges. Would they ever shoot a child who aimed at them? ...

"I couldn`t imagine that," said Specialist Wilson, a father of five.

But Sergeant Davis had a different view: "I`d shoot him, otherwise he`d shoot me. But I wouldn`t feel good about it."

What a perfect epitaph for the Iraq adventure: We didn`t feel good about it! But we did it anyway.

The reality of military occupation is more accurately and painfully illustrated in the story of a young man apparently kicked to death by British troops while in custody because his father informed on coalition soldiers who had looted a hotel safe. (British Soldiers `Kicked Iraqi Prisoner to Death`, Robert Fisk, Independent, January 04, 2004).

"They set on Baha especially, and he kept crying that he couldn`t breathe in the hood. He kept asking them to take the bag off and said that he was suffocating. But they laughed at him and kicked him more. One of them said: `Stop screaming and you`ll be able to breathe more easily.` Baha was so scared. Then they increased the kicking on him and he collapsed on the floor.î

Well, maybe after Baha was dead the soldiers stopped laughing and didn`t feel good about it anymore.

But they did it anyway.

Fifty years from now, when the oil is gone, after Iraq`s latest strongman has evicted his predecessor from the shattered pile of our abandoned embassy, our ineffectual and insincere promises for Iraq are long forgotten, and people can`t remember if their grandfathers were killed by Saddam, the IGC, or whatever came after, tourists can visit Iraq and observe the only lasting legacy of the war we fought, and the evil that we did:

Tombstones.

Copyright 2004 Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halycon Days. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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Bush to Have Senior Citizens Defend Iraq
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DELRAY, FL (IWR News Parody) To meet the growing need for more soldiers and to rotate the troops already in Iraq, President Bush has decided to enlist the support of senior citizens.
"If we are going to keep having these neocon preemptive wars, like Richard Perle and David Frum say we should, then we would either have to reinstitute the draft, which no one wants, or somehow recruit more soldiers from the public.

Then Karl Rove had this brilliant idea, that it would be pretty easy to hoodwink a couple hundred thousand seniors or so and have them the keep the peace in Iraq, while we and our boys invade Syria and Iran.

You know, before Ariel Sharon threatens to support Howard Dean if don`t invade one of those countries soon.

Karl also says that if we get more troops it will take the heat off us.

I mean who cares if some insurgent from the Fedayeen lobs a grenade into a group of seniors. After all, those old farts already have one foot in the grave anyway!

Just think how much money we could save on Medicare and Social Security payments alone," said Mr. Bush.

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=232…

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Employment Situation Summary
Technical information:
Household data: [phone] USDL 04-07
http://www.bls.gov/cps/

Establishment data: 691-6555 Transmission of material in this release is
http://www.bls.gov/ces/ embargoed until 8:30 A.M. (EST),
Media contact: 691-5902 Friday, January 9, 2004.


THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: DECEMBER 2003



Employment was virtually unchanged in December while the unemployment rate,
at 5.7 percent, continued to trend down, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the
U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Following increases that totaled
277,000 in the prior 4 months, nonfarm payroll was flat in December (+1,000).

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

The number of unemployed persons was 8.4 million in December and the unem-
ployment rate was 5.7 percent. Both measures continued to edge down from their
recent highs in June 2003. In December, the unemployment rates for adult men
(5.3 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (6.6 percent) declined. The jobless
rates for the other major worker groups--adult women (5.1 percent), teenagers
(16.1 percent), whites (5.0 percent), and blacks (10.3 percent)--showed little
or no change from the previous month. The unemployment rate for Asians was 5.3
percent in December, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

Total Employment and the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

The civilian labor force fell by 309,000 in December to 146.9 million; the
labor force participation rate decreased over the month to 66.0 percent. Over
the year, the participation rate declined by 0.4 percentage point. Both total
employment (138.5 million) and the employment-population ratio (62.2 percent)
were about unchanged in December. (See table A-1.)

Persons Not in the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

In December, about 1.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor
force, about the same as a year earlier. (Data are not seasonally adjusted.)
These individuals wanted and were available to work and had looked for a job
sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed, how-
ever, because they did not actively search for work in the 4 weeks preceding the
survey. There were 433,000 discouraged workers in December, also about the same
as in December 2002. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached,
were not currently looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

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Weiß nicht weshalb AP die Zahlen heute veröffentlicht. Vielleicht weil die Zahl 500 im Irak ansteht.

U.S. Soldiers Killed in Action Since WWII

Friday January 9, 2004 7:16 PM


By The Associated Press

The number of American troops killed in Iraq and in other conflicts since World War II:

-Iraq: 494.

-Afghanistan: 99.

-Kosovo: 0.

-Somalia: At least 25.

-Gulf War: 315.

-Panama: 21.

-Grenada: 16.

-Lebanon: At least 241.

-Vietnam: At least 58,000.

-Korean War: At least 33,600.

-World War II: At least 290,000.

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Jan. 9, 2004. 01:00 AM

Editorial: Debate missile shield

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

Canadians aren`t missile defence enthusiasts. Nor should we be.

U.S. President George Bush is rushing to install 10 wobbly interceptor rockets in California and Alaska this year, to "shoot down" any missiles North Korea might be crazy enough to launch. But this "Star Wars lite" scheme is more fantasy than fact, as eminent Canadians like Nobel laureate John Polanyi have pointed out.

The cost is real: $20 billion.

Yet the missiles don`t work. They most probably will one day, but not now. The U.S. General Accounting Office warns that of 10 technologies the system needs, just two function.

Moreover, the threat has been blown out of proportion. Few countries threaten us. None appears suicidal enough to attack.

Still, the Americans are adamant. Congress has passed a law requiring a shield. And rightly or not, the trauma of 9/11 has added urgency.

Even Bill Clinton, no fan of missile shields, was under the gun to comply. Bush is downright eager.

To all this, Prime Minister Paul Martin might be tempted to say, No thanks. It`s not for us. But the downside of opting out is becoming greater than that of opting in. It would alienate Washington, just as Ottawa is trying to improve relations.

Worse, it would invite the breakup of Canada`s key strategic alliance.

Bush might give up on the North American Aerospace Defence Command, a joint Canada/U.S. military operation since 1958 that tracks threats to this continent. If Canadians refuse to help track and shoot down missiles, Bush could place both functions solely in U.S. hands.

That would end Canada`s privileged access to U.S. strategic thinking, intelligence data and high-tech weaponry. And by shifting the front end of our defence into U.S. hands, it would compromise our sovereignty.

It would also put us out of step with every ally we have.

The entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization has agreed to "examine options for protecting alliance territory, forces and population centres against the full range of missile threats." Even the Russians, who once fiercely objected to missile defence, are climbing aboard.

So if Americans are fantasizing when they dream of a functioning missile shield any time soon, the shield`s critics also fantasize when they claim that we can walk away at no cost, or that we invite an arms race by signing on.

Canadians would prefer not to be forced to choose. But given Bush`s insistence, we now have to ask ourselves whether the Canada/U.S. alliance is worth risking to oppose a shield that our allies are embracing. Opponents of the shield haven`t made a convincing case.

So it`s no surprise to learn Martin plans to tell Bush that Ottawa is ready to open talks on joining the scheme, when they meet next week.

Still, before Martin makes a final decision, Parliament must be consulted, and have a healthy debate.

Canadians will want to know whether NORAD will run the system, what it may cost us, and whether radars or interceptor rockets might be based here.

Martin should signal, as well, that Canada will continue pressing the U.S. and other nuclear powers to cut down their arsenals, with a view to eliminating them, and to refrain from placing arms in space.

That much of our arms control policy Martin can and should preserve.

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Friedman Artikel gestern im Thread NYtimes

Published on Friday, January 9, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Tom Friedman`s Scary Plan for World War III
by Ira Chernus

Tom Friedman wants us to fight World War III. Tom is the influential foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. He takes the ideas of the liberal foreign policy elite and turns them into simple words that anyone can understand. "Simple" is the operative word here, as in "simplify," "simplification," "over-simplification."

Tom just published the first of a five-part series in the Times, about how to save our American lifestyle. Here`s what he wants us to believe:

We are now fighting Word War III. Just as we fought off the totalitarian Nazis and communists, we must now defeat totalitarian political Islamists. It`s a war of ideas. We believe in "certain bedrock rules of civilization." We think it`s shameful to give up your life to kill people you hate. The Soviets believed that too, which is why we could deter them from hot war and force them to end the cold war.

But "today, alas, there is no bedrock agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized world." The militant Islamists hate us more than they love life. They are willing to commit suicide in order to "impose the reign of political Islam." So we can`t deter them.

We can catch some of them before they act, by Improving our spying techniques. But the more power we give to government snoops, the more we lose our "cherished civil liberties" and stop trusting each other. That would "erode our lifestyle," which is precisely what we are trying to preserve. So, for quite a while, we must "learn to live with more risk," to maintain our open society."

The only way to escape from risk and protect our lifestyle is to "get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them." "Their home societies have not stigmatized their acts as `shameful.`" So we have to "partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II." In his next four columns, Tom will tell us how to do that.

Let`s first see why Friedman`s own war of ideas is illogical. Then we`ll get to why it`s so scary.

It may feel good to see the "war on terrorism" as a clone of the great 20th century wars. It makes the U.S. look like the good guy and the inevitable winner. But every war has its own unique causes and consequences. To lump them all together is to over-simplify and falsify reality.

One obvious example: Osama bin Laden wants to impose the reign of political Islam in countries that are already predominantly Muslim. Contrary to what Friedman, Bush, et al. want us to think, there is no evidence that he wants to force us all to be Muslims, the way Stalin might have wanted us all to be communists. Nor has Osama set out about exterminating whole "racial" groups, as Hitler did.

Why was Stalin more "civilized" than Osama? Was he really ashamed of all his murders? Surely, he sent people on suicide missions for the sake of a higher ideal. Just as surely, the U.S. military has done the same. Read Catch-22. OK, technically most were not suicide missions. But U.S. military leaders are always ready to put their forces in death`s way, when they think it necessary.

And we make our dead warriors heroes, just as some Muslims do. We, too, are taught to admire self-sacrifice in defense of our ideals. To turn this fine line into a chasm separating the "civilized" from the "savages" just doesn`t make sense-especially when you are using it to justify a multibillion dollar war against the "savages," as Tom Friedman does.

Before we decide who is "civilized," there is the little matter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden. And the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK could only figure the rough odds that he might make a decision to destroy civilization in the northern hemisphere, rather than remove some missiles from Turkey. And the torture chambers of the Shah of Iran, Pinochet, and all the rest that we funded and trained, including Saddam`s. Do we get to be the "civilized" good guys because we are more willing to kill others than to kill ourselves?

Any good first-year philosophy student could go on ripping Friedman`s arguments to shreds. But it is more important to see why they are dangerous. Remember, he is a liberal. This is what we will get in the White House by using all our energy to oust George W. We will get a simplistic world divided into good guys-us and all those who support us (the "forces of moderation")-and bad guys who are not willing to play by our rules.

Our rules include freedom of religion and relatively free elections (as long as we are sure no bad guys can win). Those are blessings. But our rules also give multinational corporations and international currency traders the right to do pretty much whatever they damn please, wherever they damn please. In Friedman`s bible of global corporate capitalism, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he calls them "the horde."

He assumes that there is no way to prevent "the horde" from running the world. So we just have to make the world safe for them. Nations ruled by traditionalist Islamists would probably make life difficult for "the horde." That is why we must declare World War III against the Islamists and get Muslim "moderates" to join our side.

Of course, there is another way to avoid war, risk, and the loss of our civil liberties. We could tell other nations that they are free to make their own economic and social rules. That is all the anti-U.S. Islamists want. But then we would have to give up the great American dream of a unified corporate capitalist system free to run things in every corner of the globe. That might "erode our lifestyle." And remember, Tom says the ultimate goal of World War III is to preserve our comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

But between the lines, Tom suggests that there is another goal: to preserve our belief that we are rational, civilized, and morally pure; that we must teach the rest of the world how to be rational, civilized, and pure. It`s the same thing Englishmen believed when they started killing native Americans nearly 400 years ago. Some ideas just won`t quit, even after Hiroshima, the nuclear arms race, and the Shah.

In fact, that may be why Tom and the liberals he speaks for need so desperately to believe that we are civilized and the Islamists are not. The actual evidence is much more ambiguous. No, I wouldn`t want to live in Osama-land, and I hope no nations choose to go his route. But if I were poor, or non-white, or uneducated, or more radical than I am, I might not want to live in the good old USA either.

Osama`s system sucks. Our system sucks in quite a different way. Osama urges exploited powerless people to fight because they are the only morally pure people. Tom Friedman urges the powerful exploiters to fight because they are the only morally pure people. That way, he can justify the exploitation, the injustice, and the killing needed to keep it going. And he makes it all sound so reasonable, so simple.

But the simple truth is that the more Americans believe Tom Friedman`s ideas, the more U.S. policy will alienate Muslims around the world. So the war, and the risk to our lives, are sure to continue.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder [e-mail]

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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O`Neill Calls Bush a Disengaged President
Fri Jan 9, 2:28 PM ET Add White House - AP Cabinet & State to My Yahoo!


By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill, pushed out of the administration for not being a team player, says President Bush (news - web sites) was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."


O`Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged president who didn`t encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.


To promote the book which will be out Tuesday, O`Neill was appearing Sunday on CBS`s "60 Minutes" in an interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl.


In an excerpt released by CBS, O`Neill said that a lack of real dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the first two years of the administration and gave O`Neill the feeling that Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."


O`Neill said that the atmosphere was similar during the one-on-one meetings he held with Bush.


Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O`Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage (Bush) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."


O`Neill is described as the principal source for the new book, "The Price of Loyalty," being published by Simon and Schuster, and written by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.


In addition to interviews with O`Neill, Suskind drew on 19,000 documents O`Neill provided, according to CBS, which said Suskind also interviewed dozens of Bush insiders to flesh out his account of the administration`s first two years.


Asked about O`Neill`s comment about a disengaged president, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday, "I think it`s well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he`ll continue to do."


Asked about the administration`s opinion of the upcoming book, McClellan said, "I don`t do book reviews."


O`Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, did not immediately respond to phone messages from The AP left at his office in Pittsburgh. But in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, O`Neill said he hoped his inflammatory comments did not overshadow the substantive issues he discusses in the book.


"If the `red meat,` taken out of context, is all that people get out of this book, it will be a huge disappointment to me," he said. "Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the current state of our political process and raise our expectations for what is possible."


O`Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O`Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.


O`Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.


O`Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow, former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.

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Iraqis Taking care of Their Own

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 09, 2004 - 06:02 PM
Mustafa, 5 years old, sits at a table in the Childhood’s Voice Art Therapy School, drawing a house. The colorful home he draws is large, with a nice triangular roof. When not at Childhood’s Voice, he lives with his parents inside a makeshift structure of loose bricks stacked together and a leaky tarp pulled over the top.

Childhood’s Voice is an Iraqi NGO that established Season’s Art School where Mustafa and 180 other children come to develop children’s creative and social skills through team-based art education and art therapy projects. One of the goals of this school is to improve the critical sense and self-image of Iraqi children, so as to increase their ability to deal with problems, and raise them up from this bitter reality under the shade of the wars that have lasted for so long in Iraq.

The free services help children suffering from PTSD, poverty and other traumas and disabilities by teaching them equality and respect with peers.

Emad Abbas, the Project Coordinator and Theater Arts Director tells me that UNICEF assisted the school, but after the UN building was bombed in Baghdad has had to pull out. It is now supported by private donations and NCA, a Norwegian NGO. As two US military helicopters rumble over the small school, we watch several students drawing at the table alongside Mustafa.


Mustafa, 5 years old, drawing a house

“We give them art supplies, and just let them sit and draw whatever they like. Inevitably we are able to tell through their art what their troubles are, and how we can best help them,” says Mr. Abbas.

Fautma, a 6 year old girl wearing a tiny yellow backpack draws a scene of verdant forests and lakes as another helicopter rumbles overhead.

A little boy with a great smile sits slumped in a chair watching his peers. Four years old, Hussan can only walk with assistance. He smiles as various children walk over to speak with him, and bring him some juice.

Another boy with a speech impediment is pointed out as being the best artist in the class.


Student at Childhood’s Voice, Baghdad

As we walk into a room with several students working on computers, Mr. Abbas goes on to explain that there are two psychologists at the school, along with music, theater, computer and visual arts departments and several volunteers who work to help the children at Childhood’s Voice, which was established August 3rd, 2003.

Rasha, a woman who has been volunteering at the school for two weeks, says,

“With each of these departments we work to teach them how to work together, respect each other, and help one another.”

Monthly art exhibitions are held as a means of supporting the school, as well as expanding public awareness of the program. Initially designed to help 80 students, it now serves 180, and the number is growing rapidly. While the students go to educational school for study, this organization is more like an ‘after-school school’, assisting children in need of this healing environment. Meals are served when funding permits and donated clothing is provided when available.


Students working on computer at Childhood’s Voice, Baghdad

There are three such schools in Baghdad, but Mr. Abbas believes 100 are needed to treat the vast number of children in Baghdad who have been psychologically and physically traumatized by the wars, sanctions, and now current difficult situation in Iraq.

Up some stairs there is a small stage with several rows of plastic chairs. We watch students acting out scenes teaching them about respecting nature and respecting one another. The kids are smiling and well behaved, hands raised eagerly in the air to be called on to participate in the next scene on the stage.

Ghazwan, a skinny 15 year old boy stands on the stage enacting a scene teaching about respecting people in his community. I am told he had been brought to the school after being kidnapped. He was found naked in a water tank with cigarette burns all over his body, and mostly likely had been sexually abused. He was completely withdrawn, but even after a couple of weeks began to open up to his peers, and has made great progress with assistance from psychologists at Baghdad University.

Back downstairs it is snack time. Students file into the small kitchen for juice and rolls, then outside into the sun and a small playground. There is much laughing and playing amidst the relaxed atmosphere as two children bring rolls and juice to Samir, a boy who uses a wheelchair.


Hussan playing on slides

Out on the playground Hussan is helped to a slide. He then uses the side bars to gingerly pull himself up the steps, swinging his legs up one at a time while bracing himself as he does so. I grow concerned and go to steady him as he stands atop the slide, but one of the staff lets me know he can, and should, do this for himself. With a big smile he pushes his arms straight on the bars and swings his legs out in front of him, plops himself down, and laughs as he wisks down the slide where another staff helps him walk to another slide.

The school is not without challenges. Mr. Abbas says that with the constant threat of kidnappings, looting, checkpoints, military raids on homes in the neighborhood, and struggles for funding, the future is always uncertain.

“With the unstable situation here, especially the security, we take all the help we can get. Many families didn’t trust us at first, since we don’t charge any money. But as they have seen that we are helping the children and that we are run by Iraqis, they are beginning to support us more,” says Mr. Abbas.

The school is open to any volunteers who are willing to help, and donations can be made by wiring money to a bank in Amman, Jordan. As the school is not yet an officially registered NGO due to the long registration process mandated by the CPA, an account has been set up under a person affiliated with the school. The name of the bank is the Arabic Bank, and the name on the account is Abdel Al-Sahib, account number 166812-91718. All funds are transferred directly to Childhood’s Voice.

As I walk around the small playground before we leave I am inundated with hugs from the children and small kisses on my cheeks. Haida, a 6 year old boy who speaks a little English, laughs with me while teaching me some Arabic words. Knowing I’m from Alaska, he pulls a chair into the shade so I can sit out of the warm sun.

He tells me, “I love you. We are friends. All our families can be friends. When are you coming back here to visit us again?”



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=104

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Fear of flying
A new phase of aviation history is upon us: the paranoia years

Mark Lawson
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian

The passengers sleeping on airport seats at Gatwick and Heathrow this week during delays caused by an Italian strike must have felt almost comforted by the disruption. How nostalgic to be reminded of a time when the greatest threat to reaching your destination was an air traffic controller seeking more lira.

Try to fly to America in the future and you face hours grouching in the lounge while 22 different US agencies inspect the passenger manifest, or a passenger who has failed to secure the correct biometric visa is dragged into an office and questioned on whether his sister`s mother-in-law once walked past a mosque.

Shortly after celebrations of the centenary of the first powered flight, it became clear this week - as one BA flight was delayed and cancelled several times, pilot unions negotiated over air marshals, and the US imposed new visa restrictions - that we are entering a new phase of aviation history: the paranoia years. Queues for the cabin loos will no longer be allowed, in case a huddle of the full-bladdered is mistaken for fanatics synchronising their watches.

What may seem odd to future historians is that it took more than two years after the plane-bombs destroyed the twin towers for airports to be declared war-zones. The reason for the delay seems to have been that it was assumed by our spooks - and hoped by frequent flyers - that al-Qaida might move on to a different manner of psychopathy after 9/11. Next, it would be light-planes flown into power stations or boats torpedoed.

But security experts have now concluded that the organisation has a morbid fixation with passenger jets. It`s easy to imagine why this might be: air-mile accounts represent western wealth and the ability to capture the world, even if only symbolically on camcorders. And America has conducted most of its recent wars by dropping bombs from aeroplanes. Mad minds therefore find pure retribution in using fuselages full of Yanks to murder others on the ground. The fear now is that 9/11 was just a rehearsal.

And so, as the British transport secretary has admitted, aviation in the next decade is likely to become a business of delays, cancellations and threatened repatriations. The obvious commercial risk to the industry is that flying will come to be seen, like driving in snow-storms, as an activity dictated by necessity. The careful balance that airlines have always maintained between fear and convenience may tip the other way.

Reluctance to submit to these procedures may be hastened by the feeling that some of the measures - especially the new hi-tech security documents - are not about protecting passengers, but are primarily intended to restrict entry to America: to adapt the Statue of Liberty - put your huddled masses in a pen over there while we biometrically scan them.

The optimistic spin on this is that we may be entering the safest period of aviation in history. Once, as a frightened child waving my dad off at Heathrow on a flight number that had crashed the day before, he explained that the best time to fly was just after they had cleared wreckage from the runway: you were protected by both the law of statistics and improved maintenance.

Some of the passengers on the obsessively cosseted BA223 flights to Washington made exactly this point to reporters. If you happened to be a nervous flyer, it was surely quite a good deal to sit among passengers who had been scrutinised by almost two dozen US spooks in a plane that was escorted through US airspace by fighter jets. Every passenger is president for a day; every airline becomes El Al.

The weakness of this theory is that it assumes such levels of paranoia would be constant and uniform. If the safest time to fly is during a period of paranoia, then it follows that the riskiest moment to pick up a boarding pass is just after the panic has died down.

Suppose you were an al-Qaida hijacker planning another in-flight suicide-homicide mission. Osama bin Laden`s email from his cave picked out BA223, but the CIA intercepted what they patronisingly called your "chatter", and suddenly they were treating that take-off slot like Air Force One.

What would you do? Surely you would switch to another flight, chatting about the target through a different means of communication. The obsessive protection of a single London-Washington flight is like setting a single mousetrap in a house full of holes.

Israeli passengers accept armed guards and check-ins that take longer than the flight time because they know their nation is permanently under threat. The decision for other governments and airlines - watched by a terrified tourist industry - is whether it is now necessary for them to put the same panic in the air.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Guantanamo Bay: a global experiment in inhumanity
The US example now legitimises oppression across the world

Louise Christian
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian

Two years ago today, Feroz Abbasi, a British citizen arrested in Afghanistan, was one of the first detainees to be transferred hooded, shackled and manacled by the US military to Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. His mother, Zumrati, who lives in Croydon, was informed about five days later - by the media. It took a further six days for a British government official to contact her. Significantly, she was assured that her son did not need a lawyer.

Two years on, it is clear that the British government has betrayed the most fundamental responsibility that any government assumes - the duty to protect the rule of law. This abnegation of the essence of democratic government goes much further than a failure to protect the nine British citizens who are incarcerated in this legal black hole. It is nothing less than a collusion in an international experiment in inhumanity, which is being repeated and expanded around the world.

The UK government has been intimately involved in the nightmare world that is Guantanamo Bay from its inception. Britain sent its own security agents to interrogate its citizens and residents in the presence of the US military without a lawyer present, and in the knowledge that techniques of sensory deprivation and coercion were being practised. For a full year and a half the British government refused to express any view on the legality of the detentions; not even of its own citizens and not even when challenged in the UK courts to do so.

In July 2003, military commission trials were announced for Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg from Birmingham. Leaks from the Pentagon made it clear that a deal had already been secured. A show trial would take place, based on confessions extracted under duress, in which both men would plead guilty. Only under pressure from parliament and the media were junior ministers then authorised to make polite noises of feigned dissent. In July, an instruction was issued to the attorney general to enter into bogus negotiations to secure what it was already clear was not possible - a fair trial in Guantanamo Bay.

The extent to which our own government had become implicated in the Guantanamo Bay experiment should also have become apparent when they created their own replica model here. It was claimed by them to be superior, but mainly because they passed an undemocratic law, the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act, requiring a derogation from the newly enacted Human Rights Act. Consequently, 13 British residents are locked up indefinitely, without trial, in this country.

As with all prisoners detained for an indeterminate period, their mental health is severely affected. One has already been confined to psychiatric detention. Recently, the Privy Council committee set up to scrutinise the act concluded what should have been apparent from the outset: that such detention is unjustifiable. But, because of the lack of public outcry, the government looks set to ignore the committee.

Worldwide, the experiment is becoming the norm. It has been estimated that at least 15,000 people are being held without trial under the justification of the "war on terrorism". They include more than 3,000 detained in Iraq after the war, of whom at least 1,000 are still in detention; an estimated further 1,000 to 3,000 detained at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan; and an unknown number being held on the British territory of Diego Garcia.

Bagram is a CIA interrogation centre, practising "stress and duress" or "torture lite". An investigation has reportedly begun there after the deaths of two prisoners in suspicious circumstances. US personnel stationed at Bagram have described the regular practice of sensory deprivation and sleep starvation, as well as incidents of throwing prisoners against walls while hooded.

Ironically, such revelations have surfaced not through any desire to expose human rights abuses, but in order to justify describing such treatment as "torture lite". Meanwhile, three US soldiers were discharged this week for beating and harassing Iraqi prisoners of war, and there are reports that British troops beat eight young Iraqis, one of whom died in custody as a result.

In the US itself, the experiment continues. Over 1,000 people were arbitrarily detained in the immediate aftermath of September 11. The US government refused to give names or details to civil rights groups. Many became subject to immigration procedures and were eventually deported. Inevitably, non-US citizens in this situation receive no attention from the national media. But there are also three US Muslims detained indefinitely as "enemy combatants", two of whom were detained on US soil.

One of these, José Padilla, was seized out of the custody of the justice department by the Pentagon and placed on a military prison ship, accused of being in possession of a "dirty bomb". In court proceedings, Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby of the US military argued that detaining Padilla indefinitely without a lawyer was justified in order to gain information. Providing him access to counsel, so the logic went, "would create an expectation that his ultimate release might be obtained through an adversarial civil litigation process. This would break - probably irreparably - the sense of dependency and trust that the interrogators are attempting to create."

It is of grave concern that the example being set by the US and the UK is being used to legitimise repression internationally on an ever-increasing scale. From China, which has imprisoned up to 100 Chinese Muslims without trial, to Uzbekistan (up to 1,000), Yemen (200), Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, India and Indonesia, this alarming lead is being eagerly followed. In Israel and Chechnya, there would be far more people in prison without trial had not the authorities there taken matters one step further and authorised extra-judicial killings. They were safe in the knowledge that the US government boasted last year of killing alleged al-Qaida members in Yemen.

Yesterday, the comments of Pierre Richard Prosper, the US ambassador on war crimes, disclosed what has been suspected for some time; that it is now the British and not the US government that stands in the way of the British citizens detained in Guantanamo being returned home. When Tony Blair was asked about Guantanamo in the House of Commons this week, he spoke not about human rights abuses there but about what he described as the "immense importance" of the information gained from detainees.

What can an ordinary person do about a world turned on its head, where governments that claim to be democratic engage in repression, coercion and even torture on an international scale? Everyone needs to protest - peacefully, but as loudly and as persistently as they are able. Every act counts. And let everyone be certain of this: those who experiment in inhumanity will have no appetite to stop unless there is such protest.

· Louise Christian is the lawyer acting for the families of three of the British citizens and one British resident detained in Guantanamo Bay

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Former treasury chief exposes `disengaged` Bush
David Teather in New York
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian

A former senior economic adviser to George Bush has made an astonishing attack on the president, saying that he was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people".

Paul O`Neill, who was Mr Bush`s treasury secretary, makes his comments in an interview with the CBS show 60 Minutes.

The programme will be broadcast tomorrow.

It is his first interview since Mr Bush sacked him a little over a year ago.

Mr O`Neill sheds light on the president`s decision-making process, suggesting that there was an almost total absence of dialogue with his advisers.

The president, he says, encouraged neither the free flow of ideas nor open debate.

"There is no discernible connection," he tells CBS.

Mr Bush`s lack of engagement left advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think".

Mr O`Neill recalls his own first personal meeting with Mr Bush, during which the president failed to ask him a single question.

"I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage him on. I was surprised it turned out to be me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

The interview has been timed to coincide with a forthcoming book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Ron Suskind, for which Mr O`Neill was the main source, and where many of his criticisms are repeated.

The Price of Loyalty is reported to portray the president as a man uninterested in government policy or detailed discussion of the economy, whose decisions are chiefly informed by political motives.

The White House tried to shrug off the criticisms.

"It`s well known the way the president approaches governing and [sets] priorities," its spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities, and that is exactly what he`ll continue to do."

Mr O`Neill was replaced in December 2002 after disagreements about the president`s plans for $1,600bn in tax cuts designed to stimulate the economy.

Mr O`Neill, who had served in the Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations, publicly expressed his view that the tax cuts would do little to help the economy and would leave the US hugely in debt.

He also clashed with the president over the decision to impose import tariffs to protect the American steel industry.

Although the tax cuts can be argued to have played a part in getting the economy moving again at the end of last year, other critics have also questioned the wisdom of the policy.

They include the International Monetary Fund and Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The tax cuts plus increases in spending, much of it related to the war in Iraq, have left the country with record-breaking budget deficits and caused the dollar to plunge in value.

The tax cuts, which many argued were a sop to the rich, also appear to have done little to improve the employment prospects in the US.

The IMF warned earlier this week that the policies could cause economic growth to stall worldwide.


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Ersetz Labour durch SPD!

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Soft treatment fails to get Saddam to talk
Captive dictator has full PoW rights, Pentagon reveals

Jonathan Steele, and Luke Harding in Baghdad
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian

Saddam Hussein has been formally declared an enemy prisoner of war, but is still resisting pressure to help his American interrogators after three weeks in custody.

The former dictator, captured almost a month ago, is being given all the rights due him under the Geneva conventions on enemy prisoners of war, a Pentagon spokesman said.

According to British officials, the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told Tony Blair in Basra last week that Saddam was being treated gently in an effort to coax him into talking, but that he was "not offering information of an operationally useful kind".

"They are taking their time, trying to get him to talk so that he can feel comfortable that he can talk in captivity," a British official reported him saying.

But Mr Blair was told that documents found in a briefcase in the house near where Saddam was found had helped the US forces to track Iraqi insurgents. The results of his capture were "greater than expected", the prime minister was told.

The UN confirmed yesterday it would not oppose Washington`s plan to hand power to an unelected Iraqi government.

Rather than direct elections, the US wants "caucuses" of handpicked "notables" in each of the 18 provinces to choose a transitional national assembly, which would then appoint a government.

In the predominantly Sunni town of Baquba at least six people were killed and 39 injured yesterday by a bomb hidden in a bicycle outside a crowded Shia mosque which exploded as worshippers left after Friday prayers.

The attack was almost certainly the work of Sunni extremists, and appears to be the latest sectarian incident between Iraq`s two main religious communities. Baquba is a centre of Iraqi resistance. American troops have carried out numerous raids there, arresting dozens of suspected insurgents.

Shia leaders are unhappy with the plan for transferring power in June, which the US worked out with the Iraq governing council.

Calling for direct elections, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shia cleric, said this week that the US plan would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people".

Supporters of direct elections say they could be held on the basis of the existing Iraqi census and the food ration cards which Iraqis had under the old UN oil-for-food programme. US and British officials say there is no time to organise them properly.

Abdel Aziz Hakim, a senior Shia who headed the governing council last month, wrote to Mr Annan 10 days ago offering a compromise whereby the UN would examine the options and judge their feasibility.

The offer was sensitive, since the US has made it clear that it wants to cut the UN out of the Iraq issue until a new government is formed. Its plan for the transfer of sovereignty made no mention of a UN role.

Barely concealing his annoyance shortly after the plan was announced in November, Mr Annan told reporters: "There have been some questions about whether this was an omission or a message.

After lengthy debate at its New York headquarters, he has accepted that the UN can do little, especially as concern for the security of its own staff is still strong.

In a reply to the governing council`s current chairman, Adnan Pachachi, Mr Annan wrote this week that it would be too ambitious to expect the UN "to become involved to a significant extent" in Iraq before the end of June.

Privately, UN officials accept Washington`s line that early elections would be ill-prepared.

Security has been a serious issue for the UN since a lorry-bomb destroyed its Baghdad headquarters last August, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of mission, and 21 other people.

It was the most devastating attack in the UN`s 58-year existence. All non-Iraqi staff were withdrawn in October and the UN now runs what is left of its Iraq operations from Cyprus and Jordan.

An early task for the new Iraq government will be to make plans for a constitution and elections held on its basis in 2005.

The US seems willing to give the UN a role once the occupation is formally over. "Our position is that we should prepare for a role after June. It`s not practical before," a UN official said last night.

Britain is confident that a sovereign Iraqi government would invite US and British troops to remain as part of a multilateral force approved by the UN security council.

"It would leave the US in overall theatre command rather like Afghanistan," a British official said. "The Iraqi government could always abrogate the agreement but they would have to to take the security consequences."


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Democratic losers keep talking but fail to answer big question: why?
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
10 January 2004


Three candidates who do not matter, running in a primary that does not matter, held a debate in Washington DC yesterday. They offered plenty of policy prescriptions, but not an answer to the real question: why are they competing for a Democratic presidential nomination they cannot win?

For America`s political insiders, The Rev Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich are little more than irritants, demanding time at debates and space on news pages that would be better devoted to the six "serious" contenders with a genuine chance of victory. Apart from Mr Kucinich, they have not raised significant money. With the exception of the Mr Sharpton in South Carolina, their support is negligible. Yet they further clutter a field that, even limited to six, would be tangled enough. Their appearance at George Washington University was a symbol of their marginal status. In fact, it is the District of Colombia, not Iowa or New Hampshire, which is holding the first primary on 13 January.

The debate, devised to press the campaign for DC statehood, was been shunned by the Big Six, five of whom have even removed their name from the ballot. The primary is also non-binding, meaning that no actual delegates will be chosen for July`s Democratic convention in Boston.

But, in separate ways, each of the three has a subtle influence on the campaign, and each has good reason to pursue their quest to a probably little noticed end. Indeed, low expectations and shoestring field operations mean they will probably survive longer than bigger fish such as Richard Gephardt, Joe Lieberman or John Kerry, for whom defeat in the early primaries would be financially disastrous.

Of the three, Mr Kucinich is being taken most seriously. He decided to run in mid-2002, driven by outrage at the bellicose foreign policy of the Bush administration, the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the threat to civil liberties embodied in Attorney General John Ashcroft`s Patriot Act. It is tempting to dismiss him as a flake; the "boy mayor" of Cleveland at 31 in 1977 and the youngest person elected to run a major US city; so full of himself that he sacked his police chief live on television.

Mr Kucinich was sacked by the voters after only two years. He then headed west, became a vegan and acquired spiritual advisers. His campaign has been endorsed by the singer Willie Nelson. His campaign is run by a `transformational kinesiologist`, a healer through movement, without experience in politics. He has raised $5m (£2.7m) for the campaign and has a solid core of support on the radical left.

Ms Moseley Braun is another veteran of Capitol Hill, elected in 1992 from Illinois to become the first (and, so far, only) black woman to win a seat in the US Senate. But she was defeated in 1998 after a single term by a little known Republican; no mean feat in a state which grows more Democratic with each electoral cycle.

Ms Moseley Braun`s downfall was due to a string of ethics controversies, ranging from meetings with a murderous Nigerian dictator to allegations of improper use and reporting of campaign funds. None were ever proven.

Mr Sharpton comes across as what he is: a flamboyant activist. In the set-piece debates, he is the funny one, getting off good-natured one-liners to deflate his rivals. But his candidacy has another very serious purpose, to cement himself as successor to Jesse Jackson as leading spokesman for black America.
10 January 2004 10:45

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 10, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Bush Seeks Ways to Create Jobs, and Fast
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - The stage had been set to celebrate the revival of jobs.

With a phalanx of women entrepreneurs at his side and a billboard covered with the word "Jobs!" behind him, President Bush proclaimed his confidence about the economy here on Friday. But he made only passing reference to the latest news about employment.

The reason was clear: Friday`s report on unemployment in December was much weaker than either the administration or most independent economists had predicted. Job creation was virtually nil, and the unemployment rate declined only because the labor force shrank by 309,000 workers. Many of those were people who had simply become too discouraged to keep looking for work.

The problem confronting Mr. Bush is that there is little he can do between now and the elections except wait and hope that the employment picture improves. And the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already reduced short-term interest rates to just 1 percent.

"In terms of big levers to pull, they don`t have anything," said Pierre Ellis, a senior economist at Decision Economics, a forecasting company.

It is entirely possible that the job trend will abruptly improve over the next several months. Businesses are more optimistic and more willing to invest in expansion than they have been in years, and that should translate into more jobs at some point.

President Bush may also have an ace in the hole. Last year`s tax cuts are expected to produce another big bulge of tax refunds and lower tax bills between now and June - about $40 billion in extra cash flow to households, according to economists at Goldman Sachs and Macroeconomic Advisers.

"It`s not a good idea to give excessive weight to any particular statistic," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. "If you look at the pattern, most of the economic news has been good rather than bad."

Both the White House and the Fed are confronted by a recovery unlike any other in modern history. Economic growth has been soaring for months, corporate profits have shot up and the stock market has regained much of its old ebullience.

Yet job creation has been slower than in almost any previous recovery, and wage growth has slowed to a crawl. That appears to reflect another big new element that lies entirely outside the president`s control: the enormous increases in productivity, which have made it possible for companies to squeeze more output from each worker.

"The evidence is powerful that we can have 4 or 5 percent growth without hiring much," said John Makin, a senior economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Makin has long been among the more pessimistic economic forecasters, but the employment and wage data on Friday came in far worse than even he had expected. "I was stunned, quite frankly," he said.

It is not unusual for presidents to undertake actions to straighten out the economy and then do little but hope and pray they work - and in time. Jimmy Carter appointed Paul A. Volcker as chairman of the Fed, and he increased interest rates to stem inflation. The first President Bush reluctantly raised taxes to deal with a ballooning budget deficit. In each case, those actions helped the economy recover, but not in time to earn Mr. Carter or Mr. Bush a second term.

Administration officials know that the crucial issue in an election season is jobs. And President Bush`s track record, a net loss of more than two million jobs since he took office, remains one of his biggest political weaknesses.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush`s Democratic opponents jumped on the jobs number as another opportunity to attack his record.

"President Bush has all but declared `Mission Accomplished` on an economy that is still not generating jobs," said Gen. Wesley K. Clark. Howard Dean, who has distanced himself from former President Bill Clinton through much of his campaign, said Mr. Bush had generated only 1,000 jobs in December while the economy added about 1,000 jobs every three hours during Mr. Clinton`s administration.

"What further proof do we need that George Bush`s economic policies are a failure for working Americans?" Mr. Dean said in a statement issued after the new employment data was released.

Unable to do much more to stimulate the economy, administration officials have stepped up their arguments that the three tax cuts over the last three years have made the economic slowdown and job losses shorter and smaller than they might otherwise have been.

"Without the passage of the president`s plans, by the second quarter in 2003, the unemployment rate would have been nearly one percentage point higher," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said earlier this week. "As many as 1.5 million fewer Americans would be working, and real G.D.P. would have been as much as 2 percent lower."

It is impossible to prove or disprove such contentions, but they are unlikely to comfort voters in big industrial states where hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last three years.

Administration officials also appear to have stepped up efforts to show their concern, sometimes by criticizing "unfair trade practices" by China and other countries and occasionally by offering help in prominent cases.

On Thursday, for example, the Export-Import Bank announced a new agreement to lend $35 million to Malden Mills, a textile company in Massachusetts whose owners have been trying to pull it out of bankruptcy court.

However well intentioned, such moves amount to little more than window dressing. "If they want to do something for public relations, they might have some kind of job hiring incentive," Mr. Ellis of Decision Economics said. "But it could not possibly be something of a magnitude that would affect this economy."



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Die Sache mit den nicht entstandenen Jobs hat auch einen positiven Aspekt, nicht für die Betroffenen, die Wiederwahl Bush`s wird unwahrscheinlicher.
Das wäre es die Sache wert, wenn anschließend wieder eine solide Wirtschaftspolitik betrieben würde und die Voodoo-Ökonomie endlich ein Ende hätte.

January 10, 2004
Growth in Jobs Came to a Halt During December
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Job growth came to an unexpected halt in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, and rather than hunt for scarce work, tens of thousands of people disappeared from the labor force.

Most forecasters had said they thought December would be a breakthrough month for job creation, given the strengthening economy. But instead of the 150,000 new jobs they had expected, there were a minuscule 1,000. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent from 5.9 percent in November, but that was mainly because so many people chose not to look for work, a requirement to be counted as unemployed.

"We thought we were finally moving out of the jobless recovery, that the work force was really growing at last," said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist for Global Insight, a research and forecasting firm. "And now this report is telling us we are still stuck in a jobless recovery."

President Bush, speaking in Washington before a group of small-business owners, focused on the drop in the unemployment rate, which he called "a positive sign that the economy is getting better."

Other administration officials called attention to the few positives in the report — for example, job growth in construction, education and health care. "We think we have the policies in place to produce job growth going forward," N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the President`s Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview, referring to what he described as the stimulus from the Bush tax cuts.

But there is little more the president can do to stimulate the economy, and the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already lowered short-term interest rates to just 1 percent. That leaves the White House waiting and hoping that the employment picture improves between now and the elections.

For Democrats on the campaign trail, the employment numbers were an opportunity to heap criticism on the administration.

"With the recovery that we`re supposed to be in, adding a thousand jobs is pathetic, nothing short of pitiful and pathetic," Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri told reporters in Concord, N.H. "This president is presiding over an economy that is still not producing jobs."

The government lowered by more than a third its original estimates of the number of jobs created in October and November. Instead of an increase of 143,000 jobs in those months, the revised total was 94,000.

That shaved the total job creation to 278,000 in the five months that the economy has been adding jobs. Most economists maintain that job growth must proceed at a pace of at least 150,000 a month, on average, to absorb everyone who wants to work — a rate that the economy is lagging well behind.

Citing the weak labor market, Ben S. Bernanke, an influential governor of the Federal Reserve, declared in a speech Sunday that the central bank would keep interest rates down to encourage borrowing and spending to keep the recovery from dying out. Yesterday`s jobs report only reinforced the prospect that rates will stay low, and in response, bond prices rose and stock prices and the dollar fell, as they often do on such news. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.26 percent, closing at 10,458.89.

The jobs data left economists struggling to reconcile the nation`s strong economic growth with faltering employment. How can the output of goods and services be going up so briskly, as most statistics show, without bringing up employment, too?

One answer is productivity. The output from an hour of work has been rising faster than the demand for what is produced, and employers have brought the two into balance by holding back on hiring while pushing existing workers to keep up their output.

"I think we got slower productivity growth in the fourth quarter than the third," Mr. Gault said, "but when it will run out enough so that we have to create more jobs is anybody`s guess." Data on productivity in the last three months of 2003 will be released next month; in the third quarter, productivity rose 9.4 percent.

The second explanation that some economists cite is statistics that they describe as faulty, or at least conflicting.

The bureau calculates employment two ways. It surveys net job changes at 400,000 companies representative of the nation`s nearly nine million incorporated businesses. Most economists regard that method, called the payroll survey, as more reliable and comprehensive than the bureau`s household survey, in which members of 60,000 households are interviewed each month.

But the household survey is better at catching self-employment and off-the-books work than the payroll survey. According to the household survey, job creation averaged 278,000 a month from October through December, even allowing for 54,000 jobs lost in December. That was nearly six times the job creation in the payroll survey, and some economists say that at this juncture in the recovery, the household numbers merit more attention.

"The payroll survey is underestimating job creation," said Maury N. Harris, chief United States economist at UBS, the global banking firm. "I don`t know by how much, but when all is said and done, you probably will be closer to what household is telling you."

Another hard-to-interpret number in yesterday`s report was the drop of two-tenths of a percentage point in the unemployment rate. Unemployment has declined from a peak of 6.3 percent in June, when the many months of weak economic growth in the aftermath of the 2001 recession finally began to give way to a much more visible upturn.

Normally, a falling jobless rate means that the unemployed are seeking and finding jobs. But in December, 309,000 working-age men and women who would normally be job hunting either left the labor force or did not bother to enter it in search of work, the bureau reported.

If they had not either dropped out or found jobs, the unemployment rate would have remained at 5.9 percent.

"Of all the parts of the December employment report that I think are specious, it is the decline in the unemployment rate, which is likely to be reversed next month," said William Dudley, director of domestic economic research at Goldman Sachs.

Dropping out has been a characteristic of the recovery since June, reflecting the struggles of the unemployed amid companies` reluctance to add workers. As a result, the percentage of the working-age population participating in the labor force — that is, employed or seeking employment — fell to 66 percent in December from 66.5 percent in June, a withdrawal of roughly 1.1 million people.

Reflecting this exodus, the employment-to-population ratio — a measure of the percentage of the working-age population actually holding jobs — has been dropping, as well. It has fallen nearly eight-tenths of a percentage point, to 62.2 percent, since the recession ended in November 2001, and 2.1 percentage points since the start of the recession in March of that year.

Federal Reserve policy makers consider this ratio an important indicator of how many jobs can be added without upward pressure on wages or inflation. Mr. Bernanke has cited the weakness in the ratio as an important reason for keeping interest rates low.

The decline in the ratio has been particular sharp among young people, African-Americans and Hispanics, and economists say it may help to explain a deterioration in wages among workers in jobs below the level of manager or supervisor. These workers account for 80 percent of the 130.1 million people in the work force. Their average hourly earnings, which rose 3 cents, to $15.50, in December, are growing at an ever slower annual rate: 2 percent in December, down from 3.2 percent a year earlier.

"What we worry about is consumer spending in 2004," said Mr. Gault, the Global Insight economist. "We got a lot of help in 2003 from tax cuts and from mortgage refinancings. This year, however, we are counting on better employment gains to support consumer income growth and, in turn, consumer spending. If we don`t get the jobs, we will have to worry about the consumer."

The biggest jump in employment last month, a rise of 30,000, came in jobs for temporary workers. Economists said those gains reflected the reluctance of employers to take on permanent workers until the recovery becomes much stronger.

Manufacturing, which has shed workers all through the recession and recovery, lost 26,000 more jobs in December, on a seasonally adjusted basis. On that basis, jobs also disappeared in retailing, hotel work and restaurants — 42,000 in all.

Despite the mild job growth since August, total employment fell last year by 331,000 on top of a 1.5 million drop in 2002. The last time employment, as measured by the survey of 400,000 establishments, declined for two consecutive years was in 1944 and 1945 as war production wound down.



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Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill was forced from office in 2002. Ex-Treasury Secretary O`Neill says Bush like "blind man in roomful of deaf people."

washingtonpost.com
O`Neill Depicts a Disengaged President


By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A01


President Bush showed little interest in policy discussions in his first two years in the White House, leading Cabinet meetings "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people," former Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill says in an upcoming book on the Bush White House.

O`Neill, who was forced out of his post in late 2002, spoke extensively to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind and offered up 19,000 documents, including private White House transcripts and personal notes for the book "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O`Neill."

The book will be released next week and was not available yesterday. The only on-the-record details to be had were selected quotes released by CBS from the book and from an interview with O`Neill to be aired Sunday on "60 Minutes."

The book is meant to be a chronicle of the first two years of the Bush administration and the process that shaped the president`s policymaking, mostly seen through O`Neill`s eyes.

According to the CBS material, O`Neill told Suskind that Bush was so inscrutable that administration officials had to devise White House policy on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."

In the "60 Minutes" interview, O`Neill described his first Cabinet meeting with the president: "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on. And as the book said, I was surprised that it turned out to be me talking and the president just listening. . . . As I recall it was mostly a monologue."

This is not the first time Suskind has coaxed unflattering descriptions out of former White House officials. In the January 2003 issue of Esquire, John J. DiIulio Jr., the former head of Bush`s faith-based policy office, told Suskind, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. . . . What you`ve got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It`s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

DiIulio quickly apologized and said he was "deeply remorseful." White House officials dismissed the significance of the University of Pennsylvania professor, a Democrat in a modest position who worked in the White House less than eight months.

O`Neill, in contrast, occupied the administration`s most prominent and important economic post for two years, and helped usher through the 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001 that remains one of Bush`s most important legislative feats. He was named to the post at the insistence of Vice President Cheney, an old friend, and he had close ties to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

But O`Neill`s tenure at Treasury was marked by verbal gaffes and impolitic comments, some of them in direct contradiction of White House policy. He publicly disparaged Bush`s 2002 imposition of steep tariffs on steel, roiled currency markets with his blunt talk, enraged a Brazilian president, and ultimately split with Bush in late 2002 over the president`s push to end taxation of corporate dividends.

That December, Bush forced an unsuspecting O`Neill out of office in a purge of his economic team that also sent packing his National Economic Council director, Lawrence B. Lindsey.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan would not comment on the substance of O`Neill`s statements.

"The White House isn`t in the business of doing book reviews," she said. "The president appreciated Mr. O`Neill`s service, and he is now focused on the future and our nation`s highest priorities."

O`Neill did not return phone calls yesterday, and Suskind declined to provide the book`s contents in advance of its release.

O`Neill, a former chief executive of aluminum giant Alcoa Inc., frequently complained that the media oversimplified his comments and took them out of context. He told his hometown Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Thursday, "If the `red meat,` taken out of context, is all that people get out of this [Suskind] book, it will be a huge disappointment to me. Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the current state of our political process and raise our expectations of what is possible."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Tepid economy seen in weak jobs data
By Stephen J. Glain, Globe Staff, 1/10/2004

WASHINGTON -- Payrolls barely rose in December, an indication the economy still lacks the steam needed to sustain job growth and could be a setback to President Bush`s reelection hopes.

The Labor Department said yesterday that 1,000 new jobs were created last month, well below the 130,000 to 150,000 many economists had expected from the holiday shopping season. The December level was down from the 43,000 new hires in November, a figure revised lower from the original 57,000.

"This is a big surprise, not least of which for the White House," said Wayne Ayers, chief economist for FleetBoston Financial Corp. "It`s hard to find any good news in these numbers."

The disappointing employment report supplied Democratic presidential hopefuls with ammunition in their bid to unseat President Bush. Though Bush`s approval ratings have swelled recently on bullish economic data and corporate earnings reports, languishing employment levels continue to blight his record on the economy.

"Over the past couple of months, President Bush has all but declared `mission accomplished` on an economy that is still not generating jobs and that is losing manufacturing jobs each and every month," retired General Wesley K. Clark, said while campaigning in Little Rock, Ark. "I think it`s time that George W. Bush loses his job so that we can put the American people back to work."

The United States has shed 2.3 million jobs in the last three years, Democrats stress. Bush is the first president to preside over a decline in employment during the first three years of his term since Herbert Hoover.

The report`s one bright spot was the decline in the US unemployment rate to 5.7 percent, the lowest level in more than a year. Bush seized on the rate`s decline in remarks before a meeting of women entrepreneurs at the White House. "I`m optimistic because I see things happening," he said. "Unemployment dropped today to 5.7 percent. That`s not good enough. We want more people still working. But nevertheless, it is a positive sign that the economy is getting better."

Economists, though, said the drop masked the problems in the job market.

"Yes, unemployment fell," Ayers said, "but that`s only because people dropped out of the work force altogether."

Economists were particularly surprised by the December decline in the number of retail jobs, considering that holiday spending drove retail sales up 4 percent in December.

Factory employment also declined, but at a much slower rate, extending a trend that began in the fall.

"We`ll probably see a modest recovery in the first quarter of this year," said David Huether, an economist at the National Association of Manufacturers.

Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans said the payroll data intensified the need for Congress to approve Bush`s initiatives to enlarge the work force.

"The pace of December job growth reinforces the need to pass all the elements of the president`s plan for job creation," Evans said. "Congress should make tax relief permanent and act with urgency on the rest of President Bush`s jobs and growth agenda."

To end his first term with a net growth in jobs, Bush needs the economy to create 200,000 to 300,000 jobs each month to net the 160,000 or so needed to employ new entrants in the work force, according to economists. Since Bush`s tax cuts were implemented in June, the economy has created 221,000 jobs, compared with the 1.8 million the administration estimated its tax cuts would create by the end of 2003, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a prolabor Washington think tank.

Economists blamed the weak employment figures on rising productivity rates. That makes the economy more efficient, even as it renders many jobs redundant. They also cited aggressive outsourcing -- increasingly of white-collar jobs as well as blue-collar work -- to countries with lower wages.

"Neither business nor potential employees have confidence in the economy," said Sung Won Sohn, executive vice president and chief economic officer of Wells Fargo & Co.

"Businesses are squeezed by intense competition from here and abroad with little pricing power."

Unless the United States sees payroll growth soon, China`s trade surplus with America -- at $140 billion and rising -- could emerge as a centerpiece campaign issue. The Bush administration has so far refrained from pressuring China to stop manipulating currency rates to make its products less expensive in overseas markets, and the president`s Democratic challengers are spotlighting the growing trade imbalance as a White House failure.

"In reality, economic growth will probably come in lower than 4 percent this year," said Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland`s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

"This is due to the drag of the trade deficit, which has its origins in Asian currency manipulation."

Stephen J. Glain can be reached at [e-mail].

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-smog10j…
EDITORIAL


Assault on State`s Air Rules

January 10, 2004

Last summer was the smoggiest in the Los Angeles Basin in six years. Look for even more days of watery eyes and wheezy chests if the federal government succeeds in hobbling local air quality officials.

President Bush and his congressional allies seem bent on blocking progress made by California in recent years. Their challenges, clothed in erudite language about state versus federal powers, are really outright concessions to car and engine makers and oil refiners. When Southern California cities or their private contractors replace worn-out diesel-engine buses, trash trucks and street sweepers, they are required to do so with cleaner-fuel vehicles. Nearly 60% of local transit buses — more than 3,000 of them — now run on natural gas or other clean fuels, along with hundreds of airport shuttles, school buses and dump trucks.

The White House is backing a lawsuit that would invalidate these local fleet rules adopted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District over the last three years. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the suit, brought by diesel engine makers, arguing that only the federal Environmental Protection Agency can set such fleet rules. However, Congress specifically allowed California to impose more rigorous pollution standards.

The administration is also pushing legislation that would weaken limits on ozone, the primary ingredient of smog. In 1997, the EPA toughened nationwide ozone limits. Those rules work, in part, by forcing cooperation between agencies accustomed to working independently to cut emissions. For example, in fast-growing Charlotte, N.C., local highway planners, meeting with air quality officials, have produced a plan that allows for new road construction while keeping a lid on smog. The region is now investing in light-rail transit to get commuters out of their cars and encouraging developers to mix new commercial projects with residential units.

With 70% of smog-forming emissions coming from cars and trucks, the joint planning is just common sense. Yet the president`s transportation funding bill, now before Congress, would do away with it.

Finally, only last-ditch lobbying by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others kept Congress from killing new state rules intended to clamp down on smoke-spewing small gasoline engines that power lawn mowers, leaf blowers and chain saws. Engine makers and their political allies almost succeeded on their shaky argument that the requirement, which takes effect in 2007, would cost jobs.

The gray-brown haze that so quickly dulled the San Gabriel Mountains` snow-capped sparkle after last week`s rains is a good measure of how smoggy the Southland remains. Californians want more progress, not less.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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What They Don`t Want You To Know

John Pilger

01/08/04: (The New Statesman) The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories", which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush`s, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)

This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton`s "brief" to deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one man`s torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had had anything to do with "outing" Dr David Kelly.

Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."

A favourite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges". Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush`s visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging", the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.

Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon - by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he [Bush] came..."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion are "normalised".

In "The Banality of Evil", Edward S Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on `normalisation`... There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."

Current "normalising" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts a darker shadow over Britain`s future." How does he know this? The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister`s desk", of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism", omitting to mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister`s desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.

What the normalisers don`t want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" - and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.

Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Centre, witnesses living next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning`s attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defence, which has admitted that British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops "will have access to biological monitoring". Iraqis have no such access and receive no specialist medical help.

According to the non-governmental organisation Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant", according to a US State Department official - just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.

The normalisers are anxious that this terror is again not recognised (the BBC confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi resistance) and that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed by the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has attacked the anti-war movement for not joining Bush`s "war on terror". He says "the left" must join Bush`s campaign, even his "pre-emptive" wars, or risk - that word again - "irrelevance". This echoes other liberal normalisers who, by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions" - such as the bombing to death of some 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists known as "commanders".

Schulz`s criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty`s own studies. Amnesty USA reports that the Bush administration is harbouring thousands of foreign torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty`s files. The dictator Suharto`s seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century", according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Britain supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail of blood. Scholars now put Suharto`s victims in 1965-66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.

Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto`s most outspoken protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush`s aggression.)

In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.

This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalisers don`t want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgement and blunder, never of high crime. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism", inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush`s America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind".

The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail to recognise historically the "national security state" that he and Bush are erecting as a "necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern fascism," he said, "should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."

Bush, Blair and the normalisers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr to "take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside". So successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam`s rule had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.

Then Washington, the tyrant`s old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the United States helping Saddam against them. US forces prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave Saddam`s Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking photographs, while Saddam`s forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything for Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East SaId Aburish, "except join the fight on his side." Bush Sr did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta": Saddam without Saddam.

Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam`s security network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade. A CIA-run and -paid gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under Saddam. "What is happen-ing in Iraq," writes Rai, "is re-Nazification... just as in Germany after the war."

Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his government has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 11 September hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk fighter-bombers.

Bush and Blair have been crowing about Libya`s capitulation on weapons of mass destruction it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as Scott Ritter has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of buying time than through any spirit of true co-operation" - as Bush and Blair have undermined the very international law upon which real disarmament is based. On 8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of resolutions on disarmament. The United States opposed all the most important ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon`s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if necessary".

This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the British government collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive" atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the unthinkable was normalised. Today, history is our warning that, once again, the true threat is close to home.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

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January 10, 2004
POLITICS
Governing Council Parties Are Said to Back Broad Autonomy for Kurds
By EDWARD WONG

kIRKUK, Iraq, Jan. 9 — The major political parties of the Iraqi Governing Council agreed at a meeting with Kurdish leaders on Thursday evening and Friday morning that the northern Kurdish region should keep much of the autonomy that it has held for the last 12 years, a senior Kurdish official said.

That includes allowing the region to remain together as one political body in a federalist system rather than dividing it up into several provinces, as some American officials had proposed, said the Kurdish official, Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two governing political parties in the Kurdish area.

Support of Governing Council members for broad Kurdish autonomy conflicts with the plans of the Bush administration, which is seeking to force Kurdish leaders to compromise on their demands for autonomous powers under the new government. L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, has met twice with Kurdish leaders, including Mr. Salih, in the last eight days to ask them to withdraw some requests, only to be rebuffed.

The issue of Kurdish autonomy has emerged as the most volatile one confronting American officials as they try to create a transitional government in Iraq by July 1. There is enormous reluctance by some senior White House officials to divide a federal Iraq along ethnic lines. Close regional allies of the United States like Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also chafed at this idea, for reasons related to their own concerns over ethnic and religious nationalism.

Mr. Salih, who attended the two-day meeting, said in an interview that the two main Kurdish parties were willing to accept the fact that they would not enjoy all the powers they had held since after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when the United States and Britain declared northern Iraq a no-flight zone and protected the area from Saddam Hussein`s forces.

The Kurds are ready to cede matters of foreign, monetary and national defense policy to the Iraqi national government, Mr. Salih said. Kurdish militiamen might become part of the national military, though they would answer to Kurdish authorities, he added.

"There was absolutely no dissension" from the need to "respect and defend many of the elements of the status quo in Kurdistan, including the governing structure of the Kurdish region," Mr. Salih said.

He added that leaders at the meeting discussed the future of Kirkuk, a city rich in oil and agricultural land 150 miles north of Baghdad and just south of the Kurdish region. The Kurdish parties have demanded control of the city of 1 million people. Some attendees supported a Kurdish proposal that would leave the decision of who governs Kirkuk up to a popular vote, Mr. Salih said.

Because of Kirkuk`s natural resources and ethnic divisions, a vote would almost certainly stir enormous unrest throughout Iraq. The city`s population is composed largely of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens.

The outcome of a popular vote is hard to predict because no accurate census has been done since 1957. The 173rd Airborne Brigade, which controls the area, estimates that the population is 35 percent Arab, 35 percent Kurd, 26 percent Turkmen and 4 percent other, though those numbers are just rough guesses, said Maj. Douglas Vincent, a spokesman here for the occupation forces. The numbers are changing day by day, as Kurds move into the area and many Arabs move out.

The meeting took place in the area of Erbil, the capital of the half of the Kurdish region controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Party.

Several representatives could not be reached Friday for comment. In recent interviews, some prominent Governing Council members have said they favor a federal system in Iraq, with the Kurdish region remaining as one autonomous body.

"There will be a special structure for Kurdistan, and some kind of federal structure for Iraq, but we haven`t gone into the details of that structure," said Adnan Pachachi, the head of the Governing Council.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Tod in Gewahrsam
von Robert Fisk
ZNet 04.01.2004

Die Briten sagten, mein Sohn wird bald freikommen. Drei Tage später hatte ich seine Leiche.” Der 14. September ist derTag, an dem Polizeioberstleutnant Daoud Mousa von der irakischen Polizei seinen Sohn Baha zuletzt lebend sah. An dem Tag führten britische Soldaten in dem Basraer Hotel, in dem der junge Mann an der Rezeption arbeitete, eine Razzia durch. Oberstleutnant Mousa erzählt heute: “Er lag mit den andern 7 vom Team auf dem Marmorfußboden und hatte die Hände über dem Kopf”. “Ich sagte zu ihm: “Mach dir keine Sorgen, ich habe mit dem britischen Offizier gesprochen, und er hat gesagt, sie werden dich binnen Stunden freilassen”. Der (britische) Offizier - ein Leutnant - hatte dem irakischen Polizisten sogar ein Stück Papier mit “2Lt. Mike” ausgehändigt. Die Unterschrift war nicht lesbar, dazu eine Basraer Telefonnummer. Nachname Fehlanzeige. “Drei Tage später sah ich die Leiche meines Sohnes”, so der Oberstleutnant. Er sitzt auf dem Betonfußboden seines Slum-Hauses in Basra. “Die Briten sind gekommen und teilten mir mit, er sei “in Gewahrsam gestorben”. Seine Nase war gebrochen. Über seinem Mund war Blut zu erkennen. Ich konnte blaue Flecken an seinen Rippen und Oberschenkeln sehen. An den Handgelenken, dort wo die Handschellen saßen, war die Haut abgeschält”. Baha Mousa hinterlässt zwei kleine Jungs - Hassan, 5 und den dreijährigen Hussein. Die Jungen sind jetzt Vollwaisen. Bahas 22jährige Frau war 6 Monate vor ihm an Krebs gestorben.

Niemand versucht zu verbergen, dass die meisten, wenn nicht gar alle, der acht Männer, die vom Haitham-Hotel mitgenommen wurden - zuvor hatten die britischen Soldaten im Safe 4 Waffen gefunden -, brutal misshandelt wurden und zwar im Gewahrsam der Royal Military Police. Ein Kollege Bahas namens Kifah Taha erlitt ein akutes Nierenversagen, nachdem man ihn in die Nieren getreten hatte; ein “Verletzungsgutachten” des britischen Frimley Park Hospitals stellt nüchtern fest, der Mann weise “generalisierte Hämatome” auf, “aufgrund wiederholten Angriffsgeschehens”. Oberstleutnant Mousa und sein zweiter Sohn Alaa hatten Kifah Taha sofort nach seiner Freilassung in einem Basraer Hospital aufgesucht. Sie versuchten, von ihm etwas über Baha zu erfahren. Sie fanden einen verletzten Mann vor, der - um es mit Alaas Worten auszudrücken -, “nur noch ein halber Mensch” war, “er hatte furchtbare blaue Flecken,weil sie ihn in die Rippen und in den Bauch getreten hatten. Er konnte kaum sprechen”. Aber ein anderer von Bahas Kollegen konnte - er flehte den ‘Independent am Sonntag’ (IoS) an, seinen Namen nicht zu veröffentlichen, da er befürchtet, erneut von den britischen Truppen in Basra verhaftet zu werden. Er liefert einen Bericht, der einen frösteln macht - angesichts der Art, wie diese acht Männer behandelt wurden, nachdem sie im britischen Verhörzentrum in Basra ankamen. Schrecklicher Zufall: das Gebäude war zuvor Geheimdiensthauptquartier von Ali Majid, Saddams brutalem Cousin. Majid ist bekannt als “Chemical Ali”, jener Mann, der die Kurden von Halabja vergaste. Später war er Militärgouverneur der Region Basra.

“Wir wurden in einen großen Raum gebracht, unsere Hände waren gefesselt, und wir hatten Säcke über dem Kopf. Aber in meiner Kapuze waren einige Löcher, und ich konnte etwas erkennen. Es kamen Soldaten herein - einfache Soldaten, keine Offiziere, die meisten mit kahlgeschorenen Köpfen, aber sie hatten Uniformen an -, sie traten uns, sie nahmen sich einen nach dem andern vor. Sie kickboxten uns gegen die Brust, zwischen die Beine und auf den Rücken. Wir weinten und schrien. Auf Baha hatten sie es besonders abgesehen, er schrie und schrie, er bekomme keine Luft mehr unter der Kapuze. Er bat sie immer wieder, ihm den Sack abzunehmen, er sagte, er müsse ersticken. Aber sie lachten ihn nur aus und traten ihn noch mehr. Einer von ihnen sagte: “Hör auf zu schreien, dann bekommst du leichter Luft”. Baha hatte so Angst. Sie verstärkten die Tritte gegen ihn, und er kollabierte auf dem Boden. Keiner von uns konnte stehen oder sitzen. Es war einfach zu schmerzhaft”.

Keiner der Gefangenen sagt aus, nach dem Waffenfund im Hotel befragt worden zu sein. In Wirklichkeit war der Mann, der zwei Gewehre und zwei Pistolen im Hotelsafe versteckt hatte - es handelt sich um einen der Hotelbesitzer, Haitham Vaha -, kurz nachdem die Briten kamen, aus dem Hotel geflohen. Er befindet sich nach wie vor auf der Flucht. Sein Vater und ein weiterer Geschäftspartner, Ahmed Taha Mousa, (weder mit Kifah Taha noch Baha Mousa verwandt) befinden sich noch in britischem Gewahrsam im Südirak. Mindestens einer der Männer, die von den Briten geschlagen wurden, gibt an, Haitham liebend gern an die Briten auszuliefern, wüsste er, wo er sich befindet. Amnesty International verlangt eine unabhängige, neutrale Untersuchung des Todes von Baha und der Misshandlung der übrigen irakischen Gefangenen. Das (britische) Verteidigungsministerium versucht allerdings, seine Untersuchung armee-intern abzuhandeln. Inzwischen wurden zwei Soldaten, die im Zusammenhang mit dem Tod Bahas verhaftet worden waren, auf freien Fuß gesetzt - was Bahas Familie rasend macht. “Wir werden die Britische Armee in London vor Gericht bringen”, sagt Bahas Bruder Alaa. “Sie gaben uns $3000 als Kompensation, dann sagten sie, wir könnten nochmal $5000 haben - die Verantwortung für den Mord an ihm würden sie aber nicht übernehmen. Wir weigern uns, dieses Geld anzunehmen. Was wir wollen, ist Gerechtigkeit. Wir wollen, dass die beteiligten Soldaten bestraft werden. Wieviel würde wohl eine britische Familie bekommen, deren unschuldiger Sohn von euren Soldaten verhaftet und totgeprügelt wurde?” Die Mousa-Familie hat einen internationalen Totenschein erhalten - ausgestellt von der Britischen Armee im Shaibah Militärkrankenhauszentrum, das vor Basra liegt. Der Schein trägt das Datum 21. September. Die Unterschrift auch hier unleserlich. Auf dem Schein steht, Bahas Tod sei verursacht durch “Herz-Lungen-Versagen: Erstickungstod”. Aber der anonyme britische Offizier, der das Dokument unterzeichnete, verabsäumte es, die Zeile “Ursache/infolge von” auszufüllen, ebenso die Zeile “ungefährer Zeitraum zwischen Einsetzen (der Erstickung) und Todeseintritt”. Noch schwerer wiegt, dass die Britische Armee es verabsäumte , die Formular-Fragen nach “Regt. Corps/RAF Command” und “Ship/Unit/RAF Station” vollständig auszufüllen.

Am 18. September wurde eine Untersuchung zum Tode Baha Mousas eingeleitet - durch Sektion 61 des Dritten Regiments, Sonderuntersuchungsabteilung (SIB) der Königlichen Militärpolizei (61 Section of the 3rd Regiment, Royal Military Police’s Special Investigation Branch). Sektion 61 steht unter dem Kommando von Hauptmann G. Nugent. Dieser ernannte Staff Sergeant Jay zum chefermittelnden Offizier des Falles 64695/03. Von Beginn der Untersuchung an sah sich die SIB mit überwältigenden Beweisen konfrontiert, dass britische Soldaten Gefangene in ihrem Gewahrsam getreten und verprügelt hatten. Major James Ralph ist Anästhesie- und Intensivstations-Konsultationsarzt des britischen Militärhospitals, Feldhospital 33, in Shaibah. In einem Brief (eine Kopie davon befindet sich im Besitz des ‘Independent am Sonntag’ (IoS)) schreibt Ralph: Kifah Taha “wurde am 16. September um 22 Uhr 40 in unsere Einrichtung eingeliefert. Es scheint, als wurde er etwa 72 Stunden zuvor angegriffen. Er erlitt dabei ernste Hamätome im Oberbauch, an der rechten Brustseite, am linken Vorderarm sowie am linken inneren Oberschenkel”. Ralph beschreibt Kifah Tahas Zustand als “akutes Nierenversagen”.

Oberstleutnant Daoud Mousa sagt, die Soldaten hätten seinen Sohn absichtlich zu Tode getreten. Sie hätten erfahren, dass er, der Vater, jenen britischen Offizier - “Leutnant Mike” - davon überzeugt hatte, mehrere britische Soldaten festzunehmen, weil sie während der Razzia Gelder des Hotels gestohlen hätten. “Ich sah zwei der Soldaten am Rückteil des Safes. Sie brachen ihn auf und stopften sich das Geld in Hemden und Taschen - irakische Dinare und ausländisches Geld. Der Offizier veranlasste daraufhin einen der Männer, sein Hemd aufzumachen und fand das Geld, dann wurde der Soldat entwaffnet. Aber die Militärermittler wollten nichts davon hören - sie interessierten sich nicht für den Diebstahl oder dafür, dass die Soldaten, die das Geld stahlen, einen Grund hatten, meinen Sohn zu misshandeln, aufgrund meiner Handlungsweise”. Alaa Mousa sagt, erst nach drei Tagen hätten sie erfahren, was mit Baha los war. “Ich befand mich daheim, und als ich raus ging, war die Straße voller britischer Soldaten. Sie wussten Bahas Namen nicht genau und sagten, sie suchten die Familie eines Mannes, dessen “Frau an Krebs gestorben ist”. Ich sagte, das muss Baha sein, und einer der Offiziere sagte: “Können Sie mit uns kommen?” Ein Sergeant kam dann in unser Haus, sein Name war Jay, er setzte sich auf unser Sofa und sagte: “Ich bin gekommen, Ihnen den Tod Ihres Bruders Baha mitzuteilen”. In unserem Haus brach Revolution aus - schreien und rufen und weinen. Die Briten sagten, mein Vater Daoud und noch ein zweiter von uns sollten mitkommen, um die Leiche zu identifizieren. Er sagte, ein britischer Arzt würde kommen und die Leiche untersuchen.” Alaa beschreibt, wie er später “Professor Hill”, einen Pathologen, traf, der, so sagt Alaa, danach zugab, dass “der Körper sehr klare Zeichen von Prügeln” aufwies und dass zwei von Bahas Rippen gebrochen gewesen seien.

Der politische Offizier der Briten in Basra, Robert Harkins, arrangierte ein Treffen der Mousa-Familie mit Brigadegeneral William Moore, dem Kommandeur der britischen Truppen in Basra. Die Familie sagt, General Moore hätte zwar Daoud Mousa kondoliert, sich andererseits jedoch geweigert, einen irakischen Anwalt an den Ermittlungen der Briten mitwirken zu lassen. “Er sagte uns, da sich die Ereignisse innerhalb der Britischen Armee zugetragen hätten, würde die Britische Armee die Untersuchung durchführen”, so Alaa. Am 3. Oktober brachte der Brigadegeneral ein Statement heraus, in dem er (gegenüber der Familie) sein “Bedauern” zum Ausdruck brachte, dass deren Sohn “starb, während er sich unter britischer Jurisdiktion befand.” Er verspricht, sollte die Militärpolizei zu dem Schluss kommen, dass ein Verbrechen vorliegt, so “werden die Verdächtigen vor Gericht kommen (...) nach den Gesetzen des Vereinigten Königreichs.” Zunächst nahm die Familie die Abfindung in Höhe von $3000 für Bahas Tod an - sie sagen, das Angebot habe für sie geklungen, als akzeptierten die Briten ihre Verantwortung -, gleichzeitig weigerte sich die Familie jedoch, einen Brief zu unterschreiben, den sie letzten Monat von einem britischen Claims-Offizier namens Perkins erhielt. Darin das Angebot weiterer $5000 - als “endgültige Regelung” des “Vorfalls” und zwar “ohne Schuldeingeständnis vonseiten des britischen Kontingents der Koalitions-Truppen im Irak”. Gestern verlautete ein Sprecher des Verteidigungsministeriums (MoD) “... soweit mir bekannt - Stand Anfang Dezember - dauert die Untersuchung weiter an - nichts in unseren Akten weist darauf hin, dass sie nicht andauert.” Aber anscheinend wurden keine Anklagen erhoben. Und kein Soldat befindet sich derzeit in Haft. Alaa Mousa und sein Vater sind nach wie vor sehr wütend über die Behandlung, die man ihnen angedeihen lässt. “Werden die Soldaten, die Baha töteten, etwa ungestraft davonkommen?” fragt Alaa. “Warum kann man uns nicht miteinbeziehen? Wenn man diese Männer nicht bestraft, werden sie es wieder tun”. “Wir behaupten nicht, die Briten sind ‘Besatzer’. Wir glauben, ihr seid hierher nach Basra gekommen, um uns vor Saddam zu retten. Aber ihr solltet meine Familie nicht so behandeln - uns, nachdem ihr Baha getötet habt, nur Geld anbieten (...) und uns dann davon abhalten herauszufinden, was wirklich geschah. Wenn ihr so weitermacht, ist es mit dem ‘herzlichen Willkommen’ in Basra bald vorbei”.





[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Death in Custody" ]

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Bush`s Unveils His Spacey Plan

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The Myth of the Democratic Establishment
Howard Dean`s grassroots rebellion against the power that isn`t.

By Nicholas Confessore
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0401.confesso…



It`s not hard to discern the strengths that have turned Howard Dean from a dark-horse candidate to the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Over the last six months, the former Vermont governor has sparked a hardy, dedicated movement of more than half a million grassroots followers. Dean and his staff have harnessed the Web in innovative ways to organize and expand his following, huge crowds of which emerge at Dean`s major campaign appearances. He`s not only raised far more money than any other Democratic candidate; he`s also taken about half of it in donations of less than $200, displaying a flair for small-donor fundraising in a party that has traditionally been terrible at it. And Dean has accomplished all this by taking a plain stance against a popular war and criticizing the Bush administration as often as possible, with an appealing bluntness few professional politicians are capable of pulling off.
But perhaps Dean`s most impressive feat, admirers and critics alike agree, has been "taking on the Washington Democratic establishment," as pundit Tucker Carlson recently put it on CNN. Dean has faced a phalanx of Washington-based candidates--Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.)--each of whom enjoys such establishment advantages as name recognition, a passel of ace political consultants, and deep Beltway roots.



When those candidates didn`t quite catch fire, Gen. Wesley Clark entered the race, promptly earning the explicit or implicit backing of many leading Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, whose fundraising network helped Clark build up a substantial war chest in a matter of weeks. But Dean has kept racking up poll leads and fundraising totals, leaving Washington insiders wondering how he could resist the establishment`s onslaught. As one columnist for The Christian Science Monitor wrote in December, "Most establishment Democrats and liberals in the news media are waiting for someone--anyone--to dethrone former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as the party`s presidential front-runner." Dean`s own campaign sees itself as locked in mortal combat with "a pretty strong establishment" as campaign manager Joe Trippi described it in a December appearance on "This Week."

A week before Christmas, I decided to seek out the Democratic establishment, hoping to stride through its halls of power and behold its vastness firsthand. Catching a cab a few blocks from the White House, I made my way down K Street, passing by the trade associations and corporate offices that today rarely hire a lobbyist without approval from Republican leaders on the Hill. Veering onto Massachusetts Avenue, we drove by the gleaming wedge of glass and concrete that houses the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank spearheading President Bush`s effort to privatize Social Security, and circled around the Capitol, where Republicans control both chambers of Congress and Democrats have trouble lining up rooms to caucus in. We passed by the Heritage Foundation, numerous alumni of which now help set national policy in the Bush administration, turned right, and meandered over to Capitol Hill, a funky neighborhood perpetually on the verge of gentrification.

The driver let me off in front of a modest, four-story brick office building which houses, among other things, a temp agency, a dry cleaners, and the National Barley Growers Association. The security guard ignored me as I slipped into the elevator, rode to the top floor, and stepped out into the modest, pastel-colored reception area of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped get the last Democratic president into office, and whose early and frequent criticisms of Dean have helped highlight his fight against the Washington establishment. I was led through a quiet warren of cubicles to the large, paper-strewn office of Bruce Reed, the DLC`s president, chief policy thinker, and resident wit. Reed is a cheerful, outgoing sort who usually appears younger than his 43 years. But today, an air of resignation lurks behind the smile.

When I ask him what the establishment is doing to stop Dean, Reed grimaces slightly, as if he`s just taken a sip of castor oil. "What are we doing to stop him?" asks Reed. "From our standpoint, this has always been up to the candidates themselves." Reed and his colleagues at the DLC--often painted by liberals as a centrist Death Star, bulging with corporate money and insidious influence over party affairs--have published a few op-eds comparing Dean`s candidacy to George McGovern`s disastrous 1972 run. But that`s about it. Some DLC operatives are working with Lieberman, others with Edwards. The New Democratic Network, a DLC-descended PAC, hasn`t attacked Dean; instead, they`ve praised his use of the Internet to build a campaign organization. "Let`s back up to your central premise," Reed continues, gazing wearily at a 7-inch-tall cup of Starbucks sitting before him on a conference table. "There is no establishment. We"--meaning Washington Democrats--"are a constellation of interest groups and ideologies and congressional voices. The evidence that there isn`t an establishment is just the mere fact that we have so many candidates--and such a collective inability to choose between them."

Reed`s point is hard to dispute. Liberal Democrats are as divided as centrists; many went early for Kerry, the early "establishment" candidate who has lately flopped. Labor is split down the middle, with the old industrial unions backing Gephardt, a longtime ally, and the service unions edging towards Dean. Most congressional Democrats and members of the Democratic National Committee--who, as convention "superdelegates," could conceivably swing behind and energize an anti-Dean candidate--are less interested in challenging the front-runner than in gauging the precise moment of his inevitability. "You have to realize, these people are all followers. Not leaders," says one Democratic strategist. "They put their finger to the wind." Democratic donors are also split. After Dean, no candidate has earned a sustained edge in campaign cash. Even the Clinton wing of the party, by some accounts the puppet masters behind the "stop Dean" movement, aren`t much more than an inchoate collection of pollsters, consultants, and former White House staffers divvied up among the rival campaigns of other candidates. "You could undoubtedly find an enormous number of people who would want to stop Dean," one Democratic strategist told me in December. "But there`s nowhere to go with them. What are you going to do--spend the holidays convincing other candidates to drop out of the races?"

There is, to be sure, a group of Democrats in Washington who think of themselves as part of an establishment. They have helped raise money for and steer talent to different candidates for the party`s nomination. They have access to the press, to whom they have dispensed a litany of on-and-off-the-record doubts about Dean`s electability. They convene for anxious steak lunches at the Palm. But to call them an "establishment" is like calling the House of Lords a force in British legislative affairs. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how incoherent today`s Democratic establishment is, or how little power it has to accomplish anything of substance. Howard Dean has overcome many hurdles on his way to becoming the Democratic frontrunner. But the Democratic establishment is not exactly at the top of the list.

Party crashing

The absence of a true Democratic establishment is the central fact not only of the current presidential contest, but also of the last three years of Beltway politics. Washington Democrats are not wholly without political and strategic assets. But when you put it all together, there`s not much to look at.

Democrats not only lack control of the White House and either chamber of Congress, they don`t even have strong party institutions to fall back on. Not long after the 2000 elections, party chieftains installed fundraising Wunderkind Terry McAuliffe at the Democratic National Committee with a mandate to rebuild the party`s long-dilapidated political infrastructure. He`s succeeded about as well as anyone could, considering that after he became chairman, those same party chieftains successfully pushed through Congress a campaign finance reform which deprived the DNC of most of its income. These days, McAuliffe is reduced to bragging that his new small-donor program brings in enough money to cover the DNC`s operating expenses.

The Democrats also lack the kind of idea factories which, in the absence of controlling any branch of government, are vital to helping parties formulate policy and strategy. The Brookings Institution, supposedly the brain trust of left-leaning intellectuals, houses a number of former Clinton policy hands and publishes well-turned monographs on nuclear nonproliferation and pension reform. But it`s hardly a node in the Democratic resistance--until recently, it was run by a Republican. The foremost advocacy-oriented think tanks on the left--the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the DLC`s Progressive Policy Institute--together spend about as much in a year as does just one of the three prominent conservative policy shops, the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, the pressures of Republican rule are beginning to undermine the Democrats` relationship with such long-time allies as the AARP, which recently endorsed GOP-authored prescription-drug legislation, handing Bush a major legislative victory to tout during his reelection campaign. And while Beltway Republicans can count on the likes of the The Washington Times and the FOX News Channel to function as de facto party organs, the Democrats have no such relationship with the mainstream media. NPR has a liberal temperament but, to say the least, lacks a Rush Limbaugh-like taste for political warfare. And The Washington Post, once the liberal Beltway media`s high command, if anything now reflects a center-right perspective. The paper`s editorial page, having spent the Clinton years hyperventilating about Whitewater, opined that Enron`s White House contacts weren`t worth a congressional investigation and strongly supported the war in Iraq.

Washington Democrats have recognized their own disarray, and complain about it often. Yet they have continued to behave in many respects as a party in power, negotiating with Republican leaders on the Hill as if they, and not the GOP, govern the nation. "Democrats are inclined to legislate," says Chris Jennings, who ran the health-care portfolio during the Clinton administration. "They always want to be the dealmaker." Nowadays, however, instead of making a deal, the Democrats usually get rolled. Most recently, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped congressional Republicans craft their prescription-drug proposal on the understanding that it would not include provisions aimed at privatizing Medicare--provisions which nevertheless made their way into the final legislation, unveiled in December and now signed into law. "It`s not just that Ted Kennedy was the old liberal lion, but that he supposedly knew how to play the game," says one union strategist, describing the shock many Washington Democrats felt at how the Medicare debate played out. "He`s been on the Hill for 40 years. How could he get conned like this?"

Even as out-of-power Democrats act like establishmentarians, the city`s ascendant GOP ruling class retain the instincts of revolutionaries. For three years, Democratic voters and activists across the country have watched the Republican Party assail, with seeming impunity, everything they hold dear. Aside from filibustering the GOP`s energy plan and blocking a handful of exceptionally reactionary judicial nominees, there are few success stories to which Democratic leaders can point. There`s no question that this experience has created a wellspring of anger against both congressional Republicans and President Bush. But the GOP`s romp has also elicited from the Democratic grassroots a deep contempt for the party`s Washington leadership. That frustration is the defining characteristic of the ongoing primary contest, dwarfing debates over policy, ideology, or electoral strategy. Dean and his movement have risen up to do battle against an establishment that doesn`t really exist--which is why he will almost certainly be the next Democratic nominee. "Dean`s people are motivated, they`re coherent and cohesive," says one Democratic insider. "They`re giving him money hand over fist. And he can just knock over this Potemkin village."

Demise of the machine

The Democratic establishment was once vigorous and powerful, encompassing not only Washington`s Hill barons, party officials, and a large labor movement, but also the heads of various state and city Democratic organizations, ranging from the courthouse cliques of the Solid South to Richard J. Daley`s Chicago machine. The old Democratic establishment was not necessarily democratic, and not always progressive. But by linking the local and state institutions that engaged average citizens to the Washington elites who crafted legislation, this establishment provided crucial capacities to the Democratic Party. It could hash out compromises on everything from labor law to presidential candidates (often in the proverbial smoke-filled room). In the days before television, it communicated the party`s message and organized rank-and-file voters. And for three decades, this establishment held together the disparate blocs--conservative Southerners, urban autocrats, blacks, union members, and northern liberals--that made the Democrats a majority party. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Democrats won seven out of nine presidential elections and usually controlled both houses of Congress as well.

But the same forces that dismantled the old Democratic coalition during the next two decades also dismantled the old Democratic establishment. Conservative whites deserted the party over its support for civil rights and began to vote Republican. The labor movement began a slow decline in membership and influence. Civil-service laws whittled away at the power of the big-city machines. What prerogatives the Democratic establishment retained were slowly stripped away by liberal reformers within the party. During the late 1970s, a DNC-sponsored commission chaired by George McGovern eviscerated the establishment`s power over nominations, linking delegate selection to the outcome of primary elections rather than the fiat of state-level party bosses.

The reformers succeeded in breaking up the old system. But the effect was less to devolve power to the party`s grassroots than to shrink what had been a national Democratic establishment into a largely Washington-based one, which absorbed the reformers into its ranks. Power flowed away from the disintegrating state organizations and to a growing array of Washington-based pressure groups descended from the civil rights, feminist, consumer, and environmental movements. But these--the Children`s Defense Fund, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, among others--increasingly were Beltway-based organizations run by professional activists. They raised money from members but didn`t involve them much in day-to-day politics the way, say, neighborhood party organizations turned out voters in return for filling potholes. These groups influenced politics largely through endorsements, lobbying their allies on the Hill, direct mail, and media campaigns. (The exceptions were labor and the black urban machines which supplanted the white ethnic ones, both of which could still turn out voters the old-fashioned way.) Similarly, as advertising and free media began to supplant state parties and urban machines as the establishment`s conduit to voters, a burgeoning class of Washington-based pollsters, political consultants, and fundraisers came to the fore. The reign of the bosses gave way to the reign of the experts.

But although this post-1972 Democratic establishment owned a huge chunk of Washington real estate, it was not particularly well-organized. The younger members of congress and newly-assertive liberal activists coexisted uneasily with the remnants of the pre-reform establishment. By Ronald Reagan`s first inauguration, the DNC and other party organizations were metaphorically atrophied and, at times, literally bankrupt. For most of the 1980s, the Democrats had no clear leader and, after three successive presidential losses, no governing ideology to replace the old Cold War liberalism.

What gave the Democratic ruling class power was its permanence. Decades of Democratic dominance in Washington had bequeathed a wealth of experience and talent, people who knew the levers of power and how to work them. Many of Washington`s key trade associations, law firms, and lobby shops were run by operatives who had cut their teeth in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. (Among the last of them is Jack Valenti, the former Johnson aide and long-time head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who this year announced his decision to retire.) Control of the House and Senate helped the congressional wing of the party extract jobs and campaign contributions from Republican-leaning business interests, while giving Democratic-leaning interests a purchase on policymaking and at least some incentive to cooperate and compromise with one another. With a majority in the House, Democrats could control the committee staffs, which provided a research engine to develop and implement policy. The Speaker`s Office, especially under Rep. Tip O`Neill (D-Mass.), provided a message of the day around which other Democrats and their allies could align themselves. Indeed, to many Democrats--not to mention many Republicans--the permanence of Democratic rule on the Hill was an accepted fact of Washington life.

When it came to presidential primaries, the Washington-based Democratic establishment wasn`t as dominant as its earlier incarnation. Small groups of party officials could no longer handpick delegates and tell them whom to vote for. Insurgent or "entrepreneurial" candidates could in theory win the nomination simply by winning the affections of Democratic primary voters, as Jimmy Carter did in 1976. But thanks to the earlier campaign finance reforms, a candidate`s ability to raise money became the chief criteria for whether or not he or she could make a successful run for the nomination. During the early 1980s, party leaders reasserted their power by front-loading the primary schedule. That made it hard for later entrepreneurial candidates, such as Gary Hart, to raise money quickly enough to sustain a surge, and put a premium on the fundraising advantages that usually accrued to candidates blessed by the establishment, such as Walter Mondale. Day to day, the establishment could exert real power in Washington even when on the defensive. Not long after Reagan`s 1980 victory, for example, a group of party strategists began to meet biweekly with O`Neill`s general counsel, Kirk O`Donnell, to plot strategy. Seizing on Reagan`s proposal to cut the Social Security benefits of some retirees, the Democrats began to introduce legislation to put House conservatives on the wrong side of the issue. "It was drip, drip," says Tony Coelho, the former California congressman who at the time ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "We created a voting record where the Republicans were voting wrong on Social Security and so forth. They were winning, but in `82, we ran against them on a lot of the stuff we had forced them to vote on. We picked up 26 seats and then we kept going from there."

Every scrap of power this establishment possessed in Washington, however, was contingent on Democratic control of Congress. The labor movement was not nearly as large or vigorous as it had once been. Left-leaning pressure groups derived most of their power not by mustering large, active memberships on the ground, but through their access to and tight alliance with Democrats on the Hill. And all along, the foundations of that majority were rotting away. Electorally, Democratic rule in the House and Senate rested on a large contingent of Southern conservatives whose constituents had been reliably voting for Republican presidential candidates for over a decade. Financially, congressional Democrats had, through the 1980s and early 1990s, become dependent on campaign cash from corporate special interests, who gave to them not out of ideological sympathy but in return for tax breaks, subsidies, and other giveaways that gave the party the appearance--and often the reality--of decadence and corruption. Some of that money went to build voter lists and send direct mail, but the Democrats never really created a permanent, enduring party infrastructure: a grassroots fundraising capacity and policy and message shops independent of the Hill.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the party looked healthy. Democrats commanded the White House, respectable majorities in the House and Senate, and control of 40 statehouses; Democratic governors represented eight-tenths of the U.S. population. Clinton annexed the DNC to the White House political shop, and directed its chairman, David Wilhelm, to focus all his efforts towards passing health-care reform. That move was understandable at the time. But instead of universal health care, the party got a legislative debacle that deprived the Democrats of a clear success on which to run. Combined with the House banking scandal fomented by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his allies, the passage of NAFTA (which depressed the labor vote), and Clinton`s 1993 tax hike (which motivated the GOP base), the result was decisive. In November 1994, the Democrats lost control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in four decades.

Base instincts

The conservatives who took over the House in 1995 were organized very differently from the Democrats they overthrew. They had built their movement largely without control of governmental institutions, in the shade of Democratic rule. During the 1970s, with the help of newly energized right-wing donors, conservative activists had begun to build a relatively small network of advocacy think tanks, media outlets, legal advocacy shops, and ideological pressure groups to counter both the Democratic establishment and what they viewed as a compliant, dissolute Republican establishment. During the 1980s, this "counter-establishment," as journalist Sidney Blumenthal called it, challenged the GOP old guard for dominance in the White House and on the Hill. They built up a critique of liberalism and a system of institutions that, by combining policy, political, and media functions under one roof, could sustain their movement in the wilderness.

Far from demoralizing the conservative counter-establishment, Clinton`s 1992 victory caused it to gel. Grover Norquist`s famed Wednesday Group began meeting not long after Election Day, coordinating key conservative interest groups, Hill staffers, and media. Think tanks like AEI and Cato expanded to absorb the exodus of policymakers from the Bush administration, keeping conservative talent within the Beltway. While right-wing media outlets attacked Clinton`s character, conservative backbenchers brought together social conservatives and business lobbyists--uneasy partners in the GOP coalition through the 1980s--to leach support from his policy agenda and lay the groundwork for a counter-attack. When the GOP took over Congress in 1995, the counter-establishment fused with the Republicans` congressional wing to become, in effect, Washington`s new ruling class.

But although the Democratic establishment was effectively dead, its members were slow to pick up on the fact. Gingrich`s implosion in 1995, followed by modest Democratic pickups during the next few election cycles, lulled House Democrats--and the interest groups which radiated outward from them--into believing that they could retake the Hill without the kind of spade work that the conservatives had invested. Most importantly, the Clinton White House lent the rump Democratic establishment some of the capacity they had with Congress. Although he had been in many respects a Beltway outsider, Clinton`s popularity, political acumen, and fundraising prowess lent Washington Democrats the appearance of vitality, even as their brethren at the state and local level continued to lose ground and the soft-money scandals of the mid-1990s decimated what remained of the party`s infrastructure. Control of the executive branch provided thousands of jobs to Democratic policy experts, while the White House itself acted as a centripetal force on the party`s congressional caucus and disparate interest groups. The president himself represented "a single voice that could define the debate" and drag the rest of the party establishment along behind him," noted Bruce Reed, while the White House provided "a table to sit around" to resolve disagreements and formulate strategy.

All of that was lost in 2001, when George W. Bush entered office. Without institutional support, the Democratic establishment fractured into its constituent parts, none of them dominant in terms of money, message, or ideology. Unlike conservatives, the Democrats hadn`t built up a farm team of ideological institutions to absorb the governing experience and political talent streaming out of the White House. As Kenneth Baer, a Democratic consultant and former White House speechwriter, lamented in Slate a month after Bush`s inauguration, "One way to explain the party`s post-election drift is that the people who best understand the intersection of policy and politics--those most able to craft a Democratic response to Bush--are scattered to the wind."

Responsibility for crafting a Democratic strategy and message defaulted to the minority leaders in the House and Senate, Gephardt and Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). But although they had some early successes--notably, capitalizing on White House arrogance to convince Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) to abandon his party, giving Democrats control of the Senate--Daschle and Gephardt couldn`t create an effective opposition. One problem was that the Democrats still didn`t understand how tenuous their hold on power really was. When the Enron scandal boiled over in early 2002, for instance, Joe Lieberman--at the time chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee--argued that the Democrats shouldn`t "rush to judgment" and waited five months to subpoena the White House regarding administration officials` contacts with Enron executives, by which point public interest in the firm`s bankruptcy had waned. Democrats also lacked the P.R. capabilities that conservatives had built up during their years out of power. When conservative activists and media outlets began to attack Daschle as "an obstructionist" for blocking Republican energy legislation--one group, the Family Research Council, ran ads comparing him to Saddam Hussein--the Democrats had no war room equipped to bombard newspapers with letters to the editor, demanding an apology. Nor could Democrats muster an army of chat-show surrogates who would aggressively parrot the party line on tax cuts.

Part of the problem, of course, was that there was no party line--on tax cuts, or anything else. Without an apparatus to build consensus around effective message, strategy, or policy, the Democrats spent the first two years of the Bush administration, in the midst of a recession, without an economic plan. As the GOP aggressively pushed massive a series of long-term tax cuts mostly benefiting the wealthy, the Democrats split, with liberals preaching total opposition, moderates favoring modest tax cuts for the middle class, and a few conservatives jumping ship to support Bush`s plan. The plan which in retrospect made the most tactical and substance sense--massive, short-term cuts for the middle class, financed by payroll-tax reductions--was promoted by some party leaders, including former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. But without a mechanism for dragging other Democrats on board, the party was left without a national economic message to campaign on. They decided to talk a lot about a Democratic prescription-drug plan instead--and found out, too late, that voters couldn`t tell their proposal apart from the Republicans`.

Without strong party institutions, the Democrats became even more dependent on the resources of their special interests--and even less willing to break with those interests even when doing so would have been politically prudent. There is no better example than the 2002 debate over creating a new department for homeland security. Democrats came up with the idea, while Republicans spent five months resisting it. But when Bush decided to support it--with provisions that would have given him authority to hire and fire employees of the new agency and dissolve their collective bargaining agreements--Senate Democrats blocked the bill out of deference to public-employee unions. On the campaign trail that fall, Bush successfully painted Democratic candidates like Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) as soft on terrorism, arguably costing Democrats control of the Senate.

It took another year for Democrats to begin sorting through the lessons of that defeat. And only when the failures of Bush`s Iraq policy--misleading statements in the State of the Union, failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and chaos on the ground--became evident did establishment Democrats, including those running for president, find their voices and begin aggressively criticizing the president. But by then, it was too late. Dean had gotten there first.

Primary schooling

Since last winter, the 2004 primary campaign has been, for all intents and purposes, a referendum on the Washington establishment, held by the party`s grassroots. Rank-and-file Democrats love Dean not so much because he`s "taken on" a powerful Washington establishment, but because he has tapped voters` fury and dismay that the establishment seems so powerless--even with half the popular vote behind it. It`s because the establishment is pathetic, not powerful, that these people support Dean.

This grassroots fury against the "Washington Democrats"--as Dean likes to call them--is the only factor that clearly explains his extraordinary ascent and the striking inability of any other candidates to catch fire. Certainly it`s got little to do with his stance on individual issues. Yes, Dean came out against the war resolution that other establishment candidates voted for. But Wesley Clark also opposed the resolution. And while Clark has been derided for supposedly flip-flopping on how he would have voted on the war resolution, Dean himself has split hairs. He supported an alternative resolution, sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), that was only slightly less of a blank check than the one that actually passed. In most other respects, Dean`s views are hardly different from his establishment rivals. He`s more traditionally liberal on tax cuts (he`d repeal all of them, where Lieberman and Edwards would keep the middle-class cuts), but of the five major candidates, his health-care proposal is the least radical. His ideas to expand federal aid for child care and higher education are, as Ryan Lizza pointed out in The New Republic recently, rather Clintonesque. Despite efforts by centrist intellectuals and some journalists to limn his candidacy as a liberal-versus-center battle, issue by issue, it doesn`t add up. If voters had wanted a left-liberal candidate, Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton would be leading the polls. Dean`s supporters are not stupid. They know that in Dean, they are getting a flinty, balanced-budget governor who opposes gun control and favors welfare reform. But that`s not the source of their admiration. Dean`s supporters love him because, unlike everyone else in those endless debates, he`s not tainted by association with the hapless Washington establishment.

But the Democrats` grassroots aren`t the only ones who find the establishment lacking. Increasingly, the establishment finds itself lacking, too. The Medicare debacle, in some ways the party`s signal defeat of the last three years, seems to have made a particular impact. "It illustrated to them that it was possible to bypass the Democratic Party on legislation, even on an issue that they believed they were the ultimate arbiter of," says Chris Jennings. Whereas Senate Democrats were afraid to oppose flat-out any bill that offered hundreds of billions in benefits to seniors, top Democrats in the House took a close look and decided to dig in their heels. The lock-step Republican majority passed the bill anyway, but many observers noted that, under pressure from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, only 16 Democrats voted for the bill--drawing a clear line in the sand on a piece of legislation which now faces growing criticism from those it was supposed to benefit.

There are also the first hints that Washington`s Democrats have learned a thing or two from the conservative insurgents who displaced them. In early December, I sat down with John Podesta, who was the last chief of staff to serve under Clinton, in the sparsely-furnished corner office of his new think tank, the Center for American Progress. "Good riddance," he replied when asked about the decline of the Democratic establishment. "It wasn`t really working." Podesta is one of a small but growing group of Washington Democrats who have begun to recognize not only the depth of their disarray, but also of how badly equipped the party is to change. And they`ve taken the first steps towards building the kind of institutions that sustained conservatives during the 1970s and 1980s. Podesta, like the men who founded the key advocacy think-tanks on the right, is a political operative, not an academic. (He holds a law degree, but no Ph.D.--a credential required for permanent employment at a place like Brookings.) Instead of monographs, his think tank produces op-ed-style policy briefs and the "Progress Report," a trenchant, opinionated roundup of Republican legislation and policies produced daily by the communications staff. Meanwhile, a new wave of the so-called 527 organizations--each a coalition of Democratic-leaning interest groups, including labor--have sopped up the funds that used to fill the DNC`s soft-money accounts. And instead of blowing it all on television ads, as the party did for so many years, most of the 527s have funneled the cash into massive, well-coordinated turnout and voter contact operations in preparation for the 2004 elections.

Increasingly, Washington Democrats have begun to understand what Dean`s candidacy can offer them. For the last two decades, the establishment has tried to organize voters indirectly, through pollsters, pundits, and consultants rather than directly, through "people who connected with voters, who could control different power structures across the country," says one labor strategist. Unlike the old machines, Dean`s burgeoning organization is fundamentally decentralized and democratic. (One popular Deaniac slogan: "Dean is the messenger. We are the message.") But by collaborating with a far-flung network of pro-Dean blogs and Web sites, while using such tools as Meetup.com to bring activists together on local college campuses and in neighborhood bars, Dean`s campaign involves his supporters at the granular level, rather as Daley`s aldermen and ward heelers did. "We didn`t keep building the infrastructure of the party," notes Coelho, who many in the party still hold responsible for the Democrats flat-footedness leading up to the 1994 elections. "It`s time to permit the system to move on. [Dean`s people] are creating a new group that will take over at some point, and I think that when they do, our party will be stronger than in the past."

But even as Dean continues to occasionally bash Washington Democrats in public, his top staff--including his campaign co-chairman, Steve Grossman, a former DNC head--have spent the last few months quietly reaching out to them. And for good reason: Should Dean win both the nomination and, next fall, the presidency, he will face a massive, motivated, well-funded Republican establishment that will work every day to defeat his agenda, no matter how liberal or centrist it is. As disorganized as they are, Beltway Democrats still constitute a valuable reservoir of talent, experience, and money. Without a rebuilt, robust Democratic counter-establishment, Dean will be a monumental failure as president. Howard Dean needs the Washington Democrats, in other words, as much as they need him.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Leonarda Álvarez Benites, 80, in the National Museum of Interventions. "The war between Mexico and the United States has a different meaning for Mexicans and Americans," the museum`s director said.
January 9, 2004
MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
Of Gringos and Old Grudges: This Land Is Their Land
By TIM WEINER

MEXICO CITY, Jan. 8 — In the American South, William Faulkner once wrote, the past isn`t dead. It isn`t even past.

This may become truer the farther south one goes.

In the United States, almost no one remembers the war that Americans fought against Mexico more than 150 years ago. In Mexico, almost no one has forgotten.

The war cut this country in two, and "the wound never really healed," said Miguel Soto, a Mexico City historian. It took less than two years, and ended with the gringos seizing half of Mexico, taking the land that became America`s Wild West: California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and beyond.

In Mexico, they call this "the Mutilation." That may help explain why relations between the nations are sometimes so tense.

As President Bush prepares to fly down to Mexico from Texas, where the war began back in 1846, the debate here over how to relate to the United States is heating up once again.

The question of the day is the more than 20 million Mexicans who now live in the United States.

But sensitivities about sovereignty surround every thorny issue involving Americans in Mexico. Can Americans buy land? Sometimes. Drill for oil? Never. Can American officers comb airports in Mexico? Yes. Carry guns as lawmen? No. Open and close the border at will? Well, they try.

To realize that the border was fixed by war and controlled by the victors is to understand why some Mexicans may not love the 21st-century American colossus. Yet they adore the old American ideals of freedom, equality and boundless opportunity, and they keep voting, by the millions, with their feet.

In "a relationship of love and of hatred," as Mr. Soto says, bitter memories sometimes surface like old shrapnel under the skin.

Fragments of the old war stand in the slanting morning sunlight at an old convent here in Mexico City, a sanctuary seized by invading American troops in 1847, now the National Museum of Interventions, which chronicles the struggle.

"The war between Mexico and the United States has a different meaning for Mexicans and Americans," said the museum`s director, Alfredo Hernández Murillo. "For Americans, it`s one more step in the expansion that began when the United States was created. For Mexicans, the war meant we lost half the nation. It was very damaging, and not just because the land was lost.

"It`s a symbol of Mexico`s weakness throughout history in confronting the United States. For Mexicans, it`s still a shock sometimes to cross the border and see the Spanish names of the places we lost."

Those places have names like Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio; the list is long.

The war killed 13,780 Americans, and perhaps 50,000 or more Mexicans — no one knows the true number. It was the first American war led by commanders from West Point. These were men like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. A little more than a decade later, Grant and Sherman battled Lee and Davis in the Civil War.

Historians are still fighting over how and why the battles of the Mexican War began. Some say it was Mexico`s fault for trying to stop the secession of what was then (and to some, still is) the Republic of Texas. Some say it was an imperial land grab by the president of the United States.

President James K. Polk did confide to his diary that the aim of the war was "to acquire for the United States — California, New Mexico and perhaps some other of the northern provinces of Mexico." When it was won, in February 1848, he wrote, "There will be added to the United States an immense empire, the value of which 20 years hence it would be difficult to calculate." Nine days later, prospectors struck gold in California.

Aftershocks still resonate from the Mexican War — or, as the Mexicans have it, "the American invasion." The students who walk through the National Museum of Interventions still gasp at a lithograph standing next to an American flag.

It shows Gen. Winfield Scott riding into Mexico City`s national square — "the halls of Montezuma," in the words of the Marine Corps Hymn — to seize power and raise the flag. He had followed the same invasion route as the 16th-century Spanish conquerors of Mexico. The American occupation lasted 11 months.

Many of the 75,000 Mexicans living in the newly conquered American West lost their rights to own land and live as they pleased. It was well into the 20th century before much of the land was settled and civilized.

Now, that civilization is taking another turn. More than half of the 20 million Mexicans north of the border live on the land that once was theirs. Some 8.5 million live in California — a quarter of the population. Nearly half the people of New Mexico have roots in old Mexico. Mexico is, in a sense, slowly reoccupying its former property.

"History extracts its costs with the passage of time," said Jesús Velasco Márquez, a professor who has long studied the war. "We are the biggest minority in the United States, and particularly in the territory that once was ours."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company







Gen. Winfield Scott riding into Mexico City`s central square in 1847 to seize power and raise the flag. At the National Museum of Interventions in Mexico City, the lithograph, by Karl Nebel, brings gasps from visitors. (Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries)

[Joerver]

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill, Bush Planed Invasion Within Days Of Inauguration

Saturday, January 10, 2004 09 (Drudge report) - The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq including the use of American troops within days of President Bush`s inauguration in January of 2001, NOT eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported.

That is what former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O`Neill talks to Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap," says O`Neill.

O`Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.

Suskind says O`Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam
Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam`s downfall, including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq`s oil.

"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked `secret` says `Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.`" A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of
oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

In the book, O`Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying `GO FIND ME A WAY TO DO THIS,`" says O`Neill in the book. Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the president seems to be wavering about going forward with his
second round of tax cuts.

"Haven`t we already given money to rich people," Suskind says the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting, "Shouldn`t we be giving money to the middle?"

O`Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn`t think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can`t imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."

www.drudgereport.com

[Joerver]

January 6, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/giebel01062004.html
Permanent Bases
Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won`t Go!
By DOUG GIEBEL


Well, if you`re going to war, obviously troops are going to a theater and to a country and in the immediate aftermath of such a conflict, there would have to be a need for some presence until such time as you can put in place a better system. I mean, the United States has done this many times in the course of the last 50 or 60 years and we always try to get out as quickly as we can once we have reestablished peace, put in place a stable system, it is never our intention to go and stay in a place and to impose our will by the presence of our military forces.

--Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on NPR`s "All Things Considered," October 11, 2002.

Those guiding Bush/neo-conservative foreign policy intend to establish a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq. This little-noted aim, not "oil," is the real "elephant" in the American voter`s living room. (The issue of appropriating Iraqi oil and oil revenue will be dealt with after the "coalition" take-over to set up bases on Iraqi soil.) Secretary Powell`s disingenuous comment on NPR (above) failed to note that in the past 50 or 60 years the United States still maintains a military presence in many countries long past "the immediate aftermath" of conflict. The currently-infamous U.S. installation at Guantanamo Bay dates back to 1901. A hundred-year stay in Iraq would not be anything new. How many bases? At what financial cost? At what continued (possibly never-ending) cost to human beings wounded or killed?

On April 20, 2003, The New York Times ran a story citing unnamed sources indicating the U.S. military was planning as many as four permanent military bases in Iraq. The next day, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed the story as "inaccurate and unfortunate." But what did Rumsfeld mean by "inaccurate"? Perhaps it was "unfortunate" for the administration when the basing plan was leaked to the press. Perhaps the plan was deliberately leaked by the Pentagon or White House. The national media dropped the story after Rumsfeld`s disclaimer.

Was the story "inaccurate" because instead of four military installations, the government has plans for six bases, as reported on November 19, 2003, by the Jordanian daily al-Arab al-Yawm:

The sources revealed the names of these bases and the planned positions for permanent deployment. They are:

. Al-Habbaniyah Airbase [already an RAF airbase for much of the last century] near the city of al-Fallujah, 65km west of Baghdad;

. Ash-Sha`biyah Airbase in Basra, 600km south of Baghdad;

. `Ali ibn Abi Taleb Airbase on the outskirts of the city of an-Nasiriyah, 400km south of Baghdad;

. al-Walid Airbase about 330km north west of Baghdad;

. al-Ghazlani Camp in the city of Mosul, 400km north of Baghdad;

. A permanent deployment of forces in the east of Iraq in what is known as the Hamrin mountain range that extends from Diyala Provice, 60km east of Baghdad, and borders on Iran and extends to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 260km north of Baghdad.

The sources explained the choice of these locations for permanent Anglo-American deployment by saying that they cover most of the territory of Iraq, and are linked to the Iraqi borders in all four directions, giving them strategic importance in defining the future course of the "new" Iraq. The choice of these locations is also linked to the aim of deterring neighbors of Iraq who might attempt to threaten Iraqi territory in the future.

Given the present administration`s abysmal track record for truth-telling, we may never know substantive information about this crucial issue until the bases are operational.

How long U.S. troops will remain in Iraq? Here are a few selected responses to that vital question.

1. On November 20, 1997, long before the current occupation by "coalition" forces, Clinton`s Defense Secretary William Cohen said that U.S. forces then in the region of Iraq "will stay as long as it`s necessary for them to be there."

2. Cohen`s prophetic words have been repeatedly echoed by the Bush Administration, as when Secretary of State Powell said, "How long will we stay in Iraq? We will stay as long as it takes to turn full responsibility for governing Iraq over to a capable and democratically elected Iraqi administration." (September 19, 2003)

3. President George W. Bush: (a) The Washington Post reported, "Before the war, Bush spoke optimistically about a clean transformation of Iraq, arguing that U.S. troops would not remain in the region "for one day longer than is necessary." (b) Bush statement: "These groups believe they have found an opportunity to harm America, to shake our resolve in the war on terror and to cause us to leave Iraq before freedom is fully established. They are wrong and they will not succeed." (July 1, 2003) (c) Bush statement: "We will stay as long as necessary to make sure that the Iraqi people have a government of, by and for the Iraqi people. And then we`ll come home." (May 13, 2003) (d) Bush statement: "I assured [Iraqi women leaders] that America wasn`t leaving. When they hear me say we`re staying, that means we`re staying. (November 17, 2003)

4. On July 1, 2003, Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the United States "does not have any intention of staying in Iraq forever, but the president has said that we will stay as long as is necessary to get the job done and done well and done right, and not a day longer. And that`s what you`re seeing."

5. On November 17, 2003, reporter Russell Mokhiber asked Fleischer`s replacement Scott McClellan the following: "Ambassador (Paul) Bremer said yesterday that U.S. troops will remain on the ground in Iraq even after the government is elected there. What if the (Iraqi) government asks the U.S. to get out. Would we get out?" McClellan ducked the question with this baroque response: "The Iraqi people have indicated in a number of different ways, if you look at polls, if you look at the governing council representatives, that they want us to say until the job is finished. And part of that job is making sure that we have a secure environment for the Iraqi people. And we still have important obligations that will need to be fulfilled. That includes the security side, that includes the reconstruction side. There are an enormous amount of resources going into Iraq from the international community. All of us have a stake in seeing a peaceful and free Iraq come about. It is important to transforming the Middle East. The Middle East has been a volatile region. It has been a breeding ground for terrorism, and bringing about a free, peaceful, democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will help transform that region for the better, bring about a safer and better world."

6. How long in Iraq? General Richard Myers said: "It`s going to depend on events over the next couple of years. It`s to be determined." (December 16, 2003)

7. "The United States is committed to stay as long as is necessary in Iraq, but not one day more." -- Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, February 11, 2003.

8. Reporting for the Voice of America, Meredith Buel noted, "While analysts disagree over how long American soldiers should stay in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says they will be there as long as is necessary, but not one day longer. U.S. defense officials have been careful not to estimate the length of the occupation, just as they refused to estimate how long the war itself would last." (June 13, 2003)

9. During a September 30, 2003, visit to Washington, D.C., Ahmad Chalabi, interim head of Iraq`s governing council, told reporters he would like the United States to establish permanent military bases in Iraq.

10. Even some Democrats see a long-lived U.S. presence in Iraq. In July 2003, Sen. Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News the U.S. would be Iraq for a decade. "t`s unrealistic to think we`re not going to be required to be there, in transition, even once there`s an Iraqi government, for a long time with a lot of forces." Presidential candidate Howard Dean, who opposed the war from the beginning, told Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt, "Now that we`re there, we`re stuck . . . bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition." (August 25, 2003)

11. On her return from a Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Hillary Clinton responded to the "how long" question on ABC`s This Week with a reminder that the U.S. still has bases in Korea and elsewhere, long after wars have ended.

12. June 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned by members of Parliament. How long would British troops remain in Iraq? Was there an exit strategy? Blair artfully avoided answering such questions. He did say, "Even at this moment in time, it is particularly important that we make sure that we redouble our efforts to bring stability to that country because that is the surest way of bringing stability to the rest of the world," a statement of incredibly overblown exaggeration. (Emphasis added.) Will stabilizing Iraq really bring "stability to the rest of the world"? Blair`s claim must join the other hyped misstatements of fact such as Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capabilities. (In John le Carre`s latest novel "Absolute Friends," a character says "I used to believe that I was right to lie for my country, and now I don`t know what the truth is.")

13. January 5, 2004: In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said British forces would likely remain in the country for years to come. He said he could not give an ``exact timescale`` for their withdrawal but added ``it is not going to be months. ... I can`t say whether it is going to be 2006, 2007.`` (Associated Press) Political leaders "can`t say" when the foreign troops will leave Iraq. If they told the public of their actual plans, the public might strenuously object. In 2006 or 2007, we may expect to hear, "I can`t say whether it is going to be 2008, 2009, 2010."

14. January 4, 2004: Defense experts Charles Knight and Marcus Corbin published a most important analysis deserving major national exposure. They wrote in part:

A four- or five-year occupation of Iraq by 65,000 regular and 35,000 reserve troops - a realistic possibility - will require a rotation base of 260,000 active troops . . . and 315,000 reserve troops . . . This illustration does not properly capture the full effect of our broader "war on terror" on our reservists. . . If another war begins, President Bush will still be able to mobilize plenty of military power. It is occupations that are the problem. If occupation of Iraq stretches into years and the "war on terrorism" widens even further, Army Reserve and National Guard units will be called to active service again and again - an activation rate far higher than the norm expected by our citizen soldiers, their families and their communities.

Although polls have shown the U.S. public generally supports the occupation of Iraq, it`s not clear that questions regarding a "permanent" presence have been asked of respondents. One thing for sure: if Bush Republicans (and some Democrats) prevail, the children of our grandchildren will be serving in Iraq long after the current crop of politicians and corporate leaders with their fingers in the power-and-money pie have left the scene. Is this what Americans really want?

Speaking for the Bush Administration, Scott McClellan`s words above regarding a desire to transform the Middle East deserve much more attention than they`ve been given. Far too little attention was paid when NPR`s Robert Siegel elicited from Colin Powell the incredible statement that begins this article. The United States currently has bases in such nations as Afghanistan, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria (coming soon), Cuba, Diego Garcia, Djibouti, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guam, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Netherlands, Oman, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan. Contrary to Secretary Powell`s laughable assertion, once a U.S. base is based, it becomes quite permanent. Rather than try to "get [U.S. bases] out," we spend enormous effort maintaining the majority of our military installations. And this brings us to the problem of Iraq.

The Bush Administration may intend to move most of its Middle East installations to Iraq from the countries where they`re now situated. The hope is for U.S. control of Iraq`s new-found "democracy" in service of a grandiose mission: "transforming the Middle East." Eventually Iraqi oil revenues will be appropriated to pick up some of the ever-expanding tab. One might sensibly ask, "Why not transform the United States instead?"-except that the mad dash to occupy Iraq (and by extension, tomorrow, the world) is already remaking this nation in the crippling neo-conservative image.

Should this greedy nightmare scenario of a permanent U.S. bootprint in Iraq unreel, many more "coalition" personnel will be wounded or killed, as will uncounted numbers of Iraqis and others. The fortunate insider corporations currently privatizing our military operations will reap financial benefits far beyond those now under scrutiny. It is scandalous that politicians who oppose the permanent occupation of Iraq have not brought this situation front and center to provoke a national debate.

Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is one of the few willing to broach the subject. His words are worth noting:

"If this occupation is allowed to continue for years, as the President and other Democratic presidential candidates want, we are bound to see a more formal draft. And with three of the Democratic presidential candidates favoring mandatory draft registration for 18-year-old women, even families without sons could be in for a huge surprise." (12/31/03)

The United States intends to stay in Iraq. Recall the words of President Bush: "When they hear me say we`re staying, that means we`re staying." Troops will not be coming home. It is time to ask members of Congress about this plot to further deplete both the national treasury and the ranks of dedicated human beings willing to serve their country. And what of the devoted aid workers sans multi-billion dollar contracts? What about the people of Iraq? How many will die to foster this experimental takeover-makeover? We can`t expect straight answers from proponents of the plan. If the Ozymandias-driven neo-conservative dream of world domination is to be halted by the upcoming election, this is the issue that could make a difference.

Doug Giebel lives in Big Sandy, Montana. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

[Joerver]

Saturday, January 10, 2004
War News for January 10, 2004

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

Bring `em on: Five Iraqis killed, 39 wounded by bomb in Baquba.

Bring `em on: Bomb defused at second mosque in Baquba.

Bring `em on: Canadian teacher killed in ambush.

Bring `em on: One US soldier wounded by RPG during firefight in Annah.

Bring `em on: One contract driver killed, two wounded in convoy ambush near Balad.

Bring `em on: Rocket attack on hotel in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US C-5 transport carrying 63 passengers and crew hit by SAM fire at Baghdad airport.

Bring `em on: US troops under fire near Fallujah.

Bring `em on: US troops attacked near Samarra. Two Iraqi insurgents killed, one wounded. (Last paragraph.)

Bring `em on: Two RPG attacks reported against Iraqi police in Karbala.

Two Iraqi policemen killed by US troops near Tikrit.

Polish soldier dies of unknown causes in Hindiya.

Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer`s prisoner release turns into another CPA fiasco. " U.S. administrator Paul Bremer had announced the amnesty Wednesday, promising to free about 500 of an estimated 12,800 Iraqis the coalition has detained. The first 100 were to be released Thursday from Abu Ghraib. But authorities said the amnesty had been delayed as they waited for community and tribal leaders to guarantee the good conduct of those who were about to be freed, a condition of their release. The announcement was greeted with shouts of anger and dismay. `Liars! Liars! They won`t let them out!` one woman screamed before she fainted. The release of the thousands of Iraqis held by the coalition has been a top demand of community and tribal leaders, as well as human rights advocates. Arguing for the continued detentions, U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett said, `They are suspected terrorists.`" If they`re suspected terrorists, why did you say you were going to release them?

Bush crony lands big media contract in Iraq.

Disabled American Veterans sounds off about Rummy`s restrictions on visiting wounded soldiers. "The Disabled American Veterans (DAV) is urging Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to relax severe restrictions that are preventing wounded service members from the war in Iraq and the war on terror from receiving adequate information about their earned benefits and health care… While wounded soldiers receive some information about veterans` rights and benefits from the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs representatives, Gorman said that information often is `inadequate and fails to meet the needs of those who have been injured. DAV National Services Officers offer the best knowledge, skill, experience, and representations available to disabled veterans today.` DAV services are offered at no cost to the servicemembers as part of our mission to help build better lives for disabled veterans and their families."

Convoy duty in Iraq.

Analysis: "Volunteer army is `closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history.`"

On to Damascus! "Civilians in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s office are pushing for military action against Syria and have drawn up plans for punitive airstrikes and cross-border incursions by U.S. forces, three officials said."

Commentary

Opinion: Bushies ignored the experts on Iraq. "On my desk is a pile of more than a dozen studies and pieces of congressional testimony on the likely conditions of post-war Iraq, prepared before the invasion by think-tanks of the left, centre and right, by task forces of veteran diplomats and area experts, and by freelancing academics. The degree of consensus was remarkable: Iraq`s reconstruction would be long and costly, violence was likely and goodwill towards the US probably wouldn`t last for long."

Casualty reports

Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Louisiana soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Georgia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Alabama soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Twelve Iowa Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Connecticut soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Wisconsin soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee soldier injured in Iraq.

Home Front

Lieutenant AWOL rakes in another $1 million at Florida fundraisers. "Even before Thursday`s $2,000-per-person reception, nearly 4,300 Floridians had written the maximum $2,000 checks to the Bush re-election campaign, a St. Petersburg Times analysis found."





# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:53 AM
Comments (2)

[Joerver]

Jan 9, 10:57 PM

Harris wins Iraq media contract

Communications minister may renege, cites fear of U.S. control

Brian Monroe
FLORIDA TODAY

MELBOURNE -- Harris Corp. on Friday won a contract potentially worth $165 million to upgrade the antiquated and war-ravaged media networks of Iraq. Work would start next month.

Just hours after Harris announced the contract, however, Iraq`s communications minister told reporters he might not honor the contract because he was not consulted about the award beforehand. He feared giving too much control to the American government and media.

Harris said it beat out "three or four" competing companies for the broadcasting contract. This is the second contract Harris has won in Iraq. The first was in September to start an Iraqi radio station.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, which currently is governing Iraq, awarded the Melbourne-based communications-equipment manufacturer the one-year, $96 million contract, with two additional options that could push it to $165 million, through the Defense Contracting Command in Washington.

Despite the concerns expressed by Iraqi Communications Minister Haider Abadi, Harris executives stressed they planned on turning over the finished media outlets to the Iraqi people -- two national radio channels, two national television channels and a national newspaper.

Harris spokesman Tom Hausman wouldn`t say if he is worried about losing the lucrative contract, but said: "The bottom line is: We have been selected by this government agency for a contract, and that has to be the focus of our attention -- to fulfill the needs and requirements of that contract."

If the contract goes through, experts said it would be a boon to Harris on two fronts: It strengthens the company`s broadcast sector -- which has struggled through a down economy and general malaise in the global telecommunications markets -- and it gives it a larger foothold in Iraq.

"It`s great," said James McIlree, vice president and analyst for C.E. Unterberg, Towbin, a New York firm focusing on technology companies. "It`s an enormous contract, a very large piece of business in a short amount of time."

To put that in perspective, McIlree said the company`s broadcast division gets revenues of $300 million to $400 million a year, so $96 million in one year is a "big boost for their revenues."

In an ironic twist, McIlree said the reason Harris got the broadcast contract was because of the war in Iraq -- "one of the few times the military business led to commercial business."

Much of the equipment will be produced at Harris` Broadcast Communications Division in Ohio, and the deal is not expected to directly affect local staff levels.

The new contract "plays to Harris` strengths in both broadcast and government communications," said Lawrence Harris, a telecommunications-equipment analyst for Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.

"It`s a nice award," he said. "There aren`t many companies that can bring both to the table."

Harris Chairman, President and Chief Executive Howard Lance agreed with that assessment.

"The extensive experience of our Broadcast Communications Division on international projects, combined with the large integration programs expertise of our government . . . division, will ensure success," he said. "The free flow of information is crucial to any modern society."

When Lance heard about the contract, he said he was "thrilled. I certainly think it will lead to more work. It will help us establish an even-stronger position in the Middle East, a growth market for communications businesses. I am very optimistic about follow-on opportunities."

Harris already has delivered broadcast and microwave transmitters to the region, and supplied allied countries` military forces with tough, tactical radios.

For the new contract, only "a handful" of employees would go to Iraq on a voluntary basis, Lance said.

After the network is set up, it is not expected to be propaganda media outlets for the coalition, but one run by the Iraqi people to deal with local issues and interests, Lance said.

Lance said the contract win was a team effort.

"This is one positive step in a very long journey," he said. "This is a great win for Harris."

The company`s stock rose 45 cents, or 1.2 percent, to finish Friday at $39.15 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

When completed, Harris said the new Iraqi Media Network, or IMN, will use the existing organization to create a "first-class, integrated media network" that will include two national radio channels, two national television channels and a national newspaper, Al Sabah.

Harris will lead this project with support from two local teammates: The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International, or LBCI, a Middle Eastern media network; and Al Fawares, a Kuwaiti company with Iraqi ownership.

LBCI is responsible for training and content programming for the two radio channels and two television channels -- one for news and one for entertainment. All four channels will be terrestrial and the all-news television channel also will be available by satellite.

Al Fawares will assist in expanding the newspaper into national status based on the company`s experience in Kuwait, and also will provide security, logistics and construction services.

"The IMN program is an incredible opportunity to create something of lasting value for the Iraqi people," said Youssef "Joe" Sleiman, managing director of the Iraq Initiatives Office, which Harris formed in July to capitalize on business possibilities in Iraq. "We are so very pleased to be part of this historic effort."

Harris secure communications products and battlefield radios were used in the war in Iraq, and some now are being used to help rebuild the communications infrastructure of the country.

Harris products also are part of next-generation military aircraft, such as the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, Joint Strike Fighter and Comanche stealth helicopter, along with space-based radar satellites and antennas on naval vessels.

[Joerver]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/dailyUpdate.html?s=entt
World > Terrorism & Security
posted January 9, 2004, updated 12:00 p.m. ET

US military stretched too thin?

Volunteer army is "closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history."

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Pentagon experts worry that some of the military`s most experienced pilots might quit after prolonged deployments to dangerous hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq. At least 14 US helicopters have crashed in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat over last May, claiming some 58 lives and underscoring the vulnerability of an essential cog in US military operations there. Retention of pilots is a major concern because of the time, and the cost, of training them. Analysts say the situation with pilots is just one more example that the US military is stretched too thin.
"There is no question that the force is stretched too thin," said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "We have stopped treating the reserves as a force in reserve. Our volunteer army is closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history."


The Denver Post notes that while sign-up and retention rates for active-duty branches remain strong, the recruiting of reservists has fallen off. Last year the Army fell 7 percent below its recruitment goal. And in some states, the retention rate has fallen far below the desired 85 percent - In Colorado it has fallen to 71 percent.

"This year we have lost 49 soldiers, and that is bad news," said Master Sgt. Pat Valdez, a spokesman for the 2nd Brigade of the 91st Division of the Army Reserve, which comprises some 800 soldiers from Western Plains states. "They are getting out because of personal reasons, promotions at work ... and stress on family."
One result of this situation, The Washington Post reported earlier this week, is that the Army alone has blocked the departure of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and Reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Reuters quotes the Pentagon as saying that 187,746 National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized as of Dec. 31, 2003. About 20 percent of the troops in Iraq are Reservists or Guard members but this proportion is expected to double next year. The Associated Press notes the number of military reservists called to active duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week, reflecting their new role in Iraq.
In order to accomodate the massive changeover between departing and arriving troops the next two months in Iraq, the Army this week issued a "stop loss" order to keep 7,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq from leaving the service at the end of their regular enlistments. But some defense analysts say stop-loss orders will discourage new recruits, bound to see many in uniform as no longer volunteers. "The reality is the stop-loss orders that are now in effect amount to a de facto draft," Charles Pena, defense analyst with the Cato Institute, said.

The Albany Times Union reports that the military may soon start calling up retired reservists. There are 800,000 Reserve retirees. The Pentagon is asking them to provide updated address and contact information.

But repeated deployments can keep reservists away from home for years. And this has raised concerns in the Pentagon that they will leave the military as soon as possible.

"A lot of them are telling me `When I get back, I`m not staying in. I`m getting completely out,` " said Sgt. Phillip Thomas, who oversees about 300 reservists as recruitment and retention officer at Bradt US Army Reserve Center in Niskayuna. He said they don`t mind active duty for six months, but any longer becomes a burden for those who have families and careers back home. Some worry their marriages won`t survive repeated deployments, he said.
Erich Marquardt, writing in the Asia Times, notes that the Bush administration had advanced warning that this problem might occur. A report released by the Congressional Budget Office in November of 2003 on the ability to sustain troops in Iraq recognized this dilemma. The CBO concluded that the active army would be unable to maintain current troop levels "beyond about March 2004 if it chose not to keep individual units deployed to Iraq for longer than one year without relief. Marquandt says that one reason that retention rates are such a concern is that this is the first period of major combat where Reserve troops are being deployed to the front line in such large numbers.
Even though National Guard and Reserve troops were sent to the 1991 war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, they rarely were deployed on the front lines, and were instead relegated to combat support roles. With the new troop deployment rotation planned by the Pentagon, these troops will serve on the front lines and will certainly see casualties among their ranks.
The military is also trying a financial incentive to retain full-time troops. The Army recently announced reenlistment bonuses of up to $10,000. Under the program, soldiers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kuwait who re-enlist for three years or more will be paid bonuses of up to $10,000, regardless of their military specialty. The new bonus applies only to active duty solders in the Army, and not to other military branches; nor does it apply to the National Guard or reservists.
The Associated Press reports that soldiers in Iraq had mixed responses to the bonus idea. Some told AP reporters that "no amount of money" would keep them in the military, while others said that the bonus is a "a good chunk of money," particularly for those who were planning on signing up again anyway. But the decision may be hardest on those with a family.

"Maybe if I were single I`d think about it," said Sgt. Dante Legare, 32, of the 4th Infantry Division. "That`s pretty good money ... enough to maybe put a down payment on a house," said Legare, a New York City native. "But is it worth it? I`ve already been away something like nine months. I want to see my wife."
But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he has seen no evidence so far in a major ongoing Pentagon study to support calls from analysts and some Army officials to boost the service`s strength by perhaps 20,000 troops to 500,000. Analysts believe some strains are inevitable as the force is remodeled to make it more flexible and based more on high tech weapons than boots on the ground. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added: "We`re asking extraordinary things from the force and their families. I think most individuals understand and their families understand what we`re asking them to do. We`re asking them a lot. They`re responding magnificently."
The real test, according to the Meridan (Connecticut) Record-Journal will come when troops from Afghanistan and Iraq arrive back in the US in February and March. "It will be a ballot or a vote with their feet," Connecticut National Guard Adjutant Gen. Walter A. Cugno said. "Those that stay vote for you. Those that choose to leave say, ‘Thank-you. I`ve served honorably. My family said I had enough.`"

And while many reservists are about to see their first action, The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the issues facing those who have just returned from active duty. Often they feel pressure to make up for the financial loses they, or their business, have suffered while they were gone. Sometimes they are not always welcomed back with open arms when they return to work. And unlike regular troops, they often lack a support system to help them deal with the transition. That`s why the military often advises reservists to attend monthly drills the first three months they are home, even though they are not required to go. It also encourages employers to talk with co-workers before a reservist returns from active duty.

[Joerver]

RIVALS ACCUSE DEAN OF LEADING IN POLLS

In Iowa, New Charges of Popularity

In their most bruising attacks to date, contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination used a candidates’ forum in Iowa last night to accuse former Vermont Governor Howard Dean of “leading in the polls.”

“Howard, you are running away with this race and you know it!” bellowed Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), jabbing his finger in Mr. Dean’s face. “Why won’t you have the guts to admit it?”

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) picked up on Mr. Lieberman’s theme, accusing Mr. Dean of “parlaying his so-called ‘message of hope’ into burgeoning popularity and bulging campaign coffers.”

“Howard, every time you give a speech, you raise more money,” Senator Kerry said. “It is high time that you come clean about that.”

In a particularly contentious moment, Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO) challenged all of the candidates on stage “to raise their hand if they are leading in the polls.”

Mr. Dean was the only one on stage to do so, prompting a Gephardt aide to comment later, “That moment was a homerun for Dick!”

Meanwhile, in Iraq, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein admitted for the first time that he placed bets with his Las Vegas bookie on the Iran-Iraq war while he was President of Iraq in the 1980’s.

“I knew that betting on the war was wrong,” Saddam reportedly told his interrogators. “But it was a cry for help.”

While other brutal dictators around the world praised Saddam’s candor, his confession got a chilly reception from North Korea’s Kim Jung-Il, who steadfastly opposes Saddam’s election to the Brutal Dictators Hall of Fame.

[Joerver]

January, 2004
Der 2.Teil:
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/01/08.htm
Der 1.Teil:
http://www.coastalpost.com/03/07/06.htm

Bush`s Philosophers Pt. II: Why Bipolar Psychopaths Are Running The Show
By Stephen Simac



In "Bubba Bush, Philosopher King" (Coastal Post Sept. 2003) the soprano chorus of voices in King Georgie`s head were examined. The Pipes of the neo-conservative cabal, a virulent strain of weaponized political philosophers advising Bush, were traced to their sources.

The neo-con coronavirus is an avian flu jumping to Americans from Chicken Hawks. These are warmongers who`ve never served in the military and have no children in it, just like the top roosters, Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney and George "aWol" Bush. The neocons inserted themselves into the cellular DNA of the GOP, overwhelming the Reagan/Goldwaterish, paleo-conservatives` immune system.

The etiology of the neos show their virulence stems from a double barreled influenza. Some writers and talking heads like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were Trotskyites in their youth. They still cough up that bolshevite`s tenets of Permanent Revolution and Infiltrate and Subvert in their Reviews, Journals and on Fox TV talk shows.

Others, like Paul Wolfowitz and members of Donald Rumsfeld`s staff, sneeze out the philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss was a German emigree who taught at the New School for Social Research in NYC, then the University of Chicago. Both these institutions are funded by Rockefeller Oil fortune monies. Although Strauss claimed to gain his wisdom from reading between the lines of Plato, his political philosophy is pure Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian who wrote The Prince. (A report on the methods used by Cesare Borgia, a Renaissance fiend and son of the Pope, in his rise to power using the Vatican`s armies.)

Strauss`s viral meme is filtered from philosopher Georg Hegel`s concept that the intellectual is the Lord of History. Hegel`s grand opus was that a Dialectic between Thesis and it`s Opposite- Antithesis, battle through History, rocking between them as they move towards Synthesis, which then becomes Thesis. This historical contraption can then be steered by controlling both sides of their endless Dispute. Strauss taught that if necessary, political philosophers must lie to the people, even their leaders, to achieve their ultimate goals.

Strauss cloaked this infection in the high minded phrase of "for the greater good." It`s typical when political philosophers plant themselves on higher moral grounds that they`re only staking out a prime lot on Hypocrisy Hill.



I Write The Songs

The Neo-Conservatives are like weaponized anthrax. Their talking heads float on the airwaves like genetically modified spores that turn people into frightened sheep with scrapie. Their refrains are like a Barry Manilow song you can`t get out of your head. They spin like driedels about the War on Terrorism, the War on Iraq, the Fears Out There and Keeping the Homeland Safe. Bush will get rid of Bad Men, and bring Good Things to LifeÉ Freedom, even if Messy, Democracy, Liberation, that kind of Stuff.

Their Ultimate Goals. Military occupation in the heart of the world`s oil reserves to control it. Carve up Iraq up into a hundred tribal slivers all fighting each other for control. Use up the Old and Test the New Military Hardware. Protect Israel`s flanks.

The plans for the War on Iraq and beyond began to be plotted by the neocons after the elder Bush left Hussein in power as a counterbalance to Iran. They`ve been brooding and clucking about the need to invade Iraq and take out Saddam for the last decade until younger Bush was appointed president and they wormed into power.

In 1996 Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser from the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Political Studies (IASPS) wrote an advisory paper called "A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, A Clean Break", for Benyamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister of Israel. Their Clean Break scheme was to "roll back" the Middle Eastern states of Iraq, Iran, Syria and others from nations into tribal fiefdoms, "by proxy" if possible, to protect Israel. These IASPS are now all top aides or advisors to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Some of them were involved in a policy paper in the spring of 2001 by the Project for A New American, another neo-conservative think tank.

PNAC wrote it for VP Dick Cheney, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy for Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Cheney and Jeb "Faithful Bro" Bush.



Could Be Magic

This paper called for "a substantial American force presence in the Gulf", permanently in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It positioned Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and China as the next big threats. It called for US total control of space, cyberspace and development of mini-nukes and genotype specific biological weapons. Your basic megalomaniacal plan for world dominance laid out for the neo Me`s and miniMe`s.

Just as the plan to invade Afghanistan and make it safe for a Unocal oil pipeline to an Enron gas powered plant in India was hatched long before 9/11/01, so was the War on Iraq. Wolfowitz and Rumsfield started calling for an invasion of Iraq within days of the Attacks. Fraudulent Reasons to be developed later. Rummy`s secretive Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon`s Office of Special Plans and Cheney`s Team B began winding up the alarms for a War on Iraq soon after The Attack on America. The DPB was headed at the time by Richard "Conflicts of Interests" Perle. He`s resigned as chairman, but is still a board member as is another august philosopher. Dan Quayle. The DPB began foaming at the mouth about "regime change" in Iraq in the fall of 2001.

Team B was established by Douglas Feith, aide to Cheney shortly after 9/11. A two man analysis cell of David Wurmser, also a Cheney aide and Michael Maloof was formed to manufacture a paper web of evidence against Saddam to prove his Dangers to America.

Paper bridges that have now burnt behind them. Maloof has reportedly been placed on administrative leave for leaking information about the War on Iraq to Israel, according to Jeffrey Steinberg on sf.indymedia.com. Wurmser may yet worm his way out of the toasted tissue of claims in their Scare Americans to War Syndrome. Team B`s lies to support an illegal invasion of Iraq further weakens the flanks of "Undisclosed Location" Cheney, who is already being strangled by his Halliburton Ties.



Bandstand Boggie

The neocon plot is still winding out as their newshounds are baying for Bush to get tough with the madmen of Syria and Iran, don`t forget treacherous Saudi Arabia and Libya. Crafty Khadaffi didn`t like the looks of Saddam`s Spider Hole and gave up his WMD, which he didn`t have anyways. Iran is bringing in the UN inspectors, as if that helped Saddam.

W is not as stupid as he sounds, but he is an amoral psychotic mass murderer just like his Daddy. It`s in the gene structure or something. Poppy and Barb regularly call Georgie to ask about the twins, if he`s seen ole` Kenny Boy lately, laugh about how much easier Noriega was to trap in the Vatican`s Safe House, and whatever happened to Osama`s brothers. But the real family secrets only come out when they`re shooting quail.

Poppy has warned him about the viperous, Zionist neo-cons and how they`ll bite you in the ass over Israel. W. is naturally wary about the nest of neo con asps whispering in his ear. He`s looking at Cheney and seeing only a millstone around his campaign`s neck.



Copacabana

He`s much more trusting of another loud voice in his head, Karl Rove. Rove is Georgie`s primary political strategist. Rove`s philosophy is tell Voters what they want to hear, and do what thou wilt. His words are like Humpty Dumpty`s. They mean whatever he wants them to mean.

Rove crafted Bush`s 2000 presidential campaign that took the crown away from Gore 5-4. He showed a flair for dirty tricks in 1972 when he ran Michigan`s Nixon campaign. He learned from Donald Segretti, Nixon`s Dirty Tricks Meister. Rove has only gotten slicker, a real Lee Atwater.

Rove`s telephone whispering campaign about John McCain`s illegitimate black child before South Carolina`s 2000 primary took Mcain right out of the race for Republican candidate for President. Only Strom Thurmond could get away with that in South Carolina.

Rove has psychologists testing out words in Malls across the country to determine which ones resonate most positively or negatively in Americans psyches. Fear Words like Terrorism, Bad Men, Infection are potent stimulants that charge people up, like a Slasher Flick. Words like Safer, Cleaner, Healthier, Balanced, Fair calm their Fears like a romantic Chick Flick. Rove wants Republicans to attack and soothe the psyches of voters with simple, repetitive, symbolically resonant words to play the public like an organ.

Donald Rumsfeld, head of Department of Defense for W was also secretary of Defense for Tricky Dick Nixon`s administration. Rummy made Cheney his chief of staff during the Nixon Administration. Rummy is like an irascible grandpa in a manic episode, telling everyone in the room to just shut up and listen.

He is psychologically incapable of sticking with Rove`s Meat Loaf Special of Orwellian Newspeak words.



"Ultimate," B.M.

Rummy spends most mornings creating a blizzard of "snowflakes", RummyGram memos to his staff in the DOD. His staff was so busy "slogging`" through the Q word of his "brilliant ideas" that they could only plan for the invasion of Iraq, not the aftermath. They walked American Soldiers into a quagmire that will only get worse by election day, 2004.

Even after Saddam turned up, secured in a locked cave. Looking like Jerry Garcia is alive, after all. Hussein will `fess up once we get him on his meds, although he looked pretty tranquilized coming out of his "spider hole", getting his nits picked and teeth checked. And his free checkup only cost $160 Billion, less than Free Meds for a whole generation of Medicare voters.

Rummy, however just won`t stay on his meds. He has the typical emotional swings of a classic Bi-Polar Disorder. He veers from delusional grandiosity about a unipolar World and military spending sprees to seeing only potential catastrophes on the horizon. Most of Bush`s advisors could be fit into this DSM category, some with Psychotic features.

It`s no secret that the incidence of BiPolar Disorder, or at least its diagnosis has increased dramatically in the last decade. At least some of that is probably from treating a whole generation of American children with amphetamine based drugs because they have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder in their schools. These drugs have been proven to damage the brain`s response to Serotonin, a neurohormone linked with deep depression. Psychiatrists are diagnosing many ADHD children as flowering into full blown BiPolars as adults.

It`s a perfect mental illness for a politician or a political philosopher. During the manic phase you can raise and spend tons of money or write policy papers. Voters love empty promises, and pens for hire are always in demand.

The Depressive phase comes in handy after the lost election or for dreaming up dark futures to protect against. If the voters or foundation funders believe you are protecting and serving their interests, they`ll show their appreciation no matter how nuts you are.

Der erste Teil:
http://www.coastalpost.com/03/07/06.htm

[Joerver]

January 11, 2004
Professor Nagl`s War
By PETER MAASS

Maj. John Nagl approaches war pragmatically and philosophically, as a soldier and a scholar. He graduated close to the top of his West Point class in 1988 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar. He studied international relations at Oxford for two years, then returned to military duty just in time to take command of a tank platoon during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, earning a Bronze Star for his efforts. After the war, he went back to England and earned his Ph.D. from St. Antony`s College, the leading school of foreign affairs at Oxford. While many military scholars were focusing on peacekeeping or the impact of high-tech weaponry, Nagl was drawn to a topic much less discussed in the 1990`s: counterinsurgency.

At Oxford, he immersed himself in the classic texts of guerrilla warfare. There are different schools of thought, but almost every work in the canon imparts the message that counterinsurgency is one of the hardest types of warfare to wage. Nagl read ``Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice,`` by Col. C.E. Callwell, a British officer who in 1896 warned of ``protracted, thankless, invertebrate war`` in guerrilla terrain. Nagl also read ``Small Wars Manual,`` published in 1940 by the United States Marine Corps, which cautions: ``Every detachment representing a tempting target will be harassed or attacked. The population will be honeycombed with hostile sympathizers.``

Major John Nagl at battalion headquarters outside Khaldiya, Iraq, mapping out a raid.
The more Nagl read, the more he understood the historical challenge of insurgency. Julius Caesar complained that his legions had trouble subduing the roving Britons because his men ``were little suited to this kind of enemy.`` In the early 1800`s, Carl von Clausewitz wrote of ``people`s wars`` in which ``the element of resistance will exist everywhere and nowhere.`` The book that most forcefully captured Nagl`s imagination was written by T.E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who, during World War I, led Arab fighters against the Turkish rulers in the Middle East and described the campaign (taking liberties with the facts) in his counterinsurgency classic, ``Seven Pillars of Wisdom.``

Lawrence`s is one of the few books in the canon written from the point of view of the insurgent. (Another is Mao Zedong`s ``On Guerrilla Warfare.``) In a near-hallucinatory state, suffering from dysentery and lying in a tent, Lawrence realized the key to defeating the Turkish Army. ``Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,`` he wrote. Lawrence`s guerrillas, by contrast, ``might be a vapour.`` For the Turks, he concluded, ``war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.``

In his own research, Nagl focused on two modern insurgencies in Asia. In Malaya in the 1950`s, the British successfully suppressed a Communist revolt (comprised mostly of ethnic Chinese) by generally steering clear of excessive force and instituting a ``hearts and minds`` campaign to strip the insurgents of public sympathy. In Vietnam in the 1960`s and 1970`s, the United States military took a different approach and failed. The Americans resorted to indiscriminate firepower and showed little concern for its effect on the civilian population. Comparing the two efforts, Nagl demonstrated that a key issue for a counterinsurgent army is to calibrate correctly the amount of lethal force necessary to do the job with the minimum amount of nasty, counterproductive side effects. Even if using force with restraint meant the mission would take more time or reduce the level of force protection, it was still an indispensable step: a successful counterinsurgency took care and patience. When Nagl`s doctoral thesis, ``Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam,`` was published in 2002, it carried the subtitle ``Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife.``

Soldiers from Nagl`s battalion on patrol in the town of Khaldiya. Nagl makes a point of waving to civilians from his Humvee on cordon-and-search raids.

Nagl`s scholarship helped earn him a post as a professor at West Point. But when I met him last month, he was testing his theories far from the classroom. Nagl is now the third in command of a tank battalion in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, which extends north and west of Baghdad. The counterinsurgency expert is, for the first time in his life, practicing counterinsurgency.

Over the course of two weeks I accompanied Nagl as he did everything from overseeing raids to detaining Iraqis, meeting local sheiks, doling out grants to schools, attending a memorial service for a fallen soldier, picking up bits of human flesh after a car-bomb attack, playing ultimate Frisbee with fellow soldiers and dodging rocks and bullets that Iraqis were firing at him and his soldiers. In the first of many discussions we had, I described him as an expert in counterinsurgency, and this made him laugh.

``The `expert` thing just kills me,`` he said. ``I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency, until I started doing it.``


Nagl is the operations officer of Task Force 1/34 Armor, an 800-soldier battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Jeff Swisher, that is part of the First Infantry Division. The battalion is stationed a 90-minute drive west of Baghdad, at an Iraqi air base, not far from the city of Falluja, that is now known as Camp Manhattan. The main town in the battalion`s area of operations is Khaldiya, a few miles from the base. Like Falluja and Ramadi and other former Baath Party citadels, Khaldiya is a staging ground for anti-American attacks, and five of the battalion`s soldiers have been killed and more than 40 wounded. Local allies of the Americans, or people seen as collaborators, live dangerously, too; in September, assailants killed Khaldiya`s police chief, firing 25 bullets into his body.

Despite that attack, Nagl knows that effective counterinsurgency can`t work without the formation of local security forces. Foreign troops don`t know the terrain and its people as well as locals, and besides, foreign forces cannot remain forever. And so, soon after arriving in Iraq in September, Nagl and his battalion set out to retrain Khaldiya`s corrupt and hesitant police.

When the first detachment of American soldiers went to the Khaldiya police station in an effort to form a joint patrol, the policemen on duty at the station, seeing the Humvees rolling up, scrambled out the back windows, Nagl told me. They were frightened at the prospect of walking the streets with the occupiers. The next day, when Nagl went to the station, the same thing happened. He and a few of his men walked across the street to the police force`s administrative office and collared two of the officers there, informing them that they would have the honor of patrolling with the Americans. He put AK-47`s into their hands and said it was time to move out. The conversation, as Nagl remembers it, went like this:

``You`re going to walk with us,`` Nagl said.

``No, we`re not,`` one of the officers responded.

``Yes, you are.``

``No.``

``Yes.``

``No.``

``Yes.``

``No.``

``You`re going, buddy.``

Nagl laughed as he told me the story. He and I were sitting on cots in the room where I was staying with the battalion`s translators. One of them had Scotch-taped a few centerfolds from a soft-porn magazine above his cot. A few feet away, another translator was on his knees, praying. Nagl, like every other soldier in his battalion, was far from home.

American soldiers search a house for weapons and insurgents. "I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency," Nagl says, "until I started doing it."
Nagl is 37, the eldest of six children. He grew up in a Roman Catholic household in Omaha, Neb., and said he decided to attend West Point out of a desire to serve his nation and spare his family the expense of putting him through college. (His father was an electrical engineer who served in the Navy.) Nagl found, in the gulf war, that combat was his metier, or one of them. During the invasion of Iraq last spring, he watched impatiently from the sidelines at Fort Riley, Kan., with his wife and infant son; he wanted to be in the action and thought he had missed his chance. Now, in and around Khaldiya, he is getting his chance. I asked whether it was different from what he expected. He laughed again.

``I understood intellectually that counterinsurgency is an intel-driven event,`` he began. ``You have to have the local nationals tell you who the bad guys are, and then you act on that information. But the steps between there were not clear to me.``

What did he mean?

He offered an example: ``The local comes in and says, `There`s a bad guy in my neighborhood who is planting I.E.D.`s``` -- improvised explosive devices -- ```and is an arms dealer and fires mortars at you.` Wow, that`s great intel. `So tell me where he lives.```

He paused for effect.

``There aren`t any addresses in this country. The streets don`t have names, there are no street signs, there aren`t numbers on houses; all the houses look the same.``

Nagl said he would next offer a map or satellite image to the local and ask him to point out the house. The Iraqi, in most cases, would scratch his head.

``These clowns don`t know how to read maps,`` he continued. ``So how exactly do I find out which house the bad guy lives in? I`ve got to get the Iraqi in a Humvee and drive past the house and get him to point out the house -- but he doesn`t want his friends to see him in a Humvee. I can put him in a Mercedes and put myself in local garb, but if I do that the Geneva Conventions say I lose my rights and protections. Conventional soldiers don`t usually do that sort of stuff.`` (It is the sort of thing the Special Forces are doing. I was told -- though not by Nagl -- that S.F. operators occasionally visit his base, wearing local clothes or outdoor gear that regular soldiers are not permitted to wear.)

Much of Nagl`s time in Iraq is taken up with conundrums like this. His days start before dawn, and by the time he goes to sleep, he can hardly remember everything that happened since he opened his eyes. For a student of guerrilla warfare, he knows, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. He is like a paleontologist given the chance to go back in time and walk with the dinosaurs. But Nagl can`t simply stand around and take notes. He is responsible, with the rest of his battalion, for taming an insurgency, which is as difficult as teaching dinosaurs to dance.


The American counterinsurgency war in the Philippines, which began in 1899, cost more than 4,000 American lives and left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. The British forced the relocation of nearly half a million peasants in Malaya in the 1950`s. The French in Algeria. The British in Northern Ireland. The Turks and the Kurds. The Israelis in Palestinian lands. The Americans in Vietnam. The dour lessons of the past are very much on the minds of Nagl and other American officers trying to implement a workable strategy in Iraq, but they are playing catch-up. In the 1990`s, and in fact until 9/11, counterinsurgency was a musty corner of the American military. The Pentagon referred to it as ``military operations other than war`` or ``low-intensity conflict.`` As the Iraq situation shows all too grimly, however, counterinsurgency is war, and there is nothing low-intensity about it.

Nagl understands this intellectually and intuitively. The portions of his book that focus on Vietnam stress the erroneous and muddled thinking of American military and political elites, especially Gen. William Westmoreland, who (as the historian Max Boot recounts), when asked his solution to the Vietcong, replied with one word: ``firepower.`` As a counterpoint in his study, Nagl quotes Marine Gen. Victor (Brute) Krulak, who concluded: ``You cannot win militarily. You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all.``

For Nagl, Vietnam stands as an encyclopedia of what shouldn`t be done. Foremost in the do-not-repeat category are the indiscriminate use of firepower, the resort to conventional tactics to fight an unconventional threat and the failure to implement an effective ``hearts and minds`` campaign. The preferred strategy has been referred to as ``total war,`` though the phrase is often misunderstood as referring to a scorched-earth strategy. John Waghelstein, a retired Special Forces colonel who led the team of American advisers in El Salvador in the 1980`s, is regarded as an astute though controversial practitioner of counterinsurgency; he promotes the ``total war`` strategy but does not define it as the vicious practices used by some of his pupils in the Salvadoran Army. Instead, Waghelstein, now a professor at the Naval War College, offers a subtler definition.

``Total war means you use all the elements of national power,`` he told me recently. ``It`s at the grass-roots level that you`re trying to win. You can kill enemy soldiers -- that`s not the only issue. You also need to dry up their support. You can`t just use the military. It`s got to be a constant din of propaganda; it`s got to be economic support; it`s got to be elections. As long as you only go after the guy with the weapon, you`re missing the most important part.``

Ignoring the civic side of counterinsurgency has been likened to playing chess while your enemy is playing poker. Though this truism is now well known in the military, Nagl acknowledges that it is not being applied in Iraq as well as it could be.

The civic chores are supposed to be shouldered by the American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer III, but the C.P.A. remains isolated and rather inept at implementation. Its presence is minimal outside Baghdad, and even in the capital the C.P.A.`s thousands-strong staff spends much of its time in the so-called Green Zone, in and around Saddam Hussein`s Republican Palace, behind elaborate rings of security and far removed from Iraqi civilian life. Some of the staff are on 90-day tours: they arrive; they learn a little; they leave. On the few occasions when C.P.A. officials venture outside the compound, they are usually escorted by G.I.`s or private guards.

One morning, during breakfast at the battalion canteen, I asked Nagl about the Coalition Provisional Authority. He has yet to see a C.P.A. official at the base, he said. He pointed to an empty plastic chair at the table and asked: ``Where`s the guy from C.P.A.? He should be sitting right there.``

Given the weakness of the C.P.A., Nagl and other soldiers are effectively in charge not only of the military aspects of the counterinsurgency but also of reconstruction work and political development. Trained to kill tanks, the officers at Camp Manhattan spend much of their time meeting local sheiks and apportioning the thin funds at their disposal for rebuilding; the battalion maintains a list of school-improvement projects known as ``the Romper Room list.`` It is not unusual for Nagl and Colonel Swisher to go out in the morning on a ``cordon and search`` raid and return in the afternoon to their tactical operations center for a meeting with the second in command, Maj. David Indermuehle, about dispersing small grants to local health clinics.


The entrance to Camp Manhattan discourages direct attacks. Approaching cars must park in a dirt lot about 100 yards from the front gate. The car and anyone in it must undergo a search before proceeding further. Any vehicle trying to reach the gate without stopping for a search must first run a slalom of concrete barriers that slow it down, and along the way it will be fired upon and destroyed. This makes the base a hard target.

On a bright Sunday morning in December, insurgents in Khaldiya struck a soft target -- the police station. Not long before, the officers there had been jumping out windows to avoid working with the Americans, but in the intervening months, Nagl had begun to build trust, and relations had improved. That changed on Dec. 14. At 8:32 a.m., a car packed with plastic explosives and ball bearings detonated outside the station, killing 24 policemen as well as two women and a child. Colonel Swisher and his troops arrived at the blast site within minutes, and Nagl followed soon after. When Nagl arrived, the smell of cordite was still in the air, with blood and charred flesh on the ground. An eight-foot crater had gouged the spot where the car exploded.

That evening, as we sat in the cramped room in the battalion`s tactical operations center where Nagl worked and slept, he told me about the attack and its aftermath. A portrait of Saddam Hussein was hung, with coy humor, over his bed. Above his desk, he had taped up a Dilbert spoof that a few of his soldiers had created about him. The Dilbert character, intended as Nagl, says: ``At Oxford I learned to use my huge brain. But I try not to frighten ordinary people with any gratuitous displays of mental superiority.``

The crowd that gathered after the blast, Nagl told me, didn`t seem angry at the insurgents responsible for the carnage. Instead many of them blamed the G.I.`s. The mother of a dead policeman, who was allowed inside the hastily formed perimeter, shouted insults at the Americans until an Iraqi police officer escorted her out. A rumor swept through the crowd that it wasn`t a car bomb that had caused the blast but a missile fired by the Americans, who were angry, so the rumor went, because the police were not supporting the occupation.

Though a car bombing like this one might seem indiscriminate, there are in fact at least two strategic reasons for such attacks. First, they discourage cooperation with American forces, creating precisely the kind of fear that made the police reluctant to aid the Americans in the first place. They also create chaos. If an occupying power is unable to guarantee security -- and car bombs have a way of showing it can`t -- the insurgents might, over time, win over the populace. It is a real-world employment of the Russian revolutionary slogan, ``The worse, the better.``

In the early afternoon, a funeral procession passed by Nagl and the police station, on its way from a mosque to the cemetery. A bit later, as Nagl and other soldiers recounted it to me, another procession neared the station, larger than the previous one, with about 1,000 people, many of them shouting anti-American slogans. Nagl, who was on the street, couldn`t see much of the crowd, but one of his tank commanders, Capt. Ben Miller, had a better vantage point.

``Crowd coming,`` Miller warned over the radio. ``Recommend we mount up now and pull back.``

``Roger,`` Nagl replied. ``Execute.``

The crowd threw rocks at the retreating soldiers, who sprinted to an American outpost 400 yards away. The rocks hit some of Nagl`s men, and as the mob surged forward, on the verge of overwhelming the G.I.`s, the Americans fired warning shots to disperse the protesters. Nagl`s soldiers then retreated behind coils of concertina wire at the outpost. Most of the crowd continued to the cemetery, but several hundred stayed behind, staring at the Americans from the other side of the wire. Anything could happen, Nagl recalled thinking: perhaps they`ll rush the wire; perhaps they`ll throw grenades or fire AK-47`s.

Sitting in Nagl`s room, I mentioned that a few days earlier a commander in a nearby area had told me how he`d instructed his snipers, before a planned anti-occupation march on their base began, to identify the leaders of the march and, if the crowd became violent, to shoot the leaders dead.

Nagl said he wasn`t surprised by the idea that Americans would fire on protest leaders. ``I`m only surprised he told you that,`` he said.

In his own standoff, Nagl went on to say, ``I was running through what to do if they rushed us, and there were not any particularly good answers to that question.``

What if the crowd attacked?

``You look for the leaders,`` he replied, quietly.

After a half-hour, the crowd filtered away, leaving Nagl with a metaphor for his hearts-and-minds effort: ``Across this divide they`re looking at us, we`re looking at them from behind barbed wire, and they`re trying to understand why we`re here, what we want from them. Almost inconceivable to a lot of them, I think, that what we want for them is the right to make their own decisions, to live free lives. It`s probably hard to understand that if you have lived your entire life under Saddam Hussein`s rule. And it`s hard for us to convey that message, particularly given the fact that few of us speak Arabic.``

In many ways, the standoff was also a metaphor for something larger: the American counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. The standoff could have gone either way, just as the war could go either way.

Nagl seemed to want to find a positive lesson in the day`s events, and eventually he did. ``We had soldiers surrounded by an angry crowd, and if the soldiers had not acted under pressure with discipline, as they had been trained to do, it could have been a very ugly situation,`` he said. ``It is very easy to imagine one of the soldiers panicking and firing into the crowd, and that would have really set us back a very long way.``

A few hours after the car bomb detonated, the American military announced that Saddam Hussein had been captured. The news did not elicit shouts of joy at Nagl`s base. The reaction among Nagl`s men was summed up by a soldier who didn`t hesitate when I asked whether he thought Hussein`s capture would make his job easier. ``Nah, there are too many bad people here,`` he replied. ``They don`t need Saddam Hussein to tell them to do bad things.``


Writing more than a hundred years ago, C.E. Callwell, the British military historian, predicted in his classic text ``Small Wars`` a dilemma that would face every counterinsurgent force of the 20th century. ``In a guerrilla situation,`` he warned, ``the guerrilla is the professional, the newcomer the amateur.`` Callwell offered this remedy: ``It cannot be insisted upon too strongly that in a small war the only possible attitude to assume is, speaking strategically, the offensive. The regular army must force its way into the enemy`s country and seek him out. . . . It must play to win and not for safety. . . . It is not a question of merely maintaining the initiative, but of compelling the enemy to see at every turn that he has lost it and to recognize that the forces of civilization are dominant and not to be denied.``

Callwell`s solution tends to create a new problem, however. What is the right amount of offensive force to use? At the outset of the Vietnam War, Col. John Paul Vann, who would emerge as one of the most thoughtful and ultimately tragic officers in the war, recognized the paradox and realized his firepower-loving commanders had not. In 1962, he warned David Halberstam, then a young reporter for The New York Times, that the wrong strategy had been adopted. ``This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing,`` he told Halberstam, as recounted in William Prochnau`s ``Once Upon a Distant War.`` ``The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I`m afraid we can`t do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery. You have to know who you are killing.``

Nagl, in his book, portrays Colonel Vann -- the protagonist of Neil Sheehan`s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book ``A Bright Shining Lie`` -- as a clear-eyed officer who saw what was wrong and had the courage to say it out loud. Nagl understands the message Vann imparted to Halberstam and tried to impart to the generals he served under: counterinsurgency requires an excruciatingly fine calibration of lethal force. Not enough of it means you will cede the offensive to your enemy, yet too much means you will alienate the noncombatants whose support you need.

Nagl struggles to achieve the right calibration in Iraq. I went on several cordon-and-search raids with him and his men, and as we drove in his Humvee he would always make a point of waving at civilians. A small gesture, for sure, but it showed what was on Nagl`s mind. The gesture was appreciated by some; from others it elicited hard stares.

The paradox might be impossible to resolve. The United States military has done a good job, in general, of limiting what it refers to as ``collateral damage`` in its occupation of Iraq. Yet for every raid that finds its target, there seem to be nine that don`t, and in those nine, soldiers often point weapons at civilians, drive through fields and backyards, break down doors and detain people who are later released. This is the inherent messiness and slowness of counterinsurgency that T.E. Lawrence wrote of, and it is a key reason that the failure rate in counterinsurgency is so high.

``I didn`t realize how right Lawrence of Arabia was,`` Nagl said to me once. ``My first experience of war was the gulf war, which was very clean. We shot the tanks that didn`t look like ours, we shot the enemy wearing a uniform that didn`t look like ours, we destroyed the enemy in 100 hours. That`s kind of what I thought war was. Even when I was writing that insurgency was messy and slow, the full enormity of that did not sink in on me. I am seeing appreciable progress, but I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is. There is no prospect it`s going to end anytime soon.``

The United States Army that marched into Iraq was a big-war army, with lots of armor and lots of plans for crushing a massed enemy, after which the people would offer flowers and sweets to their liberators. The Army has not completely adjusted itself to counterinsurgency, but it has undergone alterations. Nagl`s soldiers, trained to guide tanks over open ground, are now negotiating Humvees through mud alleys. Artillery and bombs, which Vann identified as the least effective weapons in Vietnam, are being used in the Iraqi counterinsurgency campaign with the precision of the knives that Vann recommended -- or so the Americans believe.

Soon after arriving at Camp Manhattan, Nagl`s battalion was the target of mortar attacks by an insurgent who was nicknamed ``the mad mortarman.`` The soldiers were unable to catch him in the act, but counterbattery radars pinpointed the field he was operating from, and Nagl`s troops fired artillery and mortars at it one night. When American soldiers went to the scene the next morning, local civilians, who hadn`t enjoyed the experience of having American shells landing by their homes, told the Americans who had been firing the mortars; four men were detained later that day.

According to the American troops, there were no complaints from local men and women about the American shelling; nobody was injured, and the locals apparently understood it was not an indiscriminate assault but a targeted response to targeted attacks. Nagl says he believes that makes a difference, and he points to declining attacks to support his case.

``Direct-fire attacks on us have dropped dramatically,`` he told me. ``We have a pretty clear message. If you shoot at us we will do our damnedest to kill you, and most of the time we will. And if you live in a neighborhood and you know there are bad people and you don`t want Americans to return heavy fire into your neighborhood, endangering your families, you need to turn in the bad guys. That message is being received.``

The picture was the same across Iraq as the year ended: the number of attacks against American forces, which averaged about 40 a day in November, fell to an average of about 20 a day in December, according to American officials. The capture of Saddam Hussein is a reflection of better intelligence; he was found not by chance but after hard intelligence work buttressed by raids in which associates of his were found and persuaded to offer tips on his whereabouts. It is, in the annals of counterinsurgency, a notable achievement.


Military officers and scholars are conducting an unusually open debate about counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, focusing on the question of calibration of firepower and the use of other pressure tactics, like surrounding hostile villages with barbed wire -- this has been done on at least two occasions by American units in the Sunni Triangle -- and demolishing houses used by insurgents and detaining their relatives. In March, the Marines will return to Iraq, and the man who will command the 20,000-strong force, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, said in an interview last month with The New York Times that the Marines will use a softer touch than the Army. ``I don`t want to condemn what people are doing,`` General Conway said. ``I`ll simply say that I think until we can win the population over and they can give us those indigenous intelligence reports, that we`re prolonging the process.`` Referring to the Army`s use of airstrikes against insurgent targets, Conway added: ``I do not envision using that tactic. It would have to be a rare incident that transcends anything that we have seen in the country to make that happen.``

It`s not clear why the Marines believe a softer touch will be more effective. During the war and its aftermath, no Marine battalions were based in the Sunni Triangle outside Baghdad, which is where the majority of attacks against American forces have occurred and where American tactics have been the most hard-nosed. Yet it is true that the Marines are, historically, more experienced at counterinsurgency warfare than the Army.

When I asked Nagl what he thought of Conway`s critique, he shrugged in a dismissive manner -- his way of saying the Marines don`t understand the reality on the ground in the Sunni Triangle. But at least one Sunni leader said he thinks Conway`s critique is spot on. Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar is deputy chief of one of the largest Sunni tribes and a member of the American-appointed Governing Council. Al-Yawar is a moderate who wants the occupation to succeed and Iraq to become a democracy. However, he doesn`t see the Army`s counterinsurgency doing much to bring real security and peace.

``The United States is using excessive power,`` he said when I visited his residence in Baghdad. ``They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam? They are demolishing houses now. They say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his family`s home destroyed?``

Al-Yawar continued: ``You cannot win the hearts and minds of the people by using force. What`s the difference between dictatorship and what`s happening now?``


The formation of ``indigenous`` forces, as they are called, is considered a paramount element of successful counterinsurgency. In his book, Nagl emphasizes that one of the many shortcomings of American policy in Vietnam was America`s inability to build a capable South Vietnamese fighting force. ``Vietnamization,`` when it finally came along in 1969, was too little, too late. During one of our discussions, Nagl explained the use of Iraqi forces as a matter of efficacy and necessity.

``There are lots of reasons why Iraqis are going to be better at it than we are,`` he said. ``They know who is supposed to be where and what they are supposed to be doing. They can see patterns of behavior that are irregular in a way that our untrained eye cannot. They can talk to everybody in a way that we cannot.``

A patchwork of Iraqi security forces is being created. In addition to the beleaguered police, there are, most notably, the new Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or I.C.D.C. The first battalion of the new Iraqi Army went through a nine-week training course late last year, but within two months of its graduation, nearly half of the battalion`s 700 soldiers had quit because their pay, about $60 a month, was too low. Although pay scales are now being reviewed, the army remains embryonic and is unlikely to assume significant counterinsurgency missions for some time. The I.C.D.C., on the other hand, already numbers more than 10,000 and is regularly engaged in joint patrols with American troops. Still, members of the I.C.D.C. appear far from ready to take over the hard-core missions being carried out by the occupation force.

Last month, I went to a base in Balad, about 50 miles from Camp Manhattan, where the Fourth Infantry Division`s First Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, was training a class of about 50 I.C.D.C. recruits. Each course takes two weeks, the first week in the classroom and the second week in the field. The battalion had already trained three classes, but not without hitches. The first commander and deputy commander of the I.C.D.C. in the area were fired after it emerged that they were extorting kickbacks from the recruits. One recruit was found to be trying to organize other recruits into an anti-American cell that would use its training to mount attacks against the occupation force; he was thrown into prison. ``In every class there are people we`re concerned about,`` an American officer told me. ``There are people in the I.C.D.C. now who we`re concerned about.``

The classroom was situated in a concrete airplane hangar in which Iraqi and American flags hung from the ceiling. The recruits, wearing red baseball caps with ``I.C.D.C.`` printed in English and Arabic, ranged in age from their late teens to their mid-40`s. Because the American trainers were having a hard time recalling the recruits` Arabic names, the Iraqis were given English nicknames. (One of the recruits, a pudgy Iraqi in his 20`s, was called Flounder, after the character in the movie ``Animal House.``) When I visited, they were being trained to say, in English, ``Raise your hands!`` and ``Drop your weapon!`` -- a strange choice in a country where few people speak English.

The recruits came from local villages, and most of them had joined the I.C.D.C. for two reasons: because they wanted better security and because they needed the money. When the classes started in October, the first group of recruits faced harassment from other locals -- sometimes even from family members -- who threatened to kill them if they worked with the Americans. According to Lt. Col. Aubrey Garner, the battalion commander, the quality of recruits has increased and threats against them have diminished as the local population realizes the money is useful and the Americans are not going to leave tomorrow. Yet Garner harbors no illusions about his I.C.D.C. recruits.

``We had this idea that we could train them and they could start independent operations quickly,`` he said. ``But what we learned is that a two-week training regimen isn`t going to turn them into soldiers like we have.``

Because the I.C.D.C. has been so slow to mature, American officials decided in December to form a special I.C.D.C. battalion composed of veteran fighters from the militias of the five major Iraqi political groups. This special battalion is intended as a strike force of determined soldiers who will focus on capturing or eliminating insurgents. The plan drew instant criticism from some Iraqis who say they believe the new battalion will focus not on fighting the insurgency but on eliminating the enemies of their political patrons. Al-Yawar, the Sunni tribal leader, is one of the plan`s harshest critics.

``It means civil war in the future,`` he said. ``If they do this, there will definitely be warlords.``

The creation of a strong security force can backfire in unexpected ways. In the Middle East, as in most of the third world, security forces do not behave terribly well. In Egypt, to take just one example, the army and other security forces have an abysmal human rights record. True, the American military has more of a guiding hand in Iraq, but that doesn`t guarantee much. The American-trained and -equipped Salvadoran Army, which was an effective fighting force in the 1980`s in the sense that its soldiers were excellent killers, eliminated not only the leftist rebels who were its official enemies but large numbers of ordinary civilians and political activists who were not bearing arms. Moreover, in countries that lack strong political leaders -- and Iraq today is such a country -- strong military leaders have a habit of exercising political control in a fashion that does not favor democratic development or political reconciliation.

For these reasons, it seems unlikely that Nagl and soldiers like him will soon be able to cede their role as the principal counterinsurgency force in Iraq. And while they wait, their work will probably not get any easier.


Two days before the attack on Khaldiya`s police station, a soldier in Nagl`s battalion, Sgt. Jarrod Black, was in a convoy that was attacked by an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., in Ramadi, a Sunni city 10 miles from Khaldiya. Black, the father of two boys, whose wife was pregnant at the time, was killed by the blast; he was the 455th American soldier to die in Iraq.

Three days later, just 24 hours after the Khaldiya car bomb, a memorial service for Black was held at an American base in Ramadi, and Nagl attended. Nagl had warned me that the final stretch of our trip to the base, about a mile`s drive through the busy center of Ramadi, might be dangerous because American convoys often got stuck in traffic, where they turned into easy targets. But the drive there was uneventful.

After the service, Nagl returned to his Humvee -- there were five vehicles in the convoy, including two, in the front and back, that had .50-caliber machine-gun turrets. The convoy left the base and headed back into Ramadi. The main street has four lanes divided by a large median; two lanes go east, two lanes west. The eastern lanes were blocked by a crane placing cement blast barriers in front of the municipal building. All eastbound vehicles were being diverted into one of the westbound lanes. After a few hundred yards, traffic snarled.

From the eastern end of the street, near a mosque that was about 500 yards away, a crowd was marching toward the convoy. At the same time, pops of gunfire were heard; they quickly became a fusillade, like Chinese New Year with bullets, though the firing was vertical -- the gunmen were shooting into the air. In a sign that violence beckoned, shopkeepers began pulling down the shutters of their stores and women and children along the street began to run.

Because the convoy was stuck, bumper to bumper, Colonel Swisher, in the Humvee ahead of Nagl`s, ordered his men to drive their vehicles over the median to the unfilled lanes on the other side and get out of town immediately. The median was high, about two feet. Nagl`s driver, Specialist James Regester, who goes by the nickname Reggie, backed up a few inches -- that was all the space he had -- and revved the engine, throwing it into first and jumping the median in a lurching heave that rocked Nagl back and forth in the cabin. The other Humvees did the same, but Colonel Swisher`s got stuck on the median, its front wheels in the air.

The soldiers left their vehicles and set up a perimeter, keeping their eyes on the crowd and rooftops, their weapons pointed at the protesters, who by now had encircled the Americans. The Iraqis were gripped with anger, jeering and shouting slogans in favor of the recently captured Saddam Hussein. They thrust their fists toward the Americans, they waved the soles of their shoes -- a particularly low insult in the Arab world -- and some of them spat toward the G.I.`s. Gunfire was everywhere.

Nagl tried to get brigade headquarters on the radio but couldn`t get through. He was talking with Colonel Swisher about alerting the base`s Quick Reaction Force to rescue the trapped convoy. Although the convoy had two .50-caliber machine guns, whose carrot-size bullets can cut through several rows of massed people, there were fewer than 20 American soldiers on hand, and one of them was a chaplain. A gun battle would leave many dead on both sides; and the crowd, about a thousand strong, controlled the rooftops.

Nagl recognized that although the protesters were furious, most of them were not insurgents. In typical insurgencies, fighters make up just a small part of the population, which is why winning the loyalty of the population is just as important as killing insurgents. The crowd`s mood might have revealed that their hearts and minds, on that day at least, were beyond the grasp of the Americans. But no one was shooting at Nagl`s men -- at least not yet.

The moment was perilous. If the G.I.`s were fired on and returned fire, or if they fired first, the inevitable results -- dead civilians with American bullets in their bodies -- would be broadcast by Al Jazeera throughout Iraq and the Arab world, delivering a useful propaganda victory to the insurgents. The insurgency has so far favored the tactics of detonate-and-run, but any quick-thinking fighter in the crowd might realize that he could instigate a bloodbath by firing a round at the sitting ducks by their Humvees.

Nagl tried to ease the tension with a wisecrack. ``Ever see `Black Hawk Down`?`` he asked me.

After five minutes that seemed much longer, the colonel`s Humvee was freed from its marooned perch. The soldiers jumped into their vehicles and began moving out. All along the street, men jeered and threw rocks. Then heavy gunfire -- boom-boom-boom -- erupted. It was only later that Nagl learned the fire came from one of his Humvees; its gunner saw someone with an AK-47 shooting -- or preparing to shoot -- at the convoy and responded with a burst of .50-caliber fire.

As the convoy raced toward home, young men along the highway jeered the passing Americans. As our Humvee reached the outskirts of Khaldiya, Nagl could see, not far from the bombed police station, a crowd on the road, waving flags and chanting slogans that included ``Saddam is in our blood and soul.`` A smoke bomb, detonated by the protesters, covered the road with an orange haze.

Children in the crowd threw rocks and stepped into the road to stop or slow down the Humvees; the kids jumped out of the way when Reggie gunned the engine. In such situations, with projectiles striking Humvees and the soldiers inside them, the rules of engagement allow soldiers to fire, because it is hard to determine whether an object that is thrown at them is a rock or a grenade. Nagl was worried that Reggie, who was steering the Humvee with his left hand and aiming his M-16 out the window with his right, might put a bullet between the eyes of one of the rock-throwing youths.

``Don`t shoot them!`` he shouted. ``Don`t shoot kids!``

``No, sir, I`m on safe, I`m on safe,`` Reggie

replied.


That evening, back in his office, Nagl told me that military intelligence had informed him that the demonstration we encountered was in fact against Saddam Hussein and in favor of his capture. It seemed hard to believe that the crowd, in the Sunni heartland, was happy about Hussein`s capture, especially given the chants I heard supporting Hussein. But when I said so to Nagl, he insisted the people were happy about Hussein; their anger, he said, revolved only around the fact of occupation.

I later learned that similar anticapture protests had occurred in Tikrit and Samarra, also Sunni strongholds. And Nagl told me that there had been more bloodshed in Ramadi after our convoy escaped the city. In our wake, American reinforcements showed up at the municipal center, which was besieged by the crowd. According to a press release from the United States military, members of the crowd fired on the G.I.`s, wounding one of them. The soldiers shot back, killing two Iraqis and wounding one. Another American convoy was attacked by several dozen Iraqis; the Americans returned fire and killed one Iraqi, according to the press release.

The best explanation for the fact that insurgents in the crowd didn`t open fire on Nagl`s convoy was simple self-defense: they knew that although they could kill some of the trapped G.I.`s, they would be killed, too. But they acted that way because the Americans had threatened and used lethal force on many occasions, and this had not won their hearts or minds. It`s a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Would the crowd, or any crowd in the Sunni Triangle, be less hostile if they hadn`t previously been threatened with lethal force and, on occasion, shot at?

John Paul Vann assumed there was a calibration of lethal power that would work in Vietnam or in any counterinsurgency effort -- the right amount of force, the right number of friendly waves. I began to wonder whether such perfection is attainable. Nagl, sounding a bit more hard-line than before the events in Ramadi and the car bomb in Khaldiya, said he thought a balance was being struck.

``I`m not really all that concerned about their hearts right now,`` he said that evening. ``We`re into the behavior-modification phase. I want their minds right now. Maybe we`ll get their hearts later, as we spend $100,000 on their schools and health clinics this week and another $100,000 on their schools and health clinics next week and $100,000 on their schools and health clinics the week after that. Over time I`ll start winning some hearts. Right now I just want them to stop shooting at us, stop planting I.E.D.`s. If they`re not involved in these activities, they should start turning in the people who are. Whatever techniques that are legal and moral that I have to use to accomplish that, I will. Counterinsurgency is not always a pretty thing.``


In what I had planned as my last day with Nagl`s unit, I walked to the tactical operations center at 9:30 in the morning to say goodbye and get a ride to the front gate, where my driver was waiting for me. From a few hundred yards away I noticed that a line of Humvees was idling in front of the center, about to move out. I ran the rest of the way, and as I neared Nagl`s Humvee he opened the back door and said: ``Get in. We took a hit.``

As the convoy raced out the front gate Nagl explained that an attack on a checkpoint from a rocket-propelled grenade had just wounded and perhaps killed two of his soldiers. We soon arrived at the scene: an armored personnel carrier that had been parked next to an unfinished cinder-block hut was surrounded by blast debris and bloody bandages; the wounded soldiers had already been taken away for treatment. Soldiers immediately set up checkpoints on the road -- a tank, with the words ``Assault & Battery`` on the barrel of its gun, stood on the median -- and began questioning the residents of nearby houses.

Nagl strode to the nearest house. In its courtyard, a man held a glass of tea in his hand. His family members -- several adult women and about a half dozen children -- had gathered a few feet away, next to a wall, with terror in their eyes.

``Did someone say they saw the guys?`` Nagl asked a soldier who had sequestered the family.

``No one says they saw the guys,`` the soldier replied.

Nagl stared at the man with the glass of tea.

``This guy is coming with us now,`` he said, sharply.

Nagl walked to a yard in front of the house and found footprints that he suspected belonged to the insurgent who had fired the grenade. The Army had never trained Nagl to be a crime-scene investigator, but that`s one of the things he has become. He walked briskly across the street, back to the cinder-block hut. There was a small crater next to the damaged armored personnel carrier, the inside of which was stained with blood. Nagl began digging in the rubble and soon found fist-size chunks of shrapnel, too large for a rocket-propelled grenade.

``It was an I.E.D.,`` he shouted -- an improvised explosive device.

Nagl continued digging, unearthing the burned remains of a motorcycle battery. There are two types of detonation devices for I.E.D.`s in Iraq: either a wire is attached to a detonator held by the insurgent, who might be 50 to 100 yards away, or an electrical detonator, attached to a small battery, is triggered by a remote control, like a repurposed garage-door opener. Nagl had found the remnants of the electrical detonator.

A few feet from Nagl, in a corner of the cinder-block hut, his soldiers had flexicuffed a middle-aged, overweight man and pulled his kaffiyeh over his eyes. The Iraqi said he didn`t know who set off the I.E.D. He was trembling and said he was sick and wanted to sit down. He was told to remain standing. On the street, soldiers were stopping cars and searching them; there was no friendliness in any soldier`s demeanor this day.

Nagl had figured out what happened. The insurgents had buried the I.E.D. -- two artillery shells wired together -- and waited for a patrol to pull up to the hut. When that happened, an insurgent who was across the street, in the front yard of the house, pushed the remote control. Nagl knew that the Americans could have avoided the attack. They had provided an easy target because they had used the hut before as a resting spot for patrols and checkpoints. The insurgents, conducting ``pattern analysis,`` had noticed this.

An order went out immediately to the battalion: do not stop at the same place for patrols or checkpoints. The only good news of the day was that this lesson had not been learned at a fatal cost. The wounded soldiers would survive.


The insurgency has weaknesses. Its ranks are composed of ex-Baathists, Islamists, small numbers of foreign fighters, criminals and dirt-poor men who agree to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a passing convoy for $500. It is not cohesive. Nor does it have a positive vision, or any vision, of how Iraq should be governed if the occupiers are driven out. Particularly with the capture of Saddam Hussein and close associates of his, whatever central leadership may have existed has been badly crippled. The American military is hoping that a headless insurgency with dwindling finances will melt away under the pressure of continued raids and precise airstrikes.

Yet the insurgency`s weaknesses are, in a looking-glass fashion, also its strengths. A senior adviser to Gen. John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, advised me to read an article in the winter issue of The Washington Quarterly by Steven Metz, the director of research at the Army War College`s Strategic Studies Institute. Metz is highly regarded in military circles. In the 1990`s he presciently warned that insurgencies would soon return to challenge the United States.

In his article, Metz wrote that disunity among the Iraqi insurgents is not as much of a disadvantage as it might seem: ``Unifying the various strands of the Iraqi insurgency behind any one strategy or objective, at least in the short term, will certainly be difficult if not impossible. Yet, this same complexity means that quashing the insurgency will be just as difficult or impossible.`` Metz also noted that insurgencies, like those in Colombia and Sierra Leone, often use money to attract fighters, rather than ideology.

In the end, it is not the guile or ingenuity of the insurgents that will determine whether they succeed -- their hit-and-run tactics are similar to those seen by Julius Caesar, after all, and they employ an attritional strategy that guerrillas have used for centuries. Instead, the deciding factor will be the guile and ingenuity of the counterinsurgents. If the history of counterinsurgency demonstrates anything, it is that Nagl and officers like him will have to be wily, tenacious and perhaps a little lucky to win. In Iraq today, it would not be unreasonable to consider the American counterinsurgents -- though they are equipped with enough firepower to destroy every building in Iraq and enough technology to listen to any whispered conversation -- the underdogs.

Even if the insurgency is kept at a low boil, what will happen when an interim government takes control of Iraq in July? Will the government have enough legitimacy? If American forces take a back seat to Iraqi security forces, as they hope to do, will fighting break out among Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds? Will the security forces be strong enough to keep order? Or will they be so strong that they turn Iraq into a dictatorship that exterminates insurgents and civilians alike?

These are risks that Nagl, at least, is willing to run. When I asked, one morning, whether the war was worth its human and financial costs, he described the goal of the occupation as freedom for blighted Iraq. He concluded by enthusiastically using a four-letter word that soldiers utter more frequently than ``the`` or ``and,`` followed by, ``yeah, it`s worth it.``

Nagl is a gifted officer with the common sense not to confuse hopes with facts. He says he believes he is winning his war, and his grasp of the present, as well as of the past and the future, is as sharp as anyone`s. He knows, though, that the war will be messy and slow, as T.E. Lawrence warned, and he knows enough about wars to realize that the outcome is not assured. That is the nature of guerrilla wars, especially -- they are chaotic and confused and only fools predict their results.

Yet if predicting the future is a hopeless endeavor, learning from the past is not. The counterinsurgency books that Nagl studied do impart an important lesson. The goal the United States hopes to reach in Iraq -- a successful counterinsurgency that does not drag on for years and does not involve a large amount of killing -- has never been achieved by any army.




Peter Maass, a contributing writer, is the author of ``Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.`` He has reported extensively for the magazine from Iraq.




Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

[Joerver]

Lethal hatreds spread in Iraq`s cockpit of violence
In the city where a US Black Hawk was downed last week, dangers lurk on every street corner for the US 82nd Airborne. Peter Beaumont spoke to both sides in Falluja`s vicious conflict as the American death toll in the country approaches 500

Peter Beaumont
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

In the dining hall at Camp Volturno on the outskirts of Falluja, the newcomers to Taskforce 1 Panther of the US 82nd Airborne Division sit quietly as they listen to their welcome brief. They are big men, barrel-chested from pushing weights, heads shaved to stubble or tiny Tintin fins.

Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Drinkwine, the battalion commander, begins the briefing that will colour these young soldiers` perceptions of the town two miles beyond their compound`s walls. The senior non-commissioned officers will tell these boys Falluja is the most `dangerous place on earth`.

`Falluja is the centrepoint of the war,` says Drinkwine, a solid man in his late thirties. `You got to be steely-eyed out there,` he said. `There are a good people down there and in the midst of them are a handful of evildoers.

`We have told the local leaders we know that there are evildoers. But we are not here to spray up the town. We say: "You shoot an RPG, you can expect some steely-eyed killers who will kill or capture you".`

Then the new boys see Falluja for the first time, projected on the mess hall screen, an aerial map of a small, ugly city nestling in a bend of the Euphrates, and bisected neatly by the line of Highway 10, which the soldiers call the `highway of death`.

It is this road that defines the American war in Falluja, and two locations in particular. The first is just to the east, where Highway 10 loops in a large four-spiralled interchange that the 82nd call the `Cloverleaf`.

The second is on the other side of the city, where Highway 10 crosses the Euphrates by what Iraqis call the `new` bridge, but what Taskforce 1 Panther has dubbed `George Washington Bridge` and the `triangle of death`.

At these two locations the Iraqi resistance has waged most fiercely its war against the United States with ambushes and improvised landmines.

Drinkwine leaves it to his battalion intelligence officer, Captain Gary Love, to fill in the picture. Love brings up a second map in which the city is sectored into areas of colour. Predominant is red. `The red,` says Captain Love, `is high threat. That is two-thirds of the city. I want you to notice that there is no green,` he says. `There are no areas where the threat is low.`

And in the last 10 days the resistance has produced a series of spectacular attacks, bringing down two helicopters near the city in two separate incidents, killing nine US personnel inside, and also murdering two French contractors working for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The members of Taskforce 1 Panther need little reminding of the dangers as they sit in a dining hall dedicated to the memory of Staff Sergeant Paul Johnson, killed just 500 metres from the camp`s gate in an attack that wounded seven other members of Alpha Company.

A father of one from Calumet, Michigan, Johnson, 29, was driving his Humvee in the `Cloverleaf` just after noon on 20 October.

The squad leader probably did not notice the 50-gallon oil drum by the roadside. It was packed with explosives and rigged with a remote control device. When it detonated next to his vehicle, the paratrooper died instantly.

But if the attack on Johnson`s squad was traumatising for the men of Camp Volturno, it was eclipsed, a fortnight later, by an event that turned Falluja, for the Americans, into the most infamous place in Iraq: the shooting down of a Chinook packed with US soldiers going on leave.

At 9am on 2 November two of the vast twin-bladed helicopters took off from Habbaniya, a few miles up the road from Falluja, on what should have been a routine flight to Baghdad airport, barely 40 miles away.

It was a short hop for the two crews that would take them over the strange and ugly hinterland of the Sunni triangle: a place of dusty fields, dykes and fetid ponds.

As the helicopters flew above a stand of date palms near the village of Buissa, Iraqi fighters hidden in the trees fired two shoulder-launched Strella anti-aircraft missiles which locked on to the heat of one of the engines, sending the aircraft crashing to the ground. It was Drinkwine`s men who later collected the bodies.

Such violence did not arise from a vacuum. The violence in Falluja - the city which gave birth to Iraq`s resistance - exploded against the background of a series of disastrous shootings of civilians by soldiers from 82nd Airborne inside the city. These incidents stoked popular sentiment in favour of the fledgling guerrilla movement at a time when it was in most need of support.

The al-Qaid Primary School sits a little south of Highway 10, set back behind a 7ft-high wall. It is a large building by Falluja standards, and easily defendable.

Crucially it afforded the soldiers of Charlie Company of the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne, who occupied it in mid-April, sweeping views across that section of the city.

When the 82nd arrived it was into a city that had held together while Iraq was disintegrating in an orgy of looting. By the time that US troops entered Falluja on 23 April, tribal and religious leaders had taken control, and resented their presence. The people of Falluja found the Americans aggressive, arrogant and alien, a problem exacerbated by a widely disseminated rumour that they could see through women`s clothing with their night vision goggles.

By 28 April - Saddam Hussein`s birthday - those tensions had fatally collided in an event that has become Iraq`s equivalent to Northern Ireland`s Bloody Sunday.

Charlie Company of the 2nd Brigade in the school was on high alert. There had already been gunfire in the town. At 10pm a demonstration of several hundred people arrived outside the school to protest about the presence of the troops within its walls.

As the crowd approached, soldiers of the 82nd, armed with machine guns and carbines, were deployed on the roof and at windows.

What happened next is still in dispute. According to Human Rights Watch, which published the most definitive account of the slaughter that would follow, none of the demonstrators had a weapon.

But the American soldiers, interviewed by the charity, claim that as the crowd approached they could hear firing becoming louder, and noticed several gunmen positioned on the roofs of the houses opposite.

Though the US soldiers believed they came under `effective` fire, Human Rights Watch believes they may have mistaken the sound of windows being broken by thrown rocks for gunfire hitting their positions.

The soldiers fired with indiscriminate force that left 16 Iraqis dead and dozens more injured - and the US killings in Falluja go on. I met the survivors from two other multiple shootings of civilians by the 82nd in the city, including eight members of Iraq`s Police Service killed by Drinkwine`s men pursuing suspected car-jackers.

But if the trigger-happy reputation of the 82nd has pushed many from what Drinkwine concedes was a `sullen resentment` towards the invasion to active support of the resistance, it is still not quite enough to explain what is happening here.

While in the words of one Baghdadi `Falluja is a bad-ass town`, it is also a town with strict social codes, and a town whose people believe they are engaged in a mission sanctified by God. It is explained by a `cell leader` in Falluja`s resistance - a bearded and prosperous-looking man in his mid-fifties, who has lost five cousins in the `fight`. `We are resisters by nature,` he tells me. `America has invaded us and insulted us and so it is legitimate for us to fight. It is our honour and our duty and we know that it will be a long fight.`

Asked how the resistance works, he explains: `There is a joint leadership but we work as individual groups. It is better that the attacks are organised randomly, although we are capable of co-ordinating when we need to.`

He describes how foreign volunteers coming to fight the Americans in Iraq are vetted, and how only those prepared to fight on the terms of the resistance in the city are welcomed.

`The big suicide bombing operations,` he says, `are nothing to do with us. We are only against the American forces.` Then he made an extraordinary confession: `Last week I was driving in my car with my smallest child when a soldier came up and started playing with him. I saw a tear in his eye. I thought: "He does not have a choice about being here". And I wished him no evil. I swear to God,` he tells me, `it hurts me to see an American bleed. I admire them, but in their own country.`

My translator later explains the importance of the al-Buessa tribe in Falluja; its harsh, simple notions of honour, a hallmark of Al Anbar province. While Falluja`s resistance is coloured by the leadership of the many ex-Baathists and regime members in the town, it is also marked by the fiercely proud credo of its tribes - in particular the al-Buessa, which claims responsibility for the downing of the Chinook.

It is the al-Buessa too, Drinkwine says, who were behind an attack by rocket-propelled grenade on the mayor`s office that injured two of his men in the 82nd. And it is the al-Buessa area by the bridge which is one of the most dangerous areas of Falluja for homemade bombs.

`The al-Buessa tribe are the biggest pain in the butt and the biggest problem,` says Captain Love. `When we first came to Falluja, the al-Buessa leader in the area by the bridge, Sheikh Ghazi [Sami al-Abed], was all over the previous guys here, giving barbecues and introducing us to "this great guy". Our reaction was: "Whoa. Who is this man and what does he want"?`

The answer, believes Love, reveals a snapshot not just of Falluja, but of Iraq`s resistance; how local political, tribal and financial struggles are finding their expression in the fight against the Coalition in a country that is increasingly hostile to the occupation.

The map drawn by Love of Falluja`s fighters describes a battle for supremacy within the al-Buessa tribe between Sheikh Ghazi Sami al-Abed, who has the money but no power, and his cousin Saradran Barakat, who has the power but no money.

It has forced the two rivals into an unhappy partnership to protect their positions within the tribe with Ghazi - according to the 82nd - supplying the money, either voluntarily or under pressure, to fund the resistance, and the now arrested Barakat the muscle and the know-how. The full picture, Love believes, is completed by the presence in the city of members of the Muslim and Islamic Brotherhoods, Ansar al-Islam and Wahhabi extremists, the latter helping to channel money from Saudi Arabia`s radicals.

If the resistance is driven by often barely visible dynamics, the 82nd`s sometimes messy presence in and around the city has its own hidden narrative. Critics of the division, including soldiers attached to it, describe them as `ruffians who get the job done`.

Sterner critics claim that the 82nd, a body of troops designed for rapid shock assaults and not for peacekeeping, are the `wrong soldiers, in the wrong city at the wrong time`.

But it is the soldiers themselves who privately express a deeper problem - of increasingly plummeting morale across the US forces here.

Deployed here straight from serving in Afghanistan, some have barely seen friends and families in two years, and while none will say that they should not be there, there is an edgy bitterness reflected in the sometimes racist graffiti around Volturno.

When I meet Sheikh Ghazi in his Falluja office, it is to find it has been vandalised during a raid by men under Drinkwine`s command, who have carved `Fuck You` into his office door, and slashed and smashed sofas, pictures and windows.

Ghazi denies involvement with the resistance, and when I ask him what advice he gives to young men wishing to fight, he tells me that he is largely ignored by them. Love claims that Ghazi`s interest is not simply political. The intelligence cell in the 82nd has noticed how he has been buying up blocks of land amid the chaos.

Ghazi is still at large because Drinkwine and his senior officers believe that the ambitious and equivocal businessman can be `leveraged` into assisting US forces to pacify the city.

`What we are seeing in this city,` says Drinkwine, `is a power struggle among the sheikhs who had little effective power under Saddam`s regime. There is also a clear influence in the violence from some of the clerics. You do notice that the closer that you get to the bridge the more difficult it becomes for us. It`s like the Shankill Road for us down there. But even though these are cowards we are dealing with, who fire from behind good people, I now believe this is an enemy that has a face. We are beginning to understand his thought processes.`

A few days later, sitting in the back of an open Humvee pick-up with soldiers from the brigade`s Alpha Company at 3am on a bitterly cold night, I notice how the paratroopers` vehicles are nerve-rackingly exposed: their armour, in most cases, is improvised by the soldiers. Some have placed steel plates against the sides, while others have constructed sandwiches of plywood and sandbags. A lucky few have Kevlar blankets.

In the darkness, Falluja is a different city. Through the soldiers` night-vision goggles it is a green oceanscape of flattened perspectives where each individual streetlight appears as a startling blizzard. In the dark - and without any goggles - all I can see is narrow streets and looming buildings and the first shadowy bunches of paratroops who are dismounting from their vehicles ahead of me.

As locks are scythed through, and two CIA officials in Arab headscarves root through a mechanic`s workshop for bomb-making equipment, a message comes from Charlie Company, which is raiding the suspect`s home, that it has come under attack from some rocket-propelled grenades.

In an instant the atmosphere thickens into something more sickly and tense: the thought that the intelligence is not only wrong, but may be a set-up. There is nothing to do but wait for the order to pull out.

It is a pointless and frightening few minutes - standing in the middle of an alien landscape, waiting for an unseen enemy to attack. It is the very nature of Iraq`s war.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

Guantanamo Bay: Two years too many
A US diplomat has hinted that British prisoners in Camp Delta may soon be repatriated. That`s too little too late for human rights campaigners. As the Guantanamo Bay detention centre marks its second anniversary Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, calls for immediate closure.

Kate Allen
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

Today marks the second `anniversary` of Guantanamo Bay, the moment the world first discovered that fighting the `war on terror` would mean setting up unaccountable and inaccessible military prisons and filling them with hundreds of prisoners from all over the world.

This is two years too many. From the moment images of manacled and blindfold men kneeling in submission in orange boiler suits flashed around the world, the USA`s prestige took a nosedive.

In letter after letter to both the White House and Downing Street, Amnesty International has made the point that legal representation and fair trials should be the bottom line not just for the nine Britons in Guantanamo Bay, but for all 650-plus detainees held in Camp Delta without charge or trial.

With some of the Guantanamo prisoners now entering their third year of captivity without access to lawyers, and without charge or trial, the need for urgent moves to end this travesty of justice could not be clearer.

As a former lawyer himself, Prime Minister Tony Blair for one must surely realise that Guantanamo Bay is nothing short of a disgrace and that basic human rights need to be restored.

However, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has rejected concern about Guantanamo as "based on the shrill hyperventilation of a few people who didn`t know what they were talking about."

Actually it is Mr Rumsfeld`s waspish remark that fails to convince. Did the United States really think that it could set up a modern gulag in defiance of decades of international legal standards and escape censure? In placing prisoners in the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay`s `no-place` - neither American soil nor Cuban jurisdiction - the American administration appears to have made the rash wager that legal untouchability would equal moral inviolability.

They have been proved staggeringly wrong. Criticism has poured in from such not especially shrill sources as the UN high commissioner for human rights, the Council of Europe, the Pope, a British law lord and countless people who have contacted Amnesty International. The Red Cross has taken the unusual step of going public about the deterioration in mental health it has witnessed among many of the Guantanamo detainees as a result of the indefinite and isolating incarceration regime.

Aside from how it may play in the United States itself, this has been disastrous human rights public relations for a country that has regularly promoted itself as a "beacon" for democracy, justice and the rule of law.

Ripping up the rulebook was hardly the right response when confronted by the grisly acts of a disaffected minority of extremists like al-Qaeda, who in any case recognise no rules. One can easily suppose that they have relished the sight of Muslims incarcerated in the Guantanamo dungeon, knowing that it provides them with fresh `evidence` of what Osama bin Laden is pleased to call the "crusader-Zionist onslaught."

Setting up Guantanamo Bay in January 2002 might have looked reasonable to some (it wasn`t), but the folly of disregarding human rights is now plain to see.

How to undo the damage?

This year the US Supreme Court is set to examine whether it should have jurisdiction over what takes place at Guantanamo Bay, a strip of land leased to the United States by Cuba.

If now the US belatedly sees fit to ensure that Guantanamo prisoners are either charged with recognisable criminal offences or released, that legal counsel is provided to all inmates (and interrogations meanwhile suspended), then much of the damage can be mended.

If instead the US intends to defy criticism and ignore court rulings, then its reputation can only sink further into the hole it has dug for itself.

Is America a big enough country to say that it was wrong on Guantanamo Bay?

• Kate Allen is director of Amnesty International UK


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Die Welt der Sensationen und Angstmacher

In thrall to scaremongers
From salmon to al-Qaeda, panic rather than a measured response is now the inevitable reaction

Mary Riddell
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

Beware the killer salmon, crammed with carcinogenic chemicals. Far from being the staple of a healthy diet, farmed salmon is the Osama bin Laden of the fish counter. It is a creature suddenly so perilous that the Pentagon might hesitate to serve it for lunch at Guantanamo Bay and so outlawed that its appearances may be confined to niche cookery slots on al-Jazeera television. Salmon, on the basis of a US report, is evil.

The Food Standards Agency and other scientists deny, conversely, that it poses any new danger. This may not mollify consumers who took up eating oily fish only because of salmonella scares about eggs and chicken, as well as the BSE crisis now convulsing America. McDonald`s is reassuring its US customers that it never uses `downer cattle`, or those which, like the rogue animal responsible for the current panic, cannot stagger unaided into the abattoir.

It does not say that the number of Americans with variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease, is zero, while obesity is about to become the biggest preventable killer of a burger-addicted nation. H.G. Wells`s prediction that statistical thinking would become `as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write` is for some other future. Until then, society is buffeted by random terrors.

On the day of the salmon scare, the finger of fear also pointed at aspirin, cited as a possible cause of pancreatic cancer in women, while Dr David King, the Government`s chief scientific officer, warned, accurately, that George W. Bush`s climate-change policy is a bigger threat to the world than terrorism. His view finds little echo in an administration that likes its dangers immediate and amenable to slick solutions, as opposed to the wearisome business of constructing a solution for Palestine.

Hence the edict that airlines must ban passengers from queuing for lavatories, lest clusters of terrorists plot in the aisles around trolleys stuffed with killer duty-free Silk Cut. Perversely, queuing will be obligatory for the snaking lines of holidaymakers requiring the new US visa or waiting to be fingerprinted on arrival.

Fear makes citizens malleable. That renders it both a gift to politicians and a chalice as poisoned as farmed salmon. Curtailing civil liberties and passing unreasonable laws is never easier than in a time of amorphous threat. Governments do not always exploit this power, as shown by last week`s Civil Contingencies Bill, a vastly more reasonable measure than campaigners had feared. By contrast, the money swallowed and strictures issued by America`s monster Department of Homeland Security are out of kilter with the results.

People are not stupid. However contagious an angst embracing everything from salmon to bin Laden, there comes a point when citizens get suspicious that the real impediment to daily life is state bureaucracy rather than any threat from mad outsiders. At that juncture, the forces of individual freedom rally, unerringly to attack the wrong targets. For example, the news that the Government will `make bath time safer` by forcing builders to fit devices regulating water heat provoked derision from the Times .

But even given that the grand provenance of this initiative, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, raises the vision of Acme Emergency Plumbers supplying legislation on regional assemblies, there is nothing wrong with a measure to prevent 430 infants from being hideously scalded every year. Each day, 10 people die in the UK from accidents at home. If wishing to save lives, it would be more useful to target novelty slippers, a prime cause of broken necks on staircases, than to harass airline passengers. The politics of the mixer tap may sound officious, but they make better sense than wilder counterterrorism measures.

Similarly, there is a good case for super traffic wardens, empowered to book drivers for minor offences. The plan, anathema to the rich motoring lobby that considers itself, like the Queen, to be above the law, would do far more for public safety than armed air marshals. But old instincts and new fearmongering combine to make us dread the catastrophic rather than the chronic.

We have little notion of what, on the calculus of risk prevention, we even think a human life is worth. Is it the cost of road safety, running at £100,000 for every death averted, or the new compulsory train protection warning system, at £10 million per fatality avoided? Maybe we would pay anything to shirk danger, but we court it too.

Smoking and drinking rocketed after 9/11, offering evidence that terror of great peril makes us reckless about the real but humdrum. We eat so much that obesity is blamed for a 15,000 jump in cancer cases. Adverts featuring arteries like bratwurst fail to deter dedicated smokers. The Government`s alcohol strategy report, dripping cirrhotic doom, will be out any time now.

The tension between the precautionary state and the neurotic citizen is growing. The Government, part-soothsayer, part-regulator, alternately stokes the worries of the public and drives people, moaning about nanny statism, into flurries of self-harm. Neither side sees properly that fear itself corrupts society. Obviously, it would be irresponsible to ignore the threat posed by al-Qaeda, but the counteroffensive risks causing greater harm.

Security, a watchword for comfort, is the default of the reactionary who loathes any outsider seeking to steal its protection. It is also the province of the rabid nationalist, living on the blurred edge where worry elides with hatred and repression. Secure homes, streets and jobs have the flipside of harsh custodial sentences, of terrorist suspects interned in Belmarsh and of failed asylum-seekers living under the warning that their children will be removed into care.

If the new, improved Civil Contingencies Bill suggests that the Home Office is modulating its intemperance, that is hopeful. The Government`s stance on outside threat has contained too much scaremongering and too little that is verifiable or true. Until last weekend`s Basra speech, when Saddam`s armoury was unmentioned, Mr Blair regularly plugged the line that he was an urgent threat to his neighbours and the world.

Never mind the difficulty in pinpointing the missing weapons of mass destruction. Like a Cartesian philosopher asserting the ontological proof of God, Mr Blair for too long offered his own certainty as an automatic guarantor of their existence. Such fantasy only fuels a mood in which the country swaps any serious assessment of the probability of danger for witchy hunches about abstract risk. The al-Qaeda threat, however serious, is inflated by a made-in-Whitehall fear that does Mr Blair no favours.

The forthcoming Hutton Report is a product of government obfuscation but also of public hysteria. Only in the hot atmosphere of exaggerated nightmares could a Prime Minister be held personally responsible for the suicide of an official exposed after flouting the rules of his job. As the Hutton approaches, we remain locked into a postwar terror contaminating all it touches, from aspirin to tuition fees. If the Government could perform an alchemic feat for the coming year, it should be to redraw the boundary between caution and blind panic. Anyone for salmon?

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Why the West is wary of Muslims
As well as condemning racism, we must also condemn radical Islam for providing succour to terrorists

WIll Hutton
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

Radical Islam represents the biggest challenge to Western civilisation since the demise of fascism and communism. Rooted in a pre-Enlightenment worldview in which religious text has the force of law and the Islamic community is innately superior to all others, the belief that there is redemption for martyrs in the afterlife fuels extraordinary acts of terrorism.

Combine this with the deeply held belief that Islamic religion, culture and society has been profoundly humiliated, and you have the cocktail that one day may lead some young men and women to immolate themselves on a BA flight or on the Tube. How to understand this threat and how to respond has become the most important issue of our age.

More than two years after 11 September, the tally of core Western values and beliefs that we have allowed to become corrupted as we respond is lengthening by the week. Equality before the law; the presumption of innocence; the right to a fair trail - all have been seen as expedients to be put aside in the `fight against terror` rather than absolute values to which we hold fast - and it has been the British Muslim community that has been on the receiving end of this new expediency more than any other. The state assembles more and more discretionary power without accountability. A scarcely disguised Islamophobia is on the increase. Long-built traditions of tolerance are under threat. We are undermining our own civilisation.

The leaders of the radical terrorist groups, and the mosques that support them, are open in what they are doing: they are launching a war of civilisations they believe they will win. It may be that Islam is currently poor and weak, but it is not degenerate like the secular West. Terrorist suicide is proof not of depravity, but of moral and cultural ascendancy. As Osama bin Laden says repeatedly, this readiness for martyrdom will eventually bring victory, whatever that may mean.

In the West, there is an uncertainty about how to respond at the level of values - lurching between a kindly multi-culturalism that anxiously wants to be sympathetic to Islam, depicting Islamic terrorism as an aberration, and the alternative view that we are on the point of a clash of civilisations. Blair and Bush perfectly reflect the uncertainty, semi-indicting Islam but hesitating to characterise their war against terrorism as part of a clash of civilisations; that is too apocalyptic. European intellectuals, who would be horrified to be included in the same camp as George Bush, agree; at the conference in Paris I am attending and which prompted this column, directors of leading European research institutes in this area insisted that there was no clash of civilisations, that Islam was pluralistic and benign, that the West was in part to blame for Islamic feelings of humiliation, and that we should maintain a belief in multiculturalism and dialogue to the last.

I share the view that Islam can be pluralistic, has the capacity to generate the secular societies we have in the West - already only a minority of European Muslims regularly attend mosques - and that the Western world has a major responsibility for what has happened. If we abandon dialogue and interaction we are lost. But I refuse to make my starting point that there is at present no potential clash of civilisations and that Islam can be wholly excused responsibility for the ideology of the terrorists. Muslim fundamentalists do believe Islam is a superior moral universe to the West - and it is that that permits terrorists to disregard of the sanctity of innocent human life and the indiscriminate way lives can be sacrificed. They are, after all, infidel.

While there are broader strains within Islam that do offer a pluralist moral code, which in turn offers hope for the future, it is also at the moment predominantly sexist and pre-Enlightenment - and that is the core of the problem both within the Islamic world and in its relationship with the West.

We cannot and should not respond with an unrigorous, soft multiculturalism that pleads such values are equivalent to our own and legitimate within their own cultural context. Nor should we fall into the trap of stereotyping Islam as universally menacing. Rather, I am at one with Professor Brian Barry, the finest egalitarian since Tawney, who, in Culture and Equality, argues that what lies behind the Western position on human rights and democracy is the Enlightenment proposition that men and women are intrinsically equal and have equal rights to dignity and self-realisation.

Thus, the West has to object to Islamic sexism - whether arranged marriage, headscarves, limiting career options or the more extreme manifestations, female circumcision and stoning women for adultery. We cannot give ground in the name of multiculturalism. As Barry argues, this is to deny values that are right, and in which democracy and respect for human rights are ultimately grounded. We should certainly respect diversity, but we cannot abandon or qualify our own beliefs in the process.

In this respect the French position since 11 September is much stronger and more coherent than our own because it is based on a systematic Enlightenment worldview. It is because the French believe in the international rule of law that they refused to support the intervention in Iraq; they were right.

But France is also right to insist that it will not support Islamic sexism; thus, the recent ban on wearing headscarves. Because it has taken a coherent position, it is respected and at least understood in the Islamic world, even if strongly criticised. Sheikh Tantawi of Cairo`s al-Azhar mosque responded to the French move by saying that just as Westerners should respect Islamic mores when in Islam, so the Islamic community had to respect Western mores when in the West. He advised French Islamic women to comply with the French law he thought reasonable. Amen to that; diversity and interaction based on mutual respect.

In my view, the path blazed by Tantawi, Barry and the French is how we must engage with Islam - but it demands we act across the waterfront. We have to maintain equality before the law, which is why it is so important that British Islamic detainees in Guantanamo Bay are tried properly under British law. If we are to be uncompromising in our opposition to cultural manifestations of religion that menace our Enlightenment commitment to equality, such as the subordination of women, we must also defend freedom of worship. We must insist that Muslims living in Britain and Europe are equal citizens, aggressively resisting their economic and social marginalisation and all forms of discrimination.

We must also repudiate the casual quasi-racism of Robert Kilroy-Silk`s that re-emerged last week in his mistakenly published column: it has no more place in our set of values than any sort of religious fundamentalism. And abroad, we stand for the same beliefs - from following UN process and upholding international law. If there is a clash of civilisations, it will only end through mutual tolerance and respect - and we earn that through standing by what we are and in what we believe, even while we respect what we are not.


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Mustard gas found by Iraq weapon hunters
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

Dozens of mortar rounds believed to be armed with mustard gas have been discovered buried in Iraq, Danish troops said yesterday.

If confirmed, the find will be the first discovery of chemical munitions in Iraq by coalition forces scouring the country for the weapons of mass destruction used as justification for the US-led invasion.

`All the instruments showed indications of the same type of chemical compound, namely blister gas,` the Danish Army said in a statement on its website. Final test results will be announced within two days.

However, the find of a small amount of mortar shells is unlikely to satisfy a growing chorus of criticism that the much-touted weapons of mass destruction either never existed or were destroyed years ago. The Danish team has found only 36 mortar rounds buried in desert about 45 miles from Al Amarah, a southern town. But it added that up to a 100 more could still be hidden at the location. The rounds were in plastic bags and some were leaking. It seems they had been buried for at least 10 years.

Even coalition military spokesmen said the weapons were likely to be a leftover from the Iran-Iraq war fought during the Eighties when mustard gas was widely used. The gas blisters the skin painfully and can be lethal if it is breathed in. Victims die in excruciating agony.

The discovery of the banned weapons will be greeted with enthusiasm in some quarters as it marks a rare success for those working with the coalition`s Iraq Survey Group to find weapons of mass destruction. The US-led mission has been under heavy fire for failing to turn up any weapons. Instead its reports have focused on the existence of clandestine weapons development programmes, rather than actual weapons production.

Earlier this month the US pulled out a 400 strong military team from Iraq, which specialised in disposing of weapons of mass destruction. That move caused outrage as it was seen as a tacit admission that significant numbers of armaments were unlikely to be found.

Critics of the war got a further boost yesterday when a former senior official in President George Bush`s administration claimed plans for invading Iraq were hatched just days after Bush came to power - and long before the terrorist atrocity of 11 September 2001.

In leaked excerpts from a TV interview to be broadcast tonight former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill said Bush`s team began laying the groundwork in early 2001. `From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,` O`Neill told the 60 Minutes programme.

O`Neill, sacked by Bush in December 2002, also attacked the `Bush doctrine` of pre-emptive strike that has come to the fore of US international strategy since 11 September.

His comments were attacked immediately by Bush officials. `It appears that the world according to Mr O`Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people,` Bush`s spokesman, Scott McClellan, said.

With a presidential election looming later this year the Bush administration is keen to move away from the Iraq issue and towards domestic problems.

With Iraq generating support for Democrat frontrunner Howard Dean, senior Republicans have instead focused on more voter-friendly topics such as relaxing immigration laws and a manned space mission to Mars.


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US father in `Private Ryan` plea as son is killed in Iraq
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer

He survived one of America`s most infamous military nightmares that became the basis of the film Black Hawk Down. He went on to beat a more personal battle, this time with cancer.

But Aaron Weaver`s life finally ended in tragedy last week when the 32-year-old US soldier died in a helicopter - another Black Hawk - shot down by a rocket attack near Falluja by Iraqi resistance fighters.

In a grim reminder of another movie, the Second World War epic, Saving Private Ryan, Weaver`s family are now trying to save his two brothers from a similar fate and are asking the military to change the men`s deployment away from the frontlines. One brother, Ryan, 30, is a helicopter pilot in Baghdad and the other, Steve, 39, is also a pilot, weeks away from being posted to Afghanistan.

As the steady trickle of body bags returning from Afghanistan and Iraq increasingly unsettles military families across the US, Weaver`s family have taken up the mantle of Private Jessica Lynch in becoming the latest ordinary Americans to attract national media attention that has made them figureheads for the conflict in Iraq.

`We`re not trying to get the other two out of the service. We`re just trying to get them from suffering the same fate,` said Mike Weaver, the men`s father, who has asked the Pentagon to make the deployment shift.

Army regulations allow for deployments to be changed for emergency reasons, such as bereavement or illness. A military spokesman said the situation would be looked at, but pointed out that the two surviving brothers might not want to be redeployed. Any formal request to change their mission would also have to come from the soldiers themselves.

He pointed out that redeployment was only possible for active service personnel and that Steve Weaver, who is only one year away from retirement and is normally based in Hawaii, had not yet been sent to Afghanistan.

Aaron Weaver`s death has a particular resonance as he had won a medal for saving a fellow soldier`s life during the ill-fated 1993 US intervention in Somalia.

His efforts were featured in Black Hawk Down, which portrayed the Battle of Mogadishu when 18 US Rangers died in a fight with Somali militiamen. During the fight, Weaver volunteered to head into combat as a reinforce ment after two helicopters had been shot down, leaving their wounded crews surrounded by hostile forces.

He also survived a long struggle with testicular cancer and continued his service in the military despite his illness. He signed a medical waiver specifically so that he could be sent to Iraq.

His last journey, in a medical helicopter that was clearly marked with red crosses, was to have a cancer check-up to see if the disease was still in remission. But now flags in his home town of Clearwater, Florida, are flying at half mast.

`It was the life he chose,` Mike Weaver told a local TV station. `He went willingly and even pulled strings to get himself there when he really didn`t have to go.`

Ryan Weaver was on duty just 60 miles away when his brother`s helicopter went down. The Weaver family is steeped in military life and tradition. As well as the three brothers, all of whom are helicopter pilots, a sister is also in the air force, though not posted overseas. Mike Weaver himself is a former US marine.

Aaron left behind a wife, a stepson and a young daughter. `I still don`t believe it. I can see his face,` said his mother, Kelly. `He`s just a beautiful boy, so strong and so smart. I just hope he didn`t suffer. I`m so proud of him.`

His father echoed that sen timent, saying that his son had survived so much only to die while a passenger in an air ambulance. `Having survived that [Somalia] and having survived cancer, I didn`t dream that something like this would have happened to him,` he said.

In all, nine US soldiers died in the Falluja helicopter, including troops who were based across America, from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. US investigators said yesterday that an initial examination of the incident had shown that the plane was shot down by guerrillas.

`The investigation has not concluded, but preliminary reports are that the helicopter was shot down by ground fire,` said US Army spokesman Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt.

· At least five people were killed yesterday when British troops and Iraqi police opened fire on stone-throwing protesters demanding jobs in the south-eastern city of Amara.


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Iraqi protesters killed in clash with UK troops
By Matthew Rosenberg, AP
11 January 2004


Up to six people were killed and 11 wounded during clashes in Iraq between protesters demanding jobs and British soldiers and Iraqi police.

The crowd, demanding jobs yesterday in the south-eastern town of Amarah, were reported to have lobbed homemade bombs and stones before they were fired on.

As crowds gathered again today, a dozen British soldiers with riot shields and batons guarded the mayor`s office, which had its windows shattered yesterday. No Iraqi police were visible at the compound that also houses the US-led coalition and the 1st Battalion of Britain`s Light Infantry.

The trouble in Amarah, 200 miles south-east of Baghdad, started when hundreds of Iraqis demanding jobs gathered in front of the coalition compound and started stoning the town hall, smashing windows.

As the protesters grew agitated, shots rang out from the crowd, a British military spokeswoman said. At the same time, troops "received reports of small explosions in the crowd."

Iraqi police, believing they were under attack, opened fire into the crowd but did not hit any protesters, she said. But witnesses said the police killed some protesters.

British soldiers moved in with armoured vehicles to support the police, and protesters hurled at least three explosive devices at them, she said.

Police Capt. Ali Jihad Hussein later described the devices as homemade bombs made of cans packed with explosive powder and nails with candlewick lighters.

One man "in the process of throwing a device" was shot dead by the soldiers, the spokeswoman said.

That death led the crowd to disperse. But some returned later and lobbed another five bombs at the armoured cars before tensions eased. Soldiers shot a second attacker and apparently wounded him, the spokeswoman said.

Six people were killed and at least 11 wounded, according to Dr. Saad Hamoud of the Al-Zahrawi Surgical Hospital. The British said they had reports of five deaths and one injury. The soldiers and police had no casualties.

Later Saturday, militants among the protesters looted a new clinic behind the mayor`s office, stealing some cabinets, desks and chairs.

Earlier, US officials acknowledged American soldiers shot and killed two Iraqi policemen who failed to identify themselves, and the military said a US Army medevac helicopter that crashed last week near Fallujah, killing all nine soldiers aboard, was probably shot down.

The US shooting of the policemen occurred Friday after paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade responded to a report of "family fighting" in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Paratroopers spotted two men wearing long coats firing into a house, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division. The men fled as the troops approached and were joined by a third man, she said.

"The soldiers verbally warned the three to stop and then fired warning shots," Aberle said. "The men refused to comply and the soldiers took a defensive position and fired," killing two of them and detaining the third.

All were found to be Iraqi policemen, Aberle said. The US military is investigating why they refused to identify themselves.

North of the capital, the US military said it was investigating allegations that soldiers killed four Iraqi civilians who tried to pass a convoy of Humvees this month in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein`s hometown.

Elsewhere, Danish and Icelandic troops uncovered a cache of 36 shells buried in the Iraqi desert, and preliminary tests showed they contained a liquid blister agent, the Danish military said Saturday.

The 120mm mortar shells were thought to be leftovers from the eight-year war between Iraq and neighboring Iran, which ended in 1988, said Kimmitt.

The shells were found by Danish engineering troops and Icelandic de-miners near Al Quarnah, north of the city of Basra where Denmark`s 410 troops are based, the Danish Army Operational Command said in a statement.

The shells were wrapped in plastic but some had leaked and they appeared to have been buried for at least 10 years, it said.

Before the war, the United States alleged Iraq still had stockpiles of mustard gas, a World War I-era blister agent stored in liquid form. US intelligence officials also claimed Iraq had sarin, cyclosarin and VX, which are extremely deadly nerve agents.

In the weeks after the Iraq war, the US-led coalition found several caches that tested positive for mustard gas but later turned out to contain missile fuel or other chemicals. Other discoveries turned out to be old caches scheduled for destruction by United Nations inspectors.

Saddam`s regime used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a chemical attack on the northern city of Halabja in 1988.

US President George W. Bush said the United States was going to war to destroy Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction, but a nine-month search has failed to find any current stockpiles.

The lack of evidence has led critics to suggest the Bush administration either mishandled or exaggerated its knowledge of Iraq`s alleged arsenal.
11 January 2004 12:31



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In der Kurdenfrage liegt noch viel Sprengstoff.

Iraqi Kurds scorn US autonomy offer
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
11 January 2004


Kurds in Iraq have rejected a US-backed plan for very limited autonomy in the north of the country, which has enjoyed a status close to independence for more than a decade. "It gave us even less than Saddam Hussein offered us in the past," a Kurdish leader said yesterday.

The Kurds, who have fought against control by Baghdad for most of the last 80 years, restated their determination to keep substantial control of their own affairs to Iraqi Arab political leaders during two days of talks last week in the Kurdish mountain headquarters at Salahudin in northern Iraq.

The US and senior Arab members of the interim Iraqi Governing Council have been pressing the Kurds to accept integration into a post-Saddam Iraq, with only local powers for the Kurdish authorities. Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the top Kurdish leaders, told seven or eight council members, all former members of the Iraqi opposition, that this was wholly unrealistic.

The Kurds have said they are willing to turn over control of foreign policy, defence, fiscal policy and natural resources to a central government. But in practice they will retain most of the powers they won a dozen years ago when Saddam Hussein withdrew his armies from Kurdistan.

The Kurdish leaders are conscious that they are in a very strong position. They lead the third-largest Iraqi community, smaller in numbers than the Shia and the Sunni Arabs but well organised and armed. They are also the only Iraqi community which supports a long-term American occupation, and Iraqi Kurdistan is the only part of the country where US forces can move in relative safety.

Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani reminded the Arab parties and individuals opposed to Saddam Hussein that they had been committed since 1992 to a federal Iraq in which the Kurdish region would rule itself. The Kurds will not declare independence because they know that this would precipitate an invasion by Turkey and also be fiercely opposed by Iran and Syria.

The result of the meeting at Salahudin has been portrayed by some Kurdish leaders as a compromise, but in fact shows that they need to concede very little to the US or Iraqi Arab leaders. Since the dissolution of the Iraqi army by the US in May the Kurdish peshmerga have been the only significant Iraqi armed force.

A Kurdish leader said that the Kurds were prepared to negotiate over the future of Kirkuk, the oil province of the north, recaptured by the Kurds during the war last year. It is unlikely that they would ever give up Kirkuk, from which many of them were driven by Saddam Hussein.

The Kurds want their autonomy to be enshrined in Iraqi law as swiftly as possible, rather than being dependent on the outcome of future Iraqi elections.
11 January 2004 12:34


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January 11, 2004
Incentives Lure Many to Quit, Even With a Lean Job Market
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

At 51, with college still ahead for his two teenage children, Lee Hutchison had no intention of retiring from FedEx, where he had worked for 21 years. But a few months ago, that is just what he did.

"It was so far from my mind, early retirement," he said. "I was in a department that wrote manuals for our aircraft engineers. We were very well respected. But when they made that retirement offer, they in effect defined a group of employees that they were saying, `We need you to leave.` It took a little while for it to dawn on me that I was part of that group."

So like thousands of others in recent months, Mr. Hutchison jumped at the opportunity to leave a good job and take his chances searching for work at a time when few jobs are being created. What little hiring there had been in recent months came to a halt in December, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Only 1,000 jobs were added last month, far short of the 150,000 forecasters had expected.

Fortified with big pension payouts and promises of health benefits, these early retirees are gambling on the devil they don`t know rather than sticking with the devil they do.

Until a year or two ago, exit packages drew fewer takers. Now they are more carefully aimed at employees in operations that are shrinking. Although no national statistics are kept, companies that offer these packages say that the response is greater than they had anticipated.

"What people are doing more than in the past is laying themselves off if they get what amounts to a big enough package," said Deborah Hart, a principal at Towers Perrin, a consulting firm that designs exit packages for corporate clients.

At FedEx, 3,600 workers took an incentive package to leave in October, out of 14,000 who were eligible. Even more striking were the numbers at Verizon Communications a month later: 21,600 workers left their jobs, or 10 percent of the company`s work force. Both companies said the responses achieved their goals.

Similar packages have been heavily subscribed recently at, among others, the State Street Corporation, a financial services company in Boston, and the Entergy Corporation, a network of utility operations with headquarters in New Orleans.

"We cannot underestimate the changing mind-set," Ms. Hart said. "People are not viewing retirement incentives as an end to work."

Employers are mindful that shrinking head counts with early retirement packages is more palatable, inside and outside the company, than layoffs. And they know that years of job insecurity have conditioned workers to fear the worst, thus raising the odds that workers will leave if the incentive is rich enough — typically 40 to 50 percent of annual preretirement wages.

The workers taking early retirement often are in their early 50`s and say they neither can afford to stop working nor want to. They embrace packages that give them full pensions years ahead of schedule, or severance equal to a year or more of full pay, or both. Although the current economic recovery is notable for an absence of robust hiring, these people are gambling they can get just enough work to make up the lost income. Above all, they are lured by the promise of continued health insurance, paid by the company.

"The incremental cost of these packages is not significantly greater than the cost of a layoff," said Ezra D. Singer, executive vice president for human resources at Verizon. "It allows the company to get to the size it needs to get to, while minimizing or eliminating the demoralizing aspects of layoffs. If we had not done this, then over the next two or three years, we would have had a work force that was constantly worried about layoffs."

Among most companies engaged in cutting labor costs, outright layoffs are still common. The elaborate retirement and buyout packages that Verizon and FedEx offered are just beginning to spread, according to management consultants who design them, and such packages put the companies at risk of losing employees they might prefer to retain.

When the package was offered to Mr. Hutchison, he felt vulnerable and "apprehensive," as he put it, feelings that FedEx`s retirement offer played on. Mr. Hutchison`s division, no longer growing, would be pared down, the company said.

But FedEx was offering both health coverage and a full pension, which in Mr. Hutchison`s case would replace nearly half his annual salary of more than $60,000. He otherwise would have had to work another 10 years to secure that sum.

"I`m not home free and I`m not asking to be, but I have a good enough safety net now," said Mr. Hutchison, who lives in Memphis, where FedEx is based. Including his wife`s salary as a teacher, he figures, "I can fall down a few times in another job and pick myself up, and my family won`t starve."

Like 5,600 other unionized employees at Verizon, Steven Carney, a field technician, took the plunge although he was protected from layoffs under the Communications Workers of America`s contract with the company. But at 53, after 35 years at the company, he had begun to find the pressures intolerable, he said, with workloads rising for employees in Verizon`s land-line operations as the company shifted its focus toward wireless.

Mr. Carney said that he had no expectation of landing a job that would replicate his $64,000-a-year salary, not counting overtime. But in preparation for his departure, he refinanced his mortgage to lower his payments by $400 a month and calculated that he could pocket $200,000 or more if he sold his home in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., moving with his wife to smaller quarters.

Her income from a teacher`s pension is $11,000, and the severance part of his Verizon package will bring him $18,000 annually in monthly payments spread over four years. That is not enough, Mr. Carney said, not with a son in the first year of law school. (His other child, also a son, just graduated as a dentist.) Still, Mr. Carney developed a skill while at Verizon as a safety coordinator, and he hopes now to make money in that field as a consultant.

"With even a part-time job to offset some of the bills, I`ll be all right," he said.

If work is scarce, however, he has his retirement settlement to fall back on. Like nearly everyone else who took the Verizon package, Mr. Carney elected a lump-sum payout. Verizon encouraged that choice, pointing out to employees that once interest rates rise from their present low levels, the pension plan will decline in value and lump sums will be lower in a future payout.

The payoff for the company is that it ended its pension obligations for more than 20,000 employees. For Mr. Carney, the lump sum came to more than $400,000. In a pinch, he said, the interest from investing that amount at, say, 5 percent would bring his total income to $42,000 a year, apart from his wife`s pension.

"The thing that concerns me is that I am not a financial person," he said. "I`ve worked with my hands all my life, and to a large degree, I am at the mercy of financial planners in my calculations."

The writing on the wall at FedEx was too blunt to ignore for Bobbie Temple, 46, a senior representative in human resources at the company`s overnight delivery operation, FedEx Express, where Mr. Hutchison also worked. The dot-com bust and the e-mail phenomenon have cut into demand for 24-hour delivery of documents and small packages, so FedEx is openly cutting costs.

"It was an offer I could not refuse," said Ms. Temple, who rose through hourly jobs to a final salary of more than $50,000 a year.

She was too young to qualify for early retirement or health coverage, but took a severance offer of roughly 18 months` pay. Without children and sharing a three-bedroom home with a significant other who brings in an income as an office furniture installer, she described her needs as more modest than those of most people leaving FedEx.

"Eventually I planned to do something different, and this made it sweeter to act now, and I did," Ms. Temple said. "You don`t want to become fearful of losing your job. I`ve never had that fear."

Martha L. Reading of North Plainfield, N.J., said she harbored that fear, and it figured in her decision to retire early from Verizon.

She was a manager of employee research, asking employees about their needs and their views of the company. At 56, she had an annual salary of $90,000. And with 24 years of service, she qualified for a normal pension, which she took as a lump sum of nearly $400,000. The severance portion of the incentive package — $94,000 in her case — prompted her to retire years ahead of her internal schedule.

Ms. Reading and her husband, a teacher, have adopted five children, ages 10 to 14, and she says she must work at least another decade to help support them.

"I just did not feel that with all the risks at Verizon, all the downsizings, I would be able to stay there that many years," she said. "I am not saying it would not be a possibility. I was not sure, and I thought if ever I was going to change careers, this would be the time. If I got into my 60`s, it would be a lot harder."

The world of adoption fascinates Ms. Reading, and she said the severance package had given her the opportunity to work with an adoption agency, conducting seminars for couples considering adoption.

She earns $200 to $300 for each family that signs up with the agency, which means she must successfully refer about 300 families a year to earn the $70,000 that she says she needs.

That much annual income is a long shot, and if she cannot earn it, then she will hunt for work, probably in market research — behaving, in other words, no differently from someone who has been laid off involuntarily.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 11, 2004
Another Test for Qaddafi: Who Infected the Children?
By PATRICK E. TYLER

BENGHAZI, Libya, — Nesma Wershefani looks at visitors warily, with piercing black eyes.

Last fall, at age 6, she went to first grade with a backpack and a brightly colored tunic, full of excitement about learning. Now she is back at home because the other children teased her about having the virus that causes AIDS, a disease she does not yet understand.

"The children and the teachers treated her very badly, and she was socially rejected," said her father, Naji Wershefani, a truck driver in Benghazi, a port city of 700,000. Mr. Wershefani, his wife and five children live in a tiny apartment on a muddy street where potholes overflow with sewage and rainwater.

Across town, Suhaila Awad, 17, struggles to endure her isolation in the second year of high school; the other students know she carries the same virus. She hates to talk about it.

"Her best friend won`t see her anymore," says her father, Muhammad Awad. "It is making me very sick, too, but in my heart."

These victims of what is known as the Benghazi epidemic, which spread H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus, to more than 400 children here in 1997-98, are the most visible face of one of the most difficult political problems Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is facing as leader of Libya.

Blame has not yet been assigned, although a number of doctors and nurses, foreign and Libyan, have been charged with negligence. Some of them — only the foreigners — are in jail, facing the death penalty.

While Colonel Qaddafi`s recent decision to rid his country of programs to develop nuclear and other unconventional weapons may usher in a new era between Libya and the West, a number of European nations also expect him to make a strong gesture on human rights in Benghazi.

"This is a test case for us, and we are at a crucial moment," said a European ambassador who has been working to free seven medical workers, six Bulgarians and a Palestinian, who were arrested in 1999. European governments and rights organizations assert that the epidemic was caused by gross negligence by Libya`s Health Ministry.

But the Libyans said the seven took part in a conspiracy by the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, Israel`s spy agency, to spread H.I.V. to Libya and undermine the state.

The detainees said they were tortured and sexually abused. Libyan officials at first denied the accusations, but later arrested senior army officers who conducted the interrogations and charged them with torture, which diplomats here say is routine in the prison system. (As part of their defense, the Libyan officers assert they, too, were tortured into confessing.)

At an AIDS conference in Nigeria in April 2001, the Libyan leader referred to the case publicly for the first time and said the foreign medical workers would be tried in the same manner as Libyan intelligence officers implicated in the operation that downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

"This is something terrible, a catastrophe, an odious crime," Colonel Qaddafi said. "We have found a doctor and a group of nurses who possessed the H.I.V. virus and who were asked to experiment" on the "effect of viruses of this type, AIDS, on the children in question."

"Who charged them with this odious task? Some said it was the C.I.A. Others said it was Mossad." The trial, he added, would be an international event, "like the Lockerbie trial."

After nearly a dozen delays, the AIDS trial began last summer.

European governments and rights groups say the Libyan Health Ministry failed to screen blood products adequately, and allowed poor sterilization practices by the staff of Al Fateh Children`s Hospital.

Yet when the outbreak was detected, the Libyan administrators accused the foreign staff of conspiracy to murder, in an act of "scapegoating," as one European ambassador called it.

"They singled out the Bulgarians because they came from a weak and isolated country, and they assumed they would receive no help," the ambassador said. "But they were wrong."

Help came in many forms: Italy, France and Switzerland invited hundreds of the infected children for treatment and counseling in European hospitals, while two of Europe`s most prominent AIDS specialists, Prof. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, and Vittorio Colizzi, an Italian researcher, studied the epidemic and found that the foreign medical workers were less to blame than the hospital administration was.

The patient who set off the epidemic, they said, was already in the hospital before the foreign medical workers arrived. In addition, they cited poor sanitary conditions, broken sterilization equipment, the reuse of needles and shortages of disposable syringes.

Many affected families are still willing to believe the worst of the foreigners.

Muhammad Wanis Ghadir, 50, whose 6-year-old son, Wanis, became infected when he went to the hospital to be treated for asthma, is "100 percent certain" that the Bulgarians and the Palestinian were testing a "manufactured" strain of H.I.V. on an unsuspecting population.

Mr. Wershefani said, "I went to the court every day and had to look into the face of the people who murdered my daughter."

With emotions so high, Colonel Qaddafi must now intervene and has told Western diplomats he will do so. The trial court suspended its work in December to await a judgment by a commission of Libyan doctors.

If Colonel Qaddafi accepts the Western judgment that Libya`s negligent health system caused the catastrophe, he will win praise in Europe, but he will be forced to assign blame at home. That could cost him more than Lockerbie; with more than 400 infected people asking for $10 million each, the payout would exceed $4 billion. Libya has pledged $2.7 billion to Lockerbie survivors.

"The state has to pay, because they are responsible to us," said Mr. Wershefani. "The children were in a Libyan hospital."

Every day he must face his daughter Nesma, already frail from a poor appetite. "She is part of me and I am losing part of me," he said. "She is growing up to die."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 9, 2004
Q&A: U.S.-Iran Relations

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 9, 2003


David L. Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the deputy director of its Center for Preventive Action, visited Iran in December. On the basis of that trip and in the aftermath of the December 26 earthquake in Bam, he says that opportunities exist for a useful dialogue between Iran and the United States.

Surveying Iran`s political scene, Phillips says that Iranian feel disillusioned by the failure of President Mohammed Khatami`s government to produce results. He says that the best hope for change in Iran lies with what he calls "the reform-minded wing of the conservative camp."

Phillips was interviewed on January 7, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.

The U.S. offer of aid--and Tehran`s acceptance of it--after the earthquake in Bam led to speculation about a new Iranian-U.S. dialogue. From what you learned in mid-December, how would you characterize the possibilities for U.S.-Iranian relations?

The Iranians are keen to have contact with Americans and explore common interests with the U.S. government.

This comes from the highest levels?

The people I have been interacting with are in the foreign ministry, in the civil society, and also from some of the more open-minded members of the conservative camp.

Are they looking in particular for contacts with the United States as a result of the agreement reached in October with Britain, France, and Germany, representing the European Union, on nuclear issues?

The Iranians had hoped that [in the wake of the] agreement with the Europeans on nuclear issues, the United States would drop its objections and would take a more positive approach on those questions. That didn`t happen in Vienna at [a meeting of] the International Atomic Energy Agency. So the idea of building on Iran`s decision to sign an additional protocol to the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing more intrusive inspections] and change the dynamic or the tone of U.S.-Iranian relations has not materialized. There`s still deep resentment in Iran about U.S. efforts to pressure Iran on its nuclear program and to embarrass it in the court of international public opinion.

What is the official U.S. position right now on Iran?

The Iranians violated their commitments under the non-proliferation treaty. They were essentially caught red-handed with enriched uranium and with technology, including laser technologies, to develop material that could be used for a nuclear weapons program. The amount of weapons-grade material was infinitesimal. The Iranians say that in 17 years, if they had wanted to initiate a weapons program, they could have. They claim that their nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes. Some Washington circles do not believe Iran`s assertions. They believe that more robust inspections are needed to make sure that Iran does not violate its commitments.

Haven`t the Iranians signed the protocol?

They did sign it. It`s going now to the Majlis [Iranian parliament] for authorization. That`s a big step forward. Now the Iranians have to implement. If there is progress on the nuclear issue, a climate can be created for the United States and Iran to explore other areas for contact and cooperation.

In Washington, there is obviously a division over what to do about Iran. Can you describe that split?

There`s one camp that believes you should have discreet discussions, specifically on Iran`s role in neighboring Iraq. There`s another camp that believes Iran is ill-intentioned and would never fulfill any obligation that advances American interests. The latter point of view prevails. After the May 12 [2003] bombings in Saudi Arabia, which the United States [based on telephone intercepts] claims were linked to al Qaeda members in detention in Iran, the United States suspended its discreet contacts and there has been no official interaction since that time.

The Iranians deny this allegation [about the Saudi bombings]. The Iranians claim the al Qaeda detainees do not have cell phones and would have no way of pulling the trigger from their prison cells in Sistan-Baluchistan province. The truth remains to be seen.

What about these Qaeda people? Obviously, the United States would like to get hold of them.

The belief is that Iran has some "big fish" under detention, including Saif al-Adel, who was the operations chief for al Qaeda. The continuing presence of the MKO [the Mujahedeen Khalq Organization, an anti-Iranian government group also known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and the People`s Mujahedeen] in Iraq represented a stumbling block impeding Iranian action concerning the Qaeda detainees. In early December, the governing council in Iraq issued an edict calling for the deportation of the People`s Mujahedeen members who are under American control.

Would that ease the whole question for U.S.-Iranian relations?

Nobody`s prepared to make a deal swapping MKO and al Qaeda. Both the U.S. and Iranian governments say they are not in the business of swapping terrorists. The fact of the matter is that, as long as the MKO was in Iraq, little chance existed for Iran to act on the al Qaeda detainees. There were reports of considerable cooperation between the Pentagon and the MKO. Apparently, the MKO was allowed to keep its weapons, convene press conferences, and travel internationally. If the governing council throws the MKO out of Iraq, that should create some space for Iran. What`s important is a uniform approach to the fight against terrorism. The Iranian government should get rid of the Qaeda detainees and send them to their countries of origin.

But in most cases, the countries of origin wouldn`t be enthusiastic about welcoming them back?

That`s been a problem. The countries, by and large, don`t want them.

Since you were in Iran, the earthquake occurred; the United States offered to send an aid delegation headed by Senator Elizabeth Dole [the former head of the American Red Cross]. The Iranians said "not now." Is there a basis for a dialogue now?

I have studied the impact of the August 1999 earthquakes between Turkey and Greece on Greek-Turkish relations. An earthquake reminds people of their mortality. There are certain forces over which we have no control. The fact that the United States is prepared to provide assistance is a very positive sign. Lifting some Treasury Department prohibitions on the transfer of goods and services was a positive step. The Iranians didn`t refuse to accept the United States delegation. They just asked that it be kept in abeyance because their absorptive capacity right now is extremely limited. I think there are openings for both the United States and Iran to pursue their national interests and to find areas of convergence.

What would the United States want from Iran?

Signing the special nuclear protocol last fall was the first step as far as the United States was concerned. Implementing it in a verifiable manner must come next. Compliance is an important and legitimate expectation.

The United States also wants Iran to turn over the Qaeda detainees, either to U.S. custody, which is not likely, or return them to their country of origin. The United States also wants the Iranians to play a constructive role in Iraq. What the Iranians say is that the United States and Iran want the same things in Iraq--a democratic country, where the Arab Shiites have proportional representation. The recent plan for indirect caucuses [to choose delegates to a constitutional convention] is a step in that direction but doesn`t quite address the demand of Shiites for direct elections as integral to the democratization process.

There is also the issue of previous Iranian support for Hezbollah, and whether Iran is still a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran maintains it is not and that Hezbollah has [transformed] into a political party. It points to the presence of Hezbollah members in Iraq that have not been involved in any terrorist activity. This matter is also disputed.

And what does Iran want?

It wants recognition of its role as a regional power. Pride is very important to Iranians. The government has broader interests about lifting sanctions and unfreezing assets.

In February, there are elections for the Iranian Majlis. The reformers won big in previous elections, but there has recently been some disillusion among supporters of reform. What is your sense of the political scene?

The last three elections since 1997--for president, for parliament, and local government--have all been overwhelmingly won by reform candidates. This occurred despite the fact that the Guardian Council [made up of conservative clergy and laymen] maintains its prerogative to take candidates off the ballot if they are too controversial. The fact of the matter is the Iranian people--and I had a chance to interact with civil society when I was there--are deeply disaffected by President Mohammed Khatami`s inability to deliver reforms. They feel that the window of opportunity was opened briefly but that Khatami lacked the capacity to move forward. In the last local elections for town councils, only 12 percent to 15 percent [of eligible voters] participated. A similar turnout is expected for the upcoming Majlis elections. The conservatives have a core group of supporters that they know they can turn out, but many of the reformers are so deeply disaffected that they are unlikely to show up at the polls.

My estimate is that the Majlis is going to swing back into the conservative camp. If there is going to be progress in Iran, it is likely to come out of the reform-minded wing of the conservative camp that wants to take a slow and incremental approach. Nobody has an appetite for another major revolution or a showdown. The key Iranian leader who worked with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khomeini on urging acceptance of the optional [nuclear] protocol was Hasan Rowhani, who is the chairman of Iran`s National Security Council. Rowhani, himself, may be in a position to run for president next year.

What does "reform" mean? What would "reformers" like to see happen?

A large part of that is normalizing Iran`s international relations and integrating Iran into the international community, so that Iran benefits more from increased political and economic contact. The economy in Iran has not done well. Iranians have high expectations but feel like they are being left behind. Reform is about political participation. It is also about getting into the global mainstream.

I notice Iran is about to restore relations with Egypt, ending Tehran`s isolation from the Arab world. Does that leave the United States as the main stumbling block to Iran`s emergence on the world scene?

The Iranians speak a lot about their sense of pride. They feel it is a defining characteristic of the Iranian people. In large measure, their problems with the United States result from the lack of respect they feel they are accorded as a regional and international. So while there are substantive issues, there are also issues of tone that have to be addressed. I personally don`t feel there is a huge divergence in U.S.-Iranian interests.

But the impression persists that Iran is backing terrorist groups. Is that not true?

Iran is on the United States government`s list of states that sponsor terrorist groups. Iran maintains it is no longer involved in supporting terrorism. Whether that is true today or was true in the past is to be determined.

The United States and Iran did have discussions before the Iraq war, didn`t they?

There was constructive contact between the United States and Iran leading up to the action in Afghanistan. And Iran played a central role at the Bonn loya jirga in November 2001 [where plans were laid for Afghanistan`s postwar government]. President Bush`s State of the Union speech in January 2002 labeling Iran as part of the "axis of evil" was regarded by Iranians as a betrayal. Those who had stretched out their hands to the United States felt their hands were chopped off. During the run-up to the Iraq war, there were also contacts between officials of the United States and Iran. There were agreements in place on search and rescue, about collaboration on humanitarian assistance. Iran feels the lack of a plan to hand over sovereignty to Iraq--and the failure to enlist Iran as a partner--poisoned the relationship even further.

After the United States accused Iran of abetting al Qaeda detainees in connection with the May 12 bombing in Saudi Arabia, contact was broken off. It is time for those discreet contacts to be resumed. If we were able to open up channels, find ways of working more closely together on Iraq, collaborate more closely in the fight against terrorism, then in time Iran might evolve into a country that is friendly to U.S. interests in the region.

[Joerver]

January 11, 2004
The Faulty Weapons Estimates

There seems little doubt that the Bush administration`s prime justification for invading Iraq — the fear that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction — was way off base. Nine months of fruitless searching have made that increasingly clear.

But last week three new reports cast further doubt on the administration`s reckless rush to invade Iraq. Taken together, they paint a picture far different from the one presented to Americans early last year. They depict a world in which Saddam Hussein, though undeniably eager to make Iraq a threatening world power, was far from any serious steps to do that. The reports strengthen our conviction that whatever threat Iraq posed did not require an immediate invasion without international support. And they underline the importance of finding out how far the Bush administration`s obsession with the Iraqi dictator warped the American intelligence reports that did so much to convince Congress and the public that the attack was justified.

The likelihood that significant weapons of mass destruction will be found seemed to grow even more remote last week with publication of an investigative report by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post. Mr. Gellman, who perused Iraqi documents and interviewed key Iraqis and members of the American search team, found that Iraq`s effort to produce terror weapons had been so thoroughly beaten down by conflict, sanctions and arms embargoes that its forbidden weapons program amounted mainly to wishful thinking.

A program to produce missiles with enough range to reach neighboring capitals, for example, turned out to exist only in designs and computations on two compact discs. Experts estimated it would have taken at least six years to build the missile, if it had worked at all. A planned genetic engineering lab to design germ weapons was never completed. Most dramatically of all, an internal letter, written by Iraq`s top unconventional-weapons official in 1995 to one of Saddam Hussein`s sons, asserted unequivocally that Iraq had destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons agents in 1991, proving the falsity of intelligence estimates that Iraq still possessed large quantities of germ materials.

The failure to find anything significant has particularly disturbed Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration national security official whose book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" led many moderates and Democrats to believe that an invasion was justified — at least in time to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, a prospect that seemed only a few years away. Now, in an article in The Atlantic magazine, Mr. Pollack anguishes over how estimates of Iraq`s capabilities could have been so far off.

He puts most of the blame on the intelligence community, which overestimated the scope and progress of Iraq`s weapons programs starting in the late 1990`s, partly because a lack of hard evidence led analysts to assume the worst. But he also condemns the Bush administration for distorting the intelligence estimates in making the case for going to war, particularly by implying that Iraq could have had a nuclear weapon within a year when estimates suggested five to seven years was more likely. Even that number now looks far-fetched given that Iraq`s nuclear program was virtually eliminated.

Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also found that three intelligence services that are arguably the best in the world — those of the United States, Britain and Israel — were tragically unable to provide accurate information on Iraq. But the Carnegie experts are even harsher in condemning the administration for deliberate exaggerations. They argue that the intelligence community gave reasonably cautious assessments up until mid-2002, when official statements and estimates suddenly became increasingly alarmist. The Carnegie analysts accuse the Bush administration of putting intense pressure on intelligence experts to conform, of minimizing the existence of dissenting views, and of routinely dropping caveats and uncertainties in painting a worst-case picture.

What emerges most forcefully from these reports is the need for two thorough inquiries. Even though members of the American search team in Iraq told Mr. Gellman they hold little prospect for major discoveries of forbidden weapons, the search must continue vigorously to a conclusion, preferably with the assistance of United Nations inspectors who have a huge database on Iraq and are more credible to much of the world. Back home, a nonpartisan investigation independent of political pressures from the administration and Congress is needed to get a better sense of how judgments about Iraq were so disastrously mistaken. Nothing can be fixed until we know for sure how it happened.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Als Diskussionsgrundlage ist Friedman, trotz seiner zweifelhaften Ansichten, immer zu gebrauchen.

January 11, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
War of Ideas, Part 2
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

While visiting Istanbul the other day, I took a long walk along the Bosporus near Topkapi Palace. There is nothing like standing at this stunning intersection of Europe and Asia to think about the clash of civilizations — and how we might avoid it. Make no mistake: we are living at a remarkable hinge of history and it`s not clear how it`s going to swing.

What is clear is that Osama bin Laden achieved his aim: 9/11 sparked real tensions between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East. Preachers on both sides now openly denounce each other`s faith. Whether these tensions explode into a real clash of civilizations will depend a great deal on whether we build bridges or dig ditches between the West and Islam in three key places — Turkey, Iraq and Israel-Palestine.

Let`s start with Turkey — the only Muslim, free-market democracy in Europe. I happened to be in Istanbul when the street outside one of the two synagogues that were suicide-bombed on Nov. 15 was reopened. Three things struck me: First, the chief rabbi of Turkey appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds in the street threw red carnations on them. Second, the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamist party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi — the first time a Turkish prime minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Third, and most revealing, was the statement made by the father of one of the Turkish suicide bombers who hit the synagogues.

"We are a respectful family who love our nation, flag and the Koran," the grieving father, Sefik Elaltuntas, told the Zaman newspaper. "But we cannot understand why this child had done the thing he had done . . . First, let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish brothers. Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me apologize in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the deaths. . . . We will be damned if we do not reconcile with them."

The same newspaper also carried a quote from Cemil Cicek, the Turkish government spokesman, who said: "The Islamic world should take stringent measures against terrorism without any `buts` or `howevers.` "

There is a message here: Context matters. Turkish politicians are not intimidated by religious fundamentalists, because — unlike too many Arab politicians — they have their own legitimacy that comes from being democratically elected. At the same time, the Turkish parents of suicide bombers don`t all celebrate their children`s suicide. They are not afraid to denounce this barbarism, because they live in a free society where such things are considered shameful and alien to the moderate Turkish brand of Islam — which has always embraced religious pluralism and which most Turks feel is the "real" Islam.

For all these reasons, if we want to help moderates win the war of ideas within the Muslim world, we must help strengthen Turkey as a model of democracy, modernism, moderation and Islam all working together. Nothing would do that more than having Turkey be made a member of the European Union — which the E.U. will basically decide this year. Turkey has undertaken a huge number of reforms to get itself ready for E.U. membership. If, after all it has done, the E.U. shuts the door on Turkey, extremists all over the Muslim world will say to the moderates: "See, we told you so — it`s a Christian club and we`re never going to be let in. So why bother adapting to their rules?"

I think Turkey`s membership in the E.U. is so important that the U.S. should consider subsidizing the E.U. to make it easier for Turkey to be admitted. If that fails, we should offer to bring Turkey into Nafta, even though it would be very complicated.

"If the E.U. creates some pretext and says `no` to Turkey, after we have done all this, I am sure the E.U. will lose and the world will lose," Turkey`s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, told me in Ankara. "If Turkey is admitted, the E.U. is going to win and world peace is going to win. This would be a gift to the Muslim world. . . . When I travel to other Muslim countries — Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia — they are proud of what we are doing. They are proud of our process [of political and economic reform to join the E.U.]. They mention this to me. They ask, `How is this going?` "

Yes, everyone is watching, which is why the E.U. would be making a huge mistake — a hinge of history mistake — if it digs a ditch around Turkey instead of building a bridge.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 11, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Argyle General
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON--Can we trust a man who muffs his mufti?

Trying to soften his military image and lure more female voters in New Hampshire, Gen. Wesley Clark switched from navy suits to argyle sweaters. It`s an odd strategy. The best way to beat a doctor is not to look like a pharmacist.

General Clark`s new pal Madonna, who knows something about pointy fashion statements, should have told him that those are not the kind of diamonds that make girls swoon.

Is there anything more annoying than argyle? Maybe Lamar Alexander`s red plaid shirt. Maybe celebrities sporting red Kabbalah strings.

After General Clark`s ill-fitting suits in his first few debates — his collars seemed to be standing away from his body in a different part of the room — a sudden infusion of dandified sweaters and duck boots just intensifies the impression that he`s having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.

It`s also a little alarming that he thinks the way to ensorcell women is to swaddle himself in woolly geometric shapes that conjure up images of Bing Crosby on the links or Fred MacMurray at the kitchen table.

"I think there`s an impression that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution," he told The Times about his gender gap, notwithstanding the fact that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution.

After his rivals jumped on him for trading hats with the Bosnian war criminal Ratko Mladic in 1994, you`d think he`d stick to his true gear.

His own Army camouflage — a material modish in the last few years in everything from bras to cargo pants to grenade-tossing Madonna videos — would have caused more of a frisson in female voters than country club plaid. (After all, the president`s harnessed "Top Gun" costume set Republican female hearts aflutter.)

On Thursday, eight reporters and three minicams trailed the general as he sweater-shopped at L. L. Bean in Concord, N.H. Chris Suellentrop filed a fashion dispatch in Slate that the Democratic candidate tried on "a plain, green, wool crew neck sweater."

Maybe the former supreme allied commander should stop fretting over his style and do more with Colin Powell`s belated admission that despite his assertions to the U.N. last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. General Clark has long been skeptical of that link.

Is his staff watching "What Not to Wear" or "Style Court"? It`s discouraging to see presidential campaigns succumb to the makeover culture. Obviously, appearances count, but clothes don`t make the man. Sometimes, they unmake him.

In the final stretch of Michael Dukakis`s moribund `88 campaign, he borrowed an aide`s brown suede jacket to look cozier. (If General Clark has trouble with civvies, Mr. Dukakis was a dud with military duds, aping Rocky the Flying Squirrel on that tank.)

Al Gore sprouted earth tones in 2000, hoping heathery brown sweaters and khakis would warm him up.

During her Senate campaign, Hillary Clinton emulated Barbara Walters and began tying a sweater around her neck, over suits, to look softer and more feminine.

Sometimes sweaters can do the trick, and sometimes they can`t.

Dan Rather, who had been perceived as colder than his predecessor, Walter Cronkite, suddenly got better ratings in 1982 and pulled into first place when he started wearing gray and maroon sweater vests under a sport coat to deliver the news. The Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales hailed Mr. Rather`s "trust-me, you`ve-got-a-friend, hello-out-there-in-television-land" aura.

But Jimmy Carter learned how clothes, like rabbits, can viciously turn on you after he gave an energy conservation fireside chat in a gray cardigan. Americans who had embraced Mr. Carter`s populist polyester blend suits railed against the cardigan, associating it with malaise and economic pain.

I asked Dan Rather about Wesley Clark`s sweater strategy.

"It makes a difference what kind of sweater you wear," he replied. "Some sweaters went out of style about the time spats did. You don`t want to pick one of those."

In a sartorial update to Churchill, General Clark wants to lead us in our battle against terrorism, giving his blood, toil, tears and sweaters.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Doonesbury is on vacation until 1/11/2004. Please enjoy this Flashback.

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Thawra Youssef, right, with family members in Basra, said that she didn`t complain about being called a slave, but that it "provoked" her to study the traditions of Iraqis of African descent.
A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight

Iraqis of African Descent Are a Largely Overlooked Link to Slavery
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01
BASRA, Iraq
The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she sensed it was an insult.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6645-2004Jan1…
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washingtonpost.com
Insurgents Downed Copter in Iraq, Army Says
U.S. Troops Kill 2 Policemen, 4 Taxi Passengers in Separate Incidents in North

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A13


BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 -- A U.S. Army helicopter that crashed this week west of Baghdad, killing four crew members and five passengers, was shot down by insurgents, U.S. officials said Saturday.

The death toll in Thursday`s incident involving a UH-60 Black Hawk was the highest in a military helicopter crash in Iraq since November, when a pair of Black Hawks collided over the northern city of Mosul. Seventeen soldiers died in that incident.

"The investigation has not concluded, but preliminary reports are that the helicopter was shot down by ground fire," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman. The military`s statement bolstered witness accounts that some sort of rocket brought down the Black Hawk. U.S. officials declined Saturday to speculate about what kind of weapon was used.

The helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, a center of anti-U.S. resistance in central Iraq, where support for deposed president Saddam Hussein has been strong.

An Iraqi official familiar with intelligence information said recent attacks on U.S. helicopters in the Fallujah area, which lies on a main road from Syria and Jordan, lent credence to reports that foreign fighters have infiltrated Iraq and form an effective, if small part of the Iraqi resistance. "Some of this equipment requires maintenance and know-how, and this likely comes from outside," the official said.

Hussein was captured on Dec. 13, but the Black Hawk crash added to evidence suggesting that Iraqi guerrillas still have both the will and the wherewithal to carry out spectacular acts of violence. Kimmitt said attacks on U.S. forces currently averaged 17 per day.

American forces are aggressively pursuing tips on locations of guerrilla hide-outs and rounding up scores of suspects, U.S. officials say. In the past few days, however, the get-tough policy has resulted in deadly mistakes. In the northern town of Kirkuk, soldiers shot and killed a pair of Iraqi policemen who had been involved in a domestic dispute and who fled when soldiers approached, according to Maj. Josselyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division.

"The soldiers pursued them, shouting warnings and firing warning shots, but the men did not respond," Aberle said. One man died immediately after being shot by U.S. troops; the other died before reaching the hospital.

In Tikrit, soldiers fired on a taxi as it passed a military convoy, killing four passengers, including a 7-year-old boy. Lt. Col Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division, called the shooting a "human tragedy."

"I believe we have a moral obligation to find out what occurred," Russell told reporters.

In southern Iraq, populated by Shiite Muslims who have generally been friendly to the U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi police and British troops fired on a group of armed rioters in the town of Amarah, witnesses said. At least four civilians died, hospital officials said.

Members of the crowd, who had been protesting joblessness, stormed the mayor`s office, then his house and then the house of his brother. The mayor fled, and his whereabouts were unknown.

As occupation troops continued searching for recently developed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Danish military on Saturday reported finding artillery shells containing a suspicious liquid that could be a chemical blistering agent.

Initial tests, which have yet to be confirmed, were taken after Danish troops found 36 120mm mortar rounds on Friday hidden in southern Iraq, the Reuters news agency reported. The Danish army said, however, that the rounds had been buried for at least 10 years.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Iraqi officials unveiled new Iraqi postage stamps that, for the first time in decades, did not carry Hussein`s portrait. The motif was along the theme of transportation. Different denominations were decorated with a horse and carriage, a tram, a rubber boat for traversing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, camels and a canoe floating among reeds.

Iraqi officials reacted with alarm to the Bush administration`s designation of Hussein as a prisoner of war. Iraqi leaders have said that they want to conduct Hussein`s trial, but under the Geneva Conventions, a POW can be tried only for war crimes by the occupying power or by an international tribunal.

"Iraqi legal bodies will determine Saddam`s status," said Justice Minister Hashim Abdul-Rahman Shibli.

Dan Senor, the spokesman for the civilian body that administers Iraq, said Hussein`s POW designation does not prejudge who eventually tries him. "His final status has not been determined," said Senor, who repeated President Bush`s pledge that Iraqis will have a "leadership role" in trying Hussein.



© 2004 The Washington Post

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washingtonpost.com
Afflicted By Comfort


By George F. Will

Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page B07


"What good is happiness? It can`t buy money."

-- Henny Youngman

Social hypochondria is the national disease of the most successful nation. By most indexes, life has improved beyond the dreams of even very recent generations. Yet many Americans, impervious to abundant data and personal experiences, insist that progress is a chimera.

Gregg Easterbrook`s impressive new book, "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," explains this perversity. Easterbrook, a Washington journalist and fellow of the Brookings Institution, assaults readers with good news.

American life expectancy has dramatically increased in a century, from 47 to 77 years. Our great-great-grandparents all knew someone who died of some disease we never fear; as recently as 1952, polio killed 3,300 Americans. Our largest public health problems arise from unlimited supplies of affordable food.

The typical American has twice the purchasing power his mother or father had in 1960. A third of America`s families own at least three cars. In 2001 Americans spent $25 billion -- more than North Korea`s GDP -- on recreational watercraft.

Factor out immigration -- a huge benefit to the immigrants -- and statistical evidence of widening income inequality disappears. The statistic that household incomes are only moderately higher than 25 years ago is misleading: Households today average fewer people, so real dollar incomes in middle-class households are about 50 percent higher today. Since 1970 the number of cars has increased 68 percent and the number of miles driven has increased even more, yet smog has declined by a third and traffic fatalities have declined from 52,627 to 42,815 last year. In 2003 we spent much wealth on things unavailable in 1953 -- a cleaner environment, reduced mortality through new medical marvels ($5.2 billion a year just for artificial knees, which did not exist a generation ago), the ability to fly anywhere or talk to anyone anywhere. The incidence of heart disease, stroke and cancer, when adjusted for population growth, is declining.

The rate of child poverty is down in a decade. America soon will be the first society in which a majority of adults are college graduates.

And so it goes. But Easterbrook says that such is today`s "discontinuity between prosperity and happiness," the "surge of national good news" scares people, vexes the news media and does not even nudge up measurements of happiness. Easterbrook`s explanations include:

• "The tyranny of the small picture." The preference for bad news produces a focus on smaller remaining problems after larger ones are ameliorated. Ersatz bad news serves the fundraising of "gloom interest groups." It also inflates the self-importance of elites, who lose status when society is functioning well. Media elites, especially, have a stake in "headline-amplified anxiety."

• "Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst." In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits. Perhaps our relaxed and cheerful progenitors were eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Only the anxiety-prone gene pool prospered.

• "Catalogue-induced anxiety" and "the revenge of the plastic" both cause material abundance to increase unhappiness. The more we can order and charge, the more we are aware of what we do not possess. The "modern tyranny of choice" causes consumers perpetual restlessness and regret.

• The "latest model syndrome" abets the "tyranny of the unnecessary," which leads to the "10-hammer syndrome." We have piled up mountains of marginally improved stuff, in the chaos of which we cannot find any of our nine hammers, so we buy a 10th, and the pile grows higher. Thus does the victor belong to the spoils.

• The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today`s culture of complaint.

Easterbrook, while arguing that happiness should be let off its leash, is far from complacent. He is scandalized by corporate corruption and poverty in the midst of so much abundance. And he has many commonsensical thoughts on how to redress the imbalance many people feel between their abundance of material things and the scarcity of meaning that they feel in their lives. The gist of his advice is that we should pull up our socks, spiritually, and make meaning by doing good while living well.

His book arrives as the nation enters an election year, when the opposition, like all parties out of power, will try to sow despondency by pointing to lead linings on all silver clouds. His timely warning is that Americans are becoming colorblind, if only to the color silver.


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© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Newsweek Poll: Dean vs. Bush?

One week before the nation’s first election-season test, Dean holds strong to his lead among Democratic voters

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Updated: 1:52 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2004Jan. 10 - Howard Dean and George W. Bush, who many political analysts say are most likely to face each other in next November’s presidential election, have both kicked off the new year with strong starts, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. One week before the Iowa Caucus, the nation’s first election test, Dean continues to poll strongest among rival candidates with registered Democrats. And Bush, still capitalizing on the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, seems to have stemmed a months-long erosion in his popularity.

Bush’s approval rating has climbed to 54 percent (from around 51 percent prior to Saddam’s capture) and 50 percent of Americans say they approve of the way things are going in Iraq, an increase from 45 percent before the Iraqi leader’s arrest. Meanwhile, after a holiday season marked by fears of terror attacks in the United States, 70 percent of registered voters say they approve of the way Bush has worked to prevent or minimize terrorism at home, his highest approval rating in that category since last May. This could prove significant in coming months because 60 percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for Bush because of his handling of terrorism.

While leadership in Iraq may be the president’s strongest suit in the polls, Bush also is polling better on the economy, with a 46 percent approval ranking, an increase from 41 percent in December and a low of 37 percent in September. And 71 percent of all voters say they think the economy is in either good or fair shape. Democrats, though, believe Bush remains vulnerable on the issue: A report released Friday by the Labor Department concludes that the fast-growing U.S. economy created only 1,000 new jobs in December, far less than the 130,000 that had been expected. “With the recovery that we’re supposed to be in, adding a thousand jobs is pathetic, nothing short of pitiful and pathetic,” Democratic candidate Rep. Richard Gephardt told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday.

Last week, Bush unveiled a new plan to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy by giving undocumented, illegal immigrant workers temporary legal status. For now, Bush holds just a 32 percent approval rating on the issue; 51 percent of Americans say they disapprove. Bush remains similarly weak on health care-exactly half disapprove of his health care policies over all (versus 37 percent) and after a proposed overhaul that some have painted as doling favors to drug companies, 47 percent of voters disapprove of his handling of Medicare (also versus 37 percent).

For his part, Dean continues to lead the pack of Democratic contenders in the run-up to Iowa and the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary. Dean continues to hold the support of 24 percent of registered Democrats. Gen. Wesley Clark (with 12 percent of Democrats’ votes), Gephardt (12 percent) and Sen. John Kerry (12 percent) are all left jostling for second in a crowded field. Perhaps because there are so many candidates vying for the nomination, a majority (58 percent) of registered Democrats prefer someone other than Dean. Still, only 17 percent of them have an unfavorable opinion of the former Vermont governor, compared with the 59 percent who say they view him favorably. This is consistent with the fact that Democrats consistently choose Dean as the candidate most likely to defeat Bush (33 percent) and best suited to manage the fragile economy (27 percent) Democratic voters, however, say they would feel more comfortable leaving national security to a retired general-most Democratic voters, 26 percent of them, consider Clark better able to lead the war terror (compared to 18 percent for Dean).

For similar reasons, Dean may have a struggle on his hands when it comes to appealing to the electorate at large. Cast as an almost polar opposite to Bush, the anti-war Dean is perceived by 43 percent of all voters as too liberal to defeat the “compassionate conservative” in the White House. Almost half (44 percent) consider him too hotheaded and undiplomatic while 33 percent interpret his temperament as passion for the issues.

With Bush’s domestic policy weaknesses squaring off against Dean’s perceived foreign policy inexperience, if a general election were held today the two men would be at the mercy of a nation divided. Forty-eight percent of registered voters polled would like to see Bush re-elected-46 percent said they would not (this breaks down predictably along party lines with 76 percent of Democratic voters strongly opposing his reelection). Forty-one percent (versus 42 percent) say a Democrat would do a better job on the economy and, similarly, 41 percent (versus 45 percent) say a Democrat would be better suited to manage foreign policy. And if a general election were held today, Dean would grab 43 percent of the vote compared to Bush’s 51 percent. This eight-point spread has held steady over the past couple months. In an election today Bush would also beat Clark (50 percent to 41 percent), Kerry (52 percent versus 41 percent) and Gerphardt (50 percent to 43 percent) by similar margins.

For this NEWSWEEK poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 1,001 adults aged 18 and older Jan. 8 and Jan. 9 by telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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February 24th, 2001: Powell Admits Saddam, "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction"

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Powell: "He (Saddam) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime`s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue."






Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Cairo, Egypt (Ittihadiya Palace)
February 24, 2001

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: I would like to welcome the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, on his first visit to Egypt, especially at this juncture when a lot of things are taking place and following the serious developments in this region. We welcome the Secretary of State as we welcome the role of the United States as the main sponsor of the peace process and as a friend of Egypt. We met with the President and the Secretary and we went through all the items on the agenda from the bilateral, the regional, to the peace process and other issues of common concern. They went very well. Also our meeting, which lasted for quite some time, covered those issues, too. We look forward to working together in order to bring the peace process on track and reach a just and lasting peace as soon as possible to put an end to the tragic situation in the Occupied Territories. The other issues relate to stability in the region.

SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. Minister and good evening ladies and gentlemen. I am very pleased to be back in Egypt and to have had the opportunity to meet and consult with President Mubarak and with the Foreign Minister. I`ve known President Mubarak for many, many years and it is good to renew the friendship. He is looked on as a wise leader not only by his people, but by people throughout the region and throughout the world. This occasion also gave me the opportunity to strengthen my relationship with the Foreign Minister and I look forward to working with him in the months and in the years ahead.

President Bush asked me to make Egypt the first stop in my Middle East trip -- to seek the advice and consul of President Mubarak on several critical issues. We discussed the deterioration of the situation between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the escalating violence, which is causing us all such concern. In our conversation we recommitted ourselves to the search for peace based on U.N Security Council Resolution 242 and 338. We also discussed the need to relieve the burden on the Iraqi people whilst strengthening controls on Saddam Hussein`s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and the means for their delivery. Egypt and the United States have a long-standing intensive military-to-military relationship, which grew stronger as we stood as comrades-in-arms to defend an Arab state--Kuwait--from unprecedented aggression some ten years ago. We stand ready today to meet any similar challenge to the international integrity and security of the states in the region. We are also cooperating, as you all know, to develop new opportunities for trade and investment and to strengthen Egypt`s participation in the global economy. We will meet again shortly; I look forward to that meeting. President Bush has invited President Mubarak to visit Washington on April 2nd and President Mubarak has accepted that invitation. President Bush and I look forward to seeing him then, to further cement our strong relationship with Egypt.

Thank you very much.

QUESTION: The Egyptian press editorial commentary that we have seen here has been bitterly aggressive in denouncing the U.S. role and not welcoming you. I am wondering whether you believe you accomplished anything during your meetings to assuage concerns about the air strikes against Iraq and the continuing sanctions?

SECRETARY POWELL: I received a very warm welcome from the leaders and I know there is some unhappiness as expressed in the Egyptian press. I understand that, but at the same time, with respect to the no-fly zones and the air strikes that we from time to time must conduct to defend our pilots, I just want to remind everybody that the purpose of those no-fly zones and the purpose of those occasional strikes to protect our pilots, is not to pursue an aggressive stance toward Iraq, but to defend the people that the no-fly zones are put in to defend. The people in the southern part of Iraq and the people in the northern part of Iraq, and these zones have a purpose, and their purpose is to protect people -- protect Arabs -- not to affect anything else in the region. And we have to defend ourselves.

We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein`s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime`s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: I would wish to borrow two expressions from what the Secretary has just said, that this situation should be under constant reviewing. So it`s not a stagnant situation that we accept things as they are, but should be reviewed. The other thing is that, as the Secretary said, he knows that there is unhappiness and knows what is taking place in Iraq. What we need is to give the full chance for the talks that are going to resume or start after tomorrow in New York between the Government and the Secretary General of the United Nations about the whole question of Iraq and the Security Council resolutions, and the Secretary General is going to listen to what the Iraqis have to say, concerning sanctions, concerning the situation after ten years, etc., so this meeting should be given full opportunity for both parties to talk, to listen, and then, judging from the results of such a meeting, I believe we shall all be reviewing the situation. So there are certain stations that are coming up and we will see what we can do.

QUESTION: You said earlier that there is no moral equivalence between the Palestinian self-defense and the Israeli attacks. Will the new American Administration change its policy and not be as aggressive as the former administration?

SECRETARY POWELL: All human life is precious. What we all have to be doing now is encouraging both sides at every level to reduce the level of violence, to begin speaking to one another again, to begin restoring economic activities so that people can put food on the table, to begin restructuring the security arrangements that were lost. And so this is the time for all of us, not to point fingers at one another, but doing everything we can to reduce the level of violence, because if the level of violence remains high, then we have trouble getting the negotiations going again.

QUESTION: Do you support keeping sanctions in place against Iraq on a Presidential level? And then for Secretary Powell, if I could return to your earlier meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister. Now that you`ve had a chance to explain and to lay out some of the explanations on the national missile defense, how concerned are you that the United States is going to further alienate the Russians by moving forward precipitously with this?

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: While answering your question, first of all you have heard what Secretary Powell had to say about sanctions, that he is re-thinking our thinking of a new type of sanctions not the same. So if the Secretary of State is thinking in that way, do you think as an Arab foreign minister, I would give you a blank answer that sanctions should stay?

QUESTION: So are you saying they should be lifted?

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: Well, sanctions so far have affected the people rather than any regime. Sanctions should be reconsidered as a weapon or as one of the procedures the Security Council resorts to. But anyway, as I said, I want to concentrate on the talks that are going to take place the day after tomorrow. Those will be very important for all of us -- for the U.S., for Egypt, for the Arab countries, for Iraq, and for the rest of the world and for the international legitimacy.

SECRETARY POWELL: Let me agree with the Minister that the talks coming up between the Iraqi leadership and the Secretary General of the United Nations are important. We will see whether they are serious -- whether they want to move in the direction that will cause the sanctions to be lifted. Sanctions aren`t something we want to live with forever. They were put in place in order to bring the regime into compliance with the international community and when that has been accomplished to the satisfaction of the international community and we can trust they have been, we will be in good shape.

With respect to Mr. Ivanov, I don`t expect that my comments alienated them any further. I don`t think they are that alienated to begin with. We are having good conversations. I was very impressed, as is President Bush, impressed by the fact that in the recent proposal they put forward to NATO, they indicated that they understand that there is a danger from missiles that are carrying warheads -- that are weapons of mass destruction. So I think we had a good conversation, a candid exchange of views, as is said in the diplomatic world. We have much more to talk about in the months ahead without alienating each other in the process.

QUESTION: Secretary Powell, there is a general feeling and consensus that the new American administration is prioritizing the Iraq issue than the Israeli-Arab conflict, which is the priority in the Arab agenda. So, I`d like your comment.

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I don`t think that`s accurate. I think the Bush administration is trying to look at the whole region as a priority and that you can`t separate out these pieces-they`re all linked. One rather significant change in emphasis in the new administration is that we are talking to our friends about all the issues in the region and not just one issue being more important than the others. That prioritization doesn`t work any longer, in my judgement.

QUESTION: Mr. Minister, given the attack by the United States on Iraq last week, do you think there is a dangerous diversion from the efforts being made don`t help calm the situation on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza?

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: Look, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza and on the Palestinian and Israeli track is very basic for all of us. So, no amount of developments in any other place would detract or distract us from the attention given to the Palestinian-Israeli track and the peace process in general with Syria and Israel and so on. But, the question of Iraq has its own dimensions and importance and we`ve discussed that in a quite detailed way and we are going to discuss that again. The peace process is so important that derailing the peace process or prolonging or procrastinating in this process would certainly affect the whole region and the stability in the Middle East in general.

QUESTION: Would you tell any specifics that Secretary Powell suggested about sanctions on Iraq and how to make them different.

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: Why do you ask me about what the Secretary said when the gentleman is right here in front of you? (Laughter)

SECRETARY POWELL: This is called push and shove. (Laughter) The Secretary can speak for himself.

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: Okay, go ahead.

QUESTION: Can we get an answer from either of you?

SECRETARY POWELL: We spoke in general terms about the sanctions regime and the specifics will come later. Right now, I`m in the process of consulting with my friends throughout the region and when that consultation process is finished and I`ve taken it back and talked to the President and talked to our friends at the Perm Five within the U.N., then all the specifics appropriate will be announced.

QUESTION: So you did not go beyond talking about (inaudible), you did not talk about specifics?

SECRETARY POWELL: We got into some level of detail, but I don`t know if it is the level of specificity that you are looking for that I would care to speak about right now.

QUESTION: (summarized) The U.S. always tries to consult with its friends in the region, but did you consult with your friends before attacking Iraq or not?

SECRETARY POWELL: That particular strike last Friday, which got all the attention, was part of the pre-planned series of actions that we take in response to provocations from Iraqi radar systems and the like. Frankly, if it had not been so visible in terms of the announcement that the strike was undertaken, it might not have gotten the kind of attention that it did. It has certainly sensitized us to the need to do a better job of making our friends aware of the kinds of plans we are executing and the kinds of contingency plans we have for the no-fly zones.

QUESTION: You`ve mentioned trade and investment. How do you see the future of the Gore-Mubarak partnership and have you discussed with the President the future of the free trade agreement (inaudible)?

SECRETARY POWELL: I did discuss with both the Foreign Minister and the President an Egyptian-U.S. free trade agreement and made the point that we know of their interest in such an agreement. We have an interest as well. There are a lot of things that have to be done, a lot of considerations that have to be looked at before we can go further. I`m sure it will be a major item of discussion at the meeting that the two presidents will have in April. With respect to the Gore-Mubarak channel, of course, that channel has left with the previous administration. We are looking for new ways of engaging with our Egyptian friends and the Foreign Minister and I did speak about that at some length.

QUESTION: (summarized) Are you aware of the sale of oil outside Iraq?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes, we are aware of the extent to which Iraq is selling oil outside of the oil-for-food constraints. It probably represents ten per cent of their total income and it is troubling to us. But the bulk of the oil still comes out of the oil-for-food program and I will be talking to our friends in the region about how we can do a better job of tightening up the leakage in the oil-for-food system.

QUESTION: (summarized) Do you expect the resumption of talks between Israel and the Palestinians?

SECRETARY POWELL: We are in a position where we have to wait for a new Israeli government to be formed and to take over. I hope that Prime Minister Sharon at that point will want to engage at every level as soon as possible, whether it`s with respect to reducing violence or security arrangements or economic activity or putting proposals down on the table. So, we shouldn`t see any of this "nothing happens until that happens." I think it`s better for us to be prepared for all things to happen, for us to move forward. But we really have to wait to see what positions Mr. Sharon takes when he becomes Prime Minister in a short period of time.

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: Wait a minute please. We have two questions to go-okay, maybe one and a half questions. Okay, you have a half of a question. (laughter)

QUESTION: (summarized) There are reports in the Arabic newspapers today that you are proposing to take a harder line on Israel and (inaudible) with respect to Iraq. Can you confirm that?

SECRETARY POWELL: I`ve made no such suggestion.

QUESTION: Are you linking the two situations in any way?

SECRETARY POWELL: The whole region is looked at as a whole but I have not offered or suggested any kind of direct quid pro quo.

QUESTION: We know that Israel suggested establishing a strategic alliance with the Clinton administration. Is this idea still on the table and what are the possibilities of making a similar alliance with Egypt? Maybe you could just focus on the elements of the relations right now.

SECRETARY POWELL: The Foreign Minister and I have talked about things we might do in the future in order to strengthen the relationship at every level-trade, economics, security assistance, military aid-and we look forward to continuing the discussion. The exact form that it will take I think will be discussed by the two presidents when we get together in April.

QUESTION: (summarized) Will the United States veto the lifting of sanctions on Iraq in the U.N.?

SECRETARY POWELL: I can`t give an answer to a question like that without knowing what a specific resolution might look like. It would be presumptuous of me to do so. Such a decision is based on what the resolution turns out to be.

QUESTION: (summarized) Minister Moussa, how big a threat is Iraq right now? It seems that the Secretary is trying to have it both ways. Either the country has been diminished by ten years of sanctions or it`s still threat that we have to worry about.

FOREIGN MINISTER MOUSSA: For us, I don`t see that threat, but if you ask the Gulf regions and countries of that area they will they would continue to feel that and they say it publicly. The question is not rhetorical. The question is not to have some headlines. It`s a very serious situation. We will continue to deal with that situation in a way that ensures stability and justice. Therefore, we will have a lot to say after the round of talks ...

SECRETARY POWELL: May I just add a p.s. that if I was a Kuwaiti and I heard leaders in Baghdad claiming that Kuwait is still a part of Iraq and it`s going to be included in the flag and the seal, if I knew they were continuing to try to find weapons of mass destruction, I would have no doubt in my mind who those weapons were aimed at. They are being aimed at Arabs, not at the United States or at others. Yes, I think we should...he has to be contained until he realizes the errors of his ways.


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THE WORLD

Bargains on used luxury cars have lured many Iraqis to lots such as this one in Baghdad.

4-Wheel Driven: Iraqis Renew Love of Luxury
With restrictions lifted and cash on hand, residents get behind the wheel with gusto.
By Nicholas Riccardi
Times Staff Writer

January 11, 2004

BAGHDAD — There may be few better places in the world to buy a used luxury car than the rubble-strewn streets of this city.

A 2002 Mercedes-Benz C-class retails for $20,000; a 1995 E320 with all the extras has an asking price of $7,000. And stories abound of late-model Land Rovers selling for similar bargains. Of course, the setting is a far cry from the Cerritos Auto Square.

Down the street from police checkpoints, stores hawk shiny, high-end cars, some scarred with bullet holes. Shoppers are distracted by American helicopters screeching overhead. One huge retailer has hauled in empty, rusting railroad cars to house the dozens of guards who watch over its acres of autos.

That doesn`t bother Sabiha Hasan Ibrahim, a 62-year-old nurse who is fed up with transferring seven times a day on Baghdad`s buses for her three-hour commute.

"Thanks to God," she said as she cruised the Nahadah car market, grilling dealers to make sure their newly dis- counted cars weren`t stolen, "this is the reality now."

As befits the residents of a wide and flat desert country where until recently gasoline was cheaper than water, Iraqis have long been car crazy. Their automotive obsession has reached new heights since the fall of Saddam Hussein, who kept a quota on the number of cars permitted in the country.

Hussein`s government had not imported a significant number of vehicles since 1980, consigning most Iraqis to a boxy, rusting existence on the roads. Now the range of newly purchased cars on the streets of Iraq — almost all used and imported from Jordan and Syria or other neighboring countries — is the most prominent sign of the nation`s shaky steps toward a consumer culture.

Since the end of the war and the 13-year U.N. embargo against Iraq, the nation has been flooded with merchandise from all over the world. Iraqis are marveling at products rarely or never seen under Hussein`s reign, from satellite dishes to blenders to Pringles potato chips.

Although the country`s newly rampant crime and uncertain future have dampened some consumers` enthusiasm, many who once hoarded money in case they needed to bribe the secret police are now going shopping.

"Iraqis have been banking for bad days," said Humam Shamaa, an economist at Baghdad University. "Now they feel the bad days will not come again. So they spend on the most important thing for them, which is a car."

After all, said Shamaa, who bought his son a 1990 BMW immediately after the fall of Hussein, "Iraqi people have been prevented from buying new cars for almost 30 years."

Iraqi commerce with other countries virtually ended in 1980 with the start of Iraq`s eight-year war against Iran, which was soon followed by the embargo and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Many Iraqis paid thousands of dollars to the government to get on lists for new cars that never came.

Under Hussein, onerous customs duties and taxes jacked up the price of most cars, and only a handful of import licenses were doled out, for high fees. This meant that only the well-connected drove luxury vehicles. Perhaps the best-connected was Hussein`s son Uday, whose fleet of Rolls-Royces and other expensive cars was legendary and who reportedly would demand that anyone spotted driving a more opulent car hand over the vehicle or face prison — or worse.

Many Iraqis shuddered when they saw a late-model BMW or Mercedes in their rear-view mirror, knowing a friend of the dictator`s was probably inside.

Hussein Aziz remembers a time from a few years ago when he was driving a friend around Baghdad in his battered Peugeot and pulled up next to a parked GMC sport utility vehicle that clearly belonged to a Hussein loyalist. After making sure the owner wasn`t around, Aziz`s friend leaned out the passenger window and lovingly stroked the vehicle`s side.

"We were asking ourselves, `Will the day come when we can ride such a car?` " recalled Aziz, a former military captain who was once imprisoned for questioning Hussein.

Now Hussein`s fees and controls have been abolished and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority has eliminated taxes on imports, at least for now. Aziz owns one of the 114,000 cars that have been registered in Baghdad since the war`s end, a 1992 Toyota Corolla — "Thanks to God," he says.

Another Baghdad resident who recently upgraded is Khatab Habib, who registered his newly purchased 1991 Toyota Crown Super Select with Baghdad`s traffic police Wednesday. The 28-year-old taxi driver said he is thrilled he won`t need to deal with the perpetual maintenance problems and painful seats of his old Brazilian-made Volkswagen. "I feel like I`m in paradise," he said.

Iraqis boast of their personal connection to their cars. Friends will frequently ask after one another`s vehicles, using the cars` personal nicknames — "How`s Abu Jumeili? How`s Abu Jamal?"

Cars, said 42-year-old Baghdad pharmacy owner Jubran Saffar, "are like a piece of the family." Saffar calls his blue 1980 Peugeot "Sattoota," after a homely yet dependable girl featured in an old Iraqi comic book.

Cars are needed not only to navigate Iraq`s sprawling, low-lying cities, but to maintain connections with rural relatives. Mohammed Yahya Timimi, 33, lives in Baghdad and has long relied on a 1988 Nissan pickup for regular runs to the back roads of his hometown of Baqubah, about 25 miles northeast of the capital.

Aware that car prices are plummeting, Timimi was tempted to drop by the Nahadah auto market and treat himself to a newer vehicle.

But, like many Iraqis now, he was an ambivalent shopper. Timimi`s carpet factory was looted after the war, and he did not want to buy too flashy a car, for fear of becoming a target for bandits.

"They are stealing everything now," he said. "They might kill you just for your shirt."

To many, this fear represents the paradox of the new Iraq — awash in glamorous goods, but rife with poverty, crime and terrorism. "Even paradise is unbearable without good people," Timimi said, citing an old proverb. "Happiness without feeling secure is nothing."

Mohammed Ahwan Saad, a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police who became a luxury car dealer, said his business was up 50% since Hussein`s ouster and would be even better if the situation were more stable.

"If it was a good security situation, you would see many people asking for Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, Lamborghinis," he said.

Despite the risks, Saad drives a late-model Mercedes. "Some people will not evaluate you for what you are," he said. "They will evaluate you for what you are driving."

Safety also weighed on the mind of 24-year-old Mohammed Mustafa Saleh as he leaned back into the buttery leather seats of a 1995 Mercedes E320 at the Nahadah lot and smiled. From a wealthy agricultural family, Saleh has long been obsessed with Mercedes and bought his first, a 1991, two years ago.

"I feel like a king," he said. But he hesitated. A beauty like this E320 would make him a prime carjacking target. Maybe he should buy it but leave it in his garage, until the situation improved, he mused.

"This is the best time to buy such a car," Saleh said, "but this is the worst time, because of security." After several more minutes of hungrily eyeing the gleaming white Mercedes, Saleh made up his mind. He left without buying the car.

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suheil Ahmed and Sameer Mohammed of The Times` Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.

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THE WORLD



Iraq Plans Made Before 9/11, O`Neill Says
Early in his term, Bush wanted to oust Hussein, the former Cabinet member asserts.
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

January 11, 2004

CRAWFORD, Texas — The Bush administration was determined to oust Saddam Hussein long before the Sept. 11 attacks, former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O`Neill told CBS News in an interview to be aired tonight.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O`Neill said in the interview with "60 Minutes."

The interview is being broadcast amid publicity for a new book by journalist Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," for which O`Neill was a primary source. The book is published by Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, the parent company of CBS News.

The book quotes O`Neill as saying he was surprised that at one meeting of President Bush`s top advisors, no one questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it," the book quotes O`Neill as saying. "That was the tone of it. The president saying, `Go find me a way to do this.` "

In the CBS interview, O`Neill also faults the Bush administration`s declared policy of preemptively attacking other nations before they can attack the United States. "For me, the notion of preemption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said.

O`Neill headed the Treasury Department from January 2001 to December 2002, when he was forced out as a result of policy disputes. An administration official dismissed his allegations Saturday, saying, "No one listened to his wacky ideas when he was in office. Why should we start now?"

Critics have accused the administration of using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse for invading Iraq and of implying that there was a link between Hussein and the attacks, which has never been proved.

In his book about the Bush administration, "Bush At War," author Bob Woodward said top officials raised the issue of targeting Hussein as soon as four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

O`Neill`s assertion dates to the early days of the administration, long before Sept. 11. But it is unclear from the remarks attributed to O`Neill in Suskind`s book whether the administration was actively preparing to oust Hussein or was just making contingency plans.

On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began planning for a war with Iraq early in Bush`s term.

"The fact of the matter is that the international community viewed Saddam Hussein as a threat before Sept. 11 and that threat became even more of a threat after Sept. 11," McClellan said from Texas, where Bush is spending the weekend.

"It appears that the world according to Mr. O`Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," McClellan said.

Like the Clinton administration before it, the Bush White House was on record with warnings aimed at the Iraqi leader well before Sept. 11. Earlier in 2001, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice warned after an Iraqi missile attack that "Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration."

After the attacks, senior administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that it had become imperative to prevent "rogue nations" such as Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction and transferring them to terrorists.

O`Neill, a former chief executive of aluminum giant Alcoa whose comments on various economic issues had caused problems for the administration, was asked to resign in a shake-up of Bush`s economic team after he opposed a plan to reduce taxes on corporate dividends.


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The Barreling Bushes
Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest
By Kevin Phillips
Kevin Phillips` new book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," has just been published by Viking Penguin.

January 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons and we`re certainly seeing it with the Bushes. Between now and the November election, it`s crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president`s family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links.

As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush`s company drilled offshore oil wells. Over the four decades since then, the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.

How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9/11 and then distorted the U.S. response to Islamic terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty.

The first family member lured by the Middle East`s petroleum wealth was George W. Bush`s great-grandfather, George H. Walker, a buccaneer who was president of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. In the 1920s, Walker and his firm participated in rebuilding the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of current-day Iraq. As senior director of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), Walker`s son-in-law Prescott Bush (George W. Bush`s grandfather) became involved with the Middle East in the years after World War II. But it was George H.W. Bush, the current president`s father, who forged the dynasty`s strongest ties to the region.

George H.W. Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. He went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to have either an oil or CIA background. This helps to explain his persistent bent toward the Middle East, covert operations and rogue banks like the Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which came to be known by the nickname "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International." In each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world`s primary destination for arms shipments.

Taking the CIA helm in January 1976, Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider. After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book "False Profits," Bush "traveled on the bank`s behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions."

Once in the White House, first as vice president to Ronald Reagan and later as president, George H.W. Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered scandals. It`s never been entirely clear what Bush`s connection was to the Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran, some BCCI-financed, helped illegally fund the operations of the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But in 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh asserted that Bush, despite his protestations, had indeed been "in the loop" on multiple illegal acts.

Much clearer was Bush`s pivotal role, both as vice president and president, in "Iraqgate," the hidden aid provided by the U.S. and its military to Saddam Hussein`s Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran during the 1980s. The U.S. is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons. As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 "Nightline" program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George [H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam`s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

During these years, Bush`s four sons — George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin — were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot.

Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) — billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush`s 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using Bin Laden-Bin Mahfouz funds.

In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy. The Wall Street Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank`s ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken — all since George W. Bush came on board — likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."

Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank," concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in steering the oil-drilling contract to the president`s son." The web entangling the Bush presidencies was already being spun.

Second son Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida, spent most of his time in the early and mid-1980s hobnobbing with ex-Cuban intelligence officers, Nicaraguan Contras and others plugged into the lucrative orbit of Miami-area front groups for the CIA. But he too had some Middle East connections. Two of his business associates, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and Camilo Padreda, both indicted for financial dealings, were longtime associates of Middle Eastern arms dealer, BCCI investor and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Prosecutors dropped the case against the two, and a federal judge ordered Padreda`s name expunged from the record. But a few years later Padreda, a former Miami-Dade County GOP treasurer, was convicted of fraud over a federally insured housing development that Jeb Bush had helped to facilitate. Jeb Bush also socialized with Adbur Sakhia, the Miami BCCI branch chief and later its top U.S. official.

Neil Bush, most famous for the scandal surrounding the corrupt practices of Colorado`s Silverado Savings & Loan, where he served as a director during the 1980s, also picked plums from Persian Gulf orchards. In 1993, after his father left the White House, Neil went to Kuwait with his parents, brother Marvin and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. When his father left, Neil stayed to lobby for business contracts, and after returning home evolved a set of lucrative relationships with Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel. One of their ventures, Ignite!, an educational software company, also included representatives of at least three ruling Persian Gulf families.

The Bush family`s Middle Eastern commercial focus is further exemplified by Marvin, the youngest brother of the current president. From 1993 to 2000 he was a major shareholder, along with Mishal Youssef Saud al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, in the Kuwait-American Corp., which had holdings in several U.S. defense, aviation and industrial security companies.

George H.W. Bush`s own Persian Gulf relationships kept expanding. While serving in the Reagan White House during the 1980s, he was known in the Middle East as "the Saudi vice president," and a New Yorker article last year described the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. as "almost a member of the [Bush] family." Indeed, many saw the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait as an outgrowth of Bush`s close ties to the oil industry and to Persian Gulf royal families, who felt threatened by Saddam Hussein`s expansionism.

After losing his bid for a second term as president, Bush joined up in 1993 with the Washington-based Carlyle Group. Under the leadership of ex-officials like Baker and former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, Carlyle developed a specialty in buying defense companies and doubling or quadrupling their value. The ex-president not only became an investor in Carlyle, but a member of the company`s Asia Advisory Board and a rainmaker who drummed up investors. Twelve rich Saudi families, including the Bin Ladens, were among them. In 2002, the Washington Post reported, "Saudis close to Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister … were encouraged to put money into Carlyle as a favor to the elder Bush." Bush retired from the company last October, and Baker, who lobbied U.S. allies last month to forgive Iraq`s debt, remains a Carlyle senior counselor.

If the 1991 war with Iraq and its aftermath cemented the Bush ties with oil elites and royalty in the Middle East, it angered Islamic true believers and radicals. By the late 1990s, many of the Islamic insurgents who had been mobilized by the CIA and others to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan were becoming increasingly anti-American. They found a kinship with Osama bin Laden, the renegade of his billionaire Saudi family, who was outraged at the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia.

When the U.S. launched a second war against Iraq in 2003 but failed to find weapons of mass destruction that Hussein was purported to have, international polls, especially those by the Washington-based Pew Center, charted a massive growth in anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment in Muslim parts of the world — an obvious boon to terrorist recruitment. Even before the war, some cynics had argued that Iraq was targeted to divert attention from the administration`s failure to catch Osama bin Laden and stop Al Qaeda terrorism.

Bolder critics hinted that George W. Bush had sought to shift attention away from how his family`s ties to the Bin Ladens and to rogue elements in the Middle East had crippled U.S. investigations in the months leading up to 9/11. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) complained that even when Congress released the mid-2003 intelligence reports on the origins of the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration heavily redacted a 28-page section dealing with the Saudis and other foreign governments, leading him to conclude, "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis."

There is no evidence to suggest that the events of Sept. 11 could have been prevented or discovered ahead of time had someone other than a Bush been president. But there is certainly enough to suggest that the Bush dynasty`s many decades of entanglement and money-hunting in the Middle East have created a major conflict of interest that deserves to be part of the 2004 political debate. No previous presidency has had anything remotely similar. Not one.


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IRAQ



Kurds` Soft Sell for a Hard-Won Autonomy
U.S. officials are reluctantly accepting a long-oppressed minority`s right to self-rule.
By Brendan O`Leary
Brendan O`Leary is Lauder Professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs its Solomon Asch Center for the study of ethnic conflict. He also will be a constitutional

January 11, 2004

It is a maxim of politics that territorial autonomy is begrudgingly conceded by central authorities and ungratefully received by those to whom it is granted. That`s one way to understand what is happening in Kurdistan, or what some still call northern Iraq. The Kurds of Kurdistan would like to be independent but will accept autonomy in a binational federation with Arab Iraq. Washington, Arab Iraqis and regional powers begrudgingly concede this emergent reality.

The Kurds are the largest nation without their own state in the Middle East. Greater Kurdistan was partitioned among Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq after World War I, even though it had a better self-determination case than most of the new states created by Woodrow Wilson and his allies. British colonial authorities in Iraq promised local Kurds autonomy in compensation but broke their word to appease Turkey and serve their petroleum interests. In independent Iraq, Kurds experienced coercive assimilation, expulsion and genocide at the hands of successive Sunni Arab-dominated regimes, most recently Saddam Hussein`s. This history explains why they aspire to an independent Kurdistan.

Autonomy is the very least the Kurds will accept, and they have had it since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They have the only functioning government and parliament in Iraq. The Kurds were the sole locally organized group to contribute significantly to the recent U.S. war effort. They joined Arab opponents of Hussein to insist that any new Iraq should be federal, with their entity as one of its regions — with emphasis on the word "one."

In accepting last week that Kurdistan must continue to exist, intact, throughout the post-June 30 transitional period, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the Coalition Provisional Authority`s L. Paul Bremer III were recognizing their debt of honor. Yet, they accepted Kurdistan`s reality without warmth or enthusiasm.

Kurds will tell you that one doesn`t hear the Bush administration condemning Israel and Turkey as ethnic states, but the air last week was thick with proclamations that Kurdistan is — or will be — such an entity. Kurds observe that U.S. officials in part defend Israel`s right to exist because of genocide against European Jewry, but in the same breath deny the right of Kurdistan to exist because it would reputedly be an ethnic state. That the Kurds of Kurdistan treat their minorities — Turkmens, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews and Christians — better than the Israelis treat their minorities is ignored. That they proclaim Kurdistan to be for all its citizens, Kurd and non-Kurd, is forgotten.

Kurds also say the same Turkish politicians who condemn Kurdistan as an ethnic entity can be heard insisting — as vehemently — that the Turks of Northern Cyprus should have maximum feasible territorial autonomy in a two-unit federation on Cyprus. They are often the same politicians who call for coercive assimilation of minorities into a Turkish ethos and ethnos. That the Kurds of Kurdistan treat their ethnic Turks much better than Turkey treats its Kurds is denied, but it is true.

So, why is Washington`s recognition of Kurdistan begrudging?

Coalition authorities in Baghdad want to placate Arab opinion, both among their collaborators and those who resist the U.S. occupation. Arab liberals promote a federation for Iraq based on Hussein`s 18 "governorates." It would have the effect of dividing Kurdish-dominated areas among four units. This vision wishfully implies that Kurds would settle for less than what they won by arms from Hussein in the Iraq war. (The regions of Mosul and Kirkuk, historically predominantly Kurdish cities, were mainly liberated by the peshmergas of Kurdistan.)

This vision died last week, and we are watching its funeral. The idea implied that Iraq could become like the United States when it cannot. America was a settler state, which displaced (and expelled) and swamped its minorities, building almost every one of the 50 states of its federation around a white (usually Protestant), English-speaking local majority. America has no historic indigenous people that comprises between one-fifth and one-third of the total federation, with its distinct language and dialects, customs, norms — and territory.

Arabs and Americans preaching a nonethnic federation to the Kurds of Iraq are whistling in the wind. The Kurds rightly interpret calls for "a nonethnic Iraq" as disguised code for the restoration of an Arab Iraq. They tell the Americans and their prospective Arab negotiating partners to look to Canada, rather than the U.S., for a more appropriate federal vision for Iraq — a binational federation, a partnership of two peoples, Kurds and Arabs.

The other reason why Washington begrudges Kurdistan`s right to exist is because it doesn`t want to provoke the regional powers, Turkey above all. The U.S. interest in avoiding a war over the breakup of Iraq is clear, but it is not obvious why the Bush administration should oppose Kurdistan`s existence within a federal Iraq, or indeed its expansion to include Kirkuk district and city.

After all, the Kurds` two major parties are committed to a democratic, binational, multiethnic, and religiously tolerant Iraq. They are both secular. Given that Kurdistan is by far the most stable and best-developed region in Iraq, it should be the building block for those in the U.S. and the United Nations intent on aiding democratic reconstruction. Washington should note that because Saddam Hussein used Palestinians in his repression of Kurds, popular Kurdish sentiment is not sharply anti-Israel in the way that Arab Iraq is. Turkey`s politicians know that a full invasion of Iraq by their army would terminate their prospects of entry into the European Union. That binds their hands.

The Bush administration knows it cannot break up Kurdistan as the Arab liberals want — and as Turkey, Syria and Iran would prefer. To do so would create chaos. The U.S. is, however, leaving Kirkuk — and the details of a federation — to the peoples of Iraq to negotiate — having abandoned the Pentagon`s preposterous plan for an American to write the constitution of Iraq.

No one knows how the negotiations will play out. With many Arabs preferring an 18-unit Iraq, and with Kurds preferring a two-unit entity, a compromise might be reached somewhere — say with five regions, Kurdistan as one entity, Baghdad as another, and three other Arab-dominated regions in the northwest and the south. Kirkuk might be a special power-sharing unit within Kurdistan, while Mosul might be a special power-sharing unit within an Arab-dominated region.

Three things are certain. Kurds will remain unified behind the idea of one Kurdistan, with the right to decentralize power within their region if they so wish. Kurdish parties want to include Kirkuk district and city in their region — to redress, fairly, Hussein`s ethnic cleansing and settler policies — and to have appropriate power-sharing arrangements with the Turkmen and Arab populations. Finally, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan will negotiate jointly, seeking a binational, democratic, multi-ethnic and religiously tolerant federal Iraq, knowing that their own supporters would prefer to have an independent state. Washington, Turkey and the Arab Iraqis should be grateful to have such an accommodating Kurdish leadership, but they won`t be caught saying so.

No one has the power and the will to remove Kurdistan`s hard-won autonomy. Whether begrudging recognition can be succeeded by something more harmonious is not known, but a period of gracious silence from Washington on its constitutional preferences would be prudent.


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SOUTH ASIA



Afghan Path to Peace Goes Through India, Pakistan
By Paula R. Newberg
Paula Newberg, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, spent December in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She is the author of "Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan."

January 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — To the cautious relief of their neighbors, nuclear adversaries India and Pakistan agreed last week to new peace talks. They have been down this road before, rarely with success. But another — and unlikely — source of good news in the region gives impetus to the India-Pakistan discussions. Afghanistan`s new constitution could mean that the country stands a chance of triumphing over South Asia`s divisive history — if durable peace comes to the region.

Against a backdrop of occasional exploding bombs in the hills behind Kabul, security alerts that brought the city to intermittent standstills and mistaken targeting by U.S. forces that killed children rather than terrorists, Afghanistan`s convocation to write a constitution could easily have degenerated into old recriminations and new animosities. Stop and start it did, but civic debate finally produced a road map for this summer`s elections and the country`s broader political future.

Can Afghanistan be governed with its new constitution? In theory, yes. President Hamid Karzai got the document he and his U.S. patrons wanted, granting him substantial authority. Opposition groups secured parliamentary powers to protect and strengthen dissident voices, women participated actively and won rights, and ethnic minorities finally have political standing in their own languages.

In practice, however, Afghanistan`s war-torn history lives on in the constitution. The moujahedeen who took over after the Soviet Union`s army withdrew, and who many Afghans believe ruined the country, dominated constitutional proceedings. Former proxies of foreign powers and now patronized by the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition, some are Cabinet members and others prosper in an economy lubricated by narcotics, corruption and insurgency. Many bribed their way into the loya jirga, or constitutional assembly, and bristled when they were criticized. Others will try to force their way into parliament and, by doing so, will shave away the fairness of future elections. If violence continues to infect the election process — and possibly even postpone voting — the constitution`s legitimacy will be jeopardized.

But peace in Afghanistan will require more than a constitution. It will need goodwill across the region, political vision from its leaders and a civil environment. Karzai has been severely tested by the continuing conflict, the anti-terrorism interests of foreign armies and the legacy of war-imposed poverty. He must now take charge of running the state. The restive Afghan electorate wants results from the government — in development and reconstruction — and seeks protection from authoritarian warlords. Karzai will need to prove himself by recalibrating the relationships among foreign patrons — many of whom view him as their insurance against extremism and want to ensure his election as president — and a vital, forthright, often contentious Afghan polity whose political preferences are unknown.

If Afghanistan is to stand on its own feet, its tattered civil service will have to be retrained to assume the responsibilities of a modern state, and Afghanistan`s government will have to ensure that this happens. Afghans will have to learn to run financial institutions for the private sector to prosper — and the government will have to make this happen, too.

Children are learning to read, but their teachers are often only a few steps ahead of them. Publicly financed colleges and universities barely exist — no texts, no libraries, no laboratories, no heat, and barely enough trained faculty. Private funds are needed to revive them if Afghans can become engineers or doctors and contribute to national reconstruction.

There are signs that change is at hand, but without sustained investment it will remain unfinished. Two years ago, Kabul`s bleak landscape included miles of rubble. Today, houses and office complexes are rising, often without official assistance and far ahead of necessary water and sewage systems. Markets are full of merchandise — new cameras compete for space with used clothing, beggars share stalls with moneylenders — but Afghans will starve if poppy cultivation continues to take precedence over growing food. Thousands of Afghans are burrowing into jerry-built private schools to learn English and technology skills, but they don`t yet have jobs or computers or, usually, electricity to run them.

The timetable for development — not just survival — is urgent. It must come soon enough to tap postwar enthusiasm, protect Afghans against resurgent fighting and deepening poverty, and reasonably balance private enterprise and state responsibility.

Afghanistan`s politics meet the country`s economy at the heart of its new constitution, and this is also where the needs of Afghans and the interests of their neighbors converge. The "composite" security issues that Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, outlined must include far more than resolving their Kashmir dispute. For peace to emerge in South Asia, all borders must be respected, including the porous one between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has long invited meddling from governments, guerrillas and smugglers. Afghanistan`s nascent constitutional order will not succeed if India and Pakistan continue their brinkmanship on Afghanistan`s periphery.

After the Indo-Pakistani talks, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced, "victory is to the moderates in India and moderates in Pakistan." But India cannot preach tolerance to Afghanistan while its ruling party encourages violent sectarian schism at home. And as long as Pakistan`s leaders malign their constitution, they endanger democracy`s chances across the border in Afghanistan.

For too long, Afghanistan`s fate has been tied to bitter contests between India and Pakistan. South Asia`s instability has too often cost Afghanistan a chance for peace. The best opportunity for a real truce may finally have arrived.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE NEW BAY BRIDGE / Artistic span`s new technology designed to fare better in quake
Dams, cranes and barges to support construction of the skyway have sprouted along the original Bay Bridge.The site of each bridge column has its own crane to lift products off of barges.






Die Bay Bridge ist die Brücke von San Francisco nach Oakland. Sie wurde bei dem Erdbeben vor einigen Jahren beschädigt mit einigen Opfern.
Sie ist nicht so bekannt wie die Golden Gate aber hat auch einige Attraktion.
Sie führt von San Francisco doppelstöckig bis zum Treasure Island. Ein Teil der Insel ist angeschüttet. Die Brücke schließt sozusagen die Bay zwischen Oakland und San Francisco, San Jose zum Weg in den Pacific mit der Golden Gate ab.
Der Teil der von dern Baumaßnahmen betroffen ist, ist der Teil von Treasure Island nach Oakland.

Artistic span`s new technology designed to fare better in quake
Glen Martin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/11/MNG5047T001.DTL



As the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge slowly rises, commuters in the region are getting a close-up view of one of the world`s most ambitious engineering projects: a 2-mile elevated roadway that will combine art and infrastructure in a showcase of cutting-edge technology.

The goal is to create a new bridge by 2009 that will be as aesthetically spectacular as it is functional. The span will be graceful, even beautiful, and provide stunning, uncluttered views of Yerba Buena Island and portions of San Francisco. At the same time, its builders say, the structure will be seismically safe enough to resist a catastrophic earthquake.

Caltrans, the state agency responsible for replacing the aging and unnervingly rickety eastern span, is employing engineering methods never attempted before in a seismic zone -- most specifically, the construction of a self-anchored suspension span near Yerba Buena Island. This element of the new bridge has engendered criticism from some engineers, who believe that such designs are unsafe in large quakes.

Caltrans insists that the structure -- visible in the form of huge cranes involved in pier construction -- will be far superior in every way to the existing bridge. Still, the concerns linger, underscored by a 6.5 temblor that wreaked havoc on the Central Coast on Dec. 22.

As the debate continues, Bay Area residents will witness a project that harkens to the mid-20th century`s construction boom of freeways, bridges and dams.

Much has changed since that era, at least from an engineer`s perspective. Materials are stronger and construction techniques more sophisticated, allowing engineers far more leeway in creating a signature span designed to endure a major quake.

As for the old Bay Bridge, geologists and structural engineers don`t like to talk about it, simply because there`s nothing good to say.

"If we knew then what we know now," said Peter Siegenthaler, Caltrans` principal construction manager for the project, "we certainly would`ve built the bridge in a different fashion. And maybe we wouldn`t have built it at all."

Opened for traffic in 1936, the Bay Bridge is about 4.5 miles long, consisting of two sections separated by tunnels on Yerba Buena Island.

The western suspension span, which begins in San Francisco, is similar in design to the Golden Gate Bridge, using huge cables anchored at each landfall to support the traffic lanes.

The eastern span, which extends from Yerba Buena Island to Oakland, is a truss and cantilever span, basically a framework of steel girders supporting a roadway.

The roadways on both bridge sections are piggybacked: Westward traffic uses the top deck, and eastbound uses the bottom deck.

The suspension span on the San Francisco side is considered relatively safe from a seismic perspective, but the eastern span is another matter.

In simplest terms, the eastern span`s rigid structure is utterly unsuitable for seismic zones, as was demonstrated during the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, when a large section of roadway collapsed from the upper to lower decks, resulting in one motorist`s death.

But even worse, engineers say, are the span`s inadequate foundations. Experts believe that any major quake with an epicenter in the vicinity of the eastern span would collapse the structure like a tinker toy construction.

The new design for the eastern span consists of a long skyway -- an elevated highway -- joined to a self-anchored suspension span near Yerba Buena Island. Roadways are side by side, providing clear, unobstructed views of the bay and adjoining cityscapes.

The new bridge will present an especially dramatic configuration at its western approach.

The transition structure -- the roadway that connects the Yerba Buena tunnels to the suspension span -- will seem to "leap from the island," Siegenthaler said.

"During that phase of construction,`` he said, "we`re going to build a temporary double-deck span to keep traffic moving through the tunnels."

The new bridge will feature a curve from the north to the Yerba Buena tunnels that is less acute, and hence represents less structural stress, than the bridge`s current angle, Siegenthaler said.

When the new span is complete, the old bridge will be dismantled.

As most things do in construction projects, the new span starts with the foundation -- the work under way and visible to motorists.

The existing east span rests on 60- to 70-foot-long wood pilings that are essentially suspended in the deep strata of mud and silt that constitutes the bay`s bottom. The pilings aren`t anchored to bedrock, which is why the current structure would be unlikely to fare well in a huge quake.

The skyway portion of the new bridge, by contrast, will sit on 300-foot- long steel pilings driven into the rock underlying the sediment strata.

Right now, giant cranes are straddling recently constructed dams -- supermarket-size structures built around the new bridge`s column sites. At high tide, the cranes hook on to the 1,600-ton steel boxes that will secure each column`s pilings, lowering them through the water to the bottom of the bay.

Each box has holes for six pilings. A piling template -- a tower that guides the pilings at the correct angles as they are pounded in -- is placed over the dam. "Somebody`s got to hold the nail while you hit it with the hammer," said Dan McElhinney, the chief deputy district director for Caltrans.

Water is then removed from the dam, and the pilings are driven into the rock with some of the world`s biggest pile hammers, each capable of 1.2 million foot-pounds of force.

"That means the force they generate is equivalent to dropping 1.2 million pounds 1 foot," Siegenthaler said.

The pilings are angled away from each other. The rationale for this strategy can be better understood, Siegenthaler said, when one contemplates a standing human being. "If you stand with your feet together, you have very little stability," he said. "Stand with them apart, and your stability is much greater."

After the pilings are reinforced with steel and concrete, a column will be erected from each footing. At the top of each column, huge cranes will place precast concrete segments of roadway. A total of 452 segments will be used for the skyway, each weighing up to 780 tons. Cast in Stockton and barged to the site, they are actually fairly light for chunks of concrete the size of office buildings.

The east span marks the first time such precast concrete techniques have been used in a seismic zone, said Caltrans engineers.

"The technology is very good for controlling the weight on precast units like this," McElhinney said.

The precast segments will be connected by cables and a special epoxy. Special hinge pipe joints at either end are designed to endure major seismic stress, as are additional smaller expansion joints employed at selected points in between.

"In an active earthquake area, you don`t want a bridge (as long as the skyway) to be a single solid piece," Siegenthaler said. "In a quake, you want it to move -- but move safely. These hinges allow ... movement of up to a meter. The pipes are designed to deform, but not break. Later, we can come back in and replace them."

As work progresses, motorists will have plenty of opportunity to see those working-class heroes, high ironworkers, plying their dangerous trade.

But while their labor may be visually riveting, don`t expect them to use rivets.

The traditional and picturesque method of fixing steel to steel by pounding red-hot metal plugs through drilled holes with a pneumatic hammer is as outmoded as pearl-buttoned spats -- at least where seismically safe structures are concerned.

"Rivets wiggle," Siegenthaler said. "During a quake, you want the entire bridge to move in a calculated way. Rivets interfere with that. Now we use high-strength bolts. They clamp -- they don`t slip."

The most controversial part of the bridge is also its signature element: the suspension segment, with its 525-foot tower -- slightly higher than the tallest towers of the west span.

The new suspension span -- unlike the Golden Gate Bridge and the west span of the Bay Bridge -- is self-anchored, meaning it is not fixed to landfalls. Instead, the middle of the main cable is threaded underneath the west end of the span with the two ends draped across the top of the tower before descending to the east end of the span, where they are anchored in the concrete decks.

The aesthetic effect will be stunning -- a kind of webbed drape that frames the bay and its environs for motorists.

The tower boasts some impressive engineering chops. It is actually four towers, bound together by beams designed to move and deform -- but not break -- in a quake.

"If you had a single tower, the stress load would be mainly translated to the base, which can`t be repaired," McElhinney said. "Here, the load is largely carried by the beams, which we can easily repair or replace."

The tower will be the tallest self-anchored suspension support in the world. And that has led to criticism that continues apace with the construction.

For example, Abolhassan Astaneh, a professor of structural engineering at UC Berkeley, said the span would be especially vulnerable to seismic motion or terrorist attack.

"Anchored suspension bridges with an even number of towers are the safest design in the world," Astaneh said. "The towers brace each other and dampen motion during seismic events." But single-tower suspension bridges, said Astaneh, are inherently unstable.

"Basically, you`re going from the best possible design to the worst," Astaneh said. "The instability (of single-tower bridges) is increased when you make them self-supporting. The main cable is connected to the deck, not the ground. It`s like anchoring a ship to itself, not to the sea bottom. The whole roadway is under such tremendous compression that any extra stress -- like a quake or explosive charge -- could make it collapse completely."

Astaneh supported an alternative design for the bridge, which the state rejected. Some have suggested that his opposition to the current design is sour grapes -- a charge that makes him bristle.

"We`re not high school kids," he said. "This isn`t about envy. I`m strictly concerned about safety. At any given time during the commute, 4,000 people could be on the suspension span. Caltrans needs to get qualified people to look at this and fix it while there`s still time."

McElhinney, who has heard Astaneh`s arguments before and discounts them, said the technology for self-anchored suspensions is established and sound. "This isn`t the first of its kind," he said. "The engineering is well understood."

Self-anchored suspension designs were popular in Germany for small bridges during World War II because they were relatively cheap and easy to construct. However, Astaneh said, they were unstable, sometimes collapsing from ground tremors caused by nearby bombing. Self-anchored suspension bridges remain in wide use throughout the world, but most are relatively small -- certainly not on a scale with the new Bay Bridge.

As to the span`s vulnerability to terrorist attack, McElhinney said, "We took another look at it after 9/11, and we included a peer group and military advisers in our review. We`re convinced the structure could sustain an attack (such as car bombs)."

At the bridge`s level of design and engineering, McElhinney said, there are multiple safety redundancies built into the structure -- the tower beams, the roadway pipe hinges, the special concrete designed to withstand high compression. "That should protect against seismic events and terrorism," he concluded.

E-mail Glen Martin at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Die Bay Bridge vom Treasure Island.

Dusk: the magic hour over the twinkling City by the Bay. If the traffic`s moving as you drive into town over the Bay Bridge, you can be sure your pulse will race -- along with your spirits. Chronicle file photo, 1997, by Russell Yip

[Joerver]

Democracy matters

Sunday, January 11, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/EDGQV3KFMF1.DTL


PRESIDENT BUSH often says that terrorists want to destroy our democratic freedoms. Part of the justification for our continuing military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq is the promotion of democracy in those countries.

What about protecting our democratic freedoms at home? Haven`t our enemies achieved one of their goals if our government, in the name of fighting tyranny and terrorism, unduly erodes our civil rights and liberties?

Consider just a few of the assaults on our basic rights in the past year:

-- Capt. James Yee, the former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, has endured prosecution, public humiliation, lack of due process and three months of imprisonment during which he was shackled in solitude -- on charges for which military intelligence has found no evidence.

Initially, the military suspected of Lee of infiltrating Guantanamo. Instead of bringing conspiracy charges, they charged him with taking home classified material. Lacking evidence for this crime, the military has now charged him with allegations of adultery and keeping pornography on his government computer.

-- Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, experienced an even more dramatic violation of his civil rights when U.S. immigration officials seized him for questioning on Sept. 26, 2002, at Kennedy International Airport. Though the federal government had no evidence connecting him to terrorists, he was not allowed to call an attorney or his family. Nor was he accused of any crime. Nevertheless, the U.S. government sent him to Syria -- a country we have denounced for its human rights abuses, especially torture -- for further interrogation.

For 10 months, Arar was locked in an underground cell and repeatedly tortured until military intelligence determined he had no ties with any terrorist groups.

By then, however, Arar`s life, like that of James Yee, had been dealt an irreversible blow.

-- Brett Bursey is one of countless citizens whose right to free speech, including the right to dissent, has been seriously abridged.

The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey for holding a "No War for Oil" placard during a presidential visit to Columbia, S.C. Whenever President Bush travels the country, the Secret Service orders local police to create "free speech zones," where protesters are quarantined. Often, these zones are quite distant from where the president is speaking. In this case, the Secret Service had created such a zone half a mile from where Bush would be speaking.

If peaceful protesters exercise their right to free speech outside of these bullpens, they are arrested for disorderly conduct, obstruction or trespassing. The Secret Service, in short, guarantees that neither the president nor the media will witness citizens` displeasure with the president`s policies.

Bursey was standing, with his sign, amid hundreds of Bush supporters when police told him he had to move because his sign was offensive. He was arrested when he refused to move to the designated "free-speech zone."

Now he is being prosecuted under an obscure law that prohibits "entering a restricted area around the president of the United States." If convicted, Bursey could face prison time and a $5,000 fine. The Justice Department, for its part, will have established a chilling precedent for curtailing the free- speech rights of protesters across the nation.

In response, the ACLU is suing the Secret Service for suppressing protesters in at least seven other states.

We understand that the threat of terrorism requires our government to balance surveillance and scrutiny with fundamental rights and liberties. But this administration has gone too far, subjecting innocent people to imprisonment and torture without evidence and equating protesters with terrorists. If a foreign government did this, we would justifiably describe it as a nation in desperate need of democratic reform.

Throughout our history, Americans have put up with the messiness and noisiness of democracy because we`ve understood that our form of self- government is the best antidote to tyranny.

It still is.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Queer eye for the security guy: Give alerts some panache
Jaime O`Neill
Sunday, January 11, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/INGHT44HMH1.DTL


The color of our fear has been jacked up to orange for a couple of weeks now, raised from yellow. We had been at yellow ever since Tom Ridge and the good folks over at Homeland Security concocted this feng shui calamity color code.

Yellow stands for "elevated," you will recall. Orange means "high," (which was what I thought "elevated" meant, but I guess it`s possible for a thing to be elevated and yet not high, kind of the way one feels after that second drink or the third or fourth hit on a joint going around at a frat party).

I don`t mean to question our leaders on matters of such seriousness, but it sometimes seems that the Department of Homeland Security is little more than a marketing tool for terrorists. After all, the whole idea of terrorism is to frighten people. How can busy people remain scared if the terrorists are denied a marketing apparatus to get the message out?

Speaking for myself, I would be utterly clueless about how frightened I should be if I didn`t have a friendly government agency with this fear gauge. Without the hardworking fearmongers at the Department of Homeland Security, I might even be unafraid, and it`s hard for terrorism to function when people are so inconsiderate as to not be terrified. Without Ridge and his people, I might even be leading a life of relative calm.

So, overall, I`m grateful to a benign government for keeping me informed of my appropriate fear level. Still, there is something bureaucratically dull and unimaginative about this color scheme. It`s all in basic colors, which are neither fashionable nor nuanced.

To correct that problem at no cost to the taxpayer, I called upon my gay friend, Steve, who offered the following color changes to the national terror color code.

According to Steve, nothing says stark fear quite like mauve. Many citizens have begun to show indifference to the current (and boring) red at the highest level of fear, so Steve thinks that by substituting mauve, people may once again begin to take the terror warnings more seriously.

Just below mauve, Steve suggests the muted urgency he finds in puce. It is neither as showy nor as predictable as the current orange. For that reason, it is much more likely to attract the necessary attention. Puce is also a bit metaphorical, suggesting the color of one`s face during moments of gut- wrenching fear.

After puce, but still representing serious jeopardy, Steve suggests something in the ecru range, a facsimile of the way we tend to blanch right after we`ve learned that a pack of terrorists has just blown up the dam above our community.

Should the terror levels ever descend to what is currently the blue, or "guarded" level, Steve thinks rose would be more appropriate, suggesting relief, mild happiness and a bit of a blush of embarrassment over all that fear we showed when our terror was in the upper registers.

At the lowest level of fear, Steve thinks that there`s nothing quite like red and white polka dots. Currently, "low" is represented by a kind of sickly blue-green utterly lacking in the celebratory emotions that such a reduced terror level would evoke, assuming we ever again live in a time when such a low terror level would be measured by our government.

Because no one knows how to respond those Department of Homeland Security colors, with Steve`s changes we at least will have the satisfaction of being more stylishly terrified.

Jaime O`Neill teaches at Butte College near Oroville (Butte County).

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

[Joerver]

Ich möchte hier auf die Diskussion über den Bush/Hitler-Vergleich hinweisen, die schon länger in den US-Medien stattfindet.

Insbesonders sind da die NeoCons von betroffen, von denen ein Teil sich auf den deutsch/amerikanischen Philosophen Strauss beruft, dem wieder Nähe zu einigen Nazi-Ideologen nachgesagt wird. Siehe auch #11391.

Die US-Presse hat sich angewöhnt oftmals durch benutzen vieler deutscher Ausdrücke diese Nähe herzustellen.

Ich möchte in dieser Sache auf einen Spiegel-Artikel hinweisen, der auch in der NYTimes erschienen ist.
Dieser steht auch in Deutsch und Englisch hier im Thread. Es ist schon mindestens ein viertel Jahr her.

The Bush Hitler Thing
t r u t h o u t | Reader Submission

Friday 09 January 2004

Dear Sir,

My family was one of Hitler`s victims. We lost a lot under the Nazi occupation, including an uncle who died in the camps and a cousin killed by a booby trap. I was terrified when my father went ballistic after finding my brother and me playing with a hand grenade. (I was only 12 at the time, and my brother insisted the grenade was safe.) I remember the rubble and the hardships of `austerity` - and the bomb craters from Allied bombs. As late as the 1980s, I had to take detours while bombs were being removed - they litter the countryside, buried under parking lots,buildings, and in the canals and rivers to this day. Believe me, I learned a lot about Hitler while I was growing up, both in Europe and here in the US - both my parents were in the war and talked about it constantly, unlike most American families. I spent my earliest years with the second-hand fear that trickled down from their PTSD - undiagnosed and untreated in those days.

I`m no expert on WWII - but I learned a lot about what happened in Germany - and Europe - back in those days. I always wondered how the wonderful German people - so honest, decent, hard-working, friendly, and generous - could ever allow such a thing to happen. (There were camps near my family`s home - they still talk about them only in hushed conspiratorial whispers.) I asked a lot of questions - we were only a few kilometers from the German border - and no one ever denied me. My relatives had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the war - they still haven`t forgotten - I don`t think anyone can forget such a horrible nightmare. Among the questions I asked:

Why didn`t you do anything about the people in the camps?

Everyone was terrified. People `disappeared` into those camps. Sometimes the Nazis came and lined everyone up, walking behind them - even school children - with a cocked pistol. You never knew when they would just shoot someone in the back of the head. Everyone was terrified. Everyone was disarmed - guns were registered, so all the Nazis had to do was go from house to house and demand the guns.

Didn`t you see what was happening?

We saw. There was nothing we could do. Our military had no modern weapons. The Nazis had technology and resources - they just invaded and took over - we were overwhelmed by their air power. They had spies everywhere - people spying on each other, just to have an `ace in the hole` in case they were accused - and anyone who had a grudge against you could accuse you of something - just an accusation meant you`d disappear. Nobody dared ask where you had gone - anyone who returned was considered suspicious - what had they said, and who did they implicate? It was a climate of fear - there`s nothing anyone can do when the government uses fear and imprisonment to intimidate people. The government was above the law - even in Germany, it became `every man for himself`. Advancement was possible by exposing `traitors` - anyone who questioned the government. It didn`t matter if the people you accused were guilty or not - just the accusation was enough.

Did anyone know what was going on?

We all knew. We imagined the worst because the Nazis made `examples` of a few people in every town and village. Public torture and execution. The most unspeakable atrocities were committed in full view of everyone. If this is what happened in public, can you imagine what might be going on in the camps? Nobody wanted to know.

Why didn`t the German people stop the Nazis?

Life was better, at first, under the Nazis. The war machine invigorated the economy - men had jobs again, and enough money to take care of their family. New building projects were everywhere. The shops were full again - and people could afford good food, culture, and luxuries. Women could stay home in comfort. Crime was reduced. Health care improved. It was a rosy scenario - Hitler brought order and prosperity. His policies won widespread approval because life was better for most Germans, after the misery of reparations and inflation. The people liked the idea of removing the worst elements of society - the gypsies, the homosexuals, the petty criminals - it was easy to elicit support for prosecuting the corrupt `evil`people poisoning society. Every family was proud of their hometown heroes - the sharply-dressed soldiers they contributed to his program - they were, after all,defending the Fatherland. Continuing a proud tradition that had been defeated and shamed after WWI, the soldiers gave the feeling of power and success to the proud families that showered them with praise and support. Their early victories were reason to celebrate - in spite of the fact that they faced poorly armed inferior forces - further proof that what they were doing was right, and the best thing for the country. The news was full of stories about their bravery and accomplishments against a vile enemy. They were `liberating` these countries from their corrupt governments.

These are some of the answers I gleaned over the years. As a child, I was fascinated with the Nazis. I thought the German soldiers were really something - that`s how strong an impression they made, even after the war. After all, they weren`t the ones committing war crimes - they were the pride of their families and communities. It was just the SS and Gestapo that were `bad`. Now I know better -but that pride in the military was a strong factor for many years, only adding to the mystique of military power - after all, my father had been a soldier too, but in the American army. It took a while to figure out the truth.

Every time I`ve gone back to Europe, someone has taken me to the `gardens of stone` - the Allied cemeteries that dot the countryside. With great sadness, my relatives would stand in abject misery, remembering the nightmare, and asking `Why?`. Maybe that`s why they wouldn`t support the US invasion of Iraq. They knew war. They knew occupation. And they knew resistance. I saw the building where British flyers hid on their way back to England - smuggled out by brave families that risked the lives of everyone to help the Allies. As a child, I had played in a basement, where the cow lived under the house, as is common there. The same place those flyers hid.

So why, now, when I hear GWB`s speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase `Never forget`. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.

So far, I`ve seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I`ve seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of `preventive war`. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of `undesirable` aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one`s neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to `fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed `enemies`. The establishment of `Homeland Security`. The dehumanization of `foreigners`. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of `goodness` and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.

There isn`t much doubt in my mind - anyone who compares the history of Hitler`s rise to power and the progression of recent events in the US cannot avoid the parallels. It`s incontrovertible. Is Bush another Hitler? Maybe not, but with each incriminating event, the parallel grows -it certainly cannot be dismissed. There`s too much evidence already. Just as Hitler used American tactics to plan and execute his reign, it looks as if Karl Rove is reading Hitler`s playbook to plan world domination - and that is the stated intent of both. From the Reichstag fire to the landing at Nuremberg to the motto of "Gott Mit Uns" to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to the insistence that peace was the ultimate goal, the line is unbroken and unwavering.

I`m afraid now, that what may still come to pass is a reign far more savage and barbaric than that of the Nazis. Already, appeasement has been fruitless - it only encourages the brazen to escalate their arrogance and braggadocio. Americans support Bush - by a generous majority - and mass media sings his praises while indicting his detractors - or silencing their opinions completely. The American people seem to care only about the domestic economic situation - and even in that, they are in complete denial. They don`t want to hear about Iraq, and Afghanistan is already forgotten. Even the Democratic opposition supports the occupation of Iraq. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Hussein deserves to be executed -with or without a trial. `Visitors` are fingerprinted. Guilty until proven innocent. Snipers are on New York City rooftops. When do the Stryker teams start appearing on American streets? They`re perfectly suited for `Homeland Security` - and they`ve had a trial run in Iraq. The Constitution has been suspended - until further notice. Dick Cheney just mentioned it may be for decades - even a generation, as Rice asserts as well. Is this the start of the 1000 year reign of this new collection of thugs? So it would seem.

I can only hope that in the coming year there will be some sign - some hint - that we are not becoming that which we abhor. The Theory of the Grotesque fares all too well these days. It may not be Nazi Germany - it might be a lot worse.

SL | Wisconsin

[Joerver]

Da der Spiegel Artikel in Deutsch nicht mehr kostenfrei zugänglich ist. Hier noch mal der Text aus diesem Thread #5486, engl.#5452 und die engl. Links.


August 4, 2003
The Leo-conservatives
By GERHARD SPÖRL,
Der Spiegel


For the past few weeks, US President George W. Bush has been surrounded by a secretive circle of advisors and public relations experts, giving rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories and debates. It`s been said that the group`s idol is German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/europe/04SPI…
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,259860,00.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Leo-Conservatives-Spieg…

DER SPIEGEL 32/2003 - 04. August 2003
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,259741,00.html
Intellektuelle

Die Leo-Konservativen

Ein geheimnisvoller Zirkel von Beratern und publizistischen Helfern um den US-Präsidenten George W. Bush gibt seit Wochen Anlass zu allerlei Verschwörungstheorien und Debatten - das Idol der Clique, heißt es, sei der deutsch-jüdische Philosoph Leo Strauss.


Der deutsche Philosoph, der da in den USA plötzlich erstaunlich populär ist, war nie ein Linker, sondern immer mit Leib und Seele ein Konservativer. Es handelt sich nicht etwa um Theodor W. Adorno, dessen 100. Geburtstag bevorsteht, oder um Herbert Marcuse, dessen sterbliche Reste gerade von New Haven (Connecticut) nach Berlin umgebettet wurden, sondern um einen von deutschen Intellektuellen bislang wenig beachteten Zeitgenossen der beiden Mitbegründer der Frankfurter Schule: Leo Strauss. Auch Strauss war ein deutscher Jude, auch er emigrierte in die USA, und er blieb dort sein Leben lang. Sein Tod jährt sich im Herbst zum 30. Mal.

Unter denen, die aus Hitlers Deutschland auswandern mussten, bildete Leo Strauss eine bemerkenswerte Ausnahme: Anders als seine Schicksalsgenossen erhielt der kleine, gründliche Denker mit der leisen Stimme frühzeitig eine Professur an der großen, hoch renommierten Universität von Chicago. Außerdem ist er der einzige deutsche Emigrant, der in den Vereinigten Staten eine weit verzweigte Denker-Schule gründete. Ihr Einfluss reicht bis in die inneren Machtzirkel Washingtons.

Was hat es auf sich mit seinen Schülern, den " Straussianern" , die seit dem Ende des Irak-Kriegs so häufig beschworen und beschrieben wurden, dass sie fast schon eine Intellektuellen-Legende geworden sind? Sie gelten als eine neokonservative Verschwörergruppe, als kleiner, elitärer Orden, der der Regierung Bush die Wege weist - und wenn es krumme Wege sind, ihr das gute Gewissen besorgt. Sie finden sich unter den Richtern im Supreme Court, sie arbeiten im Weißen Haus und im Pentagon.

Was sie denken, haben sie überwiegend bei Strauss gelernt. Allerdings sind sie machtbewusster als der Meister. Sie wollen Amerika verändern, nicht nur interpretieren.

Der Washingtoner Ableger der " Straussianer" traf sich kürzlich, wie alljährlich im Juli, zum Grillen, Baseballspielen und Plaudern über Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in einem Park der Hauptstadt. Mehr als 60 Leute aus dem inneren und äußeren Kreis der Regierung kamen da zusammen. Paul Wolfowitz, der kriegstreibende Ideenspender der Regierung Bush, war da und auch Abram Shulsky, ein Geheimdienstfachmann im Pentagon, der zusammen mit Francis Fukuyama ein Buch geschrieben hat.

William Kristol, der den " Weekly Standard" - ein Blatt mit einer Auflage von 60 000, aber großem Einfluss in Washington - herausgibt, war mit von der Partie, auch Leon Kass, der im Auftrag des Präsidenten Richtlinien für die Stammzellenforschung erarbeiten soll - auch sie Schüler des Leo Strauss.

Barbecue mit Kind und Kegel im Sonnenschein sind eigentlich unverdächtige Feiertagsvergnügungen. Doch so ziemlich alle Bewegungen der " Straussianer" stehen momentan unter Generalverdacht. Die Bedenken und Befürchtungen kommen von links, sie sind ein Versuch, die kulturelle Hegemonie der " Neocons" zu brechen, die mit der Präsidentschaft George W. Bushs begann und seit den Terroranschlägen am 11. September 2001 das patriotische Amerika durchdrungen hat.

Der zentrale Einwand: Die Strauss-Clique mag der zweiten Machtebene angehören, aber in Wahrheit verficht sie eine Ideologie der Sonderrolle Amerikas im 21. Jahrhundert, nach der dann Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney und Bush handeln.

Wolfowitz und andere Straussianer formieren sich zu einer Avantgarde der konservativen Revolution, die im Grunde genommen die Idee der liberalen Demokratie verachtet.

Die Spinne im Netz ist bei alldem der kleine, exzentrische Professor aus dem Weimar-Deutschland, der ein Verächter der Aufklärung war und den demokratischen Liberalismus für einen Sündenfall der Politik hielt.

Längst ist die Debatte aus der " New York Times" und dem " New Yorker" auch herüber nach Deutschland geschwappt. Hier zu Lande wurde Strauss Zeit seines Lebens - er starb 1973 - kaum wahrgenommen. Erst seit einigen Jahren macht sich Heinrich Meier, der Leiter der Siemens-Stiftung in München, um die Herausgabe und philosophische Einordnung von Strauss` Werk verdient.

Auch Meiers eigene Studien über Strauss, zumal über dessen Verhältnis zu dem katholischen Staatsrechtler Carl Schmitt, sind durch die Debatte über die geistigen Grundlagen des Bushismus schlagartig aktuell geworden*.

Doch wie reiht sich Strauss in die deutsche Ideengeschichte ein? Der Berliner Historiker Heinrich August Winkler zog in der " Zeit" weit reichende Schlüsse aus der Tatsache, dass Strauss freundlichen Umgang mit Carl Schmitt pflegte, dem Kritiker des Parlamentarismus und geistigen Wegbereiter der Nazis: Es gebe Parallelen zwischen der " Konservativen Revolution" vor der Machtergreifung Hitlers und der heutigen Situation in den Vereinigten Staaten.

Die Straussianer hätten " unter Bush dem Jüngeren gefunden, was Carl Schmitt letztlich vergebens gesucht hatte: den ,Zugang zum Machthaber`" , so Winkler.

Ganz so leicht ist trotzdem nicht zu klären, ob Leo Strauss wirklich zum dämonisierten " Paten der Bush-Mafia" taugt. Nach den strengen Maßstäben, die er selber anlegte, war Strauss eigentlich kein Philosoph, weil er kein systematisches Werk hinterlassen hat. Seine Stärke lag in der Interpretation der großen philosophischen Literatur von Plato über Sokrates, Spinoza, Machiavelli und Hobbes bis hin zu Martin Heidegger. In seinen frühen Jahren kreiste sein Denken um die Theologie, später um die politische Philosophie, um die " Frage nach dem Richtigen" .

Strauss war so gründlich gebildet, wie man sich einen gründlichen deutschen Professor nur vorstellen kann. Weil er klar und verständlich schrieb, lassen sich seine Bücher, im Deutsch der Vorkriegszeit geschrieben, heute noch gut lesen.

Seine Tochter Jenny, die an der Universität von Virginia antike Poetik lehrt, besitzt ein Foto des Elternhauses im hessischen Kirchhain bei Marburg, in dem ihr Vater, 1899 geboren, aufwuchs.

Es zeigt ein einfaches, stattliches Haus ohne gründerzeitliche Ornamentik. Die Familie Strauss war im Getreidehandel tätig und hielt nebenbei Hühner und Geflügel.

Der begabte Sohn Leo übertrug die unpompöse Geradlinigkeit auf seine Philosophie: So viele Brüche es im Leben eines deutschen Juden, der Soldat im Ersten Weltkrieg war, 1932 emigrierte und in Amerika seine Blütejahre erlebte, zwangsläufig geben musste, so folgerichtig entfaltete sich doch sein Denken.

Er promoviert 1921 bei Ernst Cassirer und bleibt auf der Suche nach Autorität und Orientierung. Er lehnt sich vorübergehend an den Neukantianismus an, die herrschende Vorkriegsphilosophie, und ist unzufrieden mit Max Webers Glauben an die Wertfreiheit wissenschaftlicher Urteile. Doch dann trifft er auf den Mann, den diese Generation junger Philosophen, zu der auch Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith oder Günther Anders gehören, für den tiefsten Denker ihrer Zeit hielt: Martin Heidegger.

Wie Heidegger zog Strauss eine radikale Konsequenz aus der Erfahrung des Ersten Weltkriegs und der Dauergefährdung der Weimarer Republik: Für ihn war damit geschichtlich bewiesen, dass sich die Aufklärung mit ihrem positiven Menschenbild und Fortschrittsglauben als Illusion erwiesen hatte. Als gleichermaßen hinfällig erwies sich aus seiner Sicht die Hoffnung, dass eine liberale Demokratie die Staats- und Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft sei. Daran hat Strauss bis an sein Lebensende festgehalten.

Allerdings missfiel ihm an Heideggers Hauptwerk " Sein und Zeit" (1927) der von aller möglichen Begründung der Moral absehende Existenzialismus, der " den Tod als Gott" (Strauss) verehre - was den Philosophen aus Todtnauberg anfällig für die nihilistische Todessehnsucht des Nationalsozialismus gemacht habe. Strauss hingegen entwickelte in der Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger eine leicht exzentrische Theorie, die viele Jahre später in Amerika eine verblüffend begierige Rezeption fand.

Religion ist Opium für das Volk, aber ein unerlässliches Opium.

Zwar könnten sich Philosophen, so geht seine Überlegung, im Gefolge Nietzsches der Frage widmen, was der Tod Gottes und die Abkehr von der Religion für das Denken und das Sein bedeute. Aber Staaten könnten ohne den inneren Zusammenhalt, den der Glaube verleiht, nicht existieren. Zu einer stabilen Ordnung gehöre deswegen die Religion als Bindemittel - sie ist zugegeben Opium fürs Volk, aber ein unerlässliches Opium. Liberale Demokratien wie die Weimarer Republik sind aus Strauss` Sicht auf Dauer nicht lebensfähig, weil sie ihren Bürgern keinen geistig-moralischen Halt bieten.

Die praktische Konsequenz daraus ist fatal: Eliten haben demnach das Recht, ja geradezu die Pflicht zur Manipulation der Wahrheit. Sie dürfen zu den " frommen Lügen" und dem selektiven Gebrauch der Wahrheit Zuflucht nehmen, wie es Plato empfiehlt.

Vor allem diese Bausteine einer politischen Theorie, die Strauss Zeit seines Lebens vertrat, tragen ihm heute in Amerika den Vorwurf ein, er habe an den Nazis die Methoden der Massenmanipulation studiert. Und " Straussianer" wie Wolfowitz und die anderen Betreiber des Irak-Krieges stehen jetzt im Verdacht, sie hätten nur die politische Lehre aus Strauss für ihre Zwecke gezogen. Die zum Teil fingierten Gründe für den Krieg gegen Saddam Hussein sind, so gesehen, das philosophische Erbe des Emigranten aus Deutschland.

So entsteht eine Verschwörungstheorie, wonach Strauss der Marionettenspieler ist, an dessen Fäden die Regierung Bush hängt. Dabei sind antisemitische Obertöne - Strauss als " Nazi-Jude" - kaum zu überhören, zumal viele seiner Schüler jüdische Namen - Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol - tragen.


Strauss selbst nahm größeren Anteil an der Antike als an der Gegenwart. Hans Jonas, der seit den zwanziger Jahren mit ihm befreundet war, schreibt in seinen " Erinnerungen" , Strauss sei " ein ungeheuer weltfremder und ängstlicher Mensch" gewesen. Tatsächlich war er ein tiefer Pessimist und neigte dem Gedanken zu, dass in der Geschichte nur Niedergang und Verfall zu erwarten seien.

Paradoxerweise hatte der Pessimist in entscheidenden Lebensmomenten ausgesprochenes Glück. Er verließ Deutschland schon 1932, vor der Machtergreifung Hitlers. Carl Schmitt, dessen Lehre von der Unterscheidung zwischen Freund und Feind als Ursprung des Politischen Strauss wohlwollend rezensiert hatte, verschaffte ihm ein Stipendium der Rockefeller Stiftung. So kam er erst nach Frankreich und später nach England, wo er sein " Hobbes" -Buch zu Ende schrieb, das noch heute Achtung genießt. 1938 schließlich, ehe der Zweite Weltkrieg ausbrach, kam Strauss in Amerika an.

Er überwinterte zunächst an der New Yorker " Universität im Exil" , wie die New School for Social Research genannt wurde, weil sich jüdische Flüchtlinge aus vielen Ländern Europas hier einfanden: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Arnold Brecht, Adolph Löwe, Kurt Riezler - insgesamt 180 Geistesgrößen. Sarkastisch nannten sie sich " Hitlers Geschenk an die Vereinigten Staaten" .

Strauss hatte keine unüberwindbaren Anpassungsprobleme an Amerika, das ihm völlig fremd war. Er sprach viele Sprachen, sein Englisch behielt bis zuletzt einen leichten Akzent. Und als wäre es eine List der - ausgerechnet - Hegelschen Vernunft, sorgte das Glück wieder für ihn vor: 1948 erhielt er den Ruf nach Chicago, um politische Philosophie zu lehren.

Damals war Chicago mehr als heute eine herausragende Universität. Die Rockefeller-Stiftung, deren Geld die Elite-Universitäten an der Ostküste verschmähten, sorgte für die Ausstattung. Zudem hatte der autokratische Universitätspräsident Robert M. Hutchins ein Gespür für Talente. So kam es, dass kurz nach dem Krieg drei Professoren nebeneinander lehrten, die größten Einfluss auf die Eliten bis in die Gegenwart hinein ausüben sollten.

Da war Hans J. Morgenthau, ebenfalls ein Emigrant aus Deutschland, aber anders als Strauss auf die gedankliche Durchdringung der Wirklichkeit ausgerichtet. Die größte Wirkung erzielte er mit seinen Thesen über eine neue realistische Außenpolitik - die Grundlage für eine illusionslose Haltung gegenüber der Sowjetunion im Kalten Krieg, die bald Regierungspolitik war. Der gelehrigste Schüler Morgenthaus war jener Emigrant aus Fürth, der es zum Sicherheitsberater und Außenminister unter Richard Nixon brachte: Henry Kissinger. Seine Variante der Realpolitik - Koexistenz auch mit Autokraten oder Diktatoren, wenn es das Eigeninteresse gebietet - haben erst die Neokonservativen außer Kraft gesetzt: Sie ist ihnen zu wenig moralisch und zu sehr dem Status quo verhaftet.

Der zweite Chicagoer Professor von bleibendem Gewicht war Milton Friedman, der für seine Theorie des Monetarismus 1976 den Nobelpreis für Ökonomie erhielt. Er war ein Schüler Friedrich August von Hayeks, der seit 1950 ebenfalls in Chicago lehrte, aber zu seiner Erbitterung im Schatten von John Maynard Keynes und dessen Lehre von der Staatsintervention in Krisenzeiten des Marktes stand.

Friedman ist eine Doppelbegabung, ein beliebter Universitätslehrer und gesuchter Berater, den Präsidenten von Johnson über Nixon bis Reagan heranzogen. Er empfahl den Rückzug des Staates vom Markt, woraus die Lehre von der angebotsorientierten Wirtschaftspolitik entstand: Der Kapitalismus entwickelt sich dann am besten, wenn der Profit und der Konsum durch Steuerkürzungen wachsen. Diese riskante Wirtschaftspolitik, die unter Reagan schon für ein rasantes Staatsdefizit sorgte, hat der derzeit amtierende Präsident wiederaufgenommen - mit demselben Effekt.

Der Dritte im Bunde ist Leo Strauss, der weder Morgenthaus Gegenwartssinn noch Friedmans Fähigkeit zum Umgang mit den Mächtigen besaß. Dass er über seinen Tod hinaus gehörigen Einfluss auf Politik und Politiker hat, wirkt paradox: Er war ja ein Konservativer, der nicht an die Wendung der Dinge zum Besseren glaubte. Er blieb im Herzen ein Weimarianer, auf der liberalen Demokratie ruhte für ihn kein Segen. Alle Skepsis richtete er gegen den Pluralismus und Relativismus dieser Ordnung. So anders Amerika auch sein mochte, so wenig fasste er Vertrauen zu diesem Projekt der Moderne.

Leo Strauss wollte eigentlich nur ein Lehrer sein, der seine Studenten in die Gedankenwelt der Alten einführt. Schon bei Plato, Sokrates und Xenophon ließen sich, so sah er die Dinge, die ewigen Kraftfelder studieren, in denen Menschen und Staaten zu allen Zeiten stehen, nicht zuletzt in der Gegenwart: Was ist Gerechtigkeit, was ist das gute Leben, was macht den Staat aus, wo liegen die Grenzen unseres Wissens?

In der Gegenwart stellten sich diese Fragen, so argumentierte Strauss, im Wirbel der Ereignisse und blieben schwer durchschaubar. In den großen Texten der Vergangenheit aber werden sie in Reinkultur verhandelt. Der Nachteil bestand jedoch darin, dass der Professor es beim Betrachten der Probleme beließ, weil er nicht an deren Lösbarkeit glaubte.

Doch einige seiner Schüler beseelte mehr Tatendrang. Sie wollten verstehen, um zu handeln. Von der europäischen Theorie gingen sie über auf die Praxis in Amerika.

Strauss` Seminare und Vorlesungen bekamen bald Kult-Charakter. In sie strömten auch katholische Priester oder Vertreter aus dem Chicagoer Establishment. Damit ihn das wachsende Publikum auch wirklich hören konnte, ließ sich der Professor ein Mikrofon umhängen, was damals eine größere Prozedur zu Beginn jeder Vorlesung gewesen sein muss. In den sechziger Jahren nahmen seine Schüler dann auf Tonband auf, was Strauss mittwochs nachmittags, immer ab 15.30 Uhr, vortrug.

So viel Erfolg schuf Neider. Sie stießen sich daran, dass ein Professor der politischen Philosophie in dieser Zeit am liebsten über die Antike las, ohne Rückschlüsse auf die Gegenwart zu ziehen - auf die bipolare Welt, den Kalten Krieg, die neuen Atomwaffen. Ewige Wahrheiten, vorzugsweise gewonnen aus Xenophon, Sokrates, Plato? Widerlegung der Moderne durch Widerlegung von Hobbes? Zum ersten Mal tauchten jene Stichwörter auf, die Strauss auch in der heutigen Debatte anhaften: Nihilismus, Elitismus, Esoterik.

" Ein Neokonservativer ist ein Linker, den die Wirklichkeit überfallen hat."

Seine Schüler waren jedoch fasziniert von der Welt, die er ihnen erschloss. Zu ihm strömten alsbald die Besten und Klügsten ihrer Jahrgänge, viele von ihnen wiederum Juden. Sie seien vom Krieg geprägt gewesen, oft links gestimmt, Leser von Marx und Freud, erzählen Walter Berns und Werner Dannhauser, zwei Straussianer der ersten Stunde, die selber Professoren wurden. Der Mann aus Weimar habe sie denken gelehrt und ihnen Achtung vor großen Philosophen eingeflößt.

So weltabgewandt Strauss auch war, so gegenwartsmächtig wurde er, als der Neokonservativismus Mitte der sechziger Jahre seine Anfänge nahm. Die wirklichen Paten der Neocons sind in der Familie Kristol zu finden. Irving Kristol prägte den klassischen Satz: " Ein Neokonservativer ist ein Linker, den die Wirklichkeit überfallen hat."

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristols Frau, hatte Strauss 1950 entdeckt. Von ihr stammt die klassische Streitschrift " Ein Land, zwei Kulturen" . Sie kritisiert nicht nur den Verlust an Zivilität und protestantischer Arbeitsethik, die permissive Moral und sexuelle Revolution, sondern sieht in alldem eine Folge des entfesselten Liberalismus im demokratischen Amerika.

Das ist Strauss in Reinkultur, allerdings durch Kulturkämpfer vom Kopf auf die Füße gestellt. Irving Kristol vollendete diese Umkehrung, indem er Strauss` Gedanken aufnahm, Religion sei als Bestandsgarantie einer Staatsordnung unerlässlich.

Der Professor hatte an Amerikas Gründung missbilligt, dass die Glaubensflüchtlinge Staat und Religion trennten, anstatt eine Religion verbindlich zu machen. Kristol, ein blendender Agitator als Journalist, kannte Amerika besser - mindestens 150 Millionen mehr oder minder gläubige Menschen, vorrangig Katholiken oder Protestanten, eine Alltagsfrömmigkeit, die sich auch in zahllosen Sekten organisierte und eine politische Machtbasis für die konservativ erneuerten Republikaner darstellte.

Originell an der neokonservativen Ideologie war die Entdeckung, dass die politisch entscheidenden Schlachten in Amerika um kulturelle Werte geführt werden. Die Linke hatte propagiert, das Private sei politisch. Die " Neocons" nehmen sie beim Wort. Der Staat soll sich - mit Milton Friedman - aus der Wirtschaft heraushalten, aber nicht aus dem Schlafzimmer seiner Bürger.

Die großen Schlachten in Amerika werden seither um Abtreibung und Todesstrafe, um Homosexualität oder Sex vor der Ehe geführt - um die moralischen Werte eines christlich gestimmten Landes, dem Liberalität als Gesinnung verdächtig ist. Deshalb ist es von entscheidender Bedeutung, welche Richter in den Supreme Court gewählt werden, denn sie bestimmen in letzter Instanz über den Grad an Liberalität in Amerika, weil die wichtigsten Streitfälle früher oder später bei ihnen landen. Unter den neun Richtern gilt der erzkonservative Clarence Thomas als Straussianer.

Die erste Phase der neokonservativen Revolution fand unter Ronald Reagan ihre Erfüllung. Die zweite Phase findet nun unter George W. Bush statt, dem wiedergeborenen Christen, der weiß, wie wichtig Religion ist - für den patriotischen Zusammenhalt des Landes und für seine Wiederwahl, für die er unbedingt die Stimmen der wohlorganisierten christlichen Gruppen benötigt.

Zurzeit steht die Außenpolitik im Zentrum der konservativen Revolution. " Für Verschwörungstheoretiker ist die Außenpolitik der Bush-Regierung ganz und gar eine Schöpfung von Strauss" , meint die " New York Times" . Davon kann allerdings keine Rede sein. Diese Ehre gebührt in erster Linie Paul Wolfowitz und Richard Perle, die schon seit dem Ende des Kommunismus für die volle Machtentfaltung des einzigen Weltregenten und für den Krieg als Mittel der Politik plädieren.

Diese beiden Neocons allerdings sind Schüler eines anderen Professors mit deutschem Namen, der ebenfalls in Chicago lehrte, aber dort erst kurz vor Strauss` Emeritierung ankam: Albert Wohlstetter, geboren in New York, lehrte die Theorie der Sicherheitspolitik und hatte auf Wolfowitz (der bei Strauss lediglich zwei Kurse besucht hatte) und Perle eine bleibende Wirkung. Aggressivität statt Passivität in der Außenpolitik, der Wille zur Veränderung statt des alten Status-quo-Denkens lassen sich auf Wohlstetter zurückführen - die Voraussetzungen der neuen Pax Americana.

Strauss war nach der Emigration nur noch einmal in Deutschland gewesen, in den fünfziger Jahren, eingeladen von seinem Freund Karl Löwith. Am Ende seines Lebens, sagt seine Tochter Jenny, habe sich ihr Vater isoliert gefühlt; er habe Schwierigkeiten gehabt, seine Bücher wiederauflegen zu lassen. Das hat sich jetzt geändert.

GERHARD SPÖRL



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* Heinrich Meier: " Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und `Der Begriff des Politischen`" . Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden. Verlag J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart; 192 Seiten; 24,90 Euro. Vom selben Autor erschien soeben im selben Verlag: " Das theologisch-politische Problem" . Zum Thema von Leo Strauss. 88 Seiten; 9,95 Euro.




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© DER SPIEGEL 32/2003

[Joerver]

http://www.mystolennation.com/images/spoofs/roverer.jpg

Eine der für die Herkunft deutschen Gedankenguts in der Bush-Clique steht, ist der Bush-Berater Karl Rove, dem seine deutschen Wurzeln angelastet werden. Der im Bild angeführte Name soll der Name seiner Vorfahren sein.

[Joerver]

Sunday, January 11, 2004
War News for January 11, 2004 Draft

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

Bring `em on: British troops kill five Iraqi protesters in Amarah.

Bring `em on: Iraqis resist raids in Baquba.

Bring `em on: Attacks on US troops averaged 18 per day over last week.

Bring `em on: Iraqi-American CPA official assassinated in Basra.

Bring `em on: Protestors stone British troops as demonstrations continue in Amarah.

Bring `em on: Two Estonian soldiers wounded in grenade ambush in Baghdad. (Last Paragraph.)

Bring `em on: PUK offices in Mosul mortared.

Bring `em on: Two bombs explode in Kirkuk. (Second to last paragraph.)

Non-combat casualties in Iraq cause alarm.

Challenge for General Sanchez: Winning over wary Iraqis. Nice bio piece on General Sanchez. But winning the confidence of the Iraqis was L. Paul Bremer`s mission and he failed miserably - although he remains the heart-throb of many neo-conservatives because he cuts such a dash in his combat boots and Gucci suit.

Sectarian tensions rising in Iraq.

Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer plans to leave his position in June. Although a June departure means Bremer won`t be around to administer the July 1st transition plan, his departure is the best plan Bremer has ever had.

Former cabinet officer reveals Bushies began scheming to attack Iraq in January 2001. "`From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,` O`Neill told the news program, according to excerpts released yesterday. `For me, the notion of preemption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.`" The real scandal is that the Bushies planned this operation for two years, and they still screwed it up.

Saudi newspaper says Saddam was actually captured in September 2003.

Report from Fallujah. "Drinkwine leaves it to his battalion intelligence officer, Captain Gary Love, to fill in the picture. Love brings up a second map in which the city is sectored into areas of colour. Predominant is red. `The red,` says Captain Love, `is high threat. That is two-thirds of the city. I want you to notice that there is no green,` he says. `There are no areas where the threat is low.`"

Army begins relief-in-place in Iraq. "More than 240,000 soldiers and Marines are to move into and out of Iraq from now to May, testing the military`s ability to handle a major logistical feat while battling the Iraqi insurgency. From remote camps in northern Iraq to the port here, this swapping of forces amounts to the U.S. military`s largest troop rotation since World War II."

Commentary

Opinion: Bush lied to us about Iraq`s threat. "As long as this powerful, false notion lives, the administration will continue to mislead and control a frightened, gullible public. Meanwhile, U.S. and coalition troops and civilians, on both sides, will continue to die in a war that was initiated by George W. Bush - who was going to war no matter what."

Editorial: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. "There`s still a chance -- growing slimmer by the day -- that American forces will find prohibited weapons. Anything found at this late date, though, would arouse suspicions of it`s being planted by U.S. forces. That suspicion is just a part of the damage caused by the Bush administration`s rush to invade. The inability to produce the weapons that the administration insisted that Saddam still possessed has seriously eroded American credibility with the rest of the world. The United States flouted world opinion to take pre-emptive action. The next threat to international security may be very real and require concerted action. But the United States would have an even harder time mustering support to act, now that it appears to have cried wolf in Iraq."

Book Review: "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." "… there is certainly enough to suggest that the Bush dynasty`s many decades of entanglement and money-hunting in the Middle East have created a major conflict of interest that deserves to be part of the 2004 political debate. No previous presidency has had anything remotely similar. Not one. "

Opinion: Lieutenant AWOL`s record speaks for itself. "While the U.S. has long held world respect, we now are at the lowest point in world opinion; through the eyes of the world we are no longer seen as defenders of human rights but as the military aggressor. After months of U.N. weapons inspections and being advised that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, our administration insisted there were."

Opinion: Turn off the TV. "Television becomes a tool of the Bush administration, which has been able to excuse every civil liberties violation, every attack on the environment and every budget busting deficit, not to mention the war in Iraq, on the continuing threat of terror."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Maryland soldier killed in Iraq.

Home Front

Report from Fort Carson, Colorado.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:58 AM

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Bush Proposes New NASA Mission
To Study the Unemployment

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WASHINGTON, DC (IWR News Parody) President Bush today proposed a new mission for NASA to determine scientifically if there really are millions of people out of work in America.
This would be done by modifying a spy satellite to track the lines at unemployment offices in key election battleground states.

This satellite would also monitor migration patterns of illegal aliens flowing into this country, who are now fueling the low wage economic recovery, aka the president`s McJob for Every McPerson program.

"As you know, we always hear nothing but this doom and gloom crapola coming from all these pointy headed, Chicken Little, so-called scientists out there, whose jobs we have not yet been able to outsource to India. Ha! Ha!

Anyway, these are the same traitors who make all that stuff up about global warming, the depletion of species, pollution, offshore drilling, etc. are now trying to say we have an unemployment problem in this country.

Well I say nice theory, Stalin, but can you back up what you are saying with some good Texas style proof?

I mean if there aren`t any jobs available in this country, why do we have all these undocumented Wal-Mart and Tyson`s Food employees sneaking into this country from Mexico for?

Besides, I personally have yet to see one unemployed person here at the White House, Kennebunkport, my country club or at one of my campaign speeches. I just don`t get it. Besides didn`t I just create a 1,000 jobs last month?

In conclusion, I think it is clear that there are plenty of jobs in this country, and I think this new NASA mission will prove that once and for all," said Bush.

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Baker Backed Loans That Added to Iraq Debt
1 hour, 39 minutes ago

By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Now assigned the task of reducing Iraq `s debt, presidential envoy James A. Baker III once gave crucial support for continuing a billion-dollar loan program to Saddam Hussein `s government that accounts for most of the money Iraq still owes the United States.

As secretary of state in 1989, Baker urged the Agriculture Department to offer $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq to buy U.S. farm products after Iraq said it would reject a smaller deal.


"Documents indicate he intervened personally to make sure that Iraq continued to receive high levels of funding," said Joyce Battle, Middle East analyst for the National Security Archives, a foreign policy research center with a vast collection of declassified documents from the era.


Only half the guarantees were provided before the program was suspended amid allegations of improprieties and deterioration of relations with Iraq in the months before the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.


The guarantees were an important part of the first President Bush `s effort to improve relations with Iraq in hopes of boosting commercial ties and gaining leverage with a powerful and strategically important nation.


U.S. officials were well aware at the time that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq also was believed to have biological and nuclear weapons programs and to be harboring terrorists — reasons the current Bush administration has used to justify toppling the Iraqi leader.


But in 1989, Baker and other officials hoped incentives might change Saddam.


"That turned out to be unsuccessful, but I don`t think it was necessarily a bad approach to try," said John H. Kelly, who led the State Department`s Near Eastern Affairs bureau under Baker.


After invading Kuwait, Iraq defaulted on its debt to the United States; the debt has grown to more than $4 billion. That includes $1.9 billion in principal and $1.1 billion in interest on Agriculture Department-guaranteed loans.


"The Iraq loss was certainly a shock to the system because of the magnitude," Clayton Yeutter, agriculture secretary at the time, said in an interview. He said the Iraq experience taught officials to be careful about guaranteeing too much debt for a single nation.


The U.S. debt is a small part of Iraq`s overall $120 billion debt. Baker is now traveling the world as Bush`s envoy, seeking relief for Iraq.


The United States began providing loan guarantees to Iraq in the 1980s. Iraq was at war with Iran and the United States wanted to prevent advances by Iran`s clerical government.


When the first President Bush took office in 1989, the Iraq-Iran war was over and Iraq was not a U.S. priority, Baker wrote in his 1995 memoirs, "The Politics of Diplomacy."


To the extent it was considered, however, there were reasons to seek better relations.


Iraq was a major oil supplier. It was the ninth largest customer of U.S. agricultural goods, with most purchases backed by U.S. loan guarantees. U.S. companies were competing with foreign rivals for postwar business opportunities. Iraq was then the most powerful Arab country, and the United States hoped it might help Middle East peace efforts.


Some U.S. officials and members of Congress opposed attempts to improve relations, given Iraq`s record of gassing of Kurds and other abuses. The State Department`s human rights bureau described Iraq`s record as abysmal, and its director, Richard Schifter, argued against any assistance.


But some U.S. officials saw signs of change. Iraq appeared willing to discuss chemical weapons and human rights issues. Also, Iraq agreed in March 1989 to pay $27 million to the families of 37 sailors killed by a 1987 Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark.


Bush spelled out his policy in a national security directive from Oct. 2, 1989: "The United States government should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq." The policy left open the possibility of punitive measures if incentives failed.

"We were under no illusions about Saddam`s brutality toward his own people or his capacity for escalating tensions with his neighbors," Baker wrote. "We fully recognized at the time that it was entirely possible any carrots we offered him would fail to produce the desired result."

Baker tried to improve relations. In March 1989, he assured an Iraqi diplomat that he would take a personal interest in Iraq`s request for expanded loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank. Later, when Congress barred Iraq from participating in bank programs, the State Department drafted a waiver to override the sanctions. Bush signed the waiver in January 1990.

The big issue, however, was the agricultural loan guarantees, which provide producers and lenders with assurances that loans will be repaid. The guarantees helped Iraq obtain financing to buy U.S. farm products.

By 1989, Iraq had been receiving about $1 billion a year in guarantees. The Agriculture Department proposed reducing that to $400 million for 1990, with the possibility of more money later. Officials were concerned about Iraq`s creditworthiness, about corruption in the Iraq loan program and about a brewing scandal involving unauthorized loans to Iraq by the Atlanta branch of Italy`s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.

Angered by the cut, Iraq said it would reject the guarantees. At an Oct. 6, 1989, meeting with Baker, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz "made it clear this was not a sign that the U.S. wanted improvement in relations," a State Department cable said then.

If Iraq were cut off, some U.S. officials feared Saddam would default on the existing debt. Other officials, though, questioned expanding Iraq`s already large foreign debt.

Kelly and Abraham Sofaer, the State Department counsel, proposed a $1 billion program for Iraq, divided in two parts, with safeguards to prevent misuse. Sofaer recalled that the Stark settlement was an important consideration.

"It wasn`t a quid pro quo, but it was a positive reaction to a positive development," he said in a recent interview.

Baker supported the proposal and called Agriculture Secretary Yeutter, who agreed to back the plan. The $1 billion package was approved days later at an interagency meeting.

Baker then wrote to Aziz, saying the guarantees reflected "the importance we attach to our relationship with Iraq."

Iraq received the first $500 million, but never the rest. Relations quickly deteriorated. By April 1990, the United States was angered by Saddam`s threat to use chemical weapons against Israel, his criticism of the U.S. role in the Gulf and other issues.

The multiagency group suspended the second part of the loan program in May 1990. Declassified documents do not cite the worsening relations, but rather allegations of abuses in the loan program.

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Our Presidents New Best Friend Boils People Alive

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See Also: Just Who Is Our New Best Friend This 29 minute video explores the reality of life in Uzbekistan

06/26/03: Let me introduce you to our presidents new best friend, President Karimov of Uzbekistan.

President Karimov government was awarded $500m in aid from the Bush administration in 2002. The SNB (Uzbekistan`s security service) received $79m of this sum.

The U.S. State Department web site states "Uzbekistan is not a democracy and does not have a free press. Many opponents of the government have fled, and others have been arrested." and "The police force and the intelligence service use torture as a routine investigation technique."

Now I would like to introduce you to Muzafar Avazov, a 35-year old father of four. Mr Avazov had a visit from our presidents friends security force (SNB), the photographs below detail the brutality and inhuman treatment our tax dollars subsidize, with the full knowledge of our president and his administration.

Vorsicht! Einige nicht so schönen Bilder:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3943.htm

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11 Jan 2004 16:53

U.S. mortuary sees no let-up from Iraq war dead
By David Morgan

DOVER, Del. (Reuters) - Nearly a month after Saddam Hussein`s capture, American war dead from Iraq continue to arrive with somber regularity at the wind-swept Air Force base in Delaware that is home to the world`s largest mortuary.

The remains of the fallen, wrapped in body bags and encased in ice-laden metal transfer cases, descend from the sky aboard gray military planes or white civilian Boeing 747s. They are met at the airstrip by an honor guard, chaplain and small motorcade of blue vans.

The chaplain prays while the honor guard drapes a flag over each coffin and escorts it to the vans, which ferry the dead on a two-mile (3.2 km) trek to the 70,000-square-foot (6,500-square-metre) Dover Air Force Base Port Mortuary.

There, at the U.S. military`s only stateside mortuary, the remains are identified, autopsied, embalmed, clothed in dress uniforms, placed in coffins and shipped to grieving relatives in the company of military escorts.

The bodies of nine soldiers who died aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed near Falluja on Thursday were expected to arrive this weekend.

"That will put us over 500 for Iraq," said Karen Giles, an Air Force Reserve lieutenant colonel who heads a permanent eight-member staff supplemented by FBI fingerprint experts, pathologists and other specialists.

"We`ll probably have 50 or 60 people working here over the weekend," Giles said.

500 DEAD

According to Pentagon statistics released on Friday, 494 military personnel have died in Iraq. The mortuary also handles U.S. civilian dead, including contractors.

Mortuary services began at Dover in 1955. But their current home, a facility built with $30 million allocated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, opened in October with an enhanced capacity to house hundreds of bodies.

The mortuary has been empty only twice since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March. "The last time was in October," Giles told Reuters during a tour of the facility.

Saddam Hussein`s capture on Dec. 13 raised hopes that attacks on U.S. forces would ebb as American authorities pursued new intelligence leads and stepped up counterinsurgency tactics.

But the pace of casualties has not changed despite apparent U.S. success at reducing daily attacks, policy experts say.

Thirty Americans have died in hostile action during the 27 days between Saddam`s capture and Friday, according to a Pentagon official. In comparison, 41 died in hostilities the month before Saddam`s capture, from Nov. 13 through Dec. 13.

"Since the mid-summer time period, we`ve seen a fairly steady pace of around 30 to 40 Americans killed per month, and I don`t anticipate that number changing quickly," said Michael O`Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

MORE THAN FIRST THREE YEARS OF VIETNAM

In November, U.S. casualties in Iraq surpassed the number of Americans killed in the first three years of the Vietnam War, according to a Reuters analysis of Pentagon statistics.

For a time, growing casualties threatened U.S. President George W. Bush`s public approval ratings as he prepared for re-election amid fears that Iraq could turn into a quagmire for American forces.

But Bush`s ratings surged after Saddam`s capture and have stayed aloft.

Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst James Carafano said casualties appear to have become less of an issue for the public and the media since Saddam`s capture.

"The American people will accept casualties as long as they see progress toward the setting up of a legitimate government in Iraq," Carafano said.

"Look at the headlines. Casualties were on page one every day. Now they`re drifting back to page four or page five."

Back at Dover Air Force Base, the media are not allowed to see silver caskets arrive on the tarmac because of a Pentagon blackout first implemented in 1991 under Bush`s father, former President George Bush. It was reissued in March.

Pentagon officials say the policy is meant to protect the wishes and privacy of the soldiers` families.

But policy experts say military officials are also driven by fear that news images of American casualties -- at Dover or in Iraq -- will erode public support for U.S. policy.

"The general assumption is that if people see the casualty visually, they will not any longer support the war," said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, a vocal critic of the Bush administration.

"The fear of images is a left-over Vietnam thing. However, the notion of controlling them is a modern thing."

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Refereeing in Hell
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?


Boiling over: Angry Sunnis at an anti-American protest
By Babak Dehghanpisheh
NewsweekJan. 19 issue - The explosion gouged a crater in the pavement three feet deep and three feet across. The bomb, rigged from a gas cylinder attached to a bicycle, detonated at 1:45 in the afternoon, just as worshipers were leaving after Friday prayers at a Shiite mosque in Baquba, roughly 40 miles north of Baghdad. At least four people died and 32 were injured, police told NEWSWEEK. At the weekend the bomber had not been identified, but townspeople assume he was looking to spread distrust and anger between the Shiites and their predominantly Sunni neighbors. Police officials say the day`s carnage could have been even worse if they hadn`t found and defused a second bomb at another Shiite mosque a few miles away.
The sneak attacks keep coming—against both Iraqi civilians and Coalition forces. Last week`s deadliest incident was the crash of a U.S. medical helicopter near Fallujah, killing all nine aboard. Witnesses said the Black Hawk was brought down by ground fire. Military spokesmen said an investigation was underway. Tuesday marks one month to the day of the capture of Saddam Hussein, humiliated and feeble, and Bush aides insist these are the death throes of the insurgency. And after more than 200 U.S. military deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom, one more trag-ic attack can hardly alter the Pentagon`s plans. Coalition control over Iraq`s destiny—and its fractious ethnic and religious factions—is scheduled to end in less than six months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) transfers power to an elected Iraqi leadership and disbands.

That thought scares Americans and Iraqis alike. Even if the transfer of authority allows GIs to step back from the front lines, deadly rivalries between Iraqis could make last week`s bloodshed look like national unity. And an election-year U.S. troop drawdown is all but impossible. "If the Americans leave, there will definitely be a civil war," says Sheik Nadhim Khalil, 25, who has no great love for U.S. troops. In recent weeks they have ransacked his home and the mosque where he leads Friday services in Dholoiya, a farming town in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. U.S. officials think the best hope of preventing a bloodbath depends on creating an interim constitution that will somehow satisfy the demands of Iraq`s disparate ethnic and religious groups. As if that alone didn`t pose enough of a challenge, the deadline for producing the Transitional Administration Law is no later than Feb. 28.

America`s head civilian in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has done everything he can to make it happen on schedule. He still needs a miracle. His biggest problem is the country`s 4 million or so Kurds. With the help of U.S. air cover they broke free from Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship in the wake of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Since then a generation of Iraqi Kurds has grown up in a virtually independent state with its own laws, its own leaders and its own army. They don`t want to trade their autonomy for life as an ethnic and religious minority in an overwhelmingly Arab nation of 25 million, including 15 million Shiites. On the contrary, the young Kurds are determined to reclaim an area that belonged to their people before the 1970s, when the Baghdad regime began a massive program of forced removals in and around the city of Kirkuk. The onetime Kurdish regional capital sits atop roughly 6 percent of the world`s known oil reserves.

Last spring the Kurds` peshmerga fighters marched into Kirkuk with the 173d Airborne. Things turned ugly fast. Guerrilla units began sweeping through Kirkuk and villages south of the city, evicting nearly 2,000 Arabs. Ethnic clashes continued for a week until the Americans gained control. Some Kurdish militias were intercepted in the act of raiding Arab villages. Col. Bill Mayville, the 173d`s brigade commander in Kirkuk, has been working ever since to mediate property disputes and organize peace talks with local Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman (ethnic Turk) leaders. He rolls his eyes at the Sunnis` constant allegations that he favors the Kurds. "We`re in the middle, wearing a referee`s jersey," he says. "The Kurds don`t have Kirkuk."

Not yet, anyway. Mayville has repeatedly warned Kurdish leaders in the city to cool their superheated "Jerusalem of Kurdistan" rhetoric, and his troops have raided Kurdish political-party offices and confiscated AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "No party should have an RPG," says Emma Sky, the CPA`s representative in Kirkuk. "What political activity requires an RPG?" Roughly 3,000 Arab and Turkoman protesters marched through the city on New Year`s Eve, and a shoot-out erupted as they neared the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headquarters. The clashes claimed four lives. No one seems to agree on who started it, but members of all three ethnic groups describe a succession of random shootings, explosions and kidnappings in the following days.

If the Kurds do secede, with or without Kirkuk, Bremer can scarcely hope to persuade other Iraqis to make sacrifices for the sake of national unity. Political observers quietly cheered when dozens of Sunni clerics gathered at Baghdad`s Mother of All Battles Mosque on Christmas Day to form a consultative council, traditionally known as a shura. To outsiders the meeting looked as if the participants had finally decided to help build the new Iraq. But less than a week later one of the three organizers of the shura, Sheik Mehdi al Sumaidai, was arrested in a U.S. raid that turned up five sticks of plastic explosive, eight improvised grenades, 11 AK-47s and 3,500 rounds of ammunition, several RPG launchers and a training device for firing surface-to-air missiles at the Umm al Taboul (Mother of Drums) Mosque in the capital. Other shura members, denying any connection to the doings at the Umm al Taboul Mosque, insist their council is a legitimate political body.

Khalil, who made a quick trip from Dholoiya to Baghdad a few days after the raid, says he has joined the shura. If his attitude is any sign of what the group`s members think, the cause of national unity is in deep trouble. Khalil makes no secret of his contempt for Iraq`s Shiite majority. In his Friday sermons he has called for the creation of Sunni militias to challenge the Shiites` 10,000 or so Iranian-trained paramilitary fighters and the Kurds` roughly 70,000 battle-hardened peshmerga fighters. "We are willing to sacrifice our sons and fathers to stop the rule of black turbans," he says, using a Sunni term of disparagement for Shiites. "Being ruled by Shiites would be the same as being ruled by Iran. This is unacceptable." Attendance at his mosque has doubled in recent months.

Iraq`s neighbors are saying prayers of their own as they watch what`s happening next door. They have all had their share of ethnic problems with Kurds and other minorities, but their concern goes deeper than that. When the WMD searches came up empty, Bush aides began claiming that the invasion was actually a way of planting the seeds of democracy in Arab lands. Now the fear is that Iraq`s collapse could destabilize the entire region.

With Daniel Klaidman in Washington and Owen Matthews in Istanbul

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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Camp Delta Briton claims racial abuse
Racial abuse claim by Briton

Tania Branigan
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

Guards at Guantanamo Bay are racially abusing inmates by calling them "ragheads" and "camel-riders", the family of a British detainee claims.

Shafiq Rasul, who has been held at the base since spring 2002, alleged the abuse in a letter to his family.

According to his elder brother Habib, he wrote: "Everything`s OK in Guantanamo. It`s just that sometimes some of the guards are OK with us, and some are saying things to us, calling us names like camel-rider and raghead."

Mr Rasul said: "It`s blatantly racist and Islamophobic. Shafiq`s from Tipton - he`s never seen a camel in his life."

Amnesty International said that such abuse, if true, would be "totally unacceptable and alarming".

"It`s important that the American authorities do a thorough investigation of these alleged comments."

A spokeswoman for the base said she could not verify the comments, but would raise the matter with the camp`s commanders. She added that soldiers received sensitivity training to help them work with Muslim detainees.

"If it happened it would be unfortunate and we would need to do some reinforcement. Racial comments are not tolerated," she said.

A Foreign Office spokesman said it did not comment on specific allegations, but that its officials discussed a range of issues with the US authorities.

The allegation of abuse comes amid renewed speculation about the future of the nine Britons at the US naval base in Cuba. A possible breakthrough in the negotiations to have the detainees returned to Britain was signalled recently when a senior American diplomat said the US would release them so long as the UK could "manage" them, possibly via long-term surveillance. The apparent deal prompted lawyers to blame the home secretary for blocking a final resolution.

"David Blunkett is fearful that the public mood may change or that he will be criticised if they can`t be prosecuted [in the UK]," said Louise Christian, a lawyer who represents several detainees.

The claim of racial abuse is likely to reignite debate about the treatment of the nine. Mail from the base is censored. In an earlier message seen by the Guardian, from another detainee, a lengthy blacked-out section ended: "... but other than that, everything is fine".

The father of Rhuhel Ahmed, also from Tipton, said his son had complained of food rations being cut in his last letter. "He said was getting less food than he had when he was first there," Riasoth Ahmed said. "After each meal he would go out for exercise, but he stopped because there was not enough to eat," Mr Ahmed said.

The base spokeswoman said that prisoners received three hot meals a day or were able to help themselves to cooked food.

The Amnesty International spokesman added that whatever the conditions at the base, long-term confinement without charge or access to lawyers was "absolutely unacceptable".

"What the International Red Cross focused on [in a recent report] was not the conditions per se, but the fact that indefinite detention was what was driving significant numbers of the detainees mad. It`s the utter limbo that`s the final straw," said Gareth Peirce, the solicitor acting for Shafiq Rasul and other prisoners.

Only consular officials and the IRC are allowed to visit the 660 detainees.

Tony Blair yesterday suggested that the future of the Britons would be decided shortly, telling BBC1`s Breakfast with Frost: "I think it will be resolved one way or another in the next few weeks but I can`t say exactly at this juncture how it will be resolved.

"It is extremely important that we balance up the absolute proper consideration that they get a fair and decent trial with the need to protect people in this country."

The Britons` lawyers believe that the Bush administration wants to get rid of the men because two of them are plaintiffs in a case to be heard in the US supreme court, which will consider whether American courts should have jurisdiction over the base. "They don`t want a defeat in the supreme court in election year," said Ms Peirce.

But US human rights experts have warned that previous indications of releases had not translated into action.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Bush decided to remove Saddam `on day one`
Former aide says US president made up his mind to go to war with Iraq long before 9/11, then ordered his staff to find an excuse

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

In the Bush White House, Paul O`Neill was the bespectacled swot in a class of ideological bullies who eventually kicked him out for raising too many uncomfortable questions. Now, 13 months later at a critical moment for the president, the nerd is having his revenge.

Mr O`Neill`s account of his two years as Treasury secretary, told in a book published tomorrow and in a series of interviews over the weekend, is a startling tale of an administration nominally led by a disengaged figurehead president but driven by a "praetorian guard" of hardline rightwingers led by vice president Dick Cheney, ready to bend circumstances and facts to fit their political agenda.

According to the former aluminium mogul and longstanding Republican moderate who was fired from the US Treasury in December 2002, the administration came to office determined to oust Saddam and used the September 11 attacks as a convenient justification.

As Mr O`Neill, who sat in countless national security council meetings, describes the mood: "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying `Go find me a way to do this`."

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr O`Neill told the CBS network programme, 60 Minutes. In the book, based largely on his recollections and written by an American journalist, Ron Suskind, Mr O`Neill said that even as far back as January 2001, when President Bush took office, no one in the NSC questioned the assumption that Iraq should be invaded.

In the book, The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O`Neill, the author, Mr Suskind, quotes from memoranda preparing for a war dating to the first days of the administration. "One of them marked `secret` says `Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,`" he told CBS television.

Oil contracts
He quoted from a Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which, he said, talks about carving the country`s fuel reserves up between the world`s oil companies. It talks about contractors around the world from ... 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Mr Suskind said.

The administration, as described by Mr O`Neill, was equally fixated on granting unprecedented tax cuts to the nation`s richest people who had bankrolled its election campaign. It was not prepared to listen to an anxious Treasury secretary warning of dangerously ballooning deficits. The president was "clearly signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through", Mr O`Neill says. Moderates like himself, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and Christine Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, "may have been there, in large part, as cover" for a hardline agenda, he argues. Of that trio, only Mr Powell remains in the administration and he has privately made it clear he will not stay on for a second Bush term.

Mr O`Neill`s memoir is one of the most damning White House exposés of recent times, and is already being quoted with relish by Democratic presidential contenders. It has sparked a furious damage limitation and denigration response by the president`s aides, one of whom told Time magazine in a revealing comment: "We didn`t listen to him when he was there. Why should we now?"

White House aides have also pointed to Mr O`Neill`s reputation as a gaffe-prone Treasury secretary, who at one point triggered a run on the dollar by suggesting that maintaining its strength was not a priority.

Mr O`Neill says the president often did not have much to say at key discussions and it was the bullies of the Republican right who took over. After perceptions spread early in the administration that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republicans` political mastermind, Karl Rove, were really making policy, the White House publicity machine dedicated itself to building Mr Bush up as a decisive leader. Presidential aides have "leaked" anecdotes to the press showing Mr Bush making tough decisions. In Bob Woodward`s book Bush at War, based principally on the celebrated Washington journalist`s interviews with the president and top officials, there is no doubt who is in charge as the nation faces its greatest challenge since Pearl Harbor.

Mr O`Neill paints a very different picture. He describes Mr Bush as mostly silent and inscrutable during policy debates in cabinet, and says there was hardly any real interaction between president and his department heads.

He describes those cabinet sessions as being "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people". At the end of them, he said, cabinet members were left to make policy like "blind man`s bluff" guessing what the president`s wishes were.

When the Treasury secretary went to the Oval Office for weekly discussions, he found he did all the talking. "I wondered from the first, if the president didn`t know the questions to ask," he tells Mr Suskind, "or if he did know and just did not want to know the answers?"

The one time the president does become engaged in economic policy discussion in Mr Suskind`s book, it is to question the orthodoxy of his own administration`s policy during a White House discussion of a second round of tax cuts in November 2002, following triumphal midterm election results.

According to Mr Suskind, who says he has a transcript of the meeting, the president asks: "Haven`t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut`s gonna do it again."

The president suggests instead: "Shouldn`t we be giving money to the middle?" But Mr Rove, who has masterminded Mr Bush`s election campaigns since his days in Texas, jumps in at this point in the transcript to urge the president: "Stick to principle. Stick to principle."

"He says it over and over again," Mr Suskind said. "Don`t waver."

In his own account, Mr O`Neill discovers the hard line on tax cuts is coming from Mr Cheney. Not knowing he was in his last weeks as Treasury secretary, he went to see the vice president expecting to get a sympathetic hearing for his concerns over the deficit. Instead he is told: "You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don`t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due."

Mr O`Neill`s disillusion personifies a latent split in the Republican party between traditional moderates and followers of the president`s father, and the hardliners around the second President Bush. Mr O`Neill served in the Nixon and Ford administrations before moving on to run the Alcoa aluminium corporation, where he dedicated himself to improving worker safety. He insists he continues to support the wider Republican cause but he is not going to be silenced. He declares: "I`m an old guy, and I`m rich. And there`s nothing they can do to hurt me."


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Blair admits weapons of mass destruction may never be found
· PM shows first doubts on central reason for war
· Asked was he wrong on WMD, he says: `I don`t know`

Sarah Hall, Richard Norton-Taylor and Julian Borger in Washington
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

Tony Blair yesterday signalled that weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq, in his first admission of fallibility over the central justification he gave for going to war with Iraq.

In his most downbeat assessment of the contentious issue so far, the prime minister said he did not know whether WMD would be unearthed, and conceded that this flew in the face of widespread initial expectations.

"I do not know is the answer," he admitted. "I believe that we will but I agree there were many people who thought we were going to find this in the course of the actual operation ... We just have to wait and see".

The prime minister`s admission - the latest shift in a gradual lowering of expectations - came in a wide-ranging interview on BBC 1`s Breakfast with Frost programme.

Asked by the veteran broadcaster if the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - the basis on which he took the country to war - was wrong, he replied: "Well, you can`t say that at this point in time".

He said that he had acted on intelligence on Saddam Hussein`s programmes, and stressed that, throughout the conflict, the chief of defence staff, General Sir Michael Walker, had also believed this.

"The chief of defence staff and other people were saying well, we think we might have potential WMD finds here or there. Now these things didn`t actually come to anything in the end - but I don`t know is the answer."

Mr Blair`s uncharacteristically flat response, in an interview in which he was bullish about top-up fees and the Hutton inquiry, spoke volumes about his diminishing certainty that WMD would be found. He pointedly failed to refer to the weekend discovery of 36 shells containing chemical agents in the Iraq desert north of Basra, believed to be remnants from the Iran-Iraq war.

The prime minister`s admission of doubt marks a significant shift in his public stance on the weapons issue.

In September 2002, he told the Commons that "Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing", a stance with which he persisted as he took the nation to war in March last year.

As recently as last June, he told MPs he had "no doubt" they would "find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction", though he watered down this claim to "WMD programmes" the following month.

But with the Iraq Survey Group which is leading the hunt reporting in September that it had uncovered no weapons of mass destruction, he slid further, to speaking about evidence of "clandestine laboratories".

A similar erosion of confidence has been evident within the intelligence community. "There may be small quantities, and maybe not," a well-placed Whitehall official said yesterday, in stark contrast to the note struck by the joint intelligence committee and MI6 before, during and immediately after the war.

Britain`s intelligence community now realise they face a huge credibility problem which could have far-reaching and damaging consequences already manifested by the widespread scepticism that greeted the decision over the new year to cancel British Airways flights to the US.

Senior Whitehall officials are now falling back on the argument that ministers, in their determination to go to war, should never have relied so much on intelligence in the first place.

Intelligence, they say, is almost always a question of assessment and judgment, and not hard facts.

That should have been clear when the government published its Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002, they imply.

Political opponents reacted to Mr Blair`s shift in ground with a mixture of bemusement and derision.

"Once again Tony Blair is hedging his bets," said the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram. "The prime minister should come clean, and explain whether his previous claim to have evidence of weapons of mass destruction was yet another fabrication, and if not what that evidence was."

Paul Keetch, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said it was "disingenuous" to blame intelligence reports when the prime minister had taken the decision to embark on the conflict. "Intelligence is not an exact science. But if he is now saying he`s unsure whether there were WMD or not, one would have assumed that uncertainty would have been apparent at the time," he said.

The Labour backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce opponent of the war, described Mr Blair`s shift in language as "ridiculous".

"Ten months ago, he told us that he was absolutely certain there were weapons of mass destruction. He`s now saying ... they might not find them. This is ridiculous. We were taken to war on the basis there was a real threat."

The admission of doubt is particularly significant for Mr Blair because, unlike President George Bush, he put WMD, rather than regime change, at the centre of his justification for war.

Mr Blair must now brace himself for the Hutton report into the death of the Iraqi arms specialist Dr David Kelly, which is expected by the end of the month. Yesterday, he vowed he would not hide from any criticisms - a charge put by the Conservative leader, Michael Howard.

It would be absurd for him not to respond to the report on the day it was published, he said, though he refused to confirm he would lead the debate in the Commons a week later.

"I can assure you I have no intention of hiding away from this at all," he said. "On the contrary, I am enthusiastic about being at long last able to debate these issues on the basis of an objective, independent judgment by a judge, rather than speculation."


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Survey: U.S. Jews Back Dem. Candidates

Monday January 12, 2004 8:46 AM


By RACHEL ZOLL

AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - U.S. Jews would overwhelmingly support any major Democratic candidate over President Bush if the election were held today, according to the 2004 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion.

Joe Lieberman, the only Jewish candidate, would defeat Republican Bush by the largest margin, 71 percent to 24 percent, the poll found.

In one-on-one matchups with the president, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, John Kerry and Richard Gephardt would each receive about 60 percent of the Jewish vote, compared to about 30 percent for Bush, according to the survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee and released Monday.

The poll omitted Democrats Carol Moseley Braun, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton because they were not considered strong candidates, the New York-based public policy group said.

American Jews tend to vote Democrat, and 66 percent said they backed Al Gore in the 2000 race.

Still, GOP leaders have been courting Jews, and the poll did find a slight increase in the percentage who considered themselves Republican, from 9 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004.

However, more than half of those surveyed identified themselves as Democrats. About one-third said they were independent.

The survey also found disagreement with some Bush policies.

Fifty-four percent of those polled disapprove of how Bush has handled the fight against terrorism and the U.S.-led war on Iraq, while a majority said the United States should not act without the support of its allies in responding to international crises.

Jews also overwhelmingly oppose government funding for social service programs operated by religious groups, the survey found. Allowing faith-based organizations to compete for such funding is a top Bush initiative.

Sixty percent said they supported how the Israeli government has handled relations with the Palestinian Authority, while 54 percent said they favored creating a Palestinian state.

More than two-thirds said Israel should be willing to dismantle all or some of Jewish settlements in the West Bank as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Nearly 70 percent said anti-Semitism was a greater threat to Jewish life in the United States than intermarriage, and said that among U.S. religious groups, Muslims and the ``Religious Right`` were the most anti-Semitic.

The survey of 1,000 people was conducted Nov. 25-Dec. 11 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

There are about 5.2 million Jews in the United States, according to National Jewish Population Survey released in September. The survey included people who said they were Jewish, were born to a Jewish parent or raised Jewish and did not convert to another religion.

---

On the Net:

American Jewish Committee: http://www.ajc.org/







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The US economy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Storm clouds ahead
Leader
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

Suddenly, everything is looking hunky dory for the world economy. Output in the United States is soaring. Most of Asia, and especially China, is on a roll, and even Japan, whose economy has been dead in the water for years, is showing signs of movement. Only continued stagnation in Europe is spoiling the outlook. Why then has the International Monetary Fund chosen this moment to spoil the party by issuing one of the sternest warnings it has ever made to the US? The IMF accepts that the huge "twin deficits" (on international trade and the budget) will give a much-needed short-term stimulus to US economic activity, but it is very worried about the long-term implications which will entail tax increases and spending cuts to correct. US fiscal policy, it adds, has been "extremely expansionary", with the federal fiscal balance swinging from a surplus of 2.5% of GDP in fiscal year 2000 to a deficit of just under 4% of GDP in 2003, or over 5% excluding the temporary social security surplus. Even if the deficit is reduced by the strong cyclical expansion now under way, it would still leave an unacceptably large structural deficit (ie the bit that won`t go away after a cyclical recovery) of 2% of GDP.

The IMF is equally worried about the escalating US trade deficit, which has led to a rise in US external debt that will need continuing inflows of foreign money to support it. It believes there is a "substantial risk" that the foreign appetite for US assets, especially government bonds, will diminish even faster than has already been happening during the recent orderly devaluation of the dollar. In that event there is an unspoken danger that the fall of the dollar could develop into a rout, damaging the US economy and aborting the global recovery.

This raises the question of whether the current US boom is anything more than a cynical election manoeuvre, aggravated by war spending, to keep the trappings of prosperity intact until the president is re-elected. It is certainly an unusual recovery. So far, despite strong growth, the economy hasn`t even generated enough new jobs to keep up with population growth while manufacturing employment is still in decline. Last week`s figures showed that the US generated only 1,000 jobs in December compared with 150,000 forecast by analysts. This may simply mean that the increase has been delayed until January; but it could suggest that US manufacturers themselves do not believe in the longevity of the recovery strongly enough to take on new workers in the US - as opposed to China and other parts of Asia, to where an increasing proportion of US manufacturing is being outsourced.

Meanwhile, consumer spending is being supported not, as it normally is, by rises in real incomes (though tax cuts have certainly helped), but by drawing from the bubble of remortgaged housing wealth, a phenomenon that could easily be reversed. A falling dollar will give a much-needed boost to US exports, though they remain a comparatively small part of the whole economy. The worrying question is what happens when excessive monetary and fiscal expansion have taken their toll. President Bush`s evangelicals believe that the extra output triggered by tax cuts (on top of three years of low interest rates and a cyclical recovery) will generate enough revenues to pay off the budget deficit. The IMF and others disagree. The best thing going for the US at present is that critics who have predicting that the twin deficits will bring disaster have not been proved right. But that does not mean they were wrong. President Bush has bought time - and maybe another term of office - with a supra-Keynesian burst of fiscal expansion, accompanied by very low interest rates. Sooner or later, as the normally diplomatic IMF observes, he will have to face the consequences.


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Big Brother Britain, 2004
Four million CCTV cameras watch public. UK has the highest level of surveillance
By Maxine Frith, Social Affairs Correspondent
12 January 2004


More than four million surveillance cameras monitor our every move, making Britain the most-watched nation in the world, research has revealed.

The number of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras has quadrupled in the past three years, and there is now one for every 14 people in the UK. The increase is happening at twice the predicted rate, and it is believed that Britain accounts for one-fifth of all CCTV cameras worldwide. Estimates suggest that residents of a city such as London can each expect to be captured on CCTV cameras up to 300 times a day, and much of the filming breaches existing data guidelines.

Civil liberties groups complain that the rules governing the use of the cameras in Britain are the most lax in the world. They say that, in contrast to other countries, members of the public are often unaware they are being filmed, and are usually ignorant of the relevant regulations. They also argue that there is little evidence to support the contention that CCTV cameras lead to a reduction in crime rates.

Barry Hugill, a spokesman for the human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty, said: "This proliferation of cameras is simply astounding. The use of CCTV has just exploded in the last few years, and what is terrifying is that we are alone in the world for not even having a debate about what it means for our privacy."

Professor Clive Norris, deputy director of the Centre for Criminological Research in Sheffield, presented the new research at an international conference on CCTV at Sheffield Universityon Saturday.

Professor Norris conducted a study in 2001 which predicted that the number of cameras would double from one million to two million by 2004. But his most recent study concludes that there are now "at least" 4,285,000 cameras in operation - double his earlier prediction.

There are no official government figures for the number of CCTV systems in Britain, but Professor Norris used a detailed study of surveillance cameras in London to calculate his figure.

The research formed part of a European-wide URBANEYE project on the use of CCTV.

Professor Norris said: "We are the most-watched nation in the world. One of the surprising findings was how much more control there is in other countries, such as America and France, compared to Britain.

"Other countries have been much more wary about CCTV, because of long-held concepts such as freedom of expression and assembly. These seem to be alien concepts in here."

The use of cameras to film people in the street is banned in Germany, Canada and several other countries. But it is accepted practice in Britain, which is alone in not having a privacy law that protects people against constant surveillance. The Data Protection Act states that the public has to be informed that CCTV systems are in operation, and be told how they can exercise their legal right to see their own footage. But civil rights groups said many councils, shops and businesses were failing to provide this information, and they estimated that up to 70 per of CCTVcamera operators were breaking the rules.

Some shopping-centre security guards use the cameras to track "socially undesirable" people, such as groups of teenage boys or rough sleepers, around stores, and then eject them even if they have done nothing wrong.

Professor Norris warned: "The use of these practices represents a shift from formal and legally regulated measures of crime control towards private and unaccountable justice."

Footage from the cameras has also been passed to newspapers and television companies without people`s permission. Professor Norris said: "CCTV is generally seen as benign rather than as Big Brother-style surveillance.

"We need to have a much wider debate about exactly what CCTV is doing in terms of our privacy and our society.

"It is about much more than crime. It enables people to be tracked and monitored and harassed and socially excluded on the basis that they do not fit into the category of people that a council or shopping centre wants to see in a public space."

Over the past decade, the Home Office has handed out millions of pounds in grants to police forces and councils to install CCTV systems in the belief it will reduce and prevent crime. But Mr Hugill said: "All that CCTV does is shift the crime to another area for a bit, and then it returns. If you asked most people, they would rather see the Government spending the money on more police officers than on installing cameras, which do not appear to make much difference anyway."
12 January 2004 10:34



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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US sergeant branded a coward mounts furious fightback
Combat Stress
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angles
12 January 2004


If Jessica Lynch, the fresh-faced West Virginia teenager turned international media icon, could be described as the accidental hero of the Iraq war, then Georg-Andreas Pogany is the accidental coward.

Like Private Lynch, who became an international celebrity largely through the manipulation of the Pentagon`s propaganda machine rather than anything she did or did not do on the battlefield, Staff Sergeant Pogany, hired as a translator and interrogator with US Special Forces, did nothing to seek out his poster-child status and almost certainly does not deserve the notoriety that has come his way.

Unlike Ms Lynch, though, he has no million-dollar book deals or exclusive television interviews lined up. Instead, he is back at his home base in Fort Carson, Colorado, treated as a pariah by his fellow soldiers and former colleagues in the Green Berets, his legal status in limbo and his reputation in tatters.

His story, on the surface, seems unremarkable. Last September, after just two days on active duty in Iraq, he caught sight of the mangled body of a dead Iraqi soldier inside a white body bag. The body was ripped almost in two, with a large hole and strips of ripped flesh where the man`s chest should have been.

Although a gun battle was in progress at the time - he was stationed in the tense city of Samarra, within the so-called "Sunni Triangle" of central Iraq - Sgt Pogany was not himself involved in the combat. Initially, he pushed the image of the dead Iraqi to the back of his mind and continued puffing on a cigarette.

But a few hours later, the image returned and began to haunt him. He started shaking and vomiting and could not sleep. By the next morning, he thought he might be having a nervous breakdown.

One might conclude that this was a relatively routine case of combat stress. That was the opinion of an Army chaplain Sgt Pogany consulted, and also that of an Army psychologist who suggested he transfer to other, less stressful duties until the panic attack subsided and he could return to his regular job. His, they concluded, was a normal reaction to the brutality of war.

But Sgt Pogany`s misfortune was to have a singularly unsympathetic commanding officer, whose first reaction was to tell him to "get your head out of your ass". It only deteriorated from there.

In short order, Sgt Pogany found himself stripped of his weapons and sent home to face a formal charge of cowardice before a court martial - a serious, and rarely prosecuted offence punishable by death.

According to an account Sgt Pogany gave recently to the Denver Post newspaper, he had begun to implement the army psychologist`s advice and was feeling much better when his commanding officer took the drastic action of branding him a coward. In front of a group of lower-ranking soldiers, the commander told him "what a shit bag I am and what a fucking coward I am".

Soon, Sgt Pogany was being vilified in the US media as a disgrace to his country. One television station put his picture beside Jessica Lynch`s in a split-screen montage. Pte Lynch`s image was emblazoned with the word "hero", while his carried the tag "coward".

On his return to the US, he was frisked and patted down, examined at an army hospital and deemed fit for duty. His expectation at that point was to be returned to active duty - something he would not have opposed. "The soldier should be returned to duty with no change in duty status," the hospital psychologist wrote in his report.

But within a week he was instead slapped with the cowardice charge and put on humiliating cleaning duties at Fort Carson.

His legal status has steadily improved since then. The cowardice charge was dropped and replaced with a formal accusation of "dereliction of duty" - which carries a possible six month sentence in a military prison. In mid-December, that charge, too, was dropped - in effect, an admission by the military authorities that there was no case against him in the first place.

But Sgt Pogany`s nightmare is far from over. His commanders could still try him on a non-judicial charge of dereliction of duty, which could lead to confinement, docked pay and rank, and a less than honourable discharge. Or they could opt to revive the court martial charges. The danger, especially, in the former case, is that the officer bringing the charges would also be the one presiding over the trial, making it almost impossible for him to clear his name.

The third option is that the case would be dropped altogether, but there is no indication such a decision would be taken quickly. Even in that best of scenarios, Sgt Pogany`s reputation would be almost impossible to salvage.

"Some might say he has received national notoriety," his lawyer, Richard Travis, said recently. "How do you fix that? How do you reinstate your integrity?"

Sgt Pogany`s case has elicited some sympathy in the US media - in newspapers if not on television. "The message is that under no circumstances should a man show any emotions, even in the face of the brutal events of war. Here we go again," wrote one impassioned editorialist, Philip Rose, in an upstate New York newspaper.
12 January 2004 10:35



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January 12, 2004
Bush Sought to Oust Hussein From Start, Ex-Official Says
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 — President Bush was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq from the start of his administration, more than seven months before the terrorist attacks that he later cited as the trigger for a more aggressive foreign policy, Paul H. O`Neill, Mr. Bush`s first Treasury secretary, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr. O`Neill said in an interview with the CBS program "60 Minutes."

Mr. O`Neill, who was dismissed by Mr. Bush more than a year ago over differences on economic policy, said Iraq was discussed at the first National Security Council meeting after Mr. Bush`s inauguration. The tone at that meeting and others, Mr. O`Neill said, was "all about finding a way to do it," with no real questioning of why Mr. Hussein had to go or why it had to be done then. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," Mr. O`Neill said.

Mr. O`Neill gave the interview to "60 Minutes" to promote a new book, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind. Mr. O`Neill cooperated extensively on the book, turning over 19,000 documents from his two years as Treasury secretary, including transcripts of National Security Council meetings, Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes."

Mr. O`Neill also gave an interview to Time magazine, which quoted him as casting doubt on the strength of the evidence Mr. Bush cited in making the case for war with Iraq.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," Mr. O`Neill told Time, speaking of his tenure in the administration. "There were allegations and assertions by people. But I`ve been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions.

"To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else," he continued. "And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

Mr. O`Neill, a former chairman of Alcoa, served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and was close to Vice President Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman. Mr. O`Neill had a rocky tenure as Treasury secretary. His departure came after he made it clear he differed with the White House over the need for more tax cuts. In his typically blunt style, he made no effort at the time to pretend he was not angry and hurt over being forced out.

But the account of his service to Mr. Bush, as given to Mr. Suskind, whose book is to be published Tuesday, is the first by a former senior Bush administration official. It is sure to fuel questions from Mr. Bush`s political opponents about the administration`s rationale for invading Iraq, and to focus new attention on Mr. Bush`s management style and the balance in the White House between politics and policy.

A White House spokesman, Ken Lisaius, said on Sunday night that the administration "simply is not in the business of doing book reviews."

Mr. Lisaius said the book and the interviews appeared to be "an attempt to justify the former secretary`s own opinions instead of the results this administration has achieved on behalf of the American people."

In the interviews and in excerpts from the book, Mr. O`Neill described Mr. Bush as hard to read and seemingly disengaged from the details of many policy debates. He portrayed Mr. Cheney as unwilling to serve the role of honest broker during those debates.

In the interviews on Sunday, Mr. O`Neill did not describe in depth the early discussions about removing Mr. Hussein from power. Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes" that he had documents dating from before Sept. 11, 2001, showing planning for the aftermath of a war with Iraq, covering peacekeeping forces, war crimes tribunals and Iraqi oil fields.

Since the Clinton administration, the official position of the United States, backed by bipartisan votes in Congress, has been to call for "regime change" in Iraq. Even before taking office, Mr. Bush had spoken to exiled Iraqi opponents of Mr. Hussein about his desire to drive the Iraqi leader from power.

But the administration has disclosed few details of its early thinking about war with Iraq and did not publicly raise the prospect of such a war seriously until August 2002.



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January 12, 2004
Once-Ruling Sunnis Unite to Regain a Piece of the Pie
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 11 — Fakri Abdullah al-Qaisi says the vision came to him as it does with all prophets: in communion with God, atop a holy mountain. God`s message, he said, was to unite the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.

That was in February, outside Mecca, at the barren Mount Arafat.

Mr. Qaisi returned to Iraq in June, and now has begun to realize his calling. He has brought together 85 leaders of Sunni groups from across the country — groups often at odds with one other — to form the State Council for the Sunnis, the first unified political voice for Iraqi Sunnis opposed to American rule.

Since the council first met on Dec. 25, it has demanded the release of more than 70 Sunni clerics detained by the Americans. Muhammad Ahmed al-Rashid, a senior member of the council and of the Muslim Brotherhood here, a highly political sect, has condemned the foreign occupation in long interviews with Al Jazeera, the Arab network.

From Ramadi to Tikrit, from Samarra to Baquba, towns in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad chafe under the occupation, and insurgents there continue to mount deadly attacks against allied soldiers. The Sunni Arabs were put in power by British colonialists and by Saddam Hussein, himself a Sunni, and people in the area fear the installation of a government dominated by Shiite Muslims, who make up 60 to 70 percent of the population but who have never been given ruling authority in modern times.

In a sign that the council is emerging as a political leader, the two Sunni Islamic parties on the Iraqi Governing Council have joined Mr. Qaisi`s group. At a meeting on Wednesday, the Sunni council decided to increase the number of representatives from those parties to five each from three each.

In interviews, the two Governing Council representatives from the parties said there was a need for a unified Sunni voice, and one of them, Mohsen Abdul Hameed of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said, "The Sunnis in Iraq think their role has been marginalized."

Mr. Qaisi, a dentist by training, gave a much blunter assessment. "Our country has been invaded, and all rights of the Sunni people have been affected," he said in an office in the Ibn Taimiya Mosque, a stronghold of the conservative Salafiya branch of Sunni Islam. "Their mosques have been destroyed, along with their houses, and Sunnis have been killed. Only the Sunnis are oppressed by the American invasion."

American soldiers have recently raided prominent mosques, alienating many Sunnis, with protesters at rallies calling for jihad. The most inflammatory incident took place on Jan. 1, when soldiers broke up a meeting at the Ibn Taimiya Mosque and arrested 32 people, including Imam Mahdi al-Sumaydai, the mosque`s senior cleric.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an American military spokesman, said soldiers had found explosives, Kalashnikov rifles, boxes of bullets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons.

Military officials showed reporters a videotape of the soldiers carting away weapons, but Mr. Qaisi and the imams at the mosque denied the existence of a cache. Such a discovery could indicate a link between senior members of the new Sunni council and Iraqis engaged in the armed resistance.

The State Council for the Sunnis used the raid as the basis for one of its first ultimatums. "We particularly denounce the raid on the Ibn Taimiya Mosque and in general on the other Sunni mosques," the statement said. "We ask for the occupation forces to stop this upsetting and insulting process if they want to avoid bad consequences."

Mr. Qaisi shook his head when asked whether the statement implied violence. Instead, he said, it meant public opinion would move against the Americans.

Since Mr. Hussein fell from power, no political group has emerged as the voice of the insurgency. But it is only a matter of time, terrorism experts say. "Typically it`s the armed wing that gets traction," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation. "Once they`ve gotten that publicity, they develop a political wing that`s a more acceptable face."

Mr. Qaisi is quick to deny any connection between guerrilla fighters and his council. He said that the council was the voice of the "opposition," not the "resistance," and that his members wanted to engage in peaceful discourse with the occupiers. At the same time, he said, the council has members from virulently anti-American parts of Iraq like Falluja and Tikrit. "When the resistance sees the Sunnis getting their rights," he said, "they`ll calm down, and their activities will stop."

Many of the members are clerics, and about 40 percent come from outside Baghdad, Mr. Qaisi said. The council is expected to expand to 140 members, he added, and will choose permanent leaders from each of the main branches or groups of Sunni Islam in Iraq — Salafiya, Sufism and Muslim Brotherhood.

Hatred between the hard-line Salafis and the mystical Sufis has often boiled over into armed conflict over the centuries, with the Salafis accusing the Sufis of introducing alien concepts into Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq went underground in the early 1970`s when Mr. Hussein began jailing its leaders and has resurfaced only recently.

The council leadership plays down suggestions that politically uniting the Sunnis brings Iraq closer to religious conflict. "This is about politics, not about religion," said Mahmood al-Mashhadany, a spokesman for the council`s Salafiya branch.

On a recent afternoon, leaders from the three branches prayed at the sprawling Umm al Qura Mosque before meeting to select a 13-member interim leadership committee.

Previously known as the Mother of All Battles Mosque, it was ordered built by Mr. Hussein in honor of the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, complete with minarets resembling Scud missiles and the barrels of AK-47`s.

But Mr. Qaisi said he and other council members were not supporters of Mr. Hussein. Many were arrested under his rule and were tortured in the Abu Ghraib prison, he said. There, in the 1980`s, Salafi leaders organized hundreds of cells that would carry on the religious struggle, come what may, he said.

That struggle continues today, he added, but against a different oppressor.

"We know that American people like freedom and respect human rights," Mr. Qaisi said. "We thought that America gave many benefits to humanity this century.

"But American soldiers have made big mistakes here in Iraq. There are foolish men in America, men with no culture or education. It`s like we had a dream of America, and we woke up from this dream."



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January 11, 2004
In the Center of Baghdad, an Escape to America
By ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Behind tall concrete barriers and rolls of razor wire, the United States Army has converted a former Iraqi Republican Guard officers` club here in the heart of Baghdad into a little American oasis for war-weary soldiers.

The sprawling complex has been stripped of portraits of Saddam Hussein and Baath Party paraphernalia. It now serves as the First Armored Division`s version of a five-star hotel for as many as 100 soldiers at a time who are lucky enough to get a three-day, two-night pass. More than 1,800 troops have cycled through since the hotel opened in mid-October.

Called Freedom Rest, it offers a sauna, outdoor swimming pool, 100-seat movie theater, weight rooms and 24-hour food service, including T-bone steaks and lobster. In the renovated marble lobby with glass chandeliers glistening overhead, uniformed attendants sweep up cigarette butts and serve cold drinks.

"It`s a great escape from getting mortared," Sgt. Xochitl Barragan, 27, of Fort Worth, Tex., said as she emerged dripping from the huge pool, where air defense and engineer specialists had just finished a splash contest off the 10-meter diving board.

The Army has long provided rest and relaxation escapes to improve morale for troops on extended assignments. With virtually all soldiers in Iraq now pulling yearlong tours, the Army — sensitive to potential recruiting and retention problems — has one of its most ambitious programs ever to keep soldiers` spirits high.

Nearly every sizable base in Iraq offers soldiers fully equipped gyms, military stores and free Internet cafes. Big-tent cafeterias run by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root put elite university cafeterias to shame. Near the First Division`s headquarters at the Baghdad international airport, Burger King has opened an outlet that has become one of the fast-food chain`s most successful restaurants in the world.

Each Army division in Iraq has its own version of the Freedom Rest hotel, converting some of Mr. Hussein`s former palaces to R&R duty or shipping troops to luxury mountain lake resorts in northern Iraq.

Since last summer, more than 33,000 soldiers have been flown to the United States or Europe for two-week vacations, plus travel time, and thousands more have been given shorter leaves at a resort in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where soldiers can ride water scooters, parasail or take desert safaris to giant sand dunes.

There were initial reports of some G.I.`s not reporting for flights back to Iraq once their home leave in the United States was over. But Army officials say fewer than a dozen soldiers have failed to show up on time, and most of them had extenuating family circumstances.

"It gives you a great break from our 12-hour-on, 12-hour-off days," said Staff Sgt. Victor Padilla, 26, who just returned from two weeks with his wife and two young children in Salt Lake City. Sergeant Padilla said saying goodbye a second time was made easier by knowing clearly when he would be coming home.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that morale, particularly among reservists, sank in many units last summer because troops were given no firm return date. The terms for reservists who had been called up and thought they would serve six months were extended to a year.

"The key to morale is keeping soldiers informed," said Brig. Gen. Vincent E. Boles, the Army`s chief logistician in Iraq, who commands 16,000 troops at a large base in Balad, north of Baghdad.

Conversations with scores of soldiers during the past four weeks showed that morale among most soldiers is fairly high, largely because most are in the final months of their deployments or have just arrived. Re-enlistment rates are up in many units, helped no doubt by tax-free bonuses of up to $10,000.

"We see the big light at the end of the tunnel," said Maj. Oscar Arauco, 41, the chaplain for the Fourth Infantry Division`s First Brigade. "You have a time and an endpoint."

Fourth Division soldiers have converted one of Mr. Hussein`s palaces in Tikrit into the Ironhorse Resort and Recreation Center, a rambling three-story marble building that features a sports bar, movie theatre, barbershop and laundry. Troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Iraq, but the bar offers a wide range of nonalcoholic beers. Soldiers can even get a 20-minute massage for $10.

Troops lined up to use a bank of computers at the resort`s Internet cafe (20-minute limit) one recent evening, but a gorgeous indoor swimming pool downstairs was empty. Big-screen televisions were ubiquitous, blaring CNN or American football games beamed in live via satellite.

"The palace is beautiful," Specialist Kevin Killian, 22, of Philadelphia, said while playing a computer game in the sports bar after his months of "living in the dirt" near the Iranian border. "But it`s kind of a strange feeling that Saddam and his family used to walk around in here."

Back at Freedom Rest, tucked just inside Baghdad`s barricaded "green zone," soldiers are required to check their combat fatigues, body armor and assault rifles at the door and change into civilian clothes or workout togs. For many, it is the first time in months to unwind, sleep in or watch endless movies.

Still, after nights of rocket and mortar attacks, some soldiers say it is hard to break old habits of scanning the hotel rooftop for snipers or momentarily panicking when they don`t find their weapons by their sides at bedtime.

"Last night," said Sgt. William Schramm, 25, of Lancaster, Wis., "it was so quiet I could barely sleep."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 12, 2004
America`s Red Ink

The International Monetary Fund has long been accused of failing to sound the alarm before countries with reckless fiscal policies implode. So it was nice to see staff members of the fund`s Western Hemisphere department hold a press conference last week to publicize one nation`s worrisome trends, which threaten foreign investors and the global economy.

Who was in for the scolding? Haiti? Argentina? Mexico? Not exactly. It`s the United States the fund is worried about. An economic slowdown and President Bush`s huge tax cuts conspired to swing America`s federal budget from a surplus of 2.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to a deficit of some 4 percent in 2003. Add the states` own budget shortfalls and the country`s trade deficit, the I.M.F. report notes, and the United States faces an "unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country."

Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and Donald Kohn, a Federal Reserve governor, have also railed against the deficit in recent days. But there is something humbling about hearing it from an international organization charged with monitoring economies on the brink.

In most countries, the I.M.F. is often viewed as America`s agent, preaching the inconvenient gospel of fiscal discipline and austerity. There is a certain poignancy now in having the I.M.F. preach the so-called "Washington consensus" to Washington.

The I.M.F. forcefully argues that the United States will need to adjust taxes and spending to bring its finances under control; the recovery alone won`t do it. The fund`s report warns that America`s profligacy and its voracious appetite for credit will drive up interest rates around the world, threatening the global economic recovery and American productivity growth.

Foreign investors are already selling the dollar in reaction to Washington`s fiscal recklessness, but the fund warns that this selling could accelerate and create a currency crisis. It also notes that present trends pose dangers for the future of Medicare and Social Security.

Most damning of all, the report attacks the "complicated and nontransparent manner" in which the administration`s $1.7 trillion in tax cuts were enacted, designed as they were to mask their true budgetary impact. The I.M.F.`s frustration is understandable. The United States has provided other nations with a terrible model of obfuscatory governance. Congress and the Bush administration enacted "phased in" tax cuts that were supposed to be retired in a decade, accelerated their phasing in and then, after they were priced under the assumption that they would fade away, pledged to make them permanent.

No wonder the rest of the world is appalled.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. to Push Airlines for Passenger Records
Travel Database to Rate Security Risk Factors

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01


Despite stiff resistance from airlines and privacy advocates, the U.S. government plans to push ahead this year with a vast computerized system to probe the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights in the United States.

The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after failing to win cooperation in the program`s testing phase. The order could be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing through a U.S. airport are to be scored with a number and a color that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft.

Another program that is to be introduced this year that seeks to speed frequent fliers through security lines in exchange for volunteering personal information to the government.

The two new initiatives will augment a system introduced last week to fingerprint and photograph millions of foreign visitors on arrival in the United States.

Privacy and consumer advocates worry that both programs could be discriminatory because they subject airline passengers to different levels of scrutiny. Certain travelers, such as non-U.S. citizens, could face additional questioning under the program known as CAPPS 2, or the second version of the Computer Assisted Passenger PreScreening Program, some organizations say. Business travelers who typically pay high prices for their seats will likely get an easier pass through security in the "registered traveler" program.

Privacy advocates say they are most concerned about CAPPS 2, which would replace the airlines` existing computer screening system. The TSA believes the current system is based on old assumptions about terrorists, flagging passengers, for instance, who paid with cash or bought one-way tickets. Passengers targeted for additional screening commonly find an "SSS" or "***" designation on their boarding pass.

The TSA said the new computerized system is to provide a more thorough approach to screening passengers. It will collect travelers` full name, home address and telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The information will be fed into large databases, such as Lexis-Nexis and Acxiom, that tap public records and commercial computer banks, such as shopping mailing lists, to verify that passengers are who they say they are. Once a passenger is identified, the CAPPS 2 system will compare that traveler against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases.

The two-step process will result in a numerical and color score for each passenger. A "red" rating means a passenger will be prohibited from boarding. "Yellow" indicates that a passenger will receive additional scrutiny at the checkpoint and a "green" rating paves the way for a standard trip through security. Also factored into one`s score will be intelligence about certain routes and airports where there might be higher-rated risks to security.

Although it is unclear how many passengers would fit into each category, the TSA said its best estimation is that 5 percent of the traveling public will be flagged yellow or red, compared with an estimated 15 percent of passengers who are flagged under the current version of CAPPS 1.

The registered traveler program, also known as "trusted traveler," has been a favorite of the airline industry since the terrorist attacks in 2001. The first leader of the Transportation Security Administration declined to pursue the idea, saying he worried that terrorists in "sleeper cells" could establish themselves as trusted residents over a period of years and later exploit their status to hijack planes.

Now under new leadership, the TSA is to begin testing the program at selected airports with $5 million in Congressional funding. Officials say the program could enhance security because the pool of those who need to be assessed would be reduced by the background checks each passenger would undergo. The agency declined to say how the program would work except that it would be voluntary and that registered passengers would not skip security screening altogether.

"It`s not as though the person who goes through the checkpoint won`t be going through a basic level of screening," said David M. Stone, the TSA`s acting administrator.

But privacy experts are skeptical. Registered traveler is "going to create two classes of airline travelers," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that opposes both programs. Registered traveler, he said, "has no security benefits." Terrorists will learn one way or another how to "game" the system, he said.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security started a visa-tracking program that the ACLU and other groups also deemed discriminatory. International airports and ports began digitally fingerprinting and photographing foreign visitors from certain countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America when they enter the country on a visa, although most European countries are exempt from the program.

"These kinds of dragnet systems are feel-good but cost-inefficient," said Richard Sobel, a privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. "The government would do much better using resources to better identify people and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted to the 99 percent of people who are innocent."

Under one proposal advocated by the major U.S. airlines, passengers who submit an application to the TSA would receive a special card or other identification, if they`re approved. At the airport, they would show the card at the security checkpoint or ticket counter and submit to a handprint or fingerprint to verify their identity. Then, the passenger could walk through a checkpoint area dedicated to members of the program.

The airline industry argues that a registered traveler program would not create a class system but would simply reduce wait times for all passengers. "The thing that really frustrates people is not the fact that someone goes through [the security line] more quickly," said Jim May, chief executive officer at the Air Transport Association, the airline industry`s lobbying organization. "It`s the people who don`t prepare themselves and go through security and tie up the whole line. They`re the people who really aggravate those people who are trying to catch a plane."

In the push forward on CAPPS 2, U.S. officials said the TSA is to soon begin forcing the airlines to turn over their passenger reservation lists. No airline responded to the agency`s initial request for the documents last fall. U.S. carriers have been reluctant to turn over the data because of negative publicity association with the program.

The TSA`s first airline partner to test CAPPS 2, Delta Air Lines, backed out of the agreement after privacy advocates put up a Web site encouraging passengers to boycott the airline. The European Union, whose passengers would also be rated and screened, have said the system would violate EU privacy laws, but it has allowed the TSA to use passenger data for testing purposes.

The final blow came in September last year, when JetBlue Airways was sued in several states by passengers after the airline admitted it had turned over passenger data for a military project related to aviation security. The TSA has since been unable to find an airline to help the agency test CAPPS 2 and might now have to resort to coercion to get the reservation data.

Homeland Security officials said some elements of CAPPS 2 and the U.S. VISIT program for fingerprinting and photographing foreigners will overlap because both systems compare passengers against the same terrorist and criminal watch lists. The U.S. VISIT also aims to ensure that visitors do not overstay their visas. U.S. officials said they are considering merging the two programs.

Nuala O`Connor Kelly, the chief privacy officer at Homeland Security, said if the databases are merged, the government would impose strict rules about which agencies can use the passenger information and how it could be used.

"We want these programs to be efficient to the extent it makes them more efficient to have them rolled together, we will be looking at that," Kelly said.

But Kelly acknowledged that there will be several hurdles to clear. The U.S. government has not said how long it will keep data on U.S. VISIT travelers. Information on most passengers screened by CAPPS 2 can be held only for "a matter of days," she said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror`s Scope


By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12


A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration`s handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.

His essay, published by the Army War College`s Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.

But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record`s 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.

Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College`s commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."

Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it`s not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon."

Many of Record`s arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein`s Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda." But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army`s premier academic institution.

In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration`s handling of the war on terrorism.

Record`s core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler`s overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."

He also scoffs at the administration`s policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."

He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. "The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen," he states.

The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.

To read the full report, go to washingtonpost.com/nation



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Zu #11451 Die ganze Studie:
To view the complete study in an Adobe Acrobat format, click

HERE.
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding…

Bounding the Global War on Terrorism

Dr. Jeffrey Record

December 2003


The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.



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

SUMMARY



The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration`s postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war`s political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power.

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One in five people younger than 30 reports turning to comedy programs such as Jon Stewart`s "Daily Show" for campaign news.
washingtonpost.com
39% See Bias In Reporting On Campaign
Nontraditional Media Gain Ground, Poll Finds

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A06


Americans are evenly split over whether news organizations favor one political party or the other, with a growing number of Democrats joining a larger number of Republicans in seeing the media as biased toward the other side.

Twenty-nine percent of Democrats surveyed by the Pew Research Center say presidential campaign coverage is tilted toward the GOP, up from 19 percent in 2000, a study released yesterday says. Forty-two percent of Republicans see bias toward the Democrats, up from 37 percent in the last presidential campaign. Overall, 39 percent see biased reporting, and 38 percent do not.

"Democrats think the media are giving President Bush a free pass," said Andrew Kohut, the center`s director. "For years most of the discontent was on the Republican side, and now it`s bipartisan."

Equally striking is a fundamental shift in which more Americans are turning away from the establishment media and getting their campaign information from newer outlets. One-third say they regularly or sometimes get political news from the Internet, a jump of nine percentage points in four years. Among people younger than 30, one in five reports regularly learning about the campaign from such comedy programs as Jon Stewart`s "Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" -- double the level of four years ago.

Television news programs, trying to court this audience, routinely run clips of Jay Leno, David Letterman and Stewart, who was recently featured on Newsweek`s cover.

The survey of 1,506 adults was not as encouraging for traditional media outlets. Pew found a significant decline in Americans who regularly get their campaign news from local television (42 percent, down from 48 percent in 2000), nightly network news (35 percent, down from 45 percent), newspapers (31 percent, down from 40 percent) and newsmagazines (10 percent, down from 15 percent). One exception was cable news networks, which are regularly consulted by 38 percent (up from 34 percent).

The greatest defections were among those younger than 30, nearly two-thirds of whom say they are not even somewhat interested in the Democratic presidential campaign. Only 15 percent could say which candidate served as an Army general (Wesley K. Clark) or which one was House majority leader (Richard A. Gephardt).

Major political controversies may be reaching fewer voters than campaign insiders think. Nearly six in 10 of those surveyed, regardless of age, say they have heard nothing about Howard Dean`s widely reported remark about appealing to "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." Just 20 percent say they have seen any of the Democratic debates. Those most knowledgeable about the campaign were Internet users, National Public Radio listeners and newsmagazine readers.

After years of hype, the Web has clearly come into its own in the 2004 campaign. Nearly one in five Americans reports going online for political activity, such as researching issues and e-mailing campaigns. Dean`s supporters were somewhat more likely than others, by 26 percent to 19 percent, to seek news online.

The questions about bias reveal a news audience that is increasingly fragmented along ideological lines, a far cry from the days when nearly everyone watched the three major networks. Majorities did not see bias in the early stages of the 1988 and 1996 campaigns.

Four in 10 Democrats -- but only a quarter of Republicans -- cite CBS, NBC and ABC as their main source of campaign news. Nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats rely primarily on Fox News for their political information (29 percent to 14 percent), while CNN is favored by 27 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of Republicans. One-fifth of Republicans, but only 12 percent of Democrats, turn mainly to radio, where talk shows are dominated by conservatives.

Another sign: Fox viewers are much more likely to see a great deal of bias in media coverage than viewers of CNN, network news or local TV news.

The more ideological people are, the more likely they are to feel strongly about media bias. Conservative Republicans, by 47 percent to 8 percent, say the media lean toward Democrats, while liberal Democrats, by 36 percent to 11 percent, say coverage tilts the other way.

Still, two-thirds of those questioned say they prefer news from outlets without a political point of view, while one-quarter favor news that reflects their views.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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G.W. Bush: International Racketeer

OIL ROBBER BARONS

By Ted Lang

01/12/04: (ICH) CBS`s "60 Minutes" featured former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill in an exclusive interview with CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl, which aired Sunday, January 11th. The interview confirms what those who primarily rely on the Internet for up-to-date, accurate and to-the-point news coverage have known for almost over a year: the Bush administration had planned the illegal, unconstitutional and unnecessary invasion of Iraq completely independent of any retaliatory or preventive military considerations relating to 9-11. In fact, this interview, motivated to launch a new book authored by Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, not only confirms the heavy evidence concerning the administration`s underlying intentions with regard to Iraq, but raises some scary new ones as well.

Neil Mackay penned one of the earliest sources citing the U.S. plot against Iraq and Saddam back in September 2002. Entitled "Let`s Not Forget: Bush Planned Iraq `Regime Change` Before Becoming President," still carried on Information Clearing House`s website, Mackay`s piece starts: "A SECRET blue print for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure `regime change` even before he took power in January 2001."

The article is among many that reveal a document, entitled Rebuilding America`s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, written by the neoconservative think tank calling itself Project for the New American Century [PNAC]. Although some references have been made in the mainstream media to this "neoconservative" clandestine planning, including some minor references to it ensconced in sarcasm and derision by the likes of FOXNews icons Brit Hume and Fred Barnes, the revelation now by mainstream CBS News adds a completely new dimension. PNAC is now being discovered by mainstream America.

And Information Clearing House also still carries a comprehensive analysis of PNAC written by William Rivers Pitt on February 25, 2003, entitled "The Project for the New American Century," Pitt offers: "PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana." But up till now, a major debate regarding America`s real intentions at world domination has been largely suppressed, and this is due to the failure on the part of the mainstream media.

These revelations are, at this point in time, nothing new, but they have the potential of becoming extremely pivotal as regards their significance in the upcoming presidential elections. CBS News, is now fully on board as evidenced by their website`s January 10th piece entitled, "Saddam Ouster Planned Early `01?" The article states, "The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush`s inauguration in January of 2001 - not eight months after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported." CBS quotes former Secretary O`Neill: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge heap."

The CBS report continues, "O`Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, `The Price of Loyalty,` by Ron Suskind. Suskind says O`Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military operations for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam`s downfall - including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq`s oil." [Emphasis added]

There is no longer any doubt that the Iraqi invasion was in absolutely no way justified. There have been, and still are, many horrifically violent and brutal dictators that the US government is not only allied with, but extremely protective of as well. They consistently violate human rights and perpetrate mass suffering and the mass murders of their people. The US government did absolutely nothing to mitigate the slaughter of over one million African people in Rwanda because it didn`t serve the monetary and political interests of those in power at the time.

To their credit, FOXNews.com, usually a journalistic shill and apologist for the Bush administration, also posted an article on January 10th entitled, "O`Neill: Iraq Plans Began at Start of Bush`s Term." In an article originated by the Associated Press, it is offered that, "The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said that they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale strike against the United States."

But then FOX offers that White House spokesman Scott McClellan "would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush`s term. But he said, Saddam `was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11. It appears that the world according to Mr. O`Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people,` McClellan said in Texas, where the president is staying at his ranch."

In a feeble effort at damage control, FOX did indeed acknowledge the administration`s early pre-emptive designs against Saddam and Iraq, and offered also that "In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush`s national security advisor put Saddam on notice that the United States intended a more resolute military policy toward Iraq." FOX also emphasized O`Neill`s promotion of the new book. "CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O`Neill`s remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O`Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam`s ouster," states the CBS article.

The article continues, "As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that `laughable.` Suggesting that O`Neill doesn`t know what he`s talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O`Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise, so, `Why should anyone believe he has a credible understanding of foreign policy?`"

One cannot help noticing via these cites how the Bush administration and its "officials" are spinning these revelations to blur the public`s focus on this vital matter. The Bush lies of WMD, their readily available deployment, their nuclear, biological and chemical capability, robotic airplanes and drones, and all the other accusations made by Bush have been refuted. Is this being discussed? Notice how this unjustified and unconstitutional war has never been justified? Notice how Robert Mueller, III and George Tenet were never fired for their incompetence and 9-11 intelligence mismanagement? Notice how the only Bush administration official that was jettisoned has come back at him with a "get-even" plan?

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan tries to spin this issue as merely retribution on the part of one, single solitary "disgruntled employee," and another unidentified "official" offers that O`Neill`s charges are "laughable." Aside form the fact that we should always dismiss quotes from an "unidentified" official as being "official," what precisely is so "laughable" about 500 of our military dead? What is so "laughable" about the thousands wounded and maimed?

What precisely is it that is so humorous concerning over one million Iraqis that have died because of the ten-year US embargo targeting one "enemy of the state" of the United States of America, such that all the Iraqi people have been made to suffer at the hands of "our" government? McClellan and the White House`s spin that O`Neill represents a loony, lone voice in the wilderness just doesn`t rub.

What of the protests of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter who did everything in his limited power to stop this carnage well before Bush started it? Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children have died because of Bush`s secret PNAC cabal. And our lust for oil and our lust for world dominance has indeed expanded PNAC`s objectives to include advancing the state of Israel as the only nuclear power in the region, the latter exempted from many more UN resolutions than Saddam had ever violated. And the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has itself identified PNAC`s collaborating members as American traitors.

What we have here is not an issue concerning one individual. Many Internet writers have written at length about the PNAC cabal. They, PNAC, are indeed a secret group, and a plotting cabal. And their numbers are a mere fraction of the large and growing number of Internet writers and readers who are fully informed of the deliberate lies, fraud and warmongering propaganda of the Bush administration. Their planning is NOT in the best interests of the United States and its people.

And where before the people of the world forgave America and its people for the unjust and threatening incursions of our military, they now no longer excuse our stupidity in allowing our out-of-control government to attack any and all sovereign states targeted by a tiny band of political plotters that represent a growing danger to all people on Earth.

If McClellan and the Bush White House desire to point to O`Neill as a small source of discontent within the administration, perhaps they ought to compare the number that comprises PNAC and the Bushies to one billion angry Muslims and the rest of the world. As writer William Rivers Pitt offered, "Americans enjoy their comforts, but don`t cotton to the idea of being some sort of Neo-Rome."

It has become painfully clear that this horrendous, unnecessary loss of life, wealth and national security was sacrificed by an action undertaken to justify the monetary and political advantage of a small entity on a basis comparatively much smaller than that represented by former Secretary O`Neill`s "disgruntlement."

All law-abiding, decent people the world over have always readily identified this type of immoral, self-serving behavior characterized by such reckless abandon for the rights of others. On a smaller scale of public recognition, O`Neill`s revelations compare to the level of public awareness equating to the recognition of street crime: robberies, rapes, muggings, burglaries and the like. On a level typified by the crime generated by street gangs, perhaps the definition becomes "rampant crime." And on a national basis, it could be described as a combination of organized petty street criminals, street gangs, all consolidated within a national crime syndicate; in other words, it takes on what is commonly referred to as "organized crime" or "racketeering."

Can there be any doubt that as more and more Bush lies surface, as more and more reports and their confirmation unfold, that the Bush administration is beginning to resemble the demeanor of an organized criminal element? Where is the outrage? Where`s the media? And when will we be outraged sufficiently to do something meaningful about it?

Ted Lang <[e-mail]> is a political analyst and a freelance writer.

© THEODORE E. LANG 1/11/04 All rights reserved

[Joerver]

REMARKS BY GEORGE W. BUSH


US PRESIDENT

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE ANNUAL DINNER

WHITE HOUSE

February 26, 2003



. . .

We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others; the rest will be written by us. (Applause.) On a September morning, threats that had gathered for years, in secret and far away, led to murder in our country on a massive scale. As a result, we must look at security in a new way, because our country is a battlefield in the first war of the 21st century.

We learned a lesson: The dangers of our time must be confronted actively and forcefully, before we see them again in our skies and in our cities. And we set a goal: we will not allow the triumph of hatred and violence in the affairs of men. (Applause.)

Our coalition of more than 90 countries is pursuing the networks of terror with every tool of law enforcement and with military power. We have arrested, or otherwise dealt with, many key commanders of al Qaeda. (Applause.) Across the world, we are hunting down the killers one by one. We are winning. And we`re showing them the definition of American justice. (Applause.) And we are opposing the greatest danger in the war on terror: outlaw regimes arming with weapons of mass destruction.

In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world -- and we will not allow it. (Applause.) This same tyrant has close ties to terrorist organizations, and could supply them with the terrible means to strike this country -- and America will not permit it. The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away. The danger must be confronted. We hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm, fully and peacefully. If it does not, we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed. (Applause.)

The safety of the American people depends on ending this direct and growing threat. Acting against the danger will also contribute greatly to the long-term safety and stability of our world. The current Iraqi regime has shown the power of tyranny to spread discord and violence in the Middle East. A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America`s interests in security, and America`s belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq. (Applause.)

The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people, themselves. Today they live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein -- but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us. (Applause.)

Bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq will not be easy. Yet that is no excuse to leave the Iraqi regime`s torture chambers and poison labs in operation. Any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them. (Applause.)

If we must use force, the United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq. We will deliver medicine to the sick, and we are now moving into place nearly 3 million emergency rations to feed the hungry.

We`ll make sure that Iraq`s 55,000 food distribution sites, operating under the Oil For Food program, are stocked and open as soon as possible. The United States and Great Britain are providing tens of millions of dollars to the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, and to such groups as the World Food Program and UNICEF, to provide emergency aid to the Iraqi people.

We will also lead in carrying out the urgent and dangerous work of destroying chemical and biological weapons. We will provide security against those who try to spread chaos, or settle scores, or threaten the territorial integrity of Iraq. We will seek to protect Iraq`s natural resources from sabotage by a dying regime, and ensure those resources are used for the benefit of the owners -- the Iraqi people. (Applause.)

The United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq`s new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people. Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another. All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected. (Applause.)

Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before -- in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.

There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. (Applause.) The nation of Iraq -- with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people -- is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom. (Applause.)

The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the "freedom gap" so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. Leaders in the region speak of a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade. And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region. (Applause.)

It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world -- or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim -- is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror. (Applause.)

Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state. (Applause.) The passing of Saddam Hussein`s regime will deprive terrorist networks of a wealthy patron that pays for terrorist training, and offers rewards to families of suicide bombers. And other regimes will be given a clear warning that support for terror will not be tolerated. (Applause.)

Without this outside support for terrorism, Palestinians who are working for reform and long for democracy will be in a better position to choose new leaders. (Applause.) True leaders who strive for peace; true leaders who faithfully serve the people. A Palestinian state must be a reformed and peaceful state that abandons forever the use of terror. (Applause.)

For its part, the new government of Israel -- as the terror threat is removed and security improves -- will be expected to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- (applause) -- and to work as quickly as possible toward a final status agreement. As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end. (Applause.) And the Arab states will be expected to meet their responsibilities to oppose terrorism, to support the emergence of a peaceful and democratic Palestine, and state clearly they will live in peace with Israel. (Applause.)

The United States and other nations are working on a road map for peace. We are setting out the necessary conditions for progress toward the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. It is the commitment of our government -- and my personal commitment -- to implement the road map and to reach that goal. Old patterns of conflict in the Middle East can be broken, if all concerned will let go of bitterness, hatred, and violence, and get on with the serious work of economic development, and political reform, and reconciliation. America will seize every opportunity in pursuit of peace. And the end of the present regime in Iraq would create such an opportunity. (Applause.)

In confronting Iraq, the United States is also showing our commitment to effective international institutions. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. We helped to create the Security Council. We believe in the Security Council -- so much that we want its words to have meaning. (Applause.)

The global threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction cannot be confronted by one nation alone. The world needs today and will need tomorrow international bodies with the authority and the will to stop the spread of terror and chemical and biological and nuclear weapons. A threat to all must be answered by all. High-minded pronouncements against proliferation mean little unless the strongest nations are willing to stand behind them -- and use force if necessary. After all, the United Nations was created, as Winston Churchill said, to "make sure that the force of right will, in the ultimate issue, be protected by the right of force."

Another resolution is now before the Security Council. If the council responds to Iraq`s defiance with more excuses and delays, if all its authority proves to be empty, the United Nations will be severely weakened as a source of stability and order. If the members rise to this moment, then the Council will fulfill its founding purpose.

I`ve listened carefully, as people and leaders around the world have made known their desire for peace. All of us want peace. The threat to peace does not come from those who seek to enforce the just demands of the civilized world; the threat to peace comes from those who flout those demands. If we have to act, we will act to restrain the violent, and defend the cause of peace. And by acting, we will signal to outlaw regimes that in this new century, the boundaries of civilized behavior will be respected. (Applause.)

Protecting those boundaries carries a cost. If war is forced upon us by Iraq`s refusal to disarm, we will meet an enemy who hides his military forces behind civilians, who has terrible weapons, who is capable of any crime. The dangers are real, as our soldiers, and sailors, airmen, and Marines fully understand. Yet, no military has ever been better prepared to meet these challenges.

Members of our Armed Forces also understand why they may be called to fight. They know that retreat before a dictator guarantees even greater sacrifices in the future. They know that America`s cause is right and just: liberty for an oppressed people, and security for the American people. And I know something about these men and women who wear our uniform: they will complete every mission they are given with skill, and honor, and courage. (Applause.)

Much is asked of America in this year 2003. The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time. (Applause.)

We go forward with confidence, because we trust in the power of human freedom to change lives and nations. By the resolve and purpose of America, and of our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history, and free people will keep the peace of the world.

Thank you all, very much.

[Joerver]

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

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus1…
THE NATION



Justices to Weigh Presidential Powers
Five cases on issues from detaining terror suspects to White House secrecy will test Bush`s reach.
By David G. Savage
Times Staff Writer

January 12, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has set the stage for a series of rulings on the reach of presidential power, decisions that could arrive just as voters focus on whether to endorse President Bush and his strong style of executive leadership.

Since November, the justices have voted to take up five cases that test the president`s power to act alone and without interference from Congress or the courts. They involve imprisoning foreign fighters at overseas bases, holding American citizens without charges in military brigs, preserving the secrecy of White House meetings, enforcing free-trade treaties despite environmental concerns, and abducting foreigners charged with U.S. crimes.

The case taken up Friday may be the broadest of all. Two years ago, the White House said the president had the power to designate American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and hold them in secret military custody without filing charges or allowing them to plead their innocence.

Bush`s lawyers said the "time-honored laws and customs of war" gave the commander in chief the power to hold captured soldiers. But not until recently had a president contended that his military power extended to arresting Americans on American soil.

In December, a federal appeals court in New York ruled the president overstepped his authority in the case of Jose Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim who was taken into custody at Chicago`s O`Hare International Airport and imprisoned in a military brig in South Carolina. The judges said the administration must charge him with a crime or release him.

The justices announced Friday they will take up the issue and rule on whether the president may bypass the courts and hold U.S. citizens in military custody.

"The Supreme Court appears poised to issue the most important set of decisions about the scope of presidential power since World War II," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the law and national security program for the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights. She said the high court`s move "sends a clear message that the president`s power to detain U.S. citizens is subject to certain limits."

Veteran lawyers who have argued before the Supreme Court compared the lineup of pending cases to the era when President Nixon was in the White House.

"This administration has massively asserted presidential power unlike any since Nixon," said Alan B. Morrison, a lawyer for Public Citizen, a liberal group that has opposed Bush in several pending cases. "The thread running through all these cases is that [administration officials] don`t believe the part of separation of powers that has checks and balances in it. They say they have a right to do it because it is a war, and they don`t have to be bound by all these constraints in the law."

There is "an amazing convergence of a lot of these cases all at once," said Richard A. Samp, an attorney for the conservative Washington Legal Foundation. "I think it`s because there is a basic disagreement on what American history shows, and what the Founding Fathers had in mind, in this area of the law."

At their core, the disputes center on the role the Constitution gives the president in times of war and national emergency.

The Bush administration`s lawyers assert that since the Constitution made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, he has the unilateral power to act.

Moreover, since terrorists brought their attacks to the United States in September 2001, the president`s war powers extend to the home front, they say.

This view was on display in Padilla`s case. He was arrested in Chicago after a flight from Pakistan and was suspected of having been involved in a plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Since June 2002, he has not been allowed to speak to a lawyer or to his family. No charges have been filed against him.

When Padilla`s New York lawyer sought a court hearing for him, the Bush administration took a stiff stand. The lawyer may not meet with her client, and the judges have no authority to hear his pleas, the administration said.

"The capture and detention of enemy combatants during wartime falls within the president`s core constitutional powers as commander in chief," Bush`s lawyers told the U.S. court of appeals in New York. "There is no basis to second-guess the president`s conclusion that Padilla is an enemy combatant."

They cited as a precedent a World War II case involving Nazi saboteurs. Eight German soldiers, one of whom had been born in the United States, were secretly landed on Atlantic beaches. But two of them turned themselves in to the FBI, and the others were soon arrested.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them tried before a military court in Washington. They were found guilty and sentenced to death, although Roosevelt spared two of them. The Supreme Court met during the summer and affirmed their convictions, saying the "president`s wartime detention decisions are to be accorded great deference from the courts." That phrase was repeated in the administration`s brief in the Padilla case.

But the U.S. court of appeals in New York said Congress and the courts have an equal role to play in terrorism cases within the United States. Its judges looked to a much different precedent: President Truman`s seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War. Fearing the effect of a strike, Truman ordered the military to take control of the mills.

In 1953, however, the Supreme Court reversed his order and said the president had overstepped his bounds.

In a key opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson said that while the president has great authority when U.S. forces are fighting abroad, that authority does not extend to the home front.

In Padilla`s case, the appeals court in New York quoted Jackson`s opinion to reject Bush`s claim of an "inherent constitutional power" to hold U.S. citizens who are arrested on American soil. "We agree with Padilla that the Constitution lodges these powers with Congress, not the president," the court said in a 2-1 ruling in Padilla vs. Rumsfeld.

While Congress could authorize the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, the court noted that a 1971 law prohibited such actions by the chief executive. "No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an act of Congress," the law says.

Separately, lawyers for Yaser Esam Hamdi, a second man held as an enemy combatant, had urged the court to review his case. A Saudi who was born in Louisiana, Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban when he was captured by U.S. troops. Rather than hold him as a prisoner of war, the administration sent him to the military brig in South Carolina and called him an unlawful enemy combatant. The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review his case and decide on the president`s authority to order military detention of U.S. citizens.

A case involving the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees, to be heard in the spring, tests whether the president can order hundreds of foreigners to be held without charges or a hearing. Lawyers for the nearly 600 men do not say the detention is illegal. Instead, they say the men deserve a hearing to show they are not guilty.

Bush`s lawyers say no such hearing is needed, and none may be ordered. "The courts have no jurisdiction to evaluate or second-guess the conduct of the president and the military," wrote Solicitor Gen. Theodore B. Olson.

In the White House secrecy case, the high court will decide whether a judge can require Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over documents detailing who met with the administration`s energy task force early in 2001. Two groups, one liberal and one conservative, sued Cheney, contending corporate lobbyists met with the Bush advisors in violation of an open-government law known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

Bush`s lawyers say the Constitution shields the White House from responding to such court orders. Disclosure would "interfere with the president`s exercise of core executive constitutional functions," they said.

In a case involving Mexican trucks, the court will decide whether the president can sidestep environmental laws to enforce the North American Free Trade Agreement.

When environmentalists sued, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government must first study the potential for pollution before it allows tens of thousands of older trucks to move goods across the border. Bush`s lawyers said this decision "endangers the president`s ability to act quickly and decisively in areas such as foreign affairs and national defense."

And the outcome of a Mexican abduction case, which began during the war on drugs in the 1980s, is crucial to the war on terrorism today, Bush`s lawyers have said.

In June, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Mexican doctor who was seized in Guadalajara can sue the federal agents who ordered his abduction.

In his appeal, Olson said that if this rule became law, U.S. agents who locate Osama bin Laden would be barred from seizing him. "The use of trans-border arrests — and judgments regarding the necessity of such measures — are for the executive branch to make," not the courts, Olson said in U.S. vs. Alvarez-Machain.

All but the Padilla case are expected to be decided by the Supreme Court by late June. Administration lawyers say they are confident of winning most of the cases, especially those where they lost before the 9th Circuit Court.

However, some of Bush`s critics believe the administration may have overplayed the theme of executive authority.

"This president has taken an aggressive and extreme view of his power to act unilaterally without congressional or judicial review," said Steven R. Shapiro, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union. "They have imposed maximum secrecy wherever possible, and they have asserted their actions are unreviewable by the courts. I think they will have a hard time selling that view to the Supreme Court."

If so, it would not be the first time a president clashed with the courts and lost. In the early 1970s, President Nixon lost a series of such disputes, and not just the case of the Watergate tapes. In that 1974 ruling, the court unanimously rejected Nixon`s claim of "executive privilege" and ordered him to turn over the Oval Office tapes to the special prosecutor.

Earlier, the court rejected Nixon`s claim that he had the authority to order wiretapping without a judge`s approval. He had claimed that the president`s need "to protect national security" gave him that power. Similarly, the court rejected his claim of national security as a basis for halting the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Even in the area of budget and spending, the court curbed the president`s unilateral authority. Nixon said the president had the power to "impound" money that had been appropriated by Congress, but the justices said unanimously that the executive was obliged to spend the money that Congress had ordered to be spent.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

The Decline And Fall Of The American Job
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, January 12, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/12/hsorensen.DTL


It all started with Joe, any old Joe.

Joe was a decent fellow, a businessman, a good citizen, a wonderful neighbor. But he was having a hard time making a profit. Oh, sure, he was worth a few million, but he could have been worth a lot more if labor costs weren`t so high. And those unions!

So, one day, Joe got a bright idea. "Those people in Arkansas and Tennessee and South Carolina will work for a lot less than my employees," he thought, "so why don`t I move my business down there?"

And that`s what he did. Good-bye, Detroit, hello, Charlotte. Sure, he offered to take his employees with him when he moved, but they`d have to agree to work for half their former wages. None went.

About the same time Joe made his move, Geno began to wonder why he was freezing his butt off in Duluth and paying big bucks to ship his frozen foods all over the country. "I could save big transportation bucks if I moved my operation to Ohio," Geno thought, and so he did. Duluth wept. The folks there had lost a folk hero, and the town`s best employer.

Meanwhile, the iron-mining companies pried the very last shred of iron ore out of the ground in northern Minnesota, so they left with an eye on Venezuela, which hadn`t been raped yet.

The iron-mining companies were following the fine example set by the logging companies, which around the turn of the 20th century chopped down every virgin pine in Minnesota and then left.

Now those companies are chopping down Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Joe`s competitors were envious. And they were hurting. Not only was Joe raking in the big profits Down South, but he left behind a bunch of unemployed people who couldn`t afford to buy anything anymore.

They hated to do it, but Joe`s competitors finally caved in and joined Joe in the land of mint juleps, no unions and low wages. It was around that time that people started calling the northeastern part of the United States the Rust Belt.

The arrival of his competitors in the "right to work" states made Joe a little uneasy. It wouldn`t be long before they`d be able to compete with him again, and even though he was now a multimillionaire many times over, he wanted to see just how big a fortune he could rack up before he died.

Joe made a little economic progress when he learned that people who snuck into the United States from Mexico would work for even less than the Southerners he was exploiting, so he canned his American crews and replaced them with people with Hispanic surnames. Then, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty for Mexicans living illegally in the United States, thus encouraging other Mexicans to flood across the border. In his signing message, Reagan said that from now on, employers who hired illegal immigrants would be held accountable. They`d go to jail. (Wink, wink.)

Joe and his fellow entrepreneurs had a good laugh over that one, and he learned Spanish. And, on one of his trips to Mexico, Joe learned that Mexicans working in Mexico are paid a lot less than Mexicans working in the United States, so he did what comes naturally: He moved his manufacturing plants to Mexico.

And so it went, with Joe and all his competitors and men and women in other businesses. The grass really was greener on the other side of the border, and it proved to be greener yet on the other side of the ocean.

American jobs moved south, then further south, then all over the planet. The hot spot now is Communist China, which specializes in slave labor. We abhor that, of course, but what can we do? If we don`t send our jobs there, our competitors certainly will, and where will we be then?

Out of business, that`s where.

The big downside to all this is that we`re destroying customers. Every job lost in the United States is a customer lost. Every job lost is a taxpayer lost and a tax burden gained. The pioneers in the outsourcing movement thought they were smart, and perhaps they were. Their competitors did what they had to do to survive.

But where will it all end? Will it be good for America when all the industry is somewhere else?

Governments can influence what happens. Conservatives say they don`t like big government, and liberals nod in agreement, but big government in India is what`s moving a lot of our high-tech jobs there.

India, thanks to government sponsorship, has the best technical institutes in the world. They admit only the best of the best, about 2 percent of applicants. Their standards are higher than Ivy League standards. And they have no room for slackers.

The result? India`s high-tech people are sought after by American businesses, and we`re shipping high-tech jobs to India at a breathtaking pace.

Most of you are too young to remember this, but the phrase "Made in Japan" used to be another way to say "junk." Japan had a reputation of producing everything out of used American beer cans.

That all changed in 1959, when the Japanese government told its manufacturers that, henceforth, everything shipped from Japan had to be of high quality. Toyota and Sony and all the rest had no choice but to comply, and now "Made in Japan" means dependable quality.

In America, our efficiency might spell our doom. Not only are we outsourcing production to the lowest bidder, but we`ve done a pretty good job of dumbing down all the jobs so that any low-paid worker can perform them. And we`ve automated to a maddening degree, which becomes obvious when you call just about any company with the hope of talking to a real person.

(Getting rid of switchboard operators in favor of an annoying automated system seems rather dumb until you realize how much money can be saved by not employing a team of round-the-clock operators.)

And the Wal-Martization of America continues apace, with our choices of retailers, grocers, banks, gas stations -- just about everything -- getting smaller and smaller.

I don`t know what we or our government can do to reverse the movement of the United States toward Third World status. In Washington, it`s all about money. The Republicans have always been the party of big business and money, and now the Democrats have joined them. The corporations are wonderfully represented, the people much less so.

What to do? It`s fairly easy to see what`s happening, but extremely difficult to know what to do about it.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Lack of Compensation

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 11, 2004 - 05:48 PM
“The United States Army attempts to repay damages that it may have caused by accident that are not related to combat directly or indirectly.” – First line of US Army Compensation Request Form

Hayda Hakeem grips the wheel of the beat up white and orange Passat he rents to use as a taxi. Inside we talk with him as we head to the CPA for another highly controlled occupation press conference in the CPIC. I notice two of his fingers are stubs, shaking as he grips the steering wheel as we rattle down the street.

“I have just returned to Iraq after spending 14 years in an Iranian prison because I fought in that war,” he says, “I am saddened to see this country now compared to how much better it was when I left it-even during a time of war.”

He pays the owner of the car a slice of what he makes, as he cannot afford his own vehicle.

Hayda Hakeem continues,

“I have to support my two handicapped sisters, since they have no medical support anymore. We have no heater. It is cold at night. Our parents died while I was in the prison in Iran.”

When we arrive at the CPIC I try to give him some extra money on top of the fare we’d negotiated. He doesn’t want to take it, so I thrust it in his hand and quickly shut the door. It isn’t much, but it is better than nothing, as I have heard countless terrible stories of Iraqis just trying get food and stay warm at night.

With the infrastructure still in shambles, the rationed petrol, continuing rising unemployment (over 60% now), and the end of the military occupation nowhere in sight, I continually wonder how Iraqis are getting by.

The stories of people killed, wounded, or disenfranchised in Iraq are endless. Almost every day that I have been here at least one person or family that has found out I am a journalist writing about how the occupation and illegal invasion are effecting Iraqis has approached me, desperate for someone to hear their story. While they hope I can help them, the little act I can do is to simply journal the injustice, and hope that readers will hold their government accountable for the travesty which is occurring in Iraq on a daily basis…and only growing worse with time.

While Mr. Bush speaks of sending Americans to the Moon and Mars, countless Iraqis in the country his military currently occupies are starving and freezing.

Speaking with Hayda Hakeem reminded me of a couple of examples I have investigated of people here being afflicted, directly and/or indirectly, of the wars and illegal sanctions that have tortured Iraq.

One of these is a man named Ayad Hashim. He worked as an engineer prior to the Anglo-American Invasion, and now works as a taxi driver in an attempt to feed his family of five. This is the only work he can find now due to the horrendous unemployment situation.

He had been saving money for a long time and was building his first home for his family in the Al Saidia area of Baghdad, which incurred great damaged by US troops shortly after the Invasion. He knew to contact the CPA and an Iraqi lawyer to handle his claim for destruction of his property.

“All the damage was caused by the US Army. The Army was using my house for watching people, for different jobs, for sleeping inside. While they did this they destroyed my home.”

Mr. Hashim states that he is fully aware that things like this occur during times of war, he is angry at the fact that he has yet to receive one Iraqi Dinar of compensation even though this occurred after George Bush declared major combat operations to be over in Iraq.

The actions the Army lists for Iraqis to take in order to properly file their claim are nearly impossible for most Iraqis, particularly those living in more rural areas. It requests exactly the following, which I reprint verbatim from the document:

-Proof of ownership of the property in question.

-Medical bills/Doctors written assessment of the injury.

-Additional witness statements.

-Proof of negligence of US Soldiers (statement of soldier, or identifying unit)

-Two written estimates of damages by a certified repair shop, engineer, auto dealer, or other professional as required by the nature of your claim.

-Requested amount in US dollars and Iraqi Dinar.

-Exact date and time of accident.

-Proof of Identity.

-Agency agreement.

-Death certificate (if applicable).

-Address and phone number where you can be reached.

These claims must then be filed within 30 days of the attack/damages/death. For starters, proof of ownership has become a tricky business with the new CPA. Many people have run into problems as this new administrations isn’t always acknowledging a proof of ownership certificate from Saddam’s regime.

Secondly, most people in Iraq can ill afford to visit a doctor to get a written assessment. Getting written estimates of damages is again a problem because most people cannot afford to have this done, as well as the fact that ‘certified’ repair shops or ‘auto dealers’ are almost non-existent in Iraq.

Phones pose another problem-unless a person is among the very rich select few in Iraq, most people here do not have a phone with which to be contacted, and oftentimes when their homes are destroyed, neither do they have an address where they can be reached as many of these families are now on the street.

Yet Mr. Hashim was able to produce all of which the Army asked for. He presented me with his folder complete with all of the aforementioned requests-documents, titles, certificates, witness statements, photos. He had it all.

“I contacted the CPA, gave them my photos, documents they requested and photos.”

A portion of the response he received from his claim is as follows:

“Your claim is denied. The FCA (Foreign Claims Act) requires proof of negligent or wrongful acts on the part of U.S. government employees. Accordingly, there is no evidence of negligence on the part of U.S. government employees.”

Mr. Hashim submitted three different signed testimony papers from witnesses of the destruction of his home by three people. He submitted photos, bills, testimony, certifications of proof and authenticity. Apparently doing everything the CPA asks of you still does not guarantee that you will be compensated.

Perhaps it is the line at the top of the compensation forms which states,

“The United States Army attempts to repay damages that it may have caused by accident that are not related to combat directly or indirectly.” (Italics mine)

Does this mean that intentional damages are not covered?

And which damages that have been caused by the US military in Iraq, exactly, are NOT related to combat directly or indirectly?

Jasem Hamza Al-Jbure works as a journalist for Alef-Ba Magazine in Baghdad. He and his family live in Al Shahab district in north Baghdad. In the middle of last May, after the ‘war’ had ended, US troops broke into his home at 5:30am. The soldiers ordered the family, who were clothed only in underwear, to stand in the garage at gunpoint as the soldiers searched through their home.

While this was happening a soldier standing outside the home fired his weapon at the home, breaking several windows and damaging a guardrail near some stairs.

The soldiers left him a scribbled piece of torn paper admitting to damaging his home. Being a prideful man, Mr. Al-Jbure will not go ask the CPA for money.

”I refuse to go and beg the Americans for money for destruction that they caused my home. They embarrassed my wife and daughters by pulling them from their beds, broke my windows, and now they won’t come to apologize and pay me. Why? And now they wonder why more Iraqi people want them out of our country.”

In Muslim society it is extremely rude to enter someone’s home, even a good friend or relative, without first asking permission. Now, on a daily basis all over Iraq, US soldiers completely disregard this important custom-many of them are most likely unaware they are even doing so. Yet the damage being caused by this ignorance is being done, and the effects will be more evident as time progresses.

Mr. Al-Jbure went on to tell me that US soldiers did this throughout his neighborhood. Neither he, nor any of his neighbors know why, as they never knew of any resistance fighters there.

He wanted me to know, as a fellow journalist, that newspapers in Iraq are struggling because fewer and fewer Iraqis read them because they feel it is all CPA propaganda.

“There are no independent newspapers in Iraq because this is not a free country, nor do we have democracy. Writers should have freedom to dissent, and we don’t have that anymore with the CPA than we did under Saddam.”

Because of the damage to his home, and his feelings about how Iraq is no better off now under US control, he wants the Americans gone.

The U.S. military has paid out nearly $2 million to Iraqi civilians who have complained to Coalition authorities that their family members were wrongfully killed. But because U.S. forces are immune from prosecution in Iraq courts, "commanders make payments from their discretionary funds, rarely even admitting liability," according to the UK Guardian. "Payouts average just a few hundred dollars and in some cases families have been asked to sign forms waiving their right to press for further compensation. In one area of south-western Baghdad, controlled by the 82nd Airborne Division, an officer said a total of $106,000 had been paid out to 176 claimants since July."

The CPA does have an official "human rights" bureau. It`s called the "Office of Human Rights and Transitional Justice." It`s located behind four heavily fortified military checkpoints, in the basement of the Baghdad convention center right down the hall from Bechtel. Iraqis can go there to file human rights claims. To qualify the abuse had to occur between February 1963 and April 2003, the years of Baath Party rule.

Is this a reflection of the situation concerning compensation for wrongful damages?

There is no information about the US Military or CPA payment of compensation to Iraqis who have had homes or belongings damaged by the occupation forces on any of their websites.

Phone calls to the CPA requesting such information have not been returned.



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The Five Hundred To Die In Iraq
Sunday, 11 January 2004, 2:29 pm
Column: William Rivers Pitt



The Five Hundred

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective



I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now.

-Wilfred Owen, "Strange Meeting"

It will be upon us soon. Sometime, likely before January is out, the 500th American soldier to die in Iraq will fall. He will be killed by a roadside bomb, or a mortar, or a rifle shot from afar, or a pistol to the back of the head in a crowd, or a rocket-propelled grenade into his convoy, or into his helicopter which will plunge, blazing, from the sky. He will fall in Baghdad, or Tikrit, or Mosul, or some unnamed town in between.

The 500th soldier will come to know what Luke Frist, age 20, knows now. He will know what Justin C. Pollard, age 21, knows now. Michael Mihalakis, who was 18, Stuart Moore, who was 21, Nathan Nakis, who was 19, Kenneth Souslin, who was 21, Rian Ferguson, who was 22, Jeffrey Braun, who was 19, Joseph Blickenstaff, who was 23, Jason Wright, who was 19, Ray Hutchinson, who was 20, Arron Clark, who was 20, Ryan Young, who was 21, Aaron Sissel, who was 22, Rel Ravago, who was 21, Robert Roberts, who was 21, Joseph Lister, who was 22, Scott Tyrrell, who was 21, Sheldon Hawk Eagle, who was 21, Richard Hafer, who was 21, Paul Bueche, who was 19, Damian Heidelberg, who was 21, Eugene Uhl, who was 21, Joey Whitener, who was 19, Irving Medina, who was 22, Daniel Parker, who was 18, Robert Wise, who was 21, Robert Benson, who was 20, Frances Vega, who was 20, Benjamin Freeman, who was 19, Steven Acosta, who was 19, and Charles Sims, who was 18, all know what this 500th soldier will come soon to find out for himself, in blood and anguish and a gathering darkness.

It is better to be alive than dead, better to be young than gone, better at least to die for one`s country in a cause that is just than to be spent, oath and uniform and all, as a chess piece in someone`s cynical power play.

Must that 500th soldier be a man? Ask Rachel Bosveld, who was 19, Kimberly Hampton, who was 27, Sharon Swartworth, who was 43, Karina Lau, who was 20, Analaura Gutierrez, who was 21, Alyssa Peterson, who was 27, Melissa Valles, who was 26 or Lori Ann Piestewa, who was 23, what place gender has on the fields of the dead. They would answer, if they could, but their voices were lost in the grinding of the guns in Iraq.

The number of wounded American soldiers shipped home fails to find a consistent count. Some say 2,000, others say 9,000, and still others say 11,000 and rising. Another generation of shredded American veterans has been born, honored when the country needs heroes to inspire the next generation into enlisting, but forgotten the rest of the time, left to pinch pennies and rub the stumps where their healthy young legs used to send them running and leaping and dancing through a life they surrendered in a blinding flash of pain and light.

The number now stands at 487 Americans killed, according to figures provided by the Department of Defense. The Army Times, a reading staple for the enlisted ranks, had different numbers before the New Year. Jimmy Breslin, columnist from Newsday, wrote on December 30 that the Army Times said, "There were 506 killed by the time the newspaper closed last Friday. Since then, another seven have died. The newspaper has said this is the deadliest year for the U.S. military since 1972, when 640 were killed in Vietnam." That makes 513 Americans killed before the ball dropped in Times Square. Add the six who have died since then, and the number becomes 519. Even on this most important tabulation, the numbers are fuzzy.

There is no accurate accounting of the civilians who have died, but a cross-section of the math places their count in the tens of thousands. They died in their homes, shocked and awed before the fire took them. They died in the streets, fleeing the storm. They died in their beds from wounds, or disease, or despair.

How did it come to this?

It came to this because Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," on August 26, 2002.

It came to this because Ari Fleischer said, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there," on January 9, 2003.

It came to this because Colin Powell said, "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more," on February 5, 2003.

It came to this because Donald Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are," about these weapons. "They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad," on March 30, 2003.

It came to this because George W. Bush said, "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons," on February 8, 2003.

It came to this because George W. Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," on March 17, 2003.

It came to this despite the fact that Colin Powell said, "Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors," on February 24, 2001.

The Washington Post on January 7th ran a lead story titled "Iraq`s Arsenal Was Only On Paper." The sub-headline reads, "Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage." This is yet another brick in the wall between what we were promised by the Bush administration, what we were told under the fearful and deliberately-cast shadow of September 11 was in Iraq and worthy of war, and what is actually there. The Post story reads, in part, as follows:
"In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a `grave and gathering danger` by President Bush and a `mortal threat` by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s."
"A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq`s biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find."

George W. Bush and his administration promised us that Iraq possessed 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, uranium from Africa for the development of a nuclear weapons program, and al Qaeda connections. This last bit was the key, for we were told that Saddam Hussein could hand these weapons to al Qaeda, and al Qaeda could bring them to the United States. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country," said Mr. Bush, "to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

None of it was there. The Washington Post story carried a photograph of a crudely-drawn sketch of a rocket, like a child`s musings of science fiction. That was the sum and substance of the weapons program.

In the aftermath, the rhetoric for why all of this death has been visited upon us has changed. We went to free the Iraqi people, and to bring democracy to the Middle East. When Saddam Hussein was hauled out of his hiding place several weeks ago, it was heralded as a great victory. Yet the truth of the matter undermines the bloviating glee from the Bush administration and a mainstream media that caters to their story line. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, no conventional military capabilities, no connections to al Qaeda, and no connections to September 11. Was he worth all this?

The democracy promised by the Bush administration is equally vacuous. The majority of Iraq`s population are Shia Muslims, who are seeking to establish a fundamentalist Shia government like the one currently controlling Iran. Democracy means majority rules, and if democracy is brought, that Iraqi majority will elect that fundamentalist government and throw democracy out the back door. We knew this going in, and knew as well that a Shia-controlled Iraq would align itself with the Shia-controlled Iran on top of all that oil. So democracy, in truth, was never on the table.

American forces will never leave Iraq. It was never about freedom, or democracy. It was about the occupation of an oil-rich nation in a world where petroleum stores are dwindling. Perhaps it was about revenge for September 11, but if so, it was revenge taken on a virtually defenseless civilian population that had no hand in these attacks. It was also about profit. Nearly $200 billion has been spent to date on this invasion and occupation. Most of that money has gone to massive corporations like Dick Cheney`s Halliburton, to George Herbert Walker Bush`s Carlyle Group, to weapons manufacturers, to other petroleum companies. Once upon a time, that money belonged to you. Now, it belongs to them.

So it goes for that 500th soldier, who may be the 550th soldier for all we know. Not so long ago he, or she, raised a hand and swore an oath to defend the United States of America, and pledged his, or her, life to that cause. Implicit in that oath was a promise from the country honored to receive that oath. That promise? Your life will not be spent to no good end, soldier. Your life will not be wasted. The promise was broken.

Lt. General Harold G. Moore, in his shattering memoir of the battle of Ia Drang, Vietnam, in 1965, said this: "It was no movie. When it was over the dead did not get up and dust themselves off and walk away. The wounded did not wash away the red and go on with life, unhurt. Those who were, miraculously, unscratched were by no means untouched. This is also the story of the suffering of families whose lives were forever shattered by the death of a father, a son, a husband, a brother in that Valley. This is our story and theirs. For we were soldiers once, and young."

Wilfred Owen, the poet who wrote "Strange Meeting," knows what that 500th soldier will come to know all too soon. Owen was a soldier in World War I, and was cut down by a machine gun on November 4, 1918, just seven days before the Armistice that ended the butchery. The church bells were ringing to celebrate the war`s end in his home town when his parents answered the door to find the telegram which told them of their loss. Owen was 25 years old.

Before he died, he wrote a truth.


"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil`s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

-------
William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times and international best-selling author of three books - "War On Iraq," available from Context Books, "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available from Pluto Press, and "Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism," available in August from Context Books.


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Peter Lee: `Cutting down the Shrub`
Posted on Monday, January 12 @ 09:39:54 EST
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Peter Lee

The Republicans are right. Hating George Bush makes us look bad.

The proper tone is contempt. Amused contempt.

It`s time to twist the nose of the little man who`s making such a big mess of the world these days.

We`ve done a pretty good job of broadcasting the magnitude of Bush`s errors and the disastrous consequences for America.

But we`ve also paid Bush the backhanded compliment of making Bush appear as big a monster as the monstrosities he`s committed.

In an election year, making a terrifying shibboleth out of Bush`s ambitions, reach, and power is an unforgivable sin.



As Bill Clinton said, Voters go for strong and wrong over right and weak.

We`re lucky because Bush is wrong and weak. He`s trying to be Mr. Rocket in His Pocket, Tough on Homeland Security.

But all he`s got is a sock in his flightsuit.

And it`s time to start getting the word out.

Bush has a lot of negatives. His record of a failed war, jobless recovery, and yawning deficit should bring Carteresque futility to mind, not Roosevelt-like resolve.

Beneath the election year braggadocio, Bush has got to be nervous. Only a harmonic convergence of media collusion, popular credulity, and opposition incompetence will enable him to present himself to the electorate in fuzzy soft focus as a capable, engaged, and caring leader.

We have priceless material in our hands. We just need to get it out.

Remember how much hay the right made of Vincent Foster`s hamburger (the last meal of a murder victim, not a suicide, we were told)? That was pre-Whitewater, pre-Monica, when the worst thing they could come up with was Bill Clinton`s haircut.

We can do much better.

Let`s look at Bush`s personal vulnerabilities and how they can be pushed to the top of the news crawl.

A quick rundown:

1) Bush Knew. Mr. Asleep at the Switch is pretty anxious about the investigation into 9/11. Caring too much about oil and Iraq and too little about planes crashing into buildings doesn`t look very good. The buttons to push: a) $100 million for Whitewater and only $3 million for 9/11? b) the lawsuit by families of 9/11 victims c) testify, Condi! I mean, testify publicly and under oath.

2) He Couldn`t Find Oil in Texas or WMDs in Iraq (because he was looking in exactly the wrong places! c.f. the right wing wingnut cyanide bomb plot in Texas). I like this approach because it links Harken and Arbusto (two Bush business failures that combined insufficient planning, botched execution, and a cut and run exit strategy by George Jr. to rescue his personal ass) to the similar mess in Iraq. Americans are in denial about the immense human, financial, diplomatic, and moral cost of our botched Iraq adventure; but they might say to themselves a guy who can`t keep a company afloat shouldn`t be running an empire. The main button to push: The WMD Fiasco Was a Real Intelligence Failure, in that our Chief Boob lacks the intelligence and judgment to handle the uncertainties of business or war properly.

3) Puppet President. The "Empty Suit/Big Hat No Cattle" line will be getting more play with Paul O`Neill`s published revelations about our intellectually and personally disengaged Roboprez. This certainly can be piggybacked on with the observation that Bush has always been a weak guy influenced by fraudsters: first Enron, then Halliburton. It`s nice having Enron around in an election year, isn`t it? We can push the Halliburton button til our arms are worn off up to the elbow, there`s so much fraud and dirt there. Just make sure the mud sticks to Bush as the dupe who let it happen ("just like Enron"), and not just to Cheney.

4) The Guy Who Doesn`t Know Which Way His War is Going. I think it`s a little too soon for "Mission Accomplished" to be consigned to the media memory hole, don`t you? Especially if it can be linked to another old favorite, George Jr.`s mystery non-year at the Texas Air National Guard. I don`t think the RNC will replay that carrier propaganda any time soon. Maybe we should let the American people enjoy that million-dollar (literally!) footage they paid for. Scroll a few stats over the triumphal strutting: x serviceman killed x wounded x dollars spent since the carrier landing; 100,000 troops in Iraq for years. Then "He thought the mission was accomplished. He also thinks he completed his national guard service." Superimpose subtitle over freeze frame of foolishly grinning flightsuited prez: George W. Bush AWOL 1972-73.

5) Another Ticket to Nowhere. Maybe Bush`s trillion dollar Mars initiative is a devilishly clever way to starve the government beast and make sure Social Security will be bankrupted, fer sure!. But it`s probably just a stupid and ridiculous piece of election-year grandstanding, so pile on! Point out we have a half billion dollar deficit even without the special expenditures for Iraq. Educate the public: one trillion dollars is a 1 followed by 12 zeros: $1,000,000,000,000. That will buy 500 billion school lunches. Or 3 more Iraq-sized wars.

6) Valerie Plame. This should be the biggy that brings Bush down: a flagrant, politically motivated violation of national security. And the great thing is, Bush already announced the cover-up publicly when he said he doubted the leaker would ever be identified. That was the unspoken, begging message to his underlings: please, please, please don`t tell! Let`s think about this a little bit: He`s telling us there`s no point in him issuing an order to his staff to have the leaker identify him/herself and resign, because the order would be disobeyed! Certainly opens the supposed lockstep loyalty of Bush`s White House operation to question, doesn`t it? And what`s it say about Bush`s ability to control and manage his staff, let alone know what`s going on? This stuff is pure gold. You have to think, the leaker`s gotta be Rove. Only if Rove nervously chewed his lip and recused himself from Bush`s cerebral processes on the grounds of excessive complicity would Bush be forced to come up with such a lame and desperate rationale on his own. Wouldn`t be bad if Bush got a fusillade of Plame questions at his next news conference: Why haven`t you ordered the Plame leaker to come forward?

Of course, getting these things on the media agenda takes constant work. The White House has a bottomless trick bag of press releases, leaks, and actions designed to grab control of the news cycle.

I`m sure you`ve noticed that whenever something bad happens in Iraq, like a helicopter getting shot down with 9 US troops killed, the first thing the Army does is mount Operation Big Noise (13 Iraqis captured at Tikrit!) which is supposed to march to the front of the news crawl and trump the bad news in terms of body count and timing.

Well, we can play that game too. There are so many high quality, easily accessible skeletons in George`s closet that we should be able to keep the media busy and stock a good-sized medical supply house at the same time.

We need a large-scale, coordinated, and energetic effort to drive a media agenda against Bush and at the same time put a spoke in the wheel of Bush`s media machine.

It`s not something that the Democratic candidates can do. They have to remain above the fray and out of the mud. The mud is reserved for George W. Bush, exclusively.

We have to do it.

I am a progressive dittohead in waiting, looking for some well-funded, savvy, anti-Bush radio and TV network to give me my marching orders.

But I`m not going to wait.

There`s too much shrub that needs clearing.

Copyright 2003 Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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Monday, January 12, 2004
War News for January 12, 2004

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

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in Baghdad bomb ambush.

Bring `em on: US convoy ambushed by roadside bomb near Ramadi. Two Iraqis killed.

US troops kill seven Iraqis stealing oil from pipeline near Samarra.

Iraqi Resistance Report for the period January 8 – 11, 2004.

Al-Sistani renews call for direct elections. “Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani also demanded, in a statement issued by his office, that an elected assembly must ratify an interim constitution now being created by the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council as well as proposed security agreements governing the continued presence of U.S. and other coalition troops in Iraq beyond July 1.” No wonder Bremer wants to get out of Dodge before July.

Civilian shooting have increased 300 per cent since occupation began. “As I told you, we used to receive about 16 cases a month, but this figure went up dramatically, up to 520 cases in August. I`m talking about just Baghdad area, not the whole country.”

Army War College study calls Bush’s War a “distraction.” “The report, by visiting professor Jeffrey Record, who is on the faculty of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is ‘near the breaking point.’ It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al-Qaida terrorist network.”

Japanese defense minister says its contingent in Iraq won’t help coalition troops under fire. For a real hoot, be sure to read the comments from the outraged American right-wing nutjobs following the article.

O’Neill says Lieutenant AWOL was looking for an excuse to fight Saddam Hussein in January 2001.

More on convoy duty in Iraq.

Pentagon says 504 US troops have been killed in Iraq. Wait, now they say it’s only 495. Looks like they’re having trouble keeping track of their own lies.

Report from Dover. Lieutenant AWOL’s War on America keeps the casualties hidden. Read the comments from the Heritage Foundation goon.

If you only read one article today, read this one. "For Nagl, Vietnam stands as an encyclopedia of what shouldn`t be done. Foremost in the do-not-repeat category are the indiscriminate use of firepower, the resort to conventional tactics to fight an unconventional threat and the failure to implement an effective `hearts and minds` campaign… The civic chores are supposed to be shouldered by the American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer III, but the C.P.A. remains isolated and rather inept at implementation...One morning, during breakfast at the battalion canteen, I asked Nagl about the Coalition Provisional Authority. He has yet to see a C.P.A. official at the base, he said. He pointed to an empty plastic chair at the table and asked: `Where`s the guy from C.P.A.? He should be sitting right there.` Given the weakness of the C.P.A., Nagl and other soldiers are effectively in charge not only of the military aspects of the counterinsurgency but also of reconstruction work and political development."

Commentary

Opinion: To My Republican Friends: “The ball is very much in your court this evening, guys. I make myself brief: Do you plan to continue supporting the President after Paul O`Neill`s comments on 60 Minutes tonight, comments which I suspect many of you all saw?” Don`t worry. Next, the Republicans will try to justify Bush`s War by telling us Saddam Hussein was betting on baseball.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Kansas soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Missouri soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier wounded in Iraq.








# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:08 AM
Comments (3)

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Source Revealed For Iraqi WMD Drawings
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CBS 60 Minutes

Interviews former treasury secretary Paul O`Neill

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article5510.htm

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Consumer Debt Grows at Alarming Rate
Debt Burden Will Intensify When Interest Rates Rise

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; 12:46 PM


Feeling besieged by all those post-holiday credit card bills? Struggling to dig out from an avalanche of debt?

You are not alone.

According to the latest figures from the Federal Reserve, America`s consumer debt has topped $2 trillion for the first time, continuing what debt experts view as an alarming surge in recent years.

To some, the nation`s consumer debt, which dwarfs that of any other country, represents the kind of "bubble" that the stock market grew into during the 1990s.

"It`s a huge problem," warns Howard S. Dvorkin, president and founder of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services Inc., a nonprofit debt-management organization. "You cannot be the wealthiest country in the world and have all your countrymen be up to their neck in debt."

Robert D. Manning, a leading expert on the credit card industry, sees families as likely to come under even greater stress as interest rates -- currently near historic lows -- inevitably rise.

"That`s one of the trends that`s really going to kill the American consumer in the next downturn," he says. "It`s just impossible to keep these interest rates this low for much longer."

Tied to the record consumer debt levels has been a surge in personal bankruptcies, which reached an all-time high of 1.6 million households in 2003.

In its latest statistical release on consumer credit, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday that consumer debt reached $2.004 trillion on a non-seasonally adjusted basis in November, the latest reporting period.

The figure covers most short- and intermediate-term credit extended to individuals, including car loans. It excludes loans secured by real estate, such as home mortgages. When mortgages are taken into account, the nation`s households owe close to $9 trillion, Manning says.

The $2 trillion figure represents a doubling of America`s consumer debt in less than 10 years. According to the Federal Reserve, the debt topped the $1 trillion mark for the first time in December 1994.

Of the total, commercial banks are owed the largest share, nearly $624 billion. More than $740 billion of the total is revolving credit, while $1.264 trillion is nonrevolving.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the consumer debt reached nearly $1.995 trillion in November, also a record. The only good news in the Federal Reserve figures, debt experts said, was that the seasonally adjusted debt grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent for the month, down from 5 percent in October and 6.9 percent in September.

But the overall problem may be worse than the latest record debt level indicates, said Manning, author of the book, "Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America`s Addiction to Credit." He traces the problem to a credit economy in which credit cards have become "yuppie food stamps," akin to a "social-class entitlement" rather than an earned privilege. Now, government figures show that three out of five U.S. families have credit card debt.

"What`s alarming is that [the consumer debt figure] doesn`t accurately reflect the true distress on various segments of the American population," he said. Not included in the Federal Reserve figures are "new kinds of hybrid financial institutions and new loan products," such as those offered at rent-to-own stores. There, interest rates typically work out to more than 200 percent a year, and sometimes more, Manning said. In one such store catering to middle-class African Americans, he said, the annual interest rate came to 800 percent.

Overall, Manning said, "the cost of borrowing on credit has tripled in real terms since the early 1980s." While many credit card companies offer zero percent introductory interest rates to customers with good credit, he said, the rates typically jump after the introductory period, and many Americans do not qualify for the low rates in the first place.

Although the credit card industry says average household consumer debt comes to $9,000, Manning said, it is actually closer to $13,000 when the roughly 40 percent of households that pay their balances each month are taken out of the equation.

"In the old days, the best customer was someone who could pay off their loan," said Manning, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. "Today the best client of the banking industry is someone who will never pay off their loan," because then the client is more likely to incur fees. In 2002, the average household consumer debt translated into $1,700 a year in finance charges and fees, he said.

In the long term, Manning said, the burgeoning debt "means our standard of living has to go down."

Dvorkin agrees. "It`s going to result in people having to work longer," he said. "Effectively, if this continues, the average American will not have enough to retire on and will not be able to retire."

The record consumer debt also dovetails with other social problems, Dvorkin said. More than half of all marriages end in divorce, and "the number one cause of divorce is financial pressures," he pointed out.

After reaching a new record last year, personal bankruptcies "will continue to grow," Dvorkin said. "It`s very scary."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Iraq: Money For Nothing

by Maria Tomchick; Eat The State; January 12, 2004

One of the most important news stories in 2004 is where the $18.6 billion in U.S. taxpayer money that Congress voted to spend on Iraqi reconstruction is to be spent and how. Already some of the details are available, and the trend is disturbing.

The Bush administration opened up bidding on January 7 for $5 billion worth of major construction contracts, after delaying the process twice. The work will include everything from restoring electricity and water supplies to rebuilding hospitals to fixing roads and bridges.

The rest of the $18.6 billion will be parceled out later. Another $6 billion will be bid out for "non-construction work," most of which will go to train a new Iraqi army and supply the desperately under-supplied, ill-trained, and trigger-happy Iraqi police forces, which recently made headlines by fatally shooting Iraqi demonstrators. Another $2 billion will fund more repairs for Iraqi oil infrastructure, which is currently being repaired by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root on a no-bid contract awarded by the Pentagon early last year.

Of the remaining funds, the Bush administration decided last month to defer spending $4 billion in reconstruction funds until after June 2004, when a new Iraqi government is scheduled to take over the reins from the U.S. U.S. officials claim the delay is necessary to help the U.S. government maintain leverage over the new Iraqi government, a form of benevolence that the Iraqis will certainly resent, but which fits nicely with how the U.S. government conducts business and doles out aid money throughout the rest of world.

In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced a new $1.8 billion contract with Bechtel Corp. to continue its work fixing power plants and water infrastructure in Iraq. This comes on top of a contract the U.S. government awarded to Bechtel last year to begin repair on electrical and water plants. In the selection process for the first contract, the U.S. Agency for International Development secretly solicited bids from four pre-selected companies and awarded the contract to Bechtel, over the objections of smaller companies that were not even invited to bid. This gave the company a distinct advantage in competing for the second contract. USAID even used a Bechtel infrastructure study to put together the second contract; as expected, even though the bid process was "open" this time, only two other companies bothered to submit a bid. When the Bush administration eventually parcels out the $2 billion to replace the current Halliburton contract, we can expect the same result.

A useful question to ask is "How much are the Iraqis getting for all the U.S. taxpayer money being spent?" The answer so far is alarming. Nearly $1.5 billion was paid to Bechtel in 2003, much of it for upgrades to Iraq`s electrical supply system. Yet evidence on the ground suggests that the electricity supply is as bad or worse now than under Saddam Hussein`s regime. In November, Baghdad suffered a two-day blackout and continues to experience daily rolling blackouts of several hours at a stretch. Outside of the cities it is much worse: in many rural towns and villages, the power is off for longer periods than it is on, making it impossible to refrigerate food and heat homes.

Bechtel lays the blame on the Pentagon for poor planning and on Saddam Hussein for not somehow finding a way to import necessary parts in spite of 12 years of U.S.-led sanctions. But the new Iraqi government`s Electricity Ministry knows who is really to blame. Its officials complain that power plant managers gave Bechtel a list of the spare parts last summer and fall, but so far they`ve "gotten absolutely nothing" and have been forced to operate the systems exactly as they did under Saddam Hussein.

Such corporate profiteering and mismanagement has real, drastic effects on the ground, and not just for Iraqi citizens. Col. Kurt Fuller, commander of the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division told the New York Times, regarding an increase in guerrilla attacks near the town of Abu Desheer: "We went to the neighborhood council and said, `You were totally peaceful. What happened?` They said, `No power.` Saddam used to cut off power to punish them. So they thought the coalition was punishing them."

Another such punishment is the shortage of gasoline and kerosene in Baghdad. While Democratic Congressmen in Washington DC are investigating allegations that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government to import fuel into Iraq, residents of Baghdad are spending hours and sometimes days in line at the gas pump. And most Baghdad residents heat their homes with kerosene, and that fuel is also in short supply.

Halliburton blames sabotage to Iraq`s northern oil pipelines, which have been bombed at least 85 times since May 1, 2003; however, the southern oil pipelines and infrastructure remain largely secure. A more pressing problem is the shocking state of the oil infrastructure after 12 years of U.S.-led sanctions. This has forced the Bush administration to import gasoline and kerosene into a country with the world`s second largest oil reserves, hence Halliburton`s role in shipping gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait.

Iraqis blame the shortages on smugglers who divert gas as it`s being trucked to gas stations and then sell it back over the border in Kuwait and Jordan. The problem is clearly one of security. Neither the U.S. army nor Halliburton is adequately monitoring the supply system to make sure the gas and kerosene is actually delivered to its specified endpoint. As long as the fuel is purchased, the trucks sent on their way, and the money paid into Halliburton`s pocket, whatever happens to the fuel en route appears to be no one`s business or concern -- except the Iraqis who suffer and the U.S. troops on the ground who continue to be bombed and strafed by disgruntled Iraqis.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is scrambling to clear Halliburton`s name on the pricing scandal. The Defense Contract Audit Agency has limited its investigation to reviewing Halliburton`s in-house records and invoices for fuel purchases. They are not conducting a review of average prices charged for fuel by companies in the Gulf region, nor how Halliburton chose its subcontractors, nor the Kuwaiti government`s suspected involvement in limiting Halliburton`s access to only one subcontractor, which effectively jacked up the price of fuel. And they certainly aren`t looking at why the fuel isn`t reaching its intended destination.

So far, the audit has turned up the shocking revelation that Pentagon officials signed an emergency waiver allowing Halliburton to overcharge for fuel imports. Instead of screaming for blood and seeking some kind of accountability for this egregious theft of taxpayer funds, U.S. legislators and the media have merely accepted the Pentagon`s explanation as a valid excuse for highway robbery.

The picture is clear: U.S. taxpayer funds spent on Iraqi reconstruction are lining the pockets of George Bush`s corporate associates, while U.S. taxpayers, who should expect that money to be spent for a good purpose, are being cheated. Meanwhile, Iraqi citizens, who`ve been promised help but not received any, are left to twist in the wind, while U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq are forced to manage an increasingly dangerous situation

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&Ite…

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US military `brutalised` journalists
News agency demands inquiry after American forces in Iraq allegedly treated camera crew as enemy personnel

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian

The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the "wrongful" arrest and apparent "brutalisation" of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq.

The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash.

The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were "enemy personnel" who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours.

Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were "brutalised and intimidated" by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: "Let`s have sex."

At one point during the interrogation, according to the family of one of the staff members, a US soldier shoved a shoe into the mouth one of the Iraqis.

The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall.

"They were brutalised, terrified and humiliated for three days," one source said. "It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse."

He added: "It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis."

The US military has so far refused to apologise and has bluntly told Reuters to "drop" its complaint. Major General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, claimed that two US soldiers had provided sworn evidence that they had come under fire. He admitted, however, that soldiers sometimes had to make "snap judgments".

"More often than not they are right," he said.

On January 2 Reuters` Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani turned up at the crash site where a US Kiowa Warrior helicopter had just been shot down, killing one soldier.

The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked "press". They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly afterwards.

The soldiers also detained a fourth Iraqi, working for the American network NBC. No weapons were found, the US military admitted.

Last night the nephew of veteran Reuters driver and latterly cameraman Mr Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to strip naked and had ordered him to put his shoe in his mouth.

"He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: `If you don`t shut up we`ll fuck you.`"

He added: "His treatment was very shameful. He`s very sad. He has also had hospital treatment because of his leg."

Last August a US soldier shot dead another Reuters cameraman, Mazen Dana, after mistaking his camera for a rocket launcher while he filmed outside a Baghdad prison.

An internal US investigation later cleared him of wrongdoing. During the war last April another of the agency`s cameramen, Ukrainian Taras Protswuk, was killed after a US tank fired a shell directly into his room in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, from where he had been filming.

Last night Simon Walker, a spokesman at Reuters head office in London, confirmed that the agency had made a formal complaint to the Pentagon last Friday.

He said: "We have also complained to the US military. We have complained about the detention [of our staff] and their treatment in detention. We hope it will be dealt with expeditiously."

A spokeswoman for the US military`s coalition press and information centre in Baghdad hung up when the Guardian asked her to comment.

The top US military spokesman in Iraq, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, later admitted that they had received a formal complaint and that there was an on-going investigation into the incident.

Journalists based in Baghdad have expressed concern that the US military is likely to treat other media employees in Iraq as targets.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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The axis in practice
Leader
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian

It is almost exactly two years since George Bush conjured the phrase "axis of evil" to demonise Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In his state of the union address on January 29 2002, he vowed to wage an unceasing war to eliminate the threat posed by the three countries` weapons of mass destruction and the terrorists who had attacked the US five months earlier. "States like these and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world," Mr Bush said. "The US will not permit the world`s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world`s most destructive weapons ... History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom`s fight."

As the world now knows, these were no mere rhetorical flourishes. It was indeed an historic speech, setting the seal on a more aggressive US policy that has been followed with vigour ever since. In his next state of the union address, due a week today, Mr Bush will doubtless offer an upbeat verdict on his administration`s progress. And on one level, at least, such a verdict is justified. North Korea, for example, has just opened its nuclear facilities to an unprecedented US inspection; it repeats that it is ready to abandon its weapons, if various conditions are met. Iran, likewise, has agreed to additional nuclear safeguards. Libya, an associate member of the axis of evil, has executed a volte-face on WMD. States linked to proliferation and terror, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sudan, are now focused instead on building regional peace. Others, such as Syria, are under intensifying diplomatic pressure to change tack. In all these cases, Mr Bush can argue that his uncompromising stance is bearing fruit two years on.

The president and his supporters will argue, too, that all these developments have been positively encouraged by the US invasion of Iraq - and again, such a view should not be dismissed out of hand. Even those passionately opposed to the war should acknowledge that it concentrated minds in the Middle East and beyond. As one analyst noted, it has become necessary to take Uncle Sam a bit more seriously than in the past. This may be deplored as a bully`s triumph; but lesser bully boys everywhere have taken note of it and thus to a limited, probably temporary extent, it has worked.

Yet this argument, that the war has had an overall beneficial geostrategic and security effect, remains fundamentally flawed nevertheless. The reasons may be found in Iraq itself. By invading Iraq, which had no WMD, the US and its allies, bogged down there indefinitely, have been rendered less able to respond to a real "rogue" state WMD crisis. By invading Iraq, Mr Bush appears, predictably, to have exacerbated the terrorist threat - the second of the two "great objectives" of his axis of evil speech. In truth, al-Qaida`s creeping menace is more pervasive than ever. By invading Iraq, Mr Bush has not advanced peace or democracy in the Middle East. The reverse may be more nearly true, given the political unrest in Iran, unresolved tensions between Israel, the Palestinians and Syria, violence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq`s ongoing, potentially splintering instability and the deeply paradoxical US refusal to agree to the Iraqi Shia majority`s demand for free elections. In point of fact, the Libyan shift was in train well before Mr Bush went after Saddam; North Korea would likely have started talking sooner, but for bellicose US posturing.

By its heavy-handed pursuit of evil, the US has undermined the western alliance, the UN, international law and civil rights - what might be called the "axis of good". While there has been some progress, Mr Bush`s reliance on force has made it even harder overall to realise the aims he set out in 2002. Down home in Texas, this is called shooting yourself in the foot.


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Opportunity knocks
The Democrats are in a strong position to break the political deadlock in America - but they must be bold

Stanley Greenberg
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian

The loyalties of American voters are almost perfectly divided between the Democrats and Republicans. This is a deepening divide, giving us the two Americas. The parties are now so evenly matched that the slightest shift in the political winds could blow the balance.

That the supreme court - itself divided five to four - was forced to decide the 2000 presidential election underscores the poignancy of this new American reality. The fact is that 50,992,897 Americans voted for Al Gore and 50,458,002 voted for George Bush. On that day, 48.4% of the nation`s voters aligned with one party and 47.9% with the other.

But for all the imagery of political operatives rushing to Florida and election officials holding ballots up to the light, 2000 is more than an eccentric drama: it is the current moment in an era of political deadlock.

In the year-and-a-half after the US was attacked on 9/11, I conducted 15 national polls and spoke to 15,045 voters. With the election debacle of 2000 seemingly well behind us, 46% of the American electorate still aligned with the Democrats and 46% with the Republicans. Terrorists mounted an attack on America, we responded with two wars and two regime changes, and the Republicans had a good congressional election, yet still the parties remain at parity in the public consciousness.

The 2000 election is the culmination of a half-century of American history in which no party has dominated, leaving us with the current parity and political turmoil.

Over the longer term, it is possible that social and cultural trends, a deeper identification with modern forces, effective governance, and tough-minded ways to marginalise conser vatives can win growing numbers of voters to the Democratic side of the divide. But Democrats might themselves grow comfortable with the two Americas as a strategy for establishing Democratic hegemony.

Staying within the two Americas framework has serious risks that could leave the Democrats on the outside looking in. Democratic commitment to waging the war on terrorism and maintaining a strong defence, and reassurances on values and the family may never really get heard if terrorism is ongoing and America moves from war theatre to war theatre.

If this is the case, the Democrats` sound issue positions and the Republicans` unpopular agenda never end up mattering. It is possible that the public consciousness is so shaped by 9/11 and the administration`s determination to carry the war to successive battlefields that the country settles for a "wartime" leader. And in the realm of things beyond human control, there could be a strong but short-lived economic recovery, and voters could decide to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt. In short, there are many ways for Democrats to falter, even if they take up a sensible strategic course, because the parity of the parties does not leave a lot of room for error.

But 2004 or 2008 offers a potentially much bigger moment for a much bigger election if the Democrats respond in bold ways to the opportunities that have come together in this period. Indeed, reflecting back on this half-century, this may be the moment for another bold party initiative to reclaim the times, to pursue hegemony.

The American public`s embrace of "opportunity" reminds us that the Democratic party once claimed the concept for itself, before the battle for civil rights defined the parties in racial terms and narrowed most Americans` definition of opportunity to mean racial equality. With a growing American consensus about immigrant and racial diversity, "opportunity" has been liberated and now transcends race again.

The Opportunity Democrats, starting with John Kennedy, advanced a vision of America in which we have an obligation to ensure that all share in our country`s great bounty. Kennedy expressed confidence that we could reclaim government as an instrument of community. He placed equal rights, citizenship and responsibility at the centre of his political project. He insisted that America be unassailable so that it could bring peace, but also so that other countries would look to America not simply as exceptional in arms but as exceptional in opportunity. The character of our country was essential to the character of our foreign policy.

This is a moment for Opportunity Democrats advocating a 100% America in which all share in America`s bounty. They pose the choice between a country that works for the few and one that creates opportunity for all.

The choice could hardly be starker: one party aspiring to use government to move society toward universal health care and universal post-high-school education, address vast environmental challenges, rein in corporate power, and diminish the burdens on families caught in the middle; the other party proposing to empower entrepreneurs and the market, expand the role of faith-based institutions, and reduce the size of government.

One party challenges the next generation to create an America respected for its opportunity and freedom and leading an interconnected world; the other heralds an America unequalled in its power and challenges the next generation to join America`s quest to liberate individuals, wherever they are.

The choice is really a judgment about which party, the Democrats or Republicans, is aligned with the modernising forces and which will be given the chance to manage the future successfully. The Opportunity Democrats think they are battling for that honour.

· Stanley Greenberg is a former Clinton adviser and pollster. This is extracted from The Two Americas.

© 2004 Stanley Greenberg Reprinted by arrangement with Thomas Dunne Books.


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Democratic shift to come from within, say Arab leaders
By John R Bradley in Sanaa
13 January 2004


Arab leaders reached a broad consensus yesterday that democratic principles may "rescue" their own autocratic regimes, but strongly rejected the notion that democracy and freedom of expression can be imposed from outside.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni President, hailed democracy as a "rescue ship" as he addressed the biggest pro-democracy conference ever held in the Middle East.

"Democracy is the choice of the modern age for all people of the world and the rescue ship for political regimes," he told more than 600 delegates from 40 countries and international organisations - including the European Union, the Arab League, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference - in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.

The country, which introduced a multiparty parliamentary system in 1993, three years after unification, is the only Arab nation which can stake a claim to being a working democracy, despite being the most impoverished.

Emma Bonino, the former European commissioner for humanitarian affairs and a founder of the Italian NGO "No Peace Without Justice" - a co-sponsor of the Sanaa meet - said: "I believe no other country in the region would dare to host such a conference, especially now."

The Sanaa gathering, organised in the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq and President George Bush`s stated intention of promoting democratic change in the region, also came on the back of two reports from the United Nations Development Programme, which also co-sponsored the conference. The reports lambasted the region`s dictators for a lack of political freedom, blanket press censorship, discouraging their people from exploring the world of ideas, repressing women and stunting research in science and development.

But Arab leaders warned that the impetus for change in the Middle East must come from inside their own society. Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, called for "democracy" to be viewed "as a process, not a decision imposed by others".

Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, said in a similar message to the delegates: "Democracy belongs to the people. It cannot be imposed from the outside."

One reason the Sanaa meet was almost universally welcomed was because it was an EU, rather than US, initiative. The US governmental delegation was very low key.

The oil-rich Gulf states of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, which all sent high-level delegations, held themselves up as examples of Arab countries which are taking slow but concrete reform initiatives in the context of their cultural and religious heritage. All held at least partially free democratic elections last year, after decades of autocratic rule.

Opposition parties in Yemen largely dismissed the Sanaa conference as conforming to Arab governments` entrenched habit of talking more than acting.

One prominent opposition figure predicted: "When everyone goes back home, little action will follow."
13 January 2004 10:32



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 13, 2004
THE TRANSITION
Bush Team Revising Plans for Granting Self-Rule to Iraqis
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The Bush administration, seeking to overcome new resistance on the political and security fronts in Iraq, is revising its proposed process for handing over power to an interim Iraqi government by June 30, administration officials said Monday.

Officials held a round of urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad in the wake of the rejection on Sunday by a powerful Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of the administration`s complex plans to hold caucuses around the country to select an interim legislature and executive in a newly self-governing Iraq. Officials say they are responding to the cleric`s objections with a new plan that will open the caucuses to more people and make their inner workings more transparent.

Administration officials also expressed concern about a separate part of Ayatollah Sistani`s statement on Sunday that demanded that any agreement for American-led forces to remain in Iraq be approved by directly elected representatives.

Those twin setbacks raise questions about who would have to reach an agreement with the United States that would allow more than 100,000 American troops to remain in the country after power is handed over to the Iraqis this summer.

The administration has not yet begun negotiating such an agreement with its handpicked Iraqi authorities. Such negotiations — in which the American military is expected to ask for wide latitude in its counterinsurgency efforts — could be much tougher if they have to be carried out with Iraqis who are directly elected.

Administration officials acknowledged Monday evening that the remarks opposing the caucus plan from Ayatollah Sistani were a clear rebuff that would not be easy to overcome. The ayatollah, in a decree issued Sunday, said members of the interim legislature must be chosen through direct elections. Administration officials had been trying to convince him that such elections were impractical, but did not succeed.

"We`re pushing ahead with this process and trying to deal with Ayatollah`s concerns," said a top administration official. "We`re looking at the same process we have, but trying to make it as open, inclusive and democratic as possible."

Under an agreement reached between the American-led occupation and the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of Iraqis handpicked by the occupation authorities, an elaborate set of caucuses were mapped out in each of Iraq`s 18 provinces, which are known as governorates.

Each caucus was to have an organizing committee chosen by members of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad and by others in each of the governorates. The system was so elaborate and complex that some American occupation officials said it was difficult even for them to figure out.

Now that Ayatollah Sistani has rejected the system as not democratic enough, administration officials said they were intensifying efforts in all of Iraq`s governorates and in cities and towns to hold local meetings to select delegates to the caucuses.

The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental way.

The administration continues to assert that elections cannot be held in time for the deadline of June 30, the target date for handing sovereignty over to a new Iraqi interim government. There are no census rolls, voter registration records or other means to certify a democratic vote, they say.

In addition, the security situation, especially in the Sunni Muslim heartland in the center of Iraq, is not yet strong enough for an election to be held, American officials say.

There were signs on Monday that the administration was taken aback by the ayatollah`s comments on Sunday. For weeks, administration officials had been saying the American occupation leader, L. Paul Bremer III, would be able to persuade the ayatollah to change his mind.

Some officials noted that their negotiations with Ayatollah Sistani have been hampered because the ayatollah will not talk directly with Mr. Bremer, and so the Americans have had to use multiple emissaries to communicate with him.

The ayatollah is a revered religious figure among Shiite Muslims, who make up more than 60 percent of Iraq`s population. He is also regarded as a political moderate, but his refusal to meet with Mr. Bremer or any other American occupation figures was testimony to his not wanting to recognize the legitimacy of the American occupation.

A top administration official said recently that various emissaries had conveyed messages to and from Mr. Bremer and Ayatollah Sistani, but that probably only about two-thirds of the messages got through at any one time. Signals were confusing and contradictory, at least in American eyes.

When Ayatollah Sistani suggested that perhaps a neutral authority could certify that the elections were impractical, as American authorities had insisted, the administration seized on the idea that Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations could fill the bill.

Last week, Mr. Annan passed a message to a group of Iraqi leaders at the United Nations. The message was addressed to Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council and a former Iraqi foreign minister who has been leading the negotiations with the ayatollah.

According to people familiar with the letter, Mr. Annan said in it that "while it might not be possible to have elections in the time available, nevertheless it was essential to have a process that was fully inclusive and transparent."

The Annan letter was transmitted to Ayatollah Sistani by Mr. Pachachi, inspiring hope in the administration that it would prove persuasive, administration officials said. The ayatollah`s rebuff was thus seen in Washington as a major jolt that forced a rethinking of American plans.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, was among a small number of lawmakers involved in intelligence briefings on Monday, and he said Monday evening that he did not see how the administration had a choice in the matter.

"Sistani probably isn`t going to change his mind, so we`re going to have to somehow change our caucus approach or modify it," Senator Rockefeller said. "I think that`s going to be very hard to pull off by June 30."

Mr. Rockefeller also urged the administration to consider postponing the target date for transferring power to Iraqis, but administration officials said that was not under review.

The negotiations with the ayatollah and the plans for expanding the caucus process were proceeding even as an impasse remained on another aspect of the occupation.

In that impasse, the American occupation continues to try to persuade Kurdish leaders to back off their insistence on one unified Kurdish state comprising three of the governorates and possibly additional territory, including some oil fields.

Kurds, equally adamantly, are demanding that the United States back off its own position. Some Kurdish leaders are threatening to pull Kurdish members off the Iraqi Governing Council, an American official said. Such a move would be embarrassing to the United States, which chose the council members last summer.

Many in the administration expect an accommodation to be made with the Kurds. Indeed, they say that so many Iraqis expect such an accommodation that the likelihood that the United States would bow to Kurdish demands is probably what emboldened Ayatollah Sistani to take his hard line over the weekend.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 13, 2004
Bush Disputes Ex-Official`s Claim That Iraq War Was Early Goal
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul H. O`Neill, the former Treasury secretary, that the White House was looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the very beginning of his administration.

Responding to an account provided by Mr. O`Neill in a book to be published on Tuesday, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind, Mr. Bush said he was working from his first days in office on how to carry out an existing national policy of promoting a change of government in Iraq. But the president said his focus at the time was on re-evaluating the ways in which the United States and Britain were enforcing the "no flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq.

"And no, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear," Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, when asked whether he had begun planning within days of his inauguration for an invasion of Iraq. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."

"And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with desert badger or fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines," Mr. Bush continued, apparently referring to confrontations with Iraq over the no-flight zones. "And then all of a sudden September the 11th hit."

Administration officials said Mr. Bush had taken office determined to adopt a more aggressive approach toward Iraq. They said he sought a broad review of issues and options, from the effectiveness of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq to the possibility of covert action to depose Mr. Hussein.

While the administration also did contingency planning for dealing with any threat that Iraq might pose, the officials said, it was not looking for pretexts to mount a military campaign, as Mr. O`Neill suggested in the book, which was written with his cooperation and tracks the two years he spent as treasury secretary before being dismissed.

"It`s laughable to suggest that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq that shortly after coming to office," a White House official said Monday when asked about Mr. O`Neill`s account.

The Treasury Department said it had referred to its inspector general for a possible inquiry the question of how a Treasury document marked secret came to be shown on a segment about the book on CBS`s "60 Minutes" on Sunday. Mr. Suskind, who was given access by Mr. O`Neill to 19,000 documents that were turned over to him by the department after his departure, said the document that was shown on "60 Minutes" was the cover sheet for a February 2001 briefing paper on planning for a post-war Iraq. But he said Mr. O`Neill was not provided with the briefing paper itself.

The book describes Mr. O`Neill`s surprise at the focus put on Iraq at the very first National Security Council meeting held by Mr. Bush, on Jan. 30, 2001. Iraq was also the primary topic at the second meeting of the council, two days later. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld spoke at the second meeting about how removing Mr. Hussein would "demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about" and help transform the Middle East, the book said.

Mr. Rumsfeld talked at the meeting "in general terms about post-Saddam Iraq, dealing with the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, the reconstruction of the country`s economy, and the `freeing of the Iraqi people,` " the book said.

The book portrays Mr. O`Neill, who was a member of the National Security Council, as concerned that Mr. Bush was rushing toward a confrontation without a sufficiently rigorous debate about why doing so was necessary.

"From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," the book quotes Mr. O`Neill as saying. "And if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, `Fine. Go find me a way to do this.` "

The question of how and when Mr. Bush made the decision to go to war with Iraq has been a simmering political issue since even before the conflict began last year.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said at a news conference in Iowa on Monday that Mr. O`Neill`s account amounted to a "very serious allegation" against Mr. Bush.

But administration officials said that Mr. Bush was simply looking for more effective ways to carry out an established policy that had bipartisan backing and that there was no early decision to go to war.

In 1998, Congress passed, with strong bipartisan support, the Iraq Liberation Act, which said the United States policy should be "to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." President Bill Clinton signed it into law. Later that year, Mr. Clinton ordered airstrikes against Iraq on the eve of the House`s vote to impeach him, citing Mr. Hussein`s efforts to thwart the work of United Nations weapons inspectors.

Mr. Bush, whose father decided to allow Mr. Hussein to remain in power after the 1991 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait, had made clear even before taking office that he intended to step up efforts to oust the Iraqi leader.

Imam Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, the leader of the Islamic Center of America in Detroit, one of the nation`s largest mosques, said in a telephone interview on Monday that he had spoken to Mr. Bush six or seven times, before and after the 2000 election, about removing Mr. Hussein.

Imam Qazwini said that on Jan. 29, 2001, the day before the first National Security Council meeting of the administration, he met with Mr. Bush at the White House. The president, he said, was supportive of efforts to oust Mr. Hussein, but did not mention war as a means of doing so.

"No method was discussed at all," Imam Qazwini said. "It was a general desire for regime change."

In an interview just days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush did not sound like a man who had decided to mount an invasion of Iraq.

"We`re developing our strategy," he told two correspondents from The New York Times.

The strategy he described appeared to center on strengthening economic sanctions, which he said "resemble Swiss cheese" because so many nations had ignored the United Nations mandates on what kind of trade with Iraq was prohibited.

"Let me say this to you," Mr. Bush said at the time — nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks, and before his first national security meeting. "Saddam Hussein must understand that this nation is very serious about preventing him from the development of weapons of mass destruction and any thought in his mind that he should use them against our friends and allies in the Middle East."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Ossi Time in der NYTimes!

January 13, 2004
EISENHÜTTENSTADT JOURNAL
Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany`s Gray Old Days
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

EISENHÜTTENSTADT, Germany, Jan. 6 — This town is the perfect setting for the strange mood of nostalgia that seems to be taking hold in Germany lately, even if a Socialist utopia from the Stalinist former German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) does not seem a natural inspirer of warm and fuzzy feelings about the past.

But, strange as it is, a wave of what is called ostalgie (ost meaning east in German) has become a phenomenon in this country. People wear born-in-the-G.D.R. T-shirts, or they collect Trabants, the rattling two-cylinder cars that East Germans waited years to buy, or they go on line to be contestants on the "Ossi-Quiz," all questions relating to East German pop culture.

Here in Eisenhüttenstadt — Steel Mill Town — a few miles from the Polish border, ostalgie has been provided with its own museum, officially known as the Documentation Center on Everyday Life in the G.D.R. It is just down the road from the giant steel mill built here in the early 1950`s as an industrial showpiece.

The museum is just a few rooms, mostly on the second floor of a former day-care center, but it holds 70,000 to 80,000 objects from the former East Germany. About 10,000 people a year come to look at Mikki transistor radios, jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors. Seeing these familiar objects clearly stirs warm feelings about the vanished and unrecapturable past.

"It`s a very nice place when you want to remember your childhood," Thomas Blechschmied, a 29-year-old visitor, said the other day. "My parents still have those egg-holders," he continued, pointing to a bright yellow object inside a case of plastic kitchen utensils from the early 1970`s.

There`s no general wish for the East German state be revived, Mr. Blechschmied said, explaining the limits of ostalgie. It is more a recognition that millions of people made do as best they could for the 40 or so years between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the East Germans competed in all areas of life, from consumer products to Olympic ice skating. A person might, looking at a jar of nougat, have a Proustian recollection of the shortages that plagued everyday life in East Germany.

"The products are genuine and the shelves are genuine," Mr. Blechschmied said, standing inside the well-stocked store, "but usually they were more spread out than you see here, and there were lots of empty spaces."

Ostalgie is complicated, made up of various ingredients. One is clearly the disillusionment felt by many former Easterners over German reunification, which took place 13 years ago. Unemployment these days is commonly 25 percent in regions like Eisenhüttenstadt. Rents are no longer subsidized. Doctor visits cost money. People can be fired. In addition, as Andreas Ludwig, the West German scholar of urban history who started the museum a few years ago, noted, even capitalist products break down or are shabby and schlocky.

All this has given rise to a sort of East German post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria.

Ostalgia got a huge lift during the course of the last year by the success of a movie, "Goodbye Lenin," which offered a poignant, very human image to life in the East. Set in East Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it`s the story of a woman in such delicate health that she might die if she learns that her country has ceased to exist, so her loving children maintain an ever more elaborate charade aimed at persuading her that nothing fundamental has changed.

The mother, for example, asks for Spreewald Pickles, a highly valued East German product that disappeared from the market after the fall of the wall (and has since, by popular demand, reappeared). When the children find a discarded bottle with the Spreewald label still on it, they treasure it as an item that can save a life.

Looking around Eisenhüttenstadt is to see that the Center of Everyday Life is a museum inside another sort of museum. Built during the course of the 1950`s, the town was one of four model communities East Germany created to embody in the here and now the futuristic promise of Communism.

The steel mill continues to operate, one of the very few such socialist installations still doing so. The workers` housing blocks, with their sometimes Stalinist-classical facades, are actually rather attractive, painted in creamy or buttery or ochre tones. There are parks, playgrounds, day-care centers, schools. At the same time, the place imparts a feeling of emptiness; there is an absence of bustle, a quiet at the center of things, that is itself a legacy of central planning.

Mr. Ludwig, who comes from what was West Berlin during the divided years, proposed the museum to the state of Brandenburg, though his purpose was not then and is not now to provide props for national nostalgia. He felt that with the East German state dead, it had become appropriate to collect its artifacts and to study them, just as one might have collected objects and testimonies about the American South right after the Civil War.

"There`s no real reason to be nostalgic toward the G.D.R.," he said. "It was a dictatorship and people couldn`t get out." People, he said, rarely come alone to the museum; more often, two or more generations of a family come together, or Ossis with Wessies, and they find that objects impart not only memories but lessons.

"The thing about everyday objects is that they don`t say much about politics," Mr. Ludwig said. "But people start talking when they`re in front of things. `I remember that,` A says to B. People intervene, and that starts a discussion."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 12, 2004
COVER STORY
The Battle for Brains
By MARCO EVERS,
Der Spiegel

How elite universities in the United States compete for the best students.

Many dream in vain of attending Harvard, Stanford or MIT. But the deans of these three universities also dreamt in vain of Corrina Zygourakis, 19.

The young Texan, the daughter of Greek immigrants, corresponds exactly to the ideal picture of a dream student. She achieved the highest possible score on the SAT, the standardized test of performance taken by all applicants to US colleges and universities, and her grades were equally stellar. She won a number of science awards while still in high school, and during her summer vacations she worked as a research assistant for a Harvard professor, with whom she even co-published an article in a professional journal. On top of all that, she still found time to excel in other areas: as the editor of a student newspaper, as a violinist in a chamber orchestra, as a figure skater, and as a long-distance runner. She also speaks Greek and French fluently.

Everyone wanted Zygourakis, but she turned down offers from Harvard, Stanford and MIT. Caltech, in Pasadena, California, made her an offer she could not refuse: to convince the talented girl to attend, the world-renowned institution is not charging her any tuition or room and board - an offer worth 32,000 dollars a year.

"I was shocked when I read the letter," she says. "But it made the decision easy for me." For the past year and a half, she has been happily attending Caltech for free, majoring in neurobiology. She wants to become a doctor.

Caltech sees its waiver of Zygourakis` tuition as a good investment for the future. Without the offer, she probably would have selected another university. By accepting, however, she is helping to improve the quality of Caltech`s student body, the true capital of an elite US university. After all, it is the caliber of students that triggers an astonishing performance spiral: outstanding students attract outstanding professors. Outstanding professors attract outside funding, which benefits research, which in turn attracts better students.

"The competition for students," says Gerhard Casper, the Hamburg-born former president of Stanford, "is the most important element for improving the quality of a university." And US colleges and universities are not just using academic means to compete for the best students. They also use scholarship money to attract talented students. The assets of students` parents are often irrelevant. Someone who is highly talented and wealthy can obtain a scholarship, even though he or she could easily have paid for it. Wealthy students often get even more financial aid than poor students, who frequently must take on tremendous debt to pay for their college dreams.

Because good students also like nice bathrooms and nice apartments, and like to play sports, even state universities are now spending millions of dollars to build gyms and luxury apartments on campus. This would have been considered wasteful in the paste. Nowadays, ambitious college deans treat such luxuries as necessary investments in the battle for the best students.

A university`s ability to compete depends on how well its applicants did on the SAT. If a university is suddenly able to attract candidates with higher SAT scores, then everyone knows it must be doing something right. College students` SAT scores also play a role in the always controversial but nonetheless decisive college and university rankings published each summer by U.S. News & World Report.

The higher the ranking, the more a university can charge in tuition. One year at Harvard, for example, which is currently number one on the list, costs 38,000 dollars, according to information provided by the university. Nevertheless, this does not mean that only wealthy students can attend Harvard.

Whether or not someone can pay its tuition is not a criterion for admission to Harvard. The university values intelligence more than money. Harvard puts together a financial package composed of scholarships, subsidies and low-interest loans for anyone who is accepted but can`t afford to attend. Only 19 percent of students at private US universities pay full tuition - and help subsidize the rest.

Harvard enjoys a great deal of financial latitude. With an endowment of more than 17 billion dollars, it is one of the world`s wealthiest universities. Unlike smaller colleges and universities, Harvard`s tuition covers only an ever-shrinking share of its actual costs.

Caltech president David Baltimore, a 1975 Nobel prize winner, has even considered eliminating tuition altogether. It creates administrative expenses, scares away many a talented student, and provides only four percent of Caltech`s budget.


Translated by Christopher Sultan



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Awful Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN

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

But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College.

I was one of the few commentators who didn`t celebrate Paul O`Neill`s appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn`t understand why, if Mr. O`Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn`t resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest.

But now he`s showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider`s picture of the Bush administration.

Ron Suskind`s new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O`Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations — satisfying "the base" — trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney`s blithe declaration that "Reagan proved deficits don`t matter." But there are many other revelations.

One is that Mr. O`Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O`Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn`t include triggers — it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out — it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.

Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," knew that this wasn`t true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only "top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn`t we already give them a break at the top?"

Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001.

There`s much more in Mr. Suskind`s book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good.

The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean`s assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn`t made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O`Neill`s revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O`Neill`s character but haven`t refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O`Neill`s TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.

Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they`re cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam`s capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn`t reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.

More important, having a few months of good news doesn`t excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Ein schöner Satz, der wohl auch für D gilt.

Blairs New Labour, das ist für die meisten nur noch eine verspätete, längst freudlose Millenniums-Party von machtgeilen Manipulateuren, auf der man hängen geblieben ist, weil die Alternativen noch viel fürchterlicher sind.


DER SPIEGEL 3/2004 - 12. Januar 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,281586,00.html
Großbritannien

Endspiel des Wunderkindes

Stürmische Wochen für Premier Tony Blair: Eine Untersuchung könnte ihn belasten, Labour-Abgeordnete proben den Aufstand, und Leitartikler verabschieden ihn als Auslaufmodell.

Diesen Abstecher bei der kämpfenden Truppe im Irak hatte Premier Tony Blair gebraucht - nicht etwa, um die Jungs aufzumöbeln, sondern sich selbst. Einer dieser markigen Fototermine vor martialischer Soldatenwand, um sich in Form zu bringen, bevor es aus dem Urlaub zurückging an die winterlich missvergnügte Heimatfront.
"Prima Job", rief er den Soldaten zu, und die "Daily Mail" zitierte. Doch dann ruinierte das Massenblatt den guten, kämpferischen Gesamteindruck des Premiers, indem es unter die Schlagzeile diesen gehässigen Kasten mit dem "Massenvernichtungswaffen-Zähler" montierte. Schon 248 Tage, ohne dass welche dort unten im Irak gefunden worden wären: "Wir zählen weiter."

Und das britische Publikum zählt mit. Warum noch mal, so fragt es, sind unsere Jungs eigentlich dort?

Schließlich war es eine behauptete unmittelbare Bedrohung durch Saddam Husseins Chemie- und Biowaffen, mit der Blair die Zustimmung des Parlaments zum Kriegseintritt erstritten hatte. "Trust me" - vertraut mir. Und nun gibt es sie nicht, und es wird immer offenkundiger, dass selbst von jenen Chemiefässern, die in den achtziger Jahren aus dem Westen an Saddam geliefert wurden, nichts mehr aufzufinden ist.

Mit jedem weiteren Tag lassen die Karikaturisten Blairs Nase weiter wachsen. Tony "Trust me" Blair, der Mann der ethischen Augenaufschläge, heiligen Schwüre und heftigen Beteuerungen, hat ein Problem - man vertraut ihm immer weniger, selbst wenn es nur noch um die Gesundheitsreform geht. Ach was, selbst die Auskunft über die Uhrzeit würde man noch mal gegenchecken.

Blairs politisches Glück hat sich gedreht. Und plötzlich sieht der Führer der Konservativen, Michael Howard, ein politisches Fossil aus der Thatcher-Ära, später unbeliebtester Minister der Insel und das absolute Gegenteil von cool, zunehmend gut aus.

In der ersten Fragestunde des neuen Jahres, Mittwoch vergangener Woche, trieb er den Premier vor sich her. Er setzte nach, zweimal, dreimal - im englischen Parlament sitzt man dicht wie im Pub, und die Regeln der Fragestunde erlauben schnelles Nachfassen und jede Menge Gemurmel und Geheul sowieso.

Howard befragte Blair zum Fall des Waffenexperten David Kelly. Der hatte, anonym, gegen von der Regierung "hochgesexte" Geheimdienstberichte protestiert, war verpfiffen worden und hatte sich kurz darauf umgebracht. Der eigens berufene Lordrichter Brian Hutton soll nun klären, wer Kellys Namen in Umlauf gebracht und ihn damit womöglich in eine Kurzschlusshandlung getrieben hat - Blair hatte jede Verwicklung "emphatisch" bestritten.

Doch Sir Kevin Tebbit, Staatssekretär im Verteidigungsministerium, hatte vor Hutton ausgesagt, dass die Entscheidung zur Bekanntgabe von Kellys Namen in einer Sitzung in Downing Street Nr. 10 gefallen sei.

"Stehen Sie zu Ihrem Dementi?", fragte Howard bohrend. "Ich stehe zu meinen Äußerungen in ihrer Totalität, so wie ich sie damals gemacht habe", antwortete Blair schließlich gewunden, und Howard nickte in grimmiger Befriedigung. Das klang ihm genug nach Winkelzug. Nun ist Lord Hutton dran - Ende des Monats schlägt die Stunde der Wahrheit, dann wird sein Bericht erwartet.

In der eigenen Gefolgschaft glauben viele, dass der Premier, der der Labour-Partei zwei glanzvolle Wahlsiege eingefahren und sie länger an der Macht gehalten hat als die meisten Vorgänger, seinen Zenit überschritten hat.


"Das Endspiel steht an", sagt James Naughtie munter. Er ist Redakteur jener BBC-Sendung, die den Kelly-Skandal ins Rollen gebracht hat. Er schätzt den Anteil der Labour-Abgeordneten, die ohne Blair weitermachen wollen, auf rund ein Drittel.

Immer mühsamer werden die innenpolitischen Schlachten für den Mann, der voriges Jahr bereits einmal mit einer Herzattacke in die Nothilfe eingeliefert werden musste. Eine Abstimmung über die Einführung von Studiengebühren hat er nun mit dem eigenen politischen Schicksal verknüpft - dennoch drohten über hundert Labour-Abgeordnete vergangene Woche ungerührt, ihren Regierungschef gemeinsam mit der Opposition niederzustimmen.

"Viele haben sich wohl auch einfach satt gesehen an ihm", meint Naughtie. Und das wäre kein politischer Windwechsel, sondern, viel tückischer, ein modischer. Blair, jener siegreiche junge Kulturrevolutionär aus dem Frühling 1997 - out wie die Spice Girls? Um Weihnachten meinten 46 Prozent, Blair werde 2004 nicht überleben.

Alles übertrieben? Sicher: Die britische Wirtschaft brummt wie kaum eine in Europa, das strapazierte Gesundheitssystem zeigt leichte Erholungen, und ein Sieg über den Schlächter Saddam ist letztlich doch eine gute Sache. Umfragen sehen denn auch Labour immer noch zweistellig vor den Konservativen.

Dennoch, kämpferische Zustimmung bedeutet das nicht. Blairs New Labour, das ist für die meisten nur noch eine verspätete, längst freudlose Millenniums-Party von machtgeilen Manipulateuren, auf der man hängen geblieben ist, weil die Alternativen noch viel fürchterlicher sind.

Nun zeigt sich, wie anfällig ein politischer Stil ist, der sich zu sehr auf PR-Techniken verlässt und zu wenig auf substanzielle Programme und Gefolgschaften. Mit Blairs politischem Schwächeanfall hat die Götterdämmerung für die linken Babyboomer eingesetzt, die einst in dem politischen Genie Bill Clinton ihre größten Erfolge, ihre bombastischste Spiegelung erlebten.

Blair hatte sich, wie vor ihm Clinton und nach ihm Schröder, kantenlos gemacht und damit wählbar. In den siebziger Jahren schwankte er noch, ob er Mick Jagger oder Priester werden wollte. Dann wählte er den dritten Weg - den in die Politik.

Er hat Oxford besucht, doch auf Arbeiterversammlungen behauptete er, er sei im sozialen Wohnungsbau groß geworden. Er schmückte seine glatte Biografie mit erfundenen struppigen Details, um sie maßvoll aufzurauen, und segelte durch die Parteihierarchie als Wunderkind. Er ist der jüngste Premier seit Lord Liverpool 1812. Als er zur Macht kam, wollte jeder Blair sein, so wie jeder früher Mick Jagger sein wollte.

Blair und seinesgleichen waren die Antwort der Pop-Generation auf die Politik, jung, hemdsärmelig, erfolgreiche Frau, ein Auto voller hübscher Kinder. Es waren diese missionarischen Karrieristen, die die angestammten linken Arbeiterparteien entkernten und zu postmodernen, ideologiefreien Machterringungsvereinen ummodelten.

Ob die "New Democrats" unter Clinton, "New Labour" unter Blair oder Schröders neue Mitte - überall war das Versprechen an die alten Parteiapparate das Gleiche: Wir holen euch die Macht, wenn ihr uns nicht im Wege steht.

Alle diese Modernisierer hatten und haben in der Folge das gleiche Problem: Man weiß nicht, wofür sie eigentlich einstehen, wahrscheinlich, weil sie es selbst nicht mehr wissen. Zugegeben, das ist schwieriger geworden unter den Bedingungen des grenzenlos siegreichen Kapitalismus, der bei Laune gehalten werden muss.

Clinton eröffnet heute Shopping-Malls und versucht, seiner Frau nicht im Weg zu stehen. Im Falle Blairs, so der Autor John Kampfner, habe die ideologische Entwurzelung einen besonders paradoxen Effekt gehabt: "Der Mann hat Großbritannien innerhalb von sechs Jahren in fünf Kriege geführt" - Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan und zweimal Irak. Flagge fürs Gute zeigen im Gefecht!

Blairs neue moralische Politik kann dabei Unvereinbares leicht vereinbaren, das Böse mit dem Flammenschwert verhindern und gleichzeitig überhaupt kein Problem damit haben, Panzer nach Indonesien zu liefern, mit denen Aufstände in der Provinz Aceh blutig bekämpft werden.

Moral unter den Bedingungen der Postmoderne, das war weitgehend Definitionssache, aber immer ein telewirksamer Erregungszustand. Erst recht nach dem 11. September, der eine bizarre gemeinsame Schnittmenge von neokonservativen Erstschlagsstrategen wie US-Vizepräsident Dick Cheney und linkshumanitären Interventionisten à la Blair zur Folge hatte: Tyrannen vernichten, der Welt den Scheitel neu ziehen, und wenn auf dem Weg dahin ein paar Aufträge für Halliburton abfallen, umso besser.

In den Augen der Linken aber, für die Tony Blair einst angetreten war, hat er gerade dort, wo er am moralischsten aufgetrumpft hatte, für viele am unmoralischsten gehandelt, nämlich in der Frage von Krieg und Frieden. Nun sucht Blair, der politische Staubsauger, bei ihnen Hilfe. Vorige Woche holte er Londons beliebten roten Bürgermeister und entschiedenen Kriegsgegner, Ken Livingstone, wieder zurück in die Partei.

Frustrierend für Blair wie für alle sozialdemokratischen Modernisierer: Seine linken Erfolge, etwa die Wiedereinführung von Mindestlöhnen, kann er nicht annoncieren, weil er sonst die Mitte verschreckt. So wird die Gesichtslosigkeit, zu der er New Labour verurteilt hat, zum Problem. "Die Frage ist nicht mehr die, wofür Blair steht", sagt Kampfner, "die Frage ist, wann er geht."

Zumindest hört sich das gut an in einer stark konkurrierenden Presselandschaft, die nicht immer die beste, aber ganz sicher die unterhaltsamste Europas ist. Blair kaputt - so wird er auf dem Titel des "New Statesman" bereits auf Jobsuche geschickt, unrasiert, Supermarkttüten schleppend, mit Recht deprimiert, denn, so fragt das Blatt: Wer nimmt schon noch einen 50-Jährigen?

Weit verfrüht natürlich. Selbst wenn in den nächsten Wochen noch einiges schief gehen sollte für Blair, die flexiblen Babyboomer haben eine entscheidende Qualität: die Fähigkeit zum überraschenden Comeback in der öffentlichen Meinung. "Keiner, der noch bei Trost ist", so Kampfner lächelnd, "wird Blair wirklich abschreiben."

MATTHIAS MATUSSEK


© DER SPIEGEL 3/2004

[Joerver]

Ismael Juwara`s wife, Um-Ahmad, is raising nine children in a two-bedroom rental in Thuluiya. They once had a house built with a government grant
washingtonpost.com
In Sunni Triangle, Loss of Privilege Breeds Bitterness
Veterans of Security Apparatus Are Now Pariahs

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page A01


THULUIYA, Iraq -- Less than a year ago, Ismael Mohammed Juwara lived high in the food chain of President Saddam Hussein`s Iraq. He was a secret policeman feared and respected among his comrades and in his hometown, enjoying a cornucopia of privileges from the government.

Now, as he scrapes out a living by selling diesel fuel illegally, he is a pariah in the new Iraq. "We were on top of the system. We had dreams," said Juwara, a former member of the Mukhabarat, the intelligence service that reported directly to the now-deposed president. "Now we are the losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability. Curse the Americans. Curse them."

His is the kind of angry lament that can be heard all over central Iraq, the region most devoted to Hussein. It is the area of tribes and clans that were closest to him and that could expect power and privileges from his government. As Arabs following the Sunni strain of Islam, the people here enjoyed an added advantage, because Hussein had extended their long dominance here, although they represent only about 20 percent of the population.

Hundreds of thousands of men from this area, now known as the Sunni Triangle, joined Hussein`s extensive security apparatus, including the army and multiple police and intelligence agencies. As such, they are mostly outcasts from the new governing system under construction by U.S.-led occupation authorities and their selected Iraqi political allies.

Juwara has two strikes against him: He was part of a feared repressive agency and a high-ranking Baath Party member. Such Baathists are prohibited from government posts, as well as new security organizations now being formed.

Juwara, 46, was sitting in the police station in this town along the Tigris River one recent morning as new officers sat idle. Relations between the police and U.S. occupation forces are strained. U.S. officials stopped using them for guard duty because they were considered unreliable, and soldiers no longer patrol with them. "They think we should know everything that goes on here, but we don`t," said Hafath Salah Hussein, the liaison officer with the Americans.

In clannish Thuluiya, working for the Baath Party government was often a family affair. Hafath Hussein is a cousin of Juwara. With them was Hussein Saleh Hussein, Hafath`s brother, who said he once belonged to the Interior Ministry`s general security section, another secret police branch.

Hafath Hussein and Juwara escorted a reporter to an improvised diesel fuel station in a muddy field nearby. The men earn what they can by purchasing fuel and reselling it to truckers and farmers who don`t want to wait in long lines at gas station.

Along the way, Juwara talked about his life. He said he joined the Baath Party in high school, enlisted in the army and then the secret police. His job was to watch over army personnel and opponents of the government in such conflicted locales as Basra, the large, predominantly Shiite Muslim city in the south, and Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdish north.

When he married, the government supplied him and his wife with a bedroom set. Soon after, he received a free plot of land and a home-construction loan, which was converted into a grant when the second of his nine children was born. He bought cement at cost from a government warehouse.

Health care, Juwara said, was supplied through Rashid military hospital, a special facility in Baghdad reserved for security and military officers. Last winter, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion, Juwara said, he received permission to travel abroad to get treatment for his son, 13, who suffers from a nerve condition that slurs his speech.

When Juwara bought a refrigerator, he went to a market set aside for secret police families and got it at a discount. He drove a Peugeot supplied by his unit. During the past decade of economic sanctions, he received extra rations. Now, he said, "we cook beans left over from before the war."

He said that before the war, he sold his house to finance construction of a larger one, then moved into a small rental home. After the war, he used up the construction money to support his wife and children. His new house is only half built. He is barely making ends meet, he said, explaining, "There are no jobs, certainly not with the Americans."

People such as Juwara form the core of resistance to the occupation and the developing order, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. Frequently referred to as Baathist remnants or dead-enders, they are resentful and unwilling to accept their lot quietly. For that, they make no apologies.

"Was being a Baathist some sort of disease?" Juwara said, raising his voice suddenly. "Was serving the country some sort of crime?" In effect, Sunnis such as Juwara are experiencing the changes since the U.S. invasion as a revolution in which the long-suppressed Shiite majority is taking charge.

"These people with turbans are going to run the country. What do they know? Iraq needs people like us," Juwara bellowed. People had been crowding around to buy diesel fuel, but sales momentarily halted.

Sunnis who served the deposed government often demonstrate their frustrations. In the Shiite south, they have rioted for jobs. In the Sunni center, they have rioted for pay. Conversations with Juwara and some of his colleagues from the secret police indicate that they are not loyal so much to Hussein as to a subsidized, predictable way of life.

Many people in Thuluiya, with a population of 150,000, benefited from life during the Hussein government. Big villas line the river and the land where houses sit was supplied free by the government.

"Just about every family had someone working in security or the army or some government job," said Maj. Hussein Mahdi Obeidy, a member of the U.S.-appointed police force. "It was normal to join the Baath Party. It was like a rule." Although Obeidy is a former Baathist, he was sufficiently low-ranking to qualify for the new force.

Thuluiya escaped the war; U.S. troops rushed by to other destinations. They returned in June, having discovered that guerrillas had been hiding in the area. In the months since, U.S. forces have detained hundreds of suspects in and around Thuluiya. Yet townspeople say that rebels come and go freely, hiding in homes or among lush date groves.

Besides his economic woes, Juwara expressed deep feelings of humiliation. He told of a trip to the Central Bank in Baghdad on a quest for records of his account in Thuluiya. He said the bank records were looted after the war.

"You know what they told me? `You are from Thuluiya. You are a dog. Go and ask Saddam for the money,` " he recalled. "A few months ago, they would never have treated me like that. They wouldn`t dare."

He pointed out the house of a former colleague. It was empty. "Abu Falah has disappeared. The Americans are after him," Juwara said. "They think he is with the resistance. Maybe. He needs the money."

At the field of diesel barrels, Juwara helped Hussein Saleh Hussein as customers complained that the price was too high. Hussein has his own troubles. He also sold his house. He was living with his brother, but the atmosphere grew tense because Hussein could not pay rent, so he moved to a cheap place. He sold the Mitsubishi that the Interior Ministry had supplied him. He has two wives and 10 children. "People say that the resistance pays to kill Americans. Pretty soon, that will seem like a good idea," he said.

It is illegal to resell fuel in Iraq, a fact Hafath Hussein suddenly remembered. As a policeman, he is supposed to stop it. "I tell them not to do it.

"But," he said as he pulled the reporter to one side, "we all know each other here. We will have to live together when the Americans leave. What can I do?"



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Corps of Engineers Defends KBR Deal
Fuel Averted Crisis, General Says

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page E01


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said his decision to allow a Halliburton Co. subsidiary to continue to import fuel from Kuwait to Iraq after Pentagon auditors found possible overcharging was necessary to avert a brewing crisis.

Oil-rich Iraq has had to import fuel because of continued attacks on its pipelines and refineries since the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein. "I don`t think people understand the environment we`re working in," Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers said in an interview during a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Halliburton subsidiary, KBR Inc., won an emergency no-bid contract to help rebuild Iraq in March, and some Democratic members of Congress have criticized the company and the Corps of Engineers for it. Dick Cheney ran Halliburton before he became vice president.

Last month Defense Department auditors outside the Corps said KBR may have overcharged the government $61 million by paying too high a price to a Kuwaiti subcontractor. KBR has denied gouging the government, saying that the Corps had directed it to buy the fuel from Kuwait and that it found its supplier through a competitive selection.

Flowers said a gasoline shortage in Iraq originally led him to ask KBR to find an immediate source in Kuwait. A week after the audit finding, he said, he signed a waiver letting the American company continue using the Kuwaiti subcontractor.

"If I didn`t do that there would be no way you could come close to meeting demand," Flower said. "Bad things would happen."

The Corps has made subsequent requests under the same March contract, the most recent in early December. The Pentagon said on Dec. 30 that it would no longer use the Corps to import fuel and would instead give the task to a military unit that supplies fuel to the armed forces. Flowers said the U.S. government has not had to pay for the fuel used by the armed forces because Kuwait donated it.

The Corps of Engineers is in the process of awarding two contracts that would replace the one given to KBR to repair Iraq`s oil infrastructure. The Corps had planned to award the contracts by Jan. 17, but Flowers said that deadline is on hold until the Pentagon completes its audit of the KBR contract.

"Obviously I`m disappointed we haven`t awarded them by now," he said. "When you have allegations, you have to see to things before you proceed." KBR could win one of two new oil infrastructure contracts, worth about $1 billion each, and Flowers said he is prepared for the political fallout if the Halliburton subsidiary is chosen.

"We can`t bar KBR," he said. "We took pains so there would be a level playing field, so there wouldn`t be a marked advantage. We can`t deny someone who is by law free to compete."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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White House Fires Back at O`Neill on Iraq


By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page A01


The Bush administration reacted angrily yesterday to allegations by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill that the president was detached from policymaking and was planning from his first days in office to remove Saddam Hussein even without evidence that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush took issue with O`Neill`s Iraq account, one of several allegations made public by the former Cabinet member in interviews with CBS News`s "60 Minutes" and Time magazine and in a new book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.

Bush`s spokesman said O`Neill, who was fired as Treasury secretary at the end of 2002, was "trying to justify personal views." The Treasury Department, meanwhile, requested a probe into whether O`Neill was authorized to disclose the documents he released.

In one of the most serious charges, O`Neill, who was a member of Bush`s war cabinet, said there was no evidence that Hussein`s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," O`Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, told Time. "There were allegations and assertions by people. . . . To me there is a real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

O`Neill is the highest-ranking official to part ways publicly with Bush, offering a rare view of the decision-making process in a White House known for being tight-lipped and doggedly loyal.

O`Neill describes administration officials -- particularly Vice President Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove -- as putting politics before sound judgment on issues such as steel tariffs and global warming. And he portrays Bush as detached from policy debate -- "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" -- stubbornly attached to policies regardless of facts.

O`Neill charges that Bush officials began planning Hussein`s ouster long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and information in the new accounts indicates Bush saw Hussein`s quick ouster as important for the U.S. economy. O`Neill also asserts that he was rebuked for raising concerns that Bush`s tax cuts were dangerously expanding the deficit.

When he expressed these concerns to Cheney after the 2002 midterm elections, the vice president reportedly said, "Reagan proved deficits don`t matter," and added: "We won the midterms. This is our due."

Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said yesterday that the department`s inspector general was asked to examine whether O`Neill had improperly released confidential material. He said the administration is particularly concerned about a document shown on "60 Minutes" that said "secret."

The administration previously allowed the release of some sensitive documents. Bob Woodward, author of "Bush at War," writes that his information included "notes taken during more than 50 national security council and other meetings," as well as "other personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents."

Bush yesterday gently rebutted O`Neill when asked about the Iraq allegations at an appearance in Monterrey, Mexico, with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

"I appreciate former secretary O`Neill`s service to our country," Bush said, rejecting O`Neill`s description of the Iraq chronology. "In the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with Desert Badger or flyovers and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines. And then all of a sudden September the 11th hit."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, briefing reporters on Air Force One en route to Mexico, said the O`Neill matter "appears to be more about trying to justify personal views and opinions than it does about looking at the results that we are achieving on behalf of the American people."

Asked specifically about O`Neill`s assertion that Bush and his top aides sought from the earliest days to remove Hussein, McClellan said: "The president exhausted all possible means to resolve this, resolve the situation in Iraq peacefully."

In his "60 Minutes" appearance, O`Neill said, "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go."

In Suskind`s book, "The Price of Loyalty," O`Neill provides details of top-level meetings in which political considerations seemed to trump policy judgments.

In a meeting about steel tariffs in February 2002, the book describes Mitchell Daniels, then Bush`s budget director, pleading against the tariffs. "If you can`t do the right thing when you`re at 85 percent approval [ratings], then when can you do the right thing?" Daniels reportedly asked.

But Cheney made it clear that the tariffs would be imposed, according to the account, saying "we can review this in 18 months" -- which the administration ultimately did.

The book also quotes from a lengthy memo in February 2002, from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to O`Neill and a subsequent meeting at the Treasury.

Greenspan, writing about the corporate accounting scandals, said: "There`s been too much gaming of the system until it is broke. Capitalism is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism."

But O`Neill and Greenspan, opposed by Lawrence B. Lindsey, then the White House`s top economic adviser, lost their bid to get more stringent corporate reforms. Lindsey suggested "there`s always the option of doing nothing," the book says.

O`Neill suggests that he and other moderates in the administration -- Christine Todd Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- "may have been there, in large part, as cover." On the decision to back away from a strong plan to fight global warming, O`Neill said the decision was cynically grounded on the notion that "the [conservative political] base likes this, and who the hell knows anyway?"

Cheney, who brought O`Neill to Bush`s attention, fired him after O`Neill objected to a third round of tax cuts. After telling O`Neill he was being dismissed, Cheney reportedly asked O`Neill to say it was his own decision to step down.

"I`m too old to begin telling lies now," O`Neill says he told Cheney. O`Neill says some of his former colleagues "are nasty and they have a long memory."

Comparing his time in the Bush administration and his stint in the federal government in the 1970s, O`Neill said: "The biggest difference between then and now is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."

Suskind`s book describes a pivotal White House meeting on Nov. 26, 2002, at which Bush`s 2003 tax-cut package was determined. When O`Neill warned that the cuts and growing deficits could jeopardize Bush`s plans for private Social Security accounts, Bush reportedly said: "What is your point about Social Security private accounts?"

At the same meeting, policy adviser Joshua B. Bolten warned that fully eliminating the dividend tax "burns a big hole in the budget," but Rove prevailed.

"You should be basing the package on principle," Rove is reported as telling Bush. "If double taxation of dividends is wrong, why do we want to settle for just eliminating 50 percent of the tax for individuals?"

Bush, at the meeting, reportedly paid attention to the politics of the tax proposal, saying it is important that "we don`t slam the door in the third quarter of 2004." But his question to aides about the poor -- "What are we doing on compassion?" -- was met with silence. The account of the economic meeting portrays Bush as set on Hussein`s removal, four months before he officially reached that decision. "Until we get rid of Saddam Hussein, we won`t get rid of uncertainty," Bush reportedly told his aides, who went quiet.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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aus www.focus.de


Rachefeldzug hat Konsequenzen


Die US-Regierung lässt die Vorwürfe des geschassten Finanzministers gegen den Präsidenten und seine Irak-Politik nicht auf sich sitzen. Das Finanzministerium will gegen seinen ehemaligen Chef Paul O`Neill ermitteln. Wie ein Ministeriumssprecher am Montagabend (Ortszeit) vor Journalisten in Washington sagte, soll geklärt werden, ob O`Neill für ein Anti-Bush-Enthüllungsbuch Geheimdokumente weitergegeben und damit gegen Vorschriften verstoßen habe. Bei einem Fernsehinterview am Sonntag waren Dokumente gezeigt worden, die den Stempel „geheim“ trugen.

George W. Bush sagte in einer ersten Stellungnahme, er habe die Dienste von O`Neill „für unser Land“ geschätzt. Tatsächlich habe die US-Politik schon vor seinem Amtsantritt einen Regimewechsel in Irak angestrebt. Die Enthüllungen von O`Neill bewiesen nicht, dass es eine frühe Entscheidung in der Bush-Regierung gegeben habe. Bereits sein Amtsvorgänger Präsident Bill Clinton habe 1998 nach der Ausweisung der UN-Waffeninspektoren eine solche Politik vertreten.

Nach Angaben des Buchautors Ron Suskind zirkulierten in der Regierung schon in den ersten drei Monaten 2001 Pläne für eine Irak-Invasion, für eine Nachkriegsära und Vorstellungen über die Zukunft des irakischen Öls. Er habe entsprechende Unterlagen von O`Neill und anderen Insidern aus dem Weißen Haus erhalten, sagte Suskind dem Fernsehsender CBS.

Mit Blick auf Saddam Husseins vermeintliche Massenvernichtungswaffen hatte O`Neill im US-Magazin „Time“ erklärt, er habe „in den Geheimdienstberichten nichts gesehen, was ich als echten Beweis werten würde“. Es habe lediglich „Beteuerungen und Behauptungen“ gegeben. Immerhin sei er „nicht auf den Kopf gefallen, und ich kenne den Unterschied zwischen einem Beweis und Behauptungen oder Illusionen oder Schlussfolgerungen, die man aus einem Bündel von Annahmen ziehen kann“.

Washington hatte den Krieg gegen Irak vor allem damit begründet, dass das Land im Besitz von Massenvernichtungswaffen sei. Auch neun Monate nach dem Ende des Kriegs und dem Sturz Saddams wurden jedoch noch keine solcher Waffen in Irak gefunden.

O`Neill war Ende 2002 von seinem Amt zurückgetreten. Medienberichten zufolge war er von Bush dazu gedrängt worden, weil er dessen Steuersenkungspläne kritisiert hatte. Seine Vorwürfe sind Teil einer Kampagne, mit der er für das Buch des früheren „Wall Street Journal“-Reporters Suskind mit dem Titel „The Price of Loyality“ ("Der Preis der Loyalität") wirbt. Das Buch beschäftigt sich mit der ersten Hälfte von Bushs Amtszeit, Hauptquelle ist O`Neill.

Bereits am Samstag hatte der Ex-Minister dem Präsidenten in einem CBS-Interview vorgeworfen, schon wenige Tage nach Amtsantritt mit den Planungen für einen Irak-Krieg begonnen zu haben. „Von Anfang an herrschte die Überzeugung, dass Saddam Hussein eine schlimme Person ist und verschwinden muss.“

Blair stellt sich vor Bush

Die britische Regierung verteidigte die Irak-Politik der USA und von Großbritannien. Sie sei ebenso wie die USA zu einer friedlichen Lösung der Irak-Krise entschlossen gewesen, sagte ein Sprecher von Premierminister Tony Blair am Montag in London. Der Krieg sei jedoch leider unumgänglich gewesen.

„Ich glaube nicht, dass jemand die ernsthafte Entschlossenheit der Koalition zu einer friedlichen Lösung in Zweifel ziehen sollte“, sagte Blairs Sprecher. „Leider war das nicht möglich.“ Er wies außerdem Berichte zurück, Blair habe sich pessimistisch über die Chancen geäußert, in Irak noch Massenvernichtungswaffen zu finden. Die Alliierten hatten den Krieg vor allem damit begründet, dass Irak im Besitz chemischer und biologischer Waffen sei.

Die Bundesregierung erklärte, sie sei aus guten Gründen gegen den Irak-Krieg gewesen. „Nach dem ersten Schuss hatten wir die Position vieler geteilt, die sagten, jetzt geht es darum, Frieden und Stabilität in der Region zu gewinnen“, sagte ein Sprecher des Auswärtigen Amtes in Berlin. „Die Frage, was der Regierung in Washington wann bekannt war, müssen nicht wir, sondern Historiker beantworten.“

13.01.04, 7:30 Uhr

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January 12, 2004, updated 1:00 p.m. ET
Viele Links:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0112/dailyUpdate.html?s=mets
Neocons: Don`t stop now

New book urges Bush to push regime change, keep an eye on US Muslims, and not to create Palestinian state

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Neoconservatives Richard Perle and David Frum don`t want the US to back down from its aggressive positions in the war on terror. Not now.
As President Bush turns more towards diplomacy to deal with international problems (the chosen path of one of Mr. Frum`s and Mr. Perle`s least favorite people, Secretary of State Colin Powell), the authors see this as a mistake.


In their new book, an "An end to evil: How to win the war on terror," the two men argue, among many other things:

France is really more an enemy than an ally of the US and that European nations must be forced to choose between Paris and Washington
Muslims living in the US must be given special scrutiny by US law enforcement and other Americans
The US must overthrow the regimes in Iran and Syria, and impose a blockade on North Korea
Palestinians must not be allowed to have a state
All Americans must carry a government issued identity card
The US must explicitly reject the jurisdiction of the United Nations Charter.
The two authors are both fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and former members of the Bush administration who left within the past year. CNN reports that Perle resigned last March from his position as chairman of the Pentagon`s civilian advisor Defense Policy Board over charges that he stood to profit from the war in Iraq because of his acceptance of consultant fees from telecommunications Global Crossing. He continues to serve as a member of the DPB. IndyMedia reports that Frum left his position as White House speech writer after someone leaked the news that he was the one who came up with the phrase "axis of evil."

Perle and Frum call their book a "manual for victory." The Jewish Forward says the book provides succeeds in "providing what some political observers describe as the most comprehensive and coherent summary of the core positions held by various neoconservative camps in the wake of the Iraq invasion." But the Forward says it also shows the deepening rift and battle for control of White House policy between pro-interventionist neoconservatives and old-line conservatives

"We were with them on Iraq," said Helle Dale, a foreign policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, an old-line conservative think-tank in Washington. "But if you have any sense of military constraints, you would know further calls to military action right now are a little ill-timed."
The book has generated much debate. In a review in The Washington Post, New Republic Senior Editor Lawrence Kaplan (former executive editor of The National Interest, the foreign policy journal published by Irving Kristol, the man referred to as the "godfather of neoconservatives") says bears reading "less for its grace as a polemic than for its value as a primer on how those hawks view the world around them," and that the arguments put forth by Perle and Frum, make them the "the heirs and custodians" of President Woodrow Wilson`s "crusading" foreign policy style.
When not ridiculing the backwardness of Islamic societies, they champion an effort "to lead the Arab and Muslim world to democracy and liberty"and make the case for enshrining women`s freedom at the center of official policy. An End to Evil shares the traditionally conservative view of the world as a fundamentally dangerous and Hobbesian place. But it also argues that the condition can be ameliorated – through the vigorous application of American power and ideals. This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.
Syndicatecd columnist Cal Thomas, in a piece about Iran, says Perle and Frum`s advice on how to bring about regime change in Iran (basically, no more Mr. Nice Guy) is right on the money.
The United States has two options. It can fail to follow through on its initial blow in Iraq, thus empowering and encouraging America`s enemies everywhere, or it can deal a knockout blow to terrorism by finishing the job. As we saw with the Soviet Union, resolve is often enough to achieve American objectives. As long as American diplomats think humanitarian aid and political niceties by people dressed in Western business clothes will lessen the threat against us, we will continue to be threatened.
The book also has its critics. Jim Lobe of Inter Press New Service (a long time critic of neoconservative philosophy) writes that if Perle and Frum have their way, the US would be issuing ultimatums on a daily basis. Mr. Lobe, while acknowledging the book must be taken seriously because of who wrote it (particularly Perle), he also says it contains many errors and omissions, and seems determined not to take responsibility for the fact that Iraq might not have worked out the way they first envisioned it would.
Perle and Frum naturally blame the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), retired military officers and senior officials from the administration of the current president`s father – in other words, all the foreign-policy specialists and "realists" who initially raised questions about going to war in Iraq – for resisting their calls for expanding the war to Syria, Iran, North Korea and even Saudi Arabia. And they categorically reject, albeit often defensively, any notion that the loss in momentum might be due more to over-optimistic predictions by themselves and their friends in the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld about the ease with which US forces could occupy Iraq without significant international support.
Carl Evans, columnist for The Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, accuses Perle and Frum (who he called "chicken hawk neocons") of trying "to play God."
If it`s obtuse to think you can banish terrorism (and it is), what kind of hubris is required to say you can vanquish evil? You can try, but as soon as you do, new evils inevitably, paradoxically stain your effort. Because you`re pursuing an unachievable goal, you are forced into using increasingly harsh measures, and as a result, innocents die – and evil remains. Ask the French about Algeria.
The Economist also has some problems with the book. In a review entitled "Breathlessly to victory," the Economist writes the book contains plenty of "plain talking" but tends to skim over the details.
America`s relations with the UN are settled in a brisk seven pages; those with Russia in fewer than three. This makes the reader wonder whether the boldness of the neo-conservative agenda is rooted—as they see it—in clear thinking, plain talking and moral courage, or whether it arises from a reckless disregard for complexity, shades of grey or the possibility of unintended consequences.
Perle, meanwhile, continues to make headlines while he promotes the book. Sunday he told CNN that Saudi Arabia also qualifies for the "axis of evil" club. "I hope that those who believe that we are now getting full cooperation are right," he added, referring to Kingdom`s willingness to work with the Bush administration to fight war terrorism after September 11, 2001. "I have yet to see the evidence," Perle said. Saudi papers blasted Perle Monday, saying that he only speaks the language of language of "force, murder and destruction."

http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html?stor…

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How big was it?
Greg Noll`s monster at Makaha was by far the biggest wave ever ridden until the tow-in era, according to surf lore.

Photo Gallery
http://www.latimes.com/features/outdoors/la-os-giants-pg,1,2…

http://www.latimes.com/features/outdoors/la-os-giants13jan13…

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oneill1…


White House Responds to O`Neill`s Criticisms
By Warren Vieth
Times Staff Writer

January 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — President Bush once defended Paul H. O`Neill`s penchant for speaking his mind, saying his then-Treasury secretary was "refreshingly candid." Now, he is finding out just how candid O`Neill can be.

Bush and his aides have been forced to respond to stinging criticisms from a former member of their inner circle in a new book by a prominent journalist that has been the talk of Washington for several days. In the book, O`Neill, who was fired by Bush in late 2002, portrays the president as disengaged during Cabinet meetings and eager almost from Day One of his administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.

The comments have given ammunition to Bush`s political opponents at a time when the White House is already facing fire in an intensifying Democratic presidential primary campaign.

In a development Monday, the Treasury Department said it had asked for an investigation of the possible leak of a classified document in connection with O`Neill`s criticisms.

The document was shown during a report Sunday on the book by the CBS news program "60 Minutes." It bore the Treasury Department letterhead and was marked "secret."

"Based on the `60 Minutes` segment aired last night, which displayed a document with a classified marking, the department referred the matter to the Office of Inspector General," said Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols. "That`s standard operating procedure. I can`t comment any further."

O`Neill was a major source for the book, "The Price of Loyalty," written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, who reportedly had access to thousands of documents that O`Neill saw during his nearly two years in office. The book, published by Simon & Schuster Inc., is being released today.

The Treasury Department`s request for an inquiry came as Bush and other administration officials tried to deflect criticism contained in the book, which also details O`Neill`s disillusionment with the president`s economic policies, including his decision to impose tariffs on imported steel to protect ailing U.S. steelmakers.

Bush, asked Monday about O`Neill`s assertion that Hussein`s removal was discussed by the White House National Security Council 10 days after his inauguration, said his actions were consistent with those of the Clinton administration before it.

"The stated policy of my administration towards Saddam Hussein was very clear," Bush told reporters during an appearance with Mexican President Vicente Fox in Monterrey, Mexico. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."

During the early months of his presidency, Bush said the administration`s Iraq policy focused on "fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks" in an effort to monitor Hussein`s military and weapons programs.

"And then, all of a sudden, September the 11th hit," Bush said. "And as the president of the United States, my most solemn obligation is to protect the security of the American people…. I took that duty very seriously."

Bush did not respond directly when asked whether he felt betrayed by O`Neill`s public criticism, or whether he thought O`Neill should not have provided government documents to Suskind.

"I appreciate former Secretary O`Neill`s service to our country," Bush said. "We worked together during some difficult times. We worked together when the country was in recession. We worked together when America was attacked on September the 11th, which changed how I viewed the world."

O`Neill says that the administration began planning Hussein`s ouster shortly after Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001 — long before the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the White House to declare war on international terrorism.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O`Neill told "60 Minutes" interviewer Lesley Stahl. "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime."

He said he had seen no "real evidence" that Hussein`s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration`s main rationales for the March 2003 military offensive.

According to O`Neill, the two years he spent in Washington changed the way he viewed the administration.

Despite 16 years of previous experience in various government jobs, including a top spot in the White House budget office during the Gerald R. Ford administration, O`Neill said he was not prepared for what lay in store when Bush asked him to leave his post as chief executive of Alcoa Inc., the aluminum producer, to become the nation`s chief financial officer.

According to book excerpts published Monday by the Wall Street Journal, O`Neill had the impression that Bush had not read the short memos he sent to the White House before scheduled meetings with the president. During weekly sessions, Bush often listened to his Treasury secretary for an hour, offering no responses to his assessments and proposals. The same was true in Bush`s meetings with others, O`Neill said.

"The only way I can describe it is that, well, the president is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people," O`Neill said in the book. "There is no discernible connection."

In O`Neill`s view, the advice rendered by him and other top administration officials could be easily trumped by Vice President Dick Cheney. As an example, he cited Bush`s decision in March 2002 to impose steel tariffs, a move favored by Cheney and U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick, but opposed by other Cabinet officers and top economic advisors.

O`Neill said the decision was based on political calculations, not economic fundamentals. Last month, the administration removed the tariffs more than a year ahead of schedule, responding to pleas from domestic steel consumers who complained that the duties had done more harm to their industries than the benefits they provided to steelmakers.

In another policy showdown, O`Neill said he told Cheney in late 2002 that a round of tax cuts under consideration would be potentially dangerous, because the nation was "moving toward a fiscal crisis" of rising deficits and accumulating debt.

Cheney cut him off before he could finish, O`Neill said.

"Reagan proved deficits don`t matter," the vice president was quoted as saying. "We won the midterms. This is our due."

It was not clear what information was contained in the document displayed during the "60 Minutes" report, or whether it was provided by O`Neill. Neither Suskind nor O`Neill could be reached for comment.

Suskind told CBS he interviewed hundreds of people, including several Cabinet members, while preparing the book. But he identified O`Neill as his principal source and said the former Treasury boss gave him some 19,000 internal documents to help with his research.

"Everything`s there: memoranda to the president, handwritten thank-you notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that`s sensitive," Suskind said in the "60 Minutes" interview.

"There are memos," Suskind added. "One of them marked `secret` says, `Plan for post-Saddam Iraq.` "

CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco told Associated Press that only a cover sheet referring to confidential material was shown during the "60 Minutes" report. "We don`t have a secret document. We didn`t show a secret document. We merely showed a cover sheet that alluded to a secret document," Tedesco said.

A U.S. government official who requested anonymity said it was not unusual for Cabinet members to make personal copies of unclassified documents, noting that O`Neill predecessors Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence Summers had done so. But the public disclosure of classified documents would be a potential violation of the law.

O`Neill`s comments have reverberated through the presidential campaign, with Democrats accusing the administration of trying to silence its former ally.

"The president`s White House advisors have launched an all-out attack on the man Bush once praised as a `straight-shooter,` " Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said in a statement. "Already, White House officials and their allies have begun the process of trashing O`Neill while refusing to address the merits of his charges."

Iraq war critic and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is leading the pack of Democratic presidential contenders, said O`Neill`s statements "only reaffirm my belief in how important it was for someone to stand up last year before we went to war."

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Monterrey, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it appeared to him that the O`Neill book was "more about trying to justify personal views and opinions" than it was about trying to assess the merits of Bush`s presidency. But he declined to respond in detail to specific criticisms raised by O`Neill.

"We`re not in the business of doing book reviews," McClellan said.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-iraq…

Coalition and Iraqi Allies Go Slow on Elections
Despite pressure from a Shiite leader, the U.S. and the Governing Council stick to the plan for a 2005 vote.
By Patrick J. McDonnell and Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writers

January 13, 2004

BAGHDAD — U.S. occupation officials and their Iraqi allies on Monday rejected demands that direct election of a new national government be expedited, despite calls by an influential cleric for an imminent vote.

"We all want to implement democracy in Iraq, but we don`t want to be hasty," said Hamid Kifai, spokesman for the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council.

U.S. officials are continuing to work with their Iraqi allies on a plan to return sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, but elections would wait until next year.

"There is no electoral infrastructure in this country to … institute direct elections immediately," said Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, repeating the oft-stated U.S. position. "There are no voter rolls, no electoral districts. There is no history of direct elections in this country."

The defense of the go-slow approach came as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation`s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, intensified his campaign to force speedy direct elections. Shiites, long ruled by Iraq`s Sunni Muslims, account for more than 60% of the population.

As the fight over the shape of the new Iraq continued, the U.S. military`s death toll neared 500. A roadside bomb hit a convoy in Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding two others, bringing the toll since fighting began in March to 495, according to Associated Press.

In a full-page advertisement Monday in a leading Baghdad daily newspaper, Sistani was quoted warning Iraqis obliquely about unspecified outsiders who seek to delay direct elections. It was unclear whether he was referring to coalition officials or the members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, which includes many Iraqis who lived in exile for years before returning after the fall of President Saddam Hussein.

"They want to distort the elections, distort democracy, distort the freedom which Iraqis are enjoying," the septuagenarian cleric is quoted as advising tribal leaders during a meeting in Najaf, the Shiite holy city south of Baghdad that is his base.

In the advertisement, published in the Al Azzaman newspaper, Sistani also called on the tribal leaders to recall the resistance of their ancestors against the British colonial regime in the 1920s. That rebellion was crushed but lives on, especially among the Shiite majority.

The comments were the latest in an escalating series of provocative declarations by Sistani, who has emerged as a major obstacle to the plans hammered out between Washington and the Iraqi leadership on how to transfer power.

The day before the newspaper ad, Sistani`s office in Najaf issued a statement calling credible national elections possible "within the forthcoming months." He warned Sunday that the interim national government envisioned by Washington would be formed by an "illegitimate mechanism," and predicted "serious problems" and a weakening of security and political stability.

U.S. officials and their allies here indicated they did not see the latter comment as a veiled threat. Rather, they said, Sistani and his advisors appeared to be throwing their weight around to maximize their influence in any future government.

"What I hear from Ayatollah Sistani and the full range of religious and political leaders is a … democratic vision for Iraq," Senor said. "We think it`s a healthy process when all these individuals are able to have a healthy debate and discussion in this country. It`s something we want to protect."

Last year, Sistani`s insistence on rapid elections contributed to a White House decision to scrap its plans for a more gradual return of Iraqi sovereignty. Instead, U.S. officials and the Governing Council agreed Nov. 15 on a stepped-up schedule that would restore independence on June 30 — to a transitional assembly chosen by regional assemblies — ahead of full elections and a constitution, now scheduled to be in place in 2005.

U.S. troops are expected to remain in Iraq well beyond the scheduled transfer of power.

The current debate puts U.S. officials and their allies in an awkward position: No one wants to appear to oppose free elections in a nation run for more than three decades by a dictator who was finally toppled by a U.S.-led invasion. American authorities and their allies are emphasizing practical obstacles, saying it will take at least a year to register voters, set up polls and otherwise organize fair elections.

The Governing Council has pointed to the lack of an accurate census as a major impediment.

"We need to have infrastructure ready for elections before we can carry out any proper elections that would be safe and sound and trusted by the people of Iraq, and internationally," said Kifai, the Governing Council spokesman, who appeared at a news conference with Senor.

Advocates for speedier elections have suggested a number of alternatives, such as using an existing list of Iraqi citizens compiled by the United Nations.

However, the Iraqi Governing Council spokesman said the U.N. lists were not reliable. And the last count of the Iraqi population is missing at least 5 million people, including many who have returned since the Hussein regime was toppled in the spring.

In other developments, the foreign ministers of Spain and Iraq called Monday for the U.N. to return to Iraq to help with the transfer of power.

Iraqi officials are scheduled to visit U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Jan. 19.

The U.N. pulled out its international staff in the fall after two suicide bombings at its headquarters here, one of which killed 22 people. Annan has said the situation remains too dangerous to send staff members back.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times